Patrick Nagel (1945-1984), American 1982 Serigraph "Collector's Gallery, Pacific Grove, California". Signed in the plate. Nagel combined elements of pop art, art deco, and Japanese woodblocks to create the "Nagel Woman" for Playboy Magazine. Condition as pictured.

Overall Size: 24 1/4 x 32 1/4 in.

Sight Size: 17 1/2 x 25 1/2 in.

Patrick Nagel was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1945, but was brought up in the Los Angeles area where he spent most of his life.  He attended and taught at Pasadena's Art Center School of Design, then Chouinard Art Institute, and in 1969 received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from California State University at Fullerton.

Nagel initially put his talents to work as a freelance artist, accepting commissions from major corporations and magazines, including IBM, ITT, United Artists, MGM, Universal Studios, Playboy, Architectural Digest, Rolling Stone, Oui, and Harpers.

He was most known for his "femme fatale":  While elegant and alluring, Nagel's women were also stand-offish and independent.  Beginning in 1976, Nagel began contributing regularly to Playboy, which extended the exposure and popularity of "the Nagel Woman."

In 1978, he created his first poster image for Mirage Editions.  Together with Mirage, his work became the modern day counterpart to the "posterists" who had proceeded him such as Lautrec, Mucha, Cassandre, and Holwein.

His work reflected and synthesized a variety of artistic traditions. His work bore characteristics of old Japanese woodblock print and modern-day manga, as well as European aesthetics developed by the Post- Impressionists and Pre-Raphaelites. He created a popular "art deco" style that affected fashion and decorative arts in the 1980s.

Nagel's posters have been collected by such prestigious institutions as the Library of Congress, the Oakland Museum, and the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at U.C.L.A.  Permanent collections of his work are housed at the Bibliotheque des Arts Decoratifs and the Smithsonian Institution.  He died of a heart attack in 1984 at the age of 38.

Currently, there is no Patrick Nagel catalog raisonne.  The most comprehensive book on his work is The Art of Patrick Nagel (Van Der Merk 1985).

Condition as pictured.