Battle of the Little Big Horn is a lithograph from 1964 by American artist Nathan Oliveira (1920-2010). It is pencil signed, titled, dated and editioned 30/60. The reference for this work is Garver 92. Battle of the Little Big Horn was printed by Bohuslav Horak on ivory wove Rives paper for the publisher, Kanthos Press. The image measures 19-1/4 x 14-5/8 inches.
This abstract expressionist lithograph was the fifth of twelve images included in the suite Twelve Intimate Fantasies / A Suite of Lithographs by Nathan Oliveira. Peter Selz, art historian and author, commented on this portfolio in the book Nathan Oliveira: “These prints, rapidly produced in a period of two weeks, are not as complete as they might have been. Still, they are fascinating, rather abstract pieces, some playful and others veering toward surrealist dream imagery. Several are dedicated to artists he admired, including Duccio, Michelangelo, Giocometti, and Voulkos....The graphics he produced, especially in their melding of meaning and medium, signify Oliveira’s adherence to tradition.”
Nathan Oliveira was born Nathan Joseph Roderick to a family of Portuguese immigrants in Oakland, California on December 19, 1928. After his mother married George Oliveira, another Portuguese immigrant, Nathan adopted his surname.
Oliveira studied painting and printmaking at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now the California College of the Arts or CCAC) in Oakland, and in the summer of 1950 with Max Beckmann at Mills College in Oakland. In 1955, after serving two years in the U.S. Army as a cartographic draftsman, he began teaching painting at CCAC and drawing and printmaking at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). He was a professor at Stanford University from 1964 until his retirement in 1995.
In 1959, Oliveira was the youngest painter included in the important exhibition “New Images of Man” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A five-year survey of his paintings and works on paper was shown in 1963 at the Art Gallery of the University of California, Los Angeles, and a fifteen-year survey of his paintings was mounted at the Oakland Museum of California in 1973. Oliveira had a print retrospective in 1980 at California State University, Long Beach, and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco organized a survey of his work in monotype in 1997.
Oliveira was elected to the American Academy of
Arts and Letters in 1994 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two honorary
doctorates, and, in 2000, membership in a distinguished order conferred by the
government of Portugal. His work is in the collections of many museums, among
them the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, and
the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
