Arthur Secunda (1927-2022) American, Abstract Numbered and Signed Screen Print. Shows a landscape with trees, a moon, pyramids, and what is likely a plane flying above leaving a trail through the night sky. Title: "Egypt," from the artist's Egypt Portfolio. Signed in pencil bottom right. Numbered 42/60 in pencil bottom left. 

Overall Size: 34 1/2 x 29 1/2 in. 

Sight Size: 23 x 18 in. 

Arthur Secunda was born on November 12th, 1927 in Jersey City, New Jersey. He explored jazz and science in his youth, and first studied art at the Detroit Institute of Arts as a teenager, where he befriended fellow abstract artist Raymond Edward “Ray” Johnson. He was one of the first to participate in Johnson’s mail art experiments, and Johnson traced the beginnings of his work in Correspondence Art to the letters they exchanged after Secunda’s family moved away from Detroit in 1943. Secunda continued his studies at the Art Students League of New York and at New York University, but enlisted and served in the United States Air Force in World War II, where he served as a combat artist. He used his GI Bill to study in Mexico, Paris, and Italy with many great artists and teachers. As a result Secunda developed a lifelong propensity for travel, living and working in many countries. For most of his career, however, he maintained dedicated studios in Paris and Los Angeles. Secunda had his first one-man show in 1950 at the Galerie Lucien Gout in Montpellier. He considered himself a landscape artist, and developed his own iconography to represent nature, the land, and its forms, which had a profound impact on other abstract artists who followed him, particularly in his use of color gradation. In the 1960s and 70s Secunda worked as an art critic, lecturer, curator, writer, and publisher, as well as periodically consulting for NASA as an image visualizer, helping translate scientific data into visual images. He frequently returned to Lacoste, France to teach master classes in collage and the creation of handmade artists books. He held over 140 solo exhibitions around the world throughout his life, including in the United States, Israel, France, Sweden, Belgium, Holland, Spain, and Japan. His artwork is now part of private collections around the world and in over one hundred museums worldwide, including the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C., the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Australia, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and the National Museum in Stockholm, Sweden. A permanent section of the Detroit Art Institute is dedicated to his work. The peculiar death of his close friend Johnson in 1995 profoundly affected Secunda, who became withdrawn but continued to produce art at a significantly reduced pace. He maintained a studio in Scottsdale, Arizona for ten years before moving to Boulder, Colorado, where he died on August 30th, 2022. The Arthur Secunda Museum at Cleary University in Michigan, first built in 2011, continues to pay tribute to his life and artwork.