Ileana Sonnabend

The Purple Series was the second, and also the last, series of prints to be produced from lithographic stones.

The men and women whose names were appropriated as titles for the Purple Paintings (1963) and prints constitute a gallery of Stella's circle of friends in the New York art world. At the time of Stella's acquaintance with them in the early 1960s, Ileana Sonnabend, a prominent art dealer and the former wife of Leo Castelli; Henry Garden, pseudonym for Henry Geldzahler, an assistant curator in the Department of American Painting and Sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; D., for the nickname 'Dee' of Emile de Antonio, an entrepreneur and promoter of avant-garde art; Sidney Guberman, a sculptor and a former classmate of Stella's at Princeton University; Charlotte Tokayer, a close friend of Richard Bellamy, director of the Green Gallery.