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Happy Birthday, Lucas Samaras! Our vibrant “Dreams in Dust: The Pastels of Lucas Samaras” catalogue, which was published in 2016, dives deep into the artist’s relationship with the precarious medium. Samaras began drawing with pastels in high school after emigrating from Greece in 1948 at age eleven. Not knowing the English language, he understood that art “was the only thing [he] could do without speaking.” He continued exploring the medium through college and into his early career, establishing himself as an art-world outlier in the 1950s and ’60s. His chromatic self-portraits and hallucinatory compositions of “dream fantasies”—enhanced by the vivid colors and shimmering qualities of his pastels—differed vastly from the gestural paintings of the Abstract Expressionists and Minimalists at the time. With essays by Isabelle Dervaux, Acquavella Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings at the Morgan Library & Museum and paper conservation experts Margaret Holben Ellis and Lindsey Tyne, the catalogue captures how Samaras’s early drawings acted as a catalyst for the experimental mixed-media works he is recognized for today. For more on Samaras and his drawings, purchase the book online in the link in our bio or at the Morgan Shop. __ Images: Dreams in Dust: The Pastels of Lucas Samaras catalogue. The Morgan Library & Museum, Photography by Carmen González Fraile, 2023. © Lucas Samaras, courtesy Pace Gallery #LucasSamaras #MorganLibrary #FromtheArchive