Artist: Sid Maurer
Title: Alfred Hitchcock (from the Portraits of Luminaries Collection)
Year created: 2010
Medium: Original Mixed Media Artwork on Wood Board
Edition: Original Unique Artwork, Hand-Signed by the Artist
Height (inches): 23-7/8
Width (inches): 19-7/8
Signed twice by the artist
Signed Area: front & back
Also Titled and Dated on back
This piece is unframed.
Description of piece:
Sid Maurer’s mastery as a fine artist is evident in his strikingly accurate, personal and intuitive portraits of luminaries.
Imbued with warmth and vibrancy, Maurer’s portraits capture the essence of his subjects, and synthesize Maurer’s artistic vision with his technical and compositional roots in graphic design. Bold, visible paint texturing and layering bring added light, depth and dimensionality to the artwork.
An original mixed media painting on wood board, Maurer’s self-titled Alfred Hitchcock captures the mystery, and iconic visage, of the famous director and 'Master of Suspense', Alfred Hitchcock.
Appropriately dark and moody, with masterful shadowing, the artwork measures 23-7/8” in height x 19-7/8" width.
The artwork is signed twice by the artist: first, on the front of the artwork, lower left, in an exceptionally large, bold signature in silver; and on the reverse, where Maurer has also titled and dated the work.
Alfred Hitchcock is accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity, which comes in a clear, protective archival sleeve.
SIR ALFRED HITCHCOCK (1899–1980) was an English film director, producer, and screenwriter, and one of the most influential and widely studied filmmakers in the history of cinema. Known as the "Master of Suspense", he directed over 50 feature films in a career spanning six decades, becoming as well known as any of his actors thanks to his many interviews, his cameo roles in most of his films, and his hosting and producing the television anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–65). His films garnered 46 Academy Award nominations including six wins.
Born in Leytonstone, London, Hitchcock entered the film industry in 1919 as a title card designer after training as a technical clerk and copy writer for a telegraph-cable company. He made his directorial debut with the British-German silent film The Pleasure Garden (1925). His first successful film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), helped to shape the thriller genre, while his 1929 film, Blackmail, was the first British "talkie". Two of his 1930s thrillers, The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938), are ranked among the greatest British films of the 20th century.
By 1939, Hitchcock was a filmmaker of international importance, and film producer David O. Selznick persuaded him to move to Hollywood. A string of successful films followed, including Rebecca (1940), Foreign Correspondent (1940), Suspicion (1941), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and Notorious (1946). Rebecca won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Hitchcock himself was nominated as Best Director; he was also nominated for Lifeboat (1944) and Spellbound (1945). Hitchcock made multiple films with some of the biggest stars of Hollywood, including four with Cary Grant in the 1940s and 50s, three with Ingrid Bergman in the last half of the 1940s, four with James Stewart over a ten-year span commencing in 1948, and three with Grace Kelly in the mid-1950s.
In the 1950s, Hitchcock’s masterpieces include Strangers on a Train (1951) and Dial M For Murder (1954). Between 1954 and 1960, Hitchcock directed four films often ranked among the greatest of all time: Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960), the first and last of these garnering him Best Director nominations. In 2012, his psychological thriller Vertigo, starring Stewart, displaced Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) as the British Film Institute's greatest film ever made based on its world-wide poll of hundreds of film critics. By 2018 eight of his films had been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, including The Birds (1963) and his personal favourite, Shadow of a Doubt (1943). He received the BAFTA Fellowship in 1971, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1979 and was also knighted in that year.
Artist bio:
Sid Maurer's (1926-2017) long career spanned decades in the world of Art and Music, beginning at age seventeen when he was hired as Assistant Art Director at Columbia Records in New York City. When the music industry exploded, Maurer designed album covers and promotional material for popular artists, alongside Columbia Records colleague Andy Warhol. Maurer expanded his commercial art studio to tackle a wide range of projects for the music and film industries, while his striking artistic style developed, influenced by artists he met including Pollack and Rauschenberg.
Maurer left the empire of music and art that he had helped to build to focus on his passion: painting. In the last decade, his work has been shown in a wide variety of venues, including the Georgia Capitol, the Carnegie Museum and U.C.L.A. His commissioned artwork includes work for ESPN, MotorSport America Magazine, David Bowie, Boy George, and Donovan.
As a painter, Maurer created large mixed media pieces that were very much a product of his varied training and experience. His style combined bold, dynamic colors and strokes with painstaking layouts and typographical elements. The result is the unique blend of a painter's passion tempered with the calculating compositional eye of a graphic designer, exploring his themes through the use of bold subject matter, symbols and graphics.