Artist: Sid Maurer
Title: Martin Scorsese
Year created: 2010
Medium: Original Mixed Media Painting on Wood Board
Edition: Original Unique Artwork
Height (inches): 20
Width (inches): 21-3/4
Signed by the artist twice, front and 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 Martin Scorsese measures 20” in height x 21-3/4” width. The artwork is signed twice by the artist: first, on the front of the artwork, lower right; and on the reverse, where Maurer has also titled and dated the work.
Martin Scorsese is accompanied by its original Certificate of Authenticity from Allan Rich, Sid Maurer’s gallerist and lifelong personal friend. In addition to representing artists with Hollywood ties, Allan Rich was himself a well-known character actor, author and acting coach. The COA includes a photograph of the artwork; a photograph of, and personal statement by, the artist; and is signed and dated by Allan Rich.
MARTIN SCORSESE, renowned film director, producer, screenwriter and actor, is widely regarded as one of the most significant and influential directors in film history. Scorsese's body of work explores themes such as Italian-American identity, concepts of guilt and redemption, faith, machismo, nihilism, crime and sectarianism.
Scorsese, to much international acclaim, has established a filmmaking history involving repeat collaborations with actors and film technicians, including nine films made with Robert De Niro. His films with De Niro are the psychological thriller Taxi Driver (1976), the biographical sports drama Raging Bull (1980), the satirical black comedy The King of Comedy (1982), the musical drama New York, New York (1977), the psychological thriller Cape Fear (1991), and the crime films Mean Streets (1973), Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995) and The Irishman (2019). Scorsese has also been noted for his collaborations with actor Leonardo DiCaprio, having directed him in five films: the historical epic Gangs of New York (2002), the Howard Hughes biography The Aviator (2004), the crime thriller The Departed (2006), the psychological thriller Shutter Island (2010), and the Wall Street black comedy The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). The Departed won Scorsese an Academy Award for Best Director, and for Best Picture.
Scorsese is also known for his long-time collaboration with film editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who has edited every Scorsese film beginning with Raging Bull. Scorsese's other film work includes the black comedy After Hours (1985), the romantic drama The Age of Innocence (1993), the children's adventure drama Hugo (2011), and the religious epics The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Kundun (1997) and Silence (2016). As a fan of rock music, he has directed several documentaries on the subject after editing Woodstock (1970), including The Last Waltz (1978), No Direction Home (2005), Shine a Light (2008), George Harrison: Living in the Material World (2011), and Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019).
Martin Scorsese's films have consistently garnered critical acclaim, with nine nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director, Scorsese is the most-nominated living director and is second only to William Wyler's twelve nominations overall. In 2007, Scorsese was presented with the Kennedy Center Honor at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for his influence in American culture, and four of his films have been inducted into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”. He also received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2003, a British Film Institute Fellowship in 1995, and a BAFTA Fellowship in 2012. Scorsese is also a recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award for his contributions to the cinema, and has won an Academy Award, a Palme d'Or, a Cannes Film Festival Award, a Silver Lion, a Grammy Award, three Primetime Emmy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, three BAFTA Awards, and two Directors Guild of America Awards.
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.