Here we have an electrifying print of “Icarus” in the midst of the fall. Yet bright as sunshine. It’s a large-format, two-color woodblock print by Elizabeth Eddy, signed in pencil and numbered 8 out of only 10 ever made. Ten. That’s it. That’s the whole edition.
Elizabeth Eddy was a Cleveland-born artist (1907–2002) who trained with some of the defining names of 20th century American modernism: Arshile Gorky, László Moholy-Nagy, and Max Kahn. Her work entered the permanent collections of the Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum, the Cleveland Print Club, and the Fort Wayne Art Museum. She exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Brooklyn Museum. She was, in short, the real deal, and she is criminally under known outside of serious print collecting circles.
And then there’s this. Icarus, mid-fall, rendered in a scalding golden yellow and deep slate green that shouldn’t work together but absolutely does. The figure tumbles through an explosion of feathers…some still attached, some already gone…while wings fan out above and the whole composition spirals downward in a controlled frenzy. Up close, the carving is extraordinary: thousands of individual marks, feather textures layered over feather textures, the body of the boy somehow both solid and dissolving at the same time. The two colors were printed in registration, which for a woodblock of this scale and complexity is no small feat.
The myth of Icarus is about hubris, sure, but it’s also about the breathtaking, terrifying fact of having flown at all. Eddy seems to understand that. This isn’t a cautionary tale. This is a celebration of the moment before the sea.
The rare edition comes out of the artist’s private collection. It was likely created in the late 1950s. It is signed 8/10 and titled “Icarus” in pencil, and signed in the lower right.
The Elizabeth Eddy print measures 31” x 18”. The paper is in excellent condition. It’s clean, flat, no tears. The colors are vivid and unfaded. There is a slight surface wear from decades of storage. Please see all pics as they are a part of the description.
I ship FedEx to street addresses in the continental USA only (no PO Boxes). Free shipping on the rare Eddy woodblock print.
Eddy is a genius. And the world is starting to see it.
