David Tunick, Inc.

This virtual exhibition is a departure for us in that we are featuring one work only, Les Deux Saltimbanques, by Pablo Picasso. It can occupy center stage on its own. Picasso and poet Guillaume Apollinaire together regularly visited the famous Cirque Médrano in the center of Paris, where the two young bohemians observed the performers on stage and backstage. The vagrant lives of the acrobats, animal tamers, clowns, and dancers resonated with the two artists, both recent and impoverished arrivals in the bustling capital of France. Picasso's 1905 Les Deux Saltimbanques and Apollinaire’s poem Crépuscule (below) effectively convey an intimate, yet lonely melancholy of a class of artistes with which they could identify. The medium is also a message. Picasso makes the print unique by his careful wiping of gray and black on the surface of the plate and by the rich “burr”, the textured effect resulting from ink spilling literally outside the incised, drypoint lines. The work is in a sense a combination print and drawing, which he reserved for Apollinaire. (There is one other such early impression as rich and extraordinary, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.)

Albrecht Dürer was the towering genius of the Northern Renaissance. Painter, draftsman, and printmaker, it was his prints in particular that served to spread his name, fame, and influence throughout the European world beginning in the late 15th century. This exhibition, our first online, highlights innovations in all three of the techniques in printmaking during the time of Dürer – woodcut, engraving, and etching – as exemplified in some of his best known graphic masterpieces. It also celebrates the continued relevance of his iconic images. ​ Image: Albrecht Dürer, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1498, woodcut, 388 x 280 mm., 15 1/2 x 11 1/8 in.

David Tunick, Inc. is pleased to present Master Drawings, on view beginning January 27, 2018, at our gallery premises, 13 East 69th Street, New York, NY. This exhibition is a continuation of the annual Master Drawings Week event that takes place in conjunction with over thirty galleries in the neighborhood. Over 30 drawings were on view encompassing a range of periods and schools from the seventeenth-century Dutch, and Italian to 21st-century American. Highlights will include works by Fernand Léger, Mary Cassatt, John Robert Cozens, Andy Warhol and David Cox.