The African-American artist Robert Blackburn was one of the most influential printmakers of the 20th century. For more than five decades he taught, worked with, and inspired generations of printmakers at The Printmaking Workshop, which he founded in New York in 1948. (His legacy of education and collaboration continues to this day through the non-profit Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop.) Blackburn worked as the first master printer at Universal Limited Art Editions from 1957 to 1963, helping to create 79 editions by artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Grace Hartigan, and Larry Rivers, whose 1961 lithograph of his second wife, "Face of Clarice II", is shown here. Blackburn was adept at every kind of printmaking, though his own graphic work is particularly distinguished by his embrace of experimental lithography and color abstraction. These two variations of Blackburn’s abstract still-life composition Heavy Forms exemplify his interest in re-working, re-inking, and re-orienting his lithographic stones.