Peter Takal American artist (born in Bucharest 1905- Deceased in US 1995)
Color Lithograph (5 colors)
Pencil Signed Lower Right
Title:"City at Dawn"
Year: 1956 (beside signature)
Numbered 92/200 Lower Left
Excellent Condition
Sheet measures: (44x55cm) 17-1/2 Inches Tall and 22 Inches Wide
Frame measures 24-7/8 Inches Tall and 30-1/4 Inches Wide (64x76cm)
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BIO
Peter Takal (1905–1995) was born in Romania, lived and worked in Berlin in the ‘20s, worked as an actor and artist in Paris in the ‘30s and moved to New York in the ‘40s where he became a U.S. citizen. He is appreciated internationally as a master of pen-and-ink drawings, his chosen medium, as well as a prolific print maker. Surrealist overtones are present throughout his work. Subjects range from Parisian street scenes to linear fantasies of plant life and landscapes after he acquired a farm in eastern Pennsylvania in 1945.
Takal’s career, which spanned seven decades, includes more than 100 one-man exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe. His work is currently represented in over 100 public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney and Metropolitain Museum of Art as well as many other leading museums, galleries and private collections throughout the world.
With approximately 1,500 drawings as well as prints, paintings, books, sketchbooks and archival material, the Arkansas Arts Center now holds the largest and most complete collection of Takal’s remaining work.
Peter Takal (1905–1995) was born in Romania, lived and worked in Berlin in the ‘20s, worked as an actor and artist in Paris in the ‘30s and moved to New York in the ‘40s where he became a U.S. citizen. He is appreciated internationally as a master of pen-and-ink drawings, his chosen medium, as well as a prolific print maker. Surrealist overtones are present throughout his work. Subjects range from Parisian street scenes to linear fantasies of plant life and landscapes after he acquired a farm in eastern Pennsylvania in 1945.
Takal’s career, which spanned seven decades, includes more than 100 one-man exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe. His work is currently represented in over 100 public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney and Metropolitain Museum of Art as well as many other leading museums, galleries and private collections throughout the world.
With approximately 1,500 drawings as well as prints, paintings, books, sketchbooks and archival material, the Arkansas Arts Center now holds the largest and most complete collection of Takal’s remaining work.
The art of Takal is inspired by the universality which relates all things. For him, everything must respond to a moment of truth. The invisible has found in Takal a wonderful interpreter. His visual representation always results from a secret conjunction between the mysterious powers that govern the visible and invisible world.
For Takal, realism and surrealism interact in total harmony. In the movement of the lines mysterious relationships are born. Forms, spaces, expanses without end, beaches of silence, voyages of inner life reach the discovery of profound meaning hidden under appearances that open onto another reality.
Takal's spirit is constantly in tune with his times. He has never succumbed to the fashions of the moment or the changing moods of the public and he may be in conflict with the events of a given period, but his spirit is always contemporary. Takal's work has never faded from favor, not even in the most iconoclastic periods of recent art. He has remained true to himself, single minded in his search to reconcile what his eyes see, his mind interprets and his hand directs. It is no accident that Takal's work suggests rather than proclaims, is understated rather than bombastic. While restricting himself, he explores in such depth that he approaches the infinite.
Poetry is for me the oxygen of art. My concern to capture the invisible essence of fragility, power, hope, anguish and the infinity of other emotions released in us while contemplating the visible world, has been mainly expressed through drawing. It is for me the perfect medium to give meaning to the illusiveness of true poetry. Subject and medium are attuned to each other in the poetry of the moment while I play the drawing onto paper.
Most of the time the pencil, pen or whatever instrument my hand is using, becomes part of my hand, an extension of my fingers. My eyes are hardly ever detached from the subject. The inner vision registers every impression transmitted by the eyes and traces through the hand the significant lines which never need to be revised.
As an artist I was born in Paris, and this may have preserved in me a love for the form as it is experienced, lived, loved and expressed in our human condition. I do not feel the need to shatter this form in order to obtain sublimation and essence from the visible. My ambition is to extend the visual experience beyond its physical features through the means of the line. With this I attempt to evoke the intangible that gives essential meaning to what we see so we may experience a deeper reality in which we may discover ourselves, authentically and anew.
C H R O N O L O G Y H I G H L I G H T S
1905 Peter Takal, Born in Bucharest, Romania.
1910 Moves to Berlin.
1920-1938 Pursues stage and screen acting career in the German Cabaret in and films in France. Briefly
attends life classes in Paris at the Academie Ranson, the Academie de la Grand Chaumiere, and the Academie Colarossi.
1929 Moves to Paris. Continues acting in films, first drawings reproduced in newspapers.
1932 First exhibition in Germany, Galerie Gurlit, Berlin.
1933 First exhibition in France, Galerie Zak. Paris.
1935 University of Chicago professor Edward F. Rothschild sees Takal drawings at the Salon d'Automne,
Paris and presents them to Katherine Kuh Gallery in Chicago.
1937 Travels to Casablanca, Morocco while acting in films.
First exhibition in the United States, Watercolors and Drawings by Picasso and Takal,
Katherine Kuh Gallery, Chicago.
1939 Moves to New York.
1940 Contributes illustrations to Harper’s Bazaar and other publications.
Creates original designs for textile giant Bianchini.
1941 First one-man exhibition, Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
1942 One-man exhibitions. E.B. Crocker Art Gallery, Sacramento, and the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco.
Announcer for the Federal Office of War Information, Radio-Free Europe.
1943 Declines invitation by André Breton to join Surrealist Movement.
1944 Becomes an American citizen.
1945 Publication of Selected Works (2 volumes: drawings and Poems) published by International University Press, NY.
Acquires a farm In Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania.
1955 First of many invitations to participate in Whitney Museum and Brooklyn Museum Biennials.
Library of Congress purchases works.
1956 Museum of Modern Art, New York, included in group exhibition, first of many.
1957 Duveen-Graham Gallery, New York, circulates exhibition of Takal's drawings, prints and watercolors
to 15 museums including the Arkansas Arts Center, the Los Angeles County Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts,
and the Dallas Museum of Art.
1958 One-man exhibition, the Cleveland Museum of Art, ten additional venues through
the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service.
1960 Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy, One-man exhibition.
1961 Invitation to Yaddo Foundation, Saratoga Springs, NY.
1963-1964 Tamarind Suite completed at the Ford Foundation Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles.
1965 Publishes lecture, Peter Takal: About the Invisible in Art while artist in residence at
Theodore Lyman Wright Art Center, Beloit College, Wisconsin under the auspices of
the American Federation of Arts.
1969 Moves to Geneva, Switzerland, maintains studio in Pennsylvania.
Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, one-man exhibition.
1970 Forty-year retrospective, Galerie du Grand-Mezel, Geneva.
1971-1985 Continues to work in Switzerland and the United States. One-man exhibitions in Geneva and New York.
1986 Kresge Art Museum, Michigan State University, one-man exhibition with Catalogue Raisonné of the Prints of Peter Takal.
One-man exhibition, Gallerie Blondel at FIAC, Paris of his first '30s drawings.
1990 Sixty-year retrospective, Gallerie Editart, D. Blanco, Geneva, with book: Takal Dessins 1930-1990.
1992 Publishes Danses, a book of 32 reproductions of early drawings. published by Editions Weber. Geneva, Switzerland
1993 One-man exhibition, Zeichnungen und Druckgraphic 1930-1991, Pfalzgalerle, Kaiserslautern, Germany, with catalogue.
1995 Dies in Geneva.
2000 Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock, acquires 1,250 drawings, prints, paintings and archives,
with exhibition and catalogue Peter Takal On Paper by Townsend Wolfe.
The Arkansas Art Center holds the largest and most complete collection of Takal’s work.
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