Rectangle Fleeting is a color paper relief print printed as a monotype in 1961 by American artist Edmond Casarella. It is pencil signed, dated, and titled. Rectangle was printed by the artist from a shaped cardboard matrix on cream wove paper and is pencil signed, dated, and titled. This is a unique impression with no formal edition. The actual image measures approximately 10 x 7-11/16 inches and the sheet measures 20 x 16 inches.
In 1998, the Hirschl and Adler Galleries in New York presented the exhibition Out of Bounds: Jacob Kainen, Sylvia Wald, Edmond Casarella. Joseph Goddu and Shelley Farmer wrote the introduction in the brochure for the exhibition: “The totemic imagery in Edmond Casarella’s monoprints of the early 1960s has its parallel in his painting and sculpture of that period. His development of an additive relief process for making printing blocks reflected a sculptor’s solution to the problem of how to suggest and manipulate form in a two-dimensional medium. Transparent veils of colors, achieved through multiple printings from a single block, yield prints of enduring beauty that blur traditional distinctions between painting, printmaking and sculpture.”
Edmond Casarella, printmaker, painter, sculptor, and teacher, was born in Newark, New Jersey on September 3, 1920. Upon his graduation from Cooper Union in 1942, he was hired by Anthony Velonis to print serigraphs at Creative Printmakers under the National Youth Administration which was part of the New Deal. The following year he created the poster for the 1943 exhibition, Artists for Victory. Casarella joined the U.S. Army in 1944 and, after his discharge, he enrolled at the Brooklyn Museum School where he studied printmaking with Gabor Peterdi.
Casarella made his first paper relief print about 1948 and continued to experiment with the medium throughout his career. His work was shown in 1949 at the Laurel Gallery in New York and, in 1952, he was being represented by Margaret Lowengrund's Contemporaries Gallery. In 1953, Casarella's work was included in the Young American Printmakers exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and, in 1962, he was included in the widely traveled exhibition, American Prints Today. He received a Fulbright Fellowship in 1951, a Tiffany Award in 1955, and a Guggenheim Grant in 1960. These allowed him to travel throughout Italy and Greece.
Casarella taught at the Brooklyn Museum from 1955 to 1960 and at Cooper Union and Finch College from 1969 to 1975. During the 1960s he taught courses at the Arts Students' League and Hunter College in Manhattan and had temporary teaching positions at the Pratt Institute, Yale University, Rutgers University, and Columbia University.
Edmond Casarella was elected a National Academician of the National Academy of Design and his prints, paintings and sculpture have been included in a score of exhibitions in the United States and Eastern Europe. Casarella’s work is represented in the collections of the Greek National Museum in Athens; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Australian National Museum, Canberra; the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; the Speed Art Museum, University of Louisville; the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; and the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts.
Edmond Casarella died in Englewood, New Jersey on 13 February 1996.
