"Xochimilco" and "Taxco" - two images printed on single sheet

Richard Day

Richard Day worked as an art director in early Hollywood, garnering 40 Academy Award nominations and winning 7 Oscars for 'Dark Angel', 'How Green Was My Valley', 'This Above All', 'My Gal Sal', 'A Streetcar Named Desire', 'On the Waterfront', and 'Dodsworth.'

Day used his art director's skills to approach his lithography from unusual Mondernist angles and construction. He drew on the stones with the side of the litho crayon, creating variant grays and blacks, enhanced with a few lines.

In this instance he drew two compositions on a single stone which were then editioned and each signed. They were meant to be separated but it didn't happen. We are offering both images as a single work.

During the 1930s Day did a number of very fine lithographs which were professionally printed in Los Angeles by Paul Roeher. These were shown at Jake Zeitlin's Book Shop and in 1932 Merle Armitage published 'The Lithographs of Richard Day'. His lithographs were shown in 1935 at the California-Pacific International Exposition in San Diego and are represented in the collection of the Library of Congress.

Print curator/scholar Carl Zigrosser wrote the introduction to 'The Lithographs of Richard Day', in which he praised Day's lithography: "His work must be reckoned with. Here is a new lithographer, fresh in design, original in point of view, enlivened with a sense of humor. Outstanding among his recent works,....Hotel in Cuernavaca for...its...striking juxtapositions and arrangement of plastic form."