Untitled Abstraction (3/10) from the collection of Leno Family Collection

Cameron Booth

Untitled Abstraction (3/10), 1952

Lithograph on paper

11 x 13 in (27.94 x 33.02 cm)

Paper size: 16 x 22.5 in (40.64 x 57.15 cm)

Edition. 3/10

Signature: LR Cameron Booth 1952

Inv: 2026.11

In Storage

Cameron Booth (1892–1980)
Untitled Abstraction, 1952. Lithograph, edition 3/10. Printed by Robert Blackburn, New York City.
Created in 1952, this boldly gestural lithograph captures Cameron Booth at a pivotal moment: sixty years old, teaching simultaneously at the Art Students League in New York and the Minneapolis School of Art, and fully committed to the abstract language that would define the final decades of his long career. Known as the dean of Minnesota artists, Booth brought to New York a mature artistic intelligence shaped by decades of Regionalist painting, European modernism, and Hans Hofmann's color theory — all of it distilled here into sweeping calligraphic forms, biomorphic shapes, and atmospheric tonal passages characteristic of lithographic crayon and tusche wash technique. Large looping arcs dominate the composition, enclosing suggestions of landscape — faint rooftops, cliffs, organic forms — while a sharp triangular spike rises from center-bottom and a rounded seed-pod shape anchors the right, the whole animated by a cluster of small circular marks at the left. The high-contrast black and white palette intensifies the print's raw energy, evoking both Miró's biomorphism and the gestural freedom of Abstract Expressionism at its most confident.
The impression bears the stamp of Robert Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop, New York City — a distinction of considerable significance. Blackburn's cooperative studio was the preeminent lithography workshop in mid-century America, its presses sought out by the most serious printmakers of the era. That Booth had this edition of ten pulled at Blackburn's shop in 1952 — the very period when Blackburn and Will Barnet were producing technically groundbreaking color lithographs that appeared in ARTnews — places this work at the center of New York's graphic arts renaissance. The Blackburn blind stamp is effectively a hallmark of craft and seriousness.
Edition 3 of 10.

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About the artist

Cameron Booth

American

1892-1980

Cameron Booth (1892–1980) is widely regarded as the dean of Minnesota artists — a painter, printmaker, and educator whose six-decade career bridged American Regionalism and Abstract Expressionism and helped shape the course of modernist art in the Upper Midwest.
Born in Erie, Pennsylvania, Booth grew up in Moorhead, Minnesota, before studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1912–1917), where attendance at the landmark 1913 Armory Show proved decisive. Military service in France brought direct contact with Fernand Léger, Georges Rouault, and Kees van Dongen, and he subsequently studied Cubism with André Lhote in Paris and with Hans Hofmann in Italy.
Booth returned to Minnesota in 1921, teaching at the Minneapolis School of Art and later serving as director of the St. Paul Gallery and School of Art (1931). During the 1930s he led Minnesota's Public Works of Art Project. In 1942 he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for painting. He then joined the faculty of the Art Students League of New York before returning permanently to Minnesota in 1948 to teach at the University of Minnesota, where his students included Pop Art pioneer James Rosenquist.
A traveling retrospective organized by the American Federation of Arts circulated nationally from 1961 to 1963. His work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Walker Art Center, and the Phillips Collection, among others.

Booth died 7 Mar 1980, aged 87, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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About the artist

Cameron Booth