San Francisco Cable Car at Union Square
Screenprint, or silkscreen on reused advertisement board.
This proof is printed on the blank back of an advertisement poster, cut in half by the artist to fit this particular print. It shows a fighter pilot who is being shot at in air combat. The artist was still deciding on colors for this composition. Other impressions encountered have fewer screens being used but at times also brighter colors. It seems the artist didn’t print an edition of this composition, but rather a series of variations with screens reworked, added, or omitted for each successive impression. While some impression shows San Francisco’s Union Square in bright sunlight, our impression is a dusk (or dawn) scene, with a chalky sky that shows a crescent moon. Other dusk time impressions are brighter or have a full moon instead. And the text on the billboards as well as the trolly (in ours: Powell and Market – Fisherman’s Wharf – Bay and Taylor) varies. The definition and presence of various figures and dogs also change in each impression. This was clearly a print meant to investigate possibilities for the artist. This is cutting-edge printmaking, in a technique regarded as commercial at the time, by a woman artist, and during the war!
Signed and dated in the image.
