Hen

 

Milton Clark Avery

  1885 - 1965 (biography)

1954  

woodcut 

11 15/16 x 9 11/16" image size 

pencil, lower right 

17 of 25  

pencil editioned and dated 

Lunn 57 

antique-white wove Japanese 

published 

artist 

19917 

$3,800.00 

"Hen" was produced in 1954, two years after Milton Avery began to make woodcuts. He cut directly on the block using the white to create the image. He created twenty-one woodcuts in three years between 1952 and 1955, and "Hen" was the 18th in the series. He also printed a second edition of "Hen" with a yellow background. This impression has white-out in the lower right of the image that the artist applied to diminish the effect of stray ink that he did not wish to show. Art historian Alan Fern wrote in the Harry H. Lunn Jr. catalogue raisonné of Avery's prints: "All of the woodblocks were printed by rubbing, not in a press, and this enabled the artist to vary the background tone of each impression as he printed....To a great extent, each woodblock print is an individual experience; it is rare to find two of Avery's woodcuts that are exactly the same..."