Prints with/out Pressure: American Relief Prints from the 1940s through the 1960s at The New York Public Library's Humanities and Social Sciences Library from October 28, 2005 through January 29, 2006

Exhibition Reveals that Relief Printmaking in America Served a Variety of Artistic Points of View in Mid 20th Century

Prints with/out Pressure: American Relief Prints from the 1940s through the 1960s, an exhibition opening on October 28 at The New York Public Library, reveals that artists representing a broad spectrum of styles such as realism, surrealism, expressionism, and abstraction, began to explore and experiment with the relief print during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The exhibit, featuring 148 prints from the Library's Print Collection of the Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, is on view at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street through January 29, 2006. Admission is free.

Leona Pierce, Marbles, color woodcut, ca. 1950. © The New York Public Library.

In the relief print process, the artist cuts away parts of a matrix, often a wood or linoleum block; the raised surface that remains is inked, and the inked image is then transferred to paper. Artists such as Leonard Baskin, Misch Kohn, and Bernard Reder tapped the expressive impact of black and white in their powerful relief prints depicting a troubled mankind, as did Irvin Amen in his pared-down black and white figures. For Will Barnet, angular arrangements of bold woodcut lines printed in black captured the spirit of quiet domestic scenes. Seong Moy, Antonio Frasconi, Leona Pierce, Karl Schrag, and Adja Yunkers used color to give their own particular and highly individualistic blends of figuration and abstraction dramatic impact. Vincent Longo, Fred Becker, and Robert Conover found in the resistant woodcut a vehicle to communicate a gestural energy in large, abstract relief prints. While most of these artists continued to work with a wood or linoleum block, the exhibition reveals that others like Boris Margo, Harold Paris, Arthur Deshaies, Edmond Casarella, and John Ross utlilized new and nontraditional printmaking materials, including celluloid dissolved in acetone, Lucite, and cardboard to create a relief matrix.  

The exhibition's title, Prints with/out Pressure, implies that while some artists relied on the pressure exerted by a printing press to transfer ink from a raised relief surface to paper, others required little equipment: only the back of a spoon or the artist's hand to rub a sheet of paper against the raised and inked surface to transfer image to the paper. Many artists, including Milton Avery and Naum Gabo, capitalized upon hand printing to produce unique impressions or to vary an edition.

Artistic Possibilities
Until the 1930s most American artists seemed unaware of or indifferent to earlier innovative woodcuts by painters Gauguin, Munch, and the German Expressionists. But by the end of that decade, Will Barnet, Louis Schanker, and Werner Drewes found that the medium of printmaking served their expressive needs and individual styles. The exquisitely crafted wood engravings of Fritz Eichenberg, Lynd Ward, and Grace Albee continued to be favored for book illustration, and for prints commissioned by conservative print clubs and societies. By mid-century, however, a number of artists had begun to explore and exploit the wide range of artistic possibilities and the rich, expressive visual language offered by the relief print. At this same time, critics noted that relief prints were growing in scale and colorful, painterly effects to rival the power of increasingly monumental contemporary painting.

Many of the prints in Prints with/out Pressure: American Relief Prints from the 1940s through the 1960s were given by or acquired from the artists themselves at or near the time of creation; others came from a handful of adventuresome New York galleries that dealt in contemporary prints, including Grace Borgenicht, the Contemporaries, and Weyhe Gallery. Some were purchased from print clubs and the International Graphic Arts Society, an organization that commissioned prints for sale to its membership at modest prices. Still others came to the Library through gift and bequest from Una Johnson, Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Brooklyn Museum, who (along with the Library's then-print curator, Karl Kup) championed many of these artists through exhibitions, monographs, and the highly influential Brooklyn Museum National Print Annual Exhibition.  

Works on View
Among the works on view documenting the wide range of styles and versatility of the relief print is Lynd Ward's 1947 wood engraving Bridges at Echo Bay . Ward's realistic, meticulously crafted black-and-white wood engravings often were published as "stories without words." The crisp, elegant, and descriptive lines of the work continued to be Ward's hallmark in the more than one hundred books he illustrated. The images of Argentine-born American artist Antonio Frasconi, like Ward's, were closely tied to the physical world, but Frasconi tackled the wood block with bold cuts and slashes not only to describe but to exude the energy of his vividly colored Boy with Cock, in which his young subject wrestles with his resistant captive. Frasconi's free and vigorous approach to the woodcut also successfully captures both physiognomy and personality in his portraits of Einstein and his acerbic caricature of J. Edgar Hoover.

Rather than literally describing a circus, Seong Moy extracts the chaotic energy of abstracted tumblers, acrobats, and clowns is his 1953 Two Circus Acts in One. The exhibition also documents how Moy created this color woodcut through a series of progressive proofs. While Two Circus Acts in One, though alluding to the physical world, is quite abstract, Moy also captured more literally nature's quiet beauty in his 1962 color woodcut Nassau County No. 2. Louis Schanker, a key figure in the revival of the relief print, similarly used the woodcut to create energized abstractions, such as Circle Image (1952), but the human figure in motion is quite evident in his earlier Skaters. Other artists found inspiration in the seemingly abstract hieroglyphic notations present in Native American art, including Leonard Nelson, Werner Drewes, and Worden Day. Adolf Gottlieb also was intrigued by these "primitive" pictographs. They suggested an ancient, universal language, which Gottlieb combined with his interest in Jungian theories of the collective unconscious in his untitled 1944 color woodcut.  

Use of Materials
The exhibition also demonstrates how the artist's choice and use of materials were integral to the artist's intent. Josef Albers experimented with three different printing matrices - cork, linoleum, and wood - in his 1944 relief prints Involute , Contra , and Astatic , to achieve different textural and spatial effects. Boris Margo realized fluid abstractions through his inventive use of celluloid dissolved in acetone. He poured his viscous matrix, which when hardened, could be further worked with acetone or engraving tools. His glowing colors were either stenciled on the printed image or printed in a single sweep of the roller charged with inks applied to and blended on the roller. Louis Schanker built up tactile layers of ink, printing over still-wet layers of ink below; he also sometimes printed color over black ink for special luminosity. Anne Ryan followed Schanker's example by printing dense layers of ink on black paper. For Edmond Casarella, creating a printing matrix out of cardboard allowed him to work large and independently.

Other artists wanted to celebrate the texture of the wood block and its challenging physical resistance. In a very rare, previously unknown woodcut, probably dating from the early to mid-1950s, Eva Hesse emphasized the force of the gesture necessary to work the block; several gouged blocks were inked with intense colors to create a powerful abstract image. This woodcut suggests that Hesse's interaction with tactile materials was present long before her later, well-known work with latex, fiberglass, and resin.

Organizing the Exhibit
"Organizing this exhibition has been an enlightening experience for the staff of the Print Collection," says Roberta Waddell, Curator of the Print Collection at The New York Public Library. "Our research not only revealed the stylistic variety and inventiveness evident in the relief print during the 1940s through the 1960s, but also the astuteness of Karl Kup, the former curator, who during those years acquired a significant selection of work by key participants in this historical movement. Evident, too, was the important role played by the WPA printmaking workshop in legitimizing all media, including the relief print, and in encouraging experimentation at a time during World War II when émigré artists were also validating new and unorthodox approaches to printmaking. Art history joined with institutional history as we reviewed the collection and made our selections for the exhibition."

Prints with/out Pressure: American Relief Prints from the 1940s through the 1960s is on view October 28, 2005 through January 29, 2006 in the Print Gallery and Stokes Gallery (both on the third floor) at The New York Public Library's Humanities and Social Sciences Library. Exhibition hours are Tuesday and Wednesday, 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.; Thursday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Sundays, 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.; closed Friday, November 11; Saturday, December 24; Mondays; and holidays. Admission is free. For more information, call 212-869-8089 or visit www.nypl.org.

Prints with/out Pressure: American Relief Prints from the 1940s through the 1960s was made possible by the ongoing support of Miriam and Ira D. Wallach.

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Contact:    Gayle Snible      212.704.8600

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