Card Players

 

Saul Jacob Rabino

  1892 - 1969 (biography)

c. 1935  

lithograph 

11 7/8 x 9 1/8" image size 

pencil, lower right 

at least 28 impressions 

pencil titled; signed in stone, lower left 

not in GSA book on WPA; listed on the WPA allocation card for Saul Rabino (32. Card Players) that was copied and sent from the Newark Museum to the National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, April 21, 1970 

cream wove 

published 

Federal Art Project, WPA 

17865 

$250.00 

Rabino produced a number of lithographs on the theme of entertainment: card players, chess players, opera attendees, music, and musicians. Card Players is set in a small room and the interior and players are dramatically illuminated from an overhead light source. Aside from their faces, the figures dissolve from realism to modernism as their bodies morph into rounded shapes and their legs and feet disappear. Each character has a minimally drawn unique face except that of man smoking a pipe at left. Humor is offered in the “poker faces” of the three men at right, the protectively raised shoulder and arm of the central figure as he shields his hand, and the feminine arms and hands projecting outward and over the table from the left edge of the image.