Showrooms

Steps

Creator: Robert Natkin
Offered by: DSA Fine Arts

Description
Steps
color lithograph on wove paper
31 x 24 in
(78.74 x 60.96 cm)

Robert Natkin

Edition. of 75

Natkin took the architectural format of his vertically-organized Apollo paintings one step further in the 1960s with the execution of his uncharacteristically formal and highly-structural straight edge and step paintings. Like the earlier Apollo canvases, these works are based upon a fixed structure of vertical strips of interwoven color and pattern. In the straight edge and step paintings, however, these tangent planes are clearly and rather rigidly delineated, with no overlap or subtle fusing among the various sections of the canvas.

The artist achieved this starker, architectonic effect through the attachment of masking tape to the works in progress prior to applying paint, this tape enabling him to carefully separate areas. The process, as Natkin has often pointed out, was slow, arduous, and far from enjoyable.

Natkin cites the color theories of Josef Albers as a key inspiration to these richly colorful, polymorphic works.
Although he rejected much of Albers’ rigid, highly pedagogical approach , many of the exercises recommended by the color theorist inspired Natkin.

The straight edge and step paintings reflect Natkin’s passion for such disparate traditions as Persian miniatures, Irish illuminated manuscripts, and Japanese Noh and Kabuki costumes, with their bold color and dense overlap of form. Another important influence on Natkin was a number of Chicago architects–Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Louis Sullivan–to whom several of his paintings are dedicated. Natkin admired these architects’ ability to transform the purest forms of essential structure–even that of a solid steel girder–into decorative elements. It is, in part, this fusion between structure and decoration that Natkin strives to attain in the straight edge and step paintings.

Created: c. 1972
Condition: Very Good
Very good condition. Print has been stored in metal flat file and never framed. Any minor imperfections are due to handling and its age.

More Information

Documentation:	Signed
Period:	1950-1979
Materials:	color lithograph on wove paper
Condition:	Very good condition. Print has been stored in metal flat file and never framed. Any minor imperfections are due to handling and its age.
Creation Date:	c. 1972
Styles / Movements:	Color
Incollect Reference #:	673586