Girl in a Green Cap

Anne Ryan was a self-taught painter, printmaker, collagist associated with the New York School of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s and early 1950s. Her printmaking activity began in 1941 at Atelier 17, the experimental print workshop founded by Stanley William Hayter in Paris in 1927, and then re-located to New York in 1940 after France fell to the Nazis. By 1945, she had adapted a method of woodblock printing known as the white-line technique, in which incised lines separate distinct shapes within the composition, allowing several colors to be printed simultaneously. As seen in this print, the result is a clarity of design resulting from a unified structure of lines and single-color forms, here set against a black paper background.