"Hotel Paradise Cafe"

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(1987)

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"Interiors IV: Hotel Paradise Cafe"  1987, resist-ground etching and engraving; 610x915mm; 24" x 36", full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered in pencil, lower margin.  A very good, dark impression [Milton 110].

Peter Milton (1930 -) was born in Philadelphia, the third of four children.  He attended the Yale School of Art studying under Josef Albers. He earned both his BFA and MFA at Yale, after which he taught at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore. It was while at the Maryland Institute that Peter Milton turned his attention increasingly on print making and began his monochromatic journey to becoming one of the 20th century's greatest printmakers.

Peter Milton's facility with printmaking techniques incur an overpowering visual and emotional impression on the viewer.  It is the irreducible element arising from the subjective content of his images that demands the viewer interprets the meanings within his imagery. There is an intelligence and poeticism in his art that is ambiguous in time and place, and leaves the viewer with the impression of undefined familiarity. Time is halted, environments symbolic and images at once known and unknown drawn from historical times past, present and future force the observer to look beyond the subjective and discover a magical narrative. Peter Milton's art draws on American realism as well as Surrealism's evocative juxtapositions of objects, figures and elusive meanings.

"In 1987 with Interiors IV: Hotel Parade Cafe and again in 1991 with Interiors VII: The Train from Munich while maintaining his air of richly textured mystery, Milton decided to focus on a particular time and situation - the mood of impending crisis in Europe on the brink of World War II. Although both these impressive works contain elements of the surreal, they are devoid of any of the artist's lightness of touch. There is a darkness, not only in tonality, but in the atmosphere of uneasy anticipation" [from Choreography of Consciousness by Robert Flynn Johnson].

"The Train from Munich" (click to view) is both specific and personal depicting Peter Milton's wife, Edith, escaping from Nazi Germany in 1939 and the impending darkness that was to prevail for the next six years.   "Hotel Paradise Cafe" is a complimenting work from Milton's darkest imagery of the darkest period of European history.  In these two works, Milton confronts the value in art as a political and evocative medium asking the question can art change history or only let one share and console oneself as unstoppable events unfold.  "Hotel Paradise Cafe" encapsulates the foreboding mood of Europe at the doorstep of war. This deeply symbolic imagery foreshadows the moments just before the horror mankind wrought upon itself, by choosing inaction and denial. [taken from Peter Milton's Notes on Interiors VII:  The Train From Munich".

"Interiors IV: Hotel Paradise Cafe" is in a large Roma 'Eleganza" 42 3/8" x 54" black with antique silver lip frame. The outer Belgique linen hand-covered  oyster and 6-ply ivory black with black core inner mats are acid and lignin free and protected with Acrylite-AR OP3 (UV) by CYRO ... $12,000.00 (wire-transfer only)