MINNA CITRON Hand Signed ORIGINAL Embossed Etching on Silver Foil 1969

Title: Untitled/ En Plata, 1969. Medium: Original Etching with Embossing on alufoil.

Signature: Hand Signed and dated ("`69") by the Artist in Blue Pen, LR. Edition: Rare Proof; total impressions believed to be less than 20 impressions.

Size: 27 x 19 1/2 inches. Provenance: UCLA Collection; Hatay Stratton Fine Art. About the Artist: Minna Wright Citron (October 15, 1896 - December 23, 1991) was an American painter and printmaker. Her early prints focus on the role of women, sometimes in a satirical manner, in a style known as urban realism.

Citron was drawn to printmaking in the early 1940s after seeing the works of Stanley William Hayter, whose Atelier 17 had been forced to relocate from Paris to New York City due to World War II. Citron spent much time at the Atelier 17, learning new techniques and embarking upon her own innovations. She combined the deliberate with the accidental, for example, happily exploiting the opportunity a broken etching plate provided to recreate a design.

Her goal was to find an actual third dimension in painting as well as printmaking. Toward this end, she piled on paint and varnish, creating raised surfaces on her canvases or plates. Later, she began cutting into the surfaces.

Her art became progressively more abstract, thanks in part to her continuing association with Atelier 17, which she visited often after it was moved back to France at the war's end. In the 1950s she exhibited a series of experimental prints at the Peter Deitsch Gallery in a show titled The Uncharted Course, which showed the journey of a plate through several incarnations made possible by breakage, other accidental effects, and Citron's own creative energy. Her work is represented in the collections of in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, Library of Congress, New York Public Library. Albert Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. On her ninetieth birthday she was honored at Rutgers University's Douglass College Library.

The celebration, a part of the library's'Women Artists Series', included a retrospective of Citron's work. "Models of Persistence" was the show's theme, which the ebullient Citron epitomized as she continued to create and display works of art into her nineties.

Citron died in New York City on December 23, 1991, at the age of ninety-five.