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Prints With/Out Pressure

Artists A-D

Grace Arnold Albee (American, 1890–1985)

Born on a farm in Rhode Island, Grace Arnold began drawing at age three. After studying at the Rhode Island School of Design, she married a fellow artist, the mural painter Percy Albee. In 1928 she moved to Paris, where she learned wood engraving. She was immediately greeted with critical acceptance, and her work was exhibited in several Paris Salons. In 1932 she had her first one-person exhibition at the American Library in Paris. Returning to the United States, she settled in New York and vacationed at her home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Although she initially focused on cityscapes, Albee found her greatest inspiration in the rural countryside. She typically made a detailed pencil sketch of her subject, traced it onto the end grain of a block of boxwood, and then carefully cut away the white areas of design. She worked for over fifty years, retiring in her early nineties.

Grace Arnold Albee (American, 1890–1985)
Forgotten Things
Wood engraving, issued by The Print Club of Cleveland, Ohio, 1943
Norrie Fund, purchased on subscription to The Print Club of Cleveland

Founded in 1919 and still active today, The Print Club of Cleveland supports the Print Collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art through gifts and purchases, and provides education through lectures and public programs. In 1924 the Club began issuing an annual presentation print to its subscribers. This distribution was so successful that the Club’s reputation and membership grew; in 1940, membership was opened to those throughout the country.

 

Josef Albers (American, born Germany, 1888–1976)

Josef Albers spent much of his career as an artist and teacher exploring perceptual ambiguities of space and color. Born in Germany in 1888, he studied at the Royal School of Art in Berlin, then at the School of Applied Arts in Essen, enrolling in the Bauhaus in 1920, a program that united his interest in “fine art” with his lifelong commitment to the crafts. Advancing from student to teacher, Albers remained with the Bauhaus until it closed in 1933. Black Mountain College in North Carolina, an experiment in new educational ideals, opened that year, and Albers was invited to join the faculty, bringing his Bauhaus training and sensibility to the United States. He taught there until 1949, when he moved on to Yale University. He retired in 1958, for the rest of his life continuing to experiment with color, form, and space in his paintings and prints.

Josef Albers (American, born Germany, 1888–1976)
Astatic
Woodcut from plywood, 1944
Wallach Fund


Josef Albers (American, born Germany, 1888–1976)
Contra
Linoleum cut, 1944
Norrie Fund, purchased from the Contemporaries Gallery

Josef Albers (American, born Germany, 1888–1976)
Involute
Relief print from cork, 1944
Wallach Fund

These three prints from 1944 show Albers experimenting with various printing surfaces—cork, linoleum, and wood—to realize different textural and spatial effects. The pebbled grain of the cork, the smooth surface of a sheet of linoleum, and the emphatic grain of the woodcut variously interact with Albers’s abstract forms, which hover, twist, and float.

 

Irving Amen (American, born 1918)

New York City–born Irving Amen idolized Michelangelo as a child. At fourteen, he received a scholarship to Pratt Institute, where he studied life-drawing for seven years. While serving in the Air Force, he headed a mural project in the United States and in Belgium. Upon his return he studied painting and sculpture at the Art Students League and wood engraving with printmaker Fritz Eichenberg. He then attended the Académie de la Grand Chaumière in Paris and spent time traveling in Italy, Israel, Greece, and Turkey. Although predominantly a printmaker, he is also well known for creating a peace medal commemorating the Vietnam War and designing stained-glass windows based on the Twelve Tribes of Israel for a synagogue in Columbus, Ohio. He taught art at Pratt Institute and Notre Dame University, Indiana.

Irving Amen (American, born 1918)
Times Square—4
Color woodcut, 1950
Norrie Fund, purchased from the artist

The broad areas of color and thick black outlines in Times Square—4 offer a marked contrast to Irving Amen’s other print in this exhibition, Walpurgisnacht, for which he scratched, gouged, and chiseled the figures from the wood block. Together, these two prints demonstrate the extraordinary range of a single artist and the remarkable flexibility of the woodcut.


Irving Amen (American, born 1918)
Walpurgisnacht
Woodcut, 1953
Norrie Fund, purchased from the artist

Walpurgisnacht is a celebration held in Germany on the last night of April. Originally a pagan seasonal ritual, it came to be identified as a witches’ festival held in the Harz mountains. It became widely known through a description in Goethe’s Faust.

 


Milton Avery (American, 1885–1965)

Milton Avery, whose paintings are widely appreciated for their unique interplay of abstracted shapes from nature and lyrical color harmonies, was one of the 20th century’s foremost American artists. Born in Altmar, New York, he moved in 1925 to New York City where he first became fully aware of modernist masters such as Picasso, Braque, and Matisse.

Avery made all of his woodcuts from 1952 to 1955, carving his own designs on ordinary pine planks with knives and gouges. He was intrigued by the process of hand-printing his woodcuts with the back of a spoon, and by the varying effects among impressions that he could achieve by altering the inking, the registration of the blocks, and the hand-applied pressure while printing. Avery’s woodcuts are never completely abstract. The personal and everyday subjects of his prints include himself, family members, friends, nudes, birds, and animals. Although Avery was known as a great colorist in his paintings and watercolors, the palette in his prints was largely limited to black and white, with the frequent addition of a single primary color.

Milton Avery (American, 1885–1965)
Pilot Fish
Woodcut printed in blue and black on japan paper, 1952
Wallach Fund

Milton Avery (American, 1885–1965)
Three Birds
Woodcut printed in yellow and black on japan paper, 1952
Kennedy Fund

Milton Avery (American, 1885–1965)
Dancer
Woodcut printed in red and black on japan paper, 1954
Kennedy Fund

 

Will Barnet (American, born 1911)

Will Barnet has been a prolific painter and printmaker, and an influential teacher and mentor, for over seventy years. He was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, and attended the Art School at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. At age twenty-one he came to New York on a scholarship to the Art Students League. He was promptly named the official printer for the League, and introduced many artists to various printmaking techniques. He was later appointed an instructor there in both the Graphic Arts and Painting departments, and also taught at Cooper Union, the New School, and numerous other universities throughout the country. He showed an early and abiding interest in portraying scenes from domestic life, featuring his family, pets, and home. While his style has ranged from social realism to abstraction and stylized figuration, his work is unified by an enduring sense of harmony and balance.

Will Barnet (American, born 1911)
The Butcher’s Son
Woodcut, 1939
Norrie Fund, purchased from the artist

Will Barnet (American, born 1911)
Early Morning
Woodcut, 1939
Norrie Fund, purchased from the artist

Will Barnet’s earliest prints were primarily concerned with the plight of the worker during the Depression. By the mid-1930s, however, marriage and the birth of his first child provided a new and lasting fascination with domesticity. Early Morning is indicative of this new phase, with its thick expressive lines, dynamic yet balanced composition, and focus on intimate scenes of family life. It was awarded prizes by the Print Club of Philadelphia and the First National Print Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.

 

Leonard Baskin (American, 1922–2000)

The human figure, from that of the hero of antiquity to the common man, is the central focus of Leonard Baskin’s art. He was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and studied at New York University, the New School, and Yale University, as well as in Paris and Florence. He worked as a sculptor, printmaker, and illustrator and taught at Smith College for more than twenty years and at Hampshire College, Amherst, for a decade. He took inspiration from the archaic and monumental imagery of ancient art and from a wide range of literature, from the Bible to contemporary Western poetry. His stark, unblinking visions of human turmoil have a timeless quality, and are as compelling today as when they were created.

Leonard Baskin (American, 1922–2000)
Envy, from The Seven Deadly Sins by Anthony Hecht
Northampton, Mass.: Gehenna Press, 1958
Wood engraving
Edition of 300
General Book Fund

Leonard Baskin (American, 1922–2000)
The Cry
Woodcut, issued by the International Graphic Arts Society (IGAS), 1960
Norrie Fund

The International Graphic Arts Society (IGAS), founded in New York in 1952, distributed prints monthly, aiming to achieve “a program of balanced selections ranging from realistic and traditional to abstract and expressionist forms—a fair presentation of all styles current in the U.S. and abroad.” The Cry was the sixth print Baskin made for IGAS, who believed it showed “a constructive attitude towards and a valuable contribution to our aims, for which our Society and members are most grateful.”

 

Gustave Baumann (American, born Germany, 1881–1971)

Gustave Baumann was one of the leading figures of the color woodcut revival in America. The son of a craftsman, he was born in Magdeburg, Germany. When he was ten, his family immigrated to Chicago. He began his career as a commercial artist, while studying at night at the Art Institute of Chicago. He returned to Germany for a year to attend the Kunstgewerbe Schule in Munich, where he learned the basics of color relief printmaking. After he returned to the United States, he soon settled in Brown County, Indiana, at a rural artist’s colony in Nashville and began to focus on printmaking. He followed the traditional European mode of color relief printing, using thick oil-based inks and printing his blocks on a large press. In 1918 he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he spent the remainder of his life. He found lasting inspiration in the vivid colors of the canyons and the local Native American art and artifacts.

Gustave Baumann (American, born Germany, 1881–1971)
Cordova Plaza
Color woodcut, issued by The Woodcut Society, Kansas City, 1943
Norrie Fund, purchased on subscription to The Woodcut Society, Kansas City

The Woodcut Society issued each of its prints in a folder along with a text by either the printmaker or a well-known critic. The Society asserted: “All of the important artists producing woodcuts will be invited to make blocks for distribution of proofs to members of the Society. Over a period of years, the publications of the Woodcut Society will thus form a fine, representative collection of contemporary woodcuts and criticism.”

In the essay accompanying Cordova Plaza, artist, scholar, and museum director George William Eggers remarks: “The largeness and simplicity of this design of his, the inevitable reiteration of its organic rhythms, the laconic terseness with which its message is conveyed—all these, like the very wood in which his blocks are wrought, also draw their sap and fibre straight from the earth itself.”

 

Fred Becker (American, 1913–2004)

Fred Becker learned to make woodcuts and wood engravings from a book; his foot served as a press and he “stomp[ed] on the block” to transfer image to paper. After he left New York University’s architecture program, he was employed by the Graphic Arts Division of the Works Progress Administration and was the only WPA printmaker to be included in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1936 landmark exhibition, Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism. By 1940 he had joined Stanley William Hayter at the New York Atelier 17, and honed his skills as an intaglio printmaker and printer. When he returned to the relief print in the 1950s, he incorporated elements of Hayter’s automatic drawing into his own large-scale Abstract Expressionist woodcuts, often developing the composition as he cut on the block. Becker was also an influential teacher, who set up the printmaking department at Washington University in Saint Louis, where he taught for twenty years; he later joined the faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Fred Becker (American, 1913–2004)
Virtues of Necessity
New York: Atelier 17, 1947
Color engraving, open bite and soft ground etching, printed as a relief print
Kennedy Fund

Although Becker was not one of the nine artists included in the Ruthven Todd portfolio, this print was clearly motivated by that project. To achieve this gradation of colors, the printer would have blended the inks with a roller on a smooth surface, such as a piece of glass, before applying them to the plate.

Fred Becker (American, 1913–2004)
Towards the Left
Color woodcut, 1955
Norrie Fund

This print won a prize at the 14th Annual Missouri Exhibition in 1955.

 

Morris Blackburn (American, 1902–1979)

A painter, mural painter, and teacher, as well as printmaker, Morris Blackburn first explored color printmaking in the late 1940s. He was a member of the National Serigraph Society, and had numerous exhibitions with that group at a time when screenprinting, legitimized by the WPA, was attracting a number of American artists, enticed by the simplicity of the process and the ease of printing in color. Although the wood block was a more resistant medium, Blackburn here tapped into the expressive possibilities of this resistance, and the subtle beauty of the wood grain, to suggest complex abstract forms interlocked in space. Most likely here he hand-inked a single block with delicately varied colors.

Morris Blackburn (American, 1902–1979)
Flight
Color wood engraving and woodcut, 1949
Gift of Reba and Dave Williams

 

Letterio Calapai (American, 1902–1993)

Letterio Calapai dedicated his life to sharing his knowledge of printmaking with others. Born in Boston to Sicilian immigrants, he frequently attended museums as a child, and studied art in Boston and New York. In 1946 he met Stanley William Hayter and then spent three years working at Hayter’s famed printmaking studio, Atelier 17, where he learned engraving. With Hayter’s recommendation, Calapai founded the graphic arts department at Albright Art School at the University of Buffalo. He later returned to New York and established the Intaglio Workshop for Advanced Printmaking in Greenwich Village, where printmakers from all over the world came to learn and consult with him. He also taught printmaking at New York University, the New School, and Brandeis University. In 1965 he moved to Illinois to teach at Kendall College and the University of Illinois, Chicago. He continued to make prints at his storefront workshop in Glencoe, where he worked for the remainder of his life.

Letterio Calapai (American, 1902–1993)
Nocturne II
Color woodcut, 1958
Gift of the artist

The view of New York in Nocturne II is a smaller, slightly different version of an earlier woodcut, The City, from 1957.

 

Alexander Calder (American, 1898–1976)

Alexander Calder is probably best known for his mobile and “stabile” sculptures situated all over the world. Born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania, the son and grandson of prominent Philadelphia sculptors, he initially studied to be an engineer. In 1923 he enrolled at the Art Students League, where he studied painting until 1926, when he moved to Paris. There he began to experiment with wood and wire, and met numerous artists, including Stanley William Hayter. Although he moved back to the United States the following year, he returned often to France, and maintained significant rapports with the artists he had met in Paris. The distinctive vocabulary of flying disks, twisting lines, and bright primary colors that make up so many of his sculptures is equally prominent in his paintings and graphic work, and Calder proves himself as capable of suggesting motion in two-dimensional works as he is in his sculpture.

Alexander Calder (American, 1898–1976)
When one leaf …, from the Ruthven Todd portfolio
New York: Atelier 17, 1947
Open bite etching, printed as a relief print

Alexander Calder (American, 1898–1976)
When one leaf …, from the Ruthven Todd portfolio
New York: Atelier 17, 1947
Open bite etching, printed as an intaglio print

 

Edmond Casarella (American, 1920–1996)

Born in Newark, New Jersey, Edmond Casarella first attended Cooper Union, and in the early 1940s worked with Anthony Velonis in his screenprinting studio. After serving in the Army, he studied printmaking on the G.I. Bill with Louis Schanker and his fellow student and friend Vincent Longo at the Brooklyn Museum School. Longo and Casarella together experimented with the relief print as a vehicle for an abstract, gestural calligraphy. It may, however, have been Casarella’s interest in sculpture that inspired his technical innovations in relief printing. He layered sheets of cardboard to build up a printing matrix, which he could then also carve like a traditional woodcut. Using such simple materials, he was able to make large-scale works in color, inexpensively and without assistance. He used oil-based inks and generally printed without a press, using his hand, a spoon, or a roller to transfer the image from the cardboard or paper relief matrix to the paper. By the mid-1960s Casarella had virtually given up printmaking for sculpture.

Edmond Casarella (American, 1920–1996)
Night Shape
Color cardboard relief print, 1954
Norrie Fund

Edmond Casarella (American, 1920–1996)
Break Through
Color cardboard relief print, 1960
Norrie Fund

Edmond Casarella (American, 1920–1996)
Hiraklion

Color woodcut, 1960
Norrie Fund

 

Asa Cheffetz (American, 1896–1965)

Asa Cheffetz was born in Buffalo, New York, and moved with his family to Massachusetts when he was a young boy. Following high school he studied drawing for two years at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and went on to pursue drawing and etching at the National Academy of Design in New York City. After a year, World War I interrupted his studies there, and he left to join the Navy. Following his discharge he returned to the Academy, but in 1919 he was forced to give up his studies and return to Massachusetts to run his father’s business. In the fall of 1927 a visit to Old Deerfield inspired him to resume his artistic activities, and specifically to express his passion for the New England landscape in wood engraving, a medium he had hitherto never tried. He quickly proved himself a capable engraver, favoring the density of end-grain maple, which allowed him to render the detail and atmospheric qualities of the landscape that so enchanted him. During the next twenty-five years, until eye problems forced him to give up the medium altogether, he produced more than one hundred prints devoted to the New England countryside.

Asa Cheffetz (American, 1896–1965)
Down Montgomery Way (Vermont)
Wood engraving, issued by The Woodcut Society, Kansas City, 1940
Friends of the Print Room, purchased on subscription to The Woodcut Society, Kansas City

In the autobiographical text that accompanies this print, Chaffetz wrote:

[My] passion for the New England scene remains undiminished to this day. I [continue] to cut wood, and continue to be fascinated by the spell of my own countryside. By lifelong association and influence, I am a New Englander. And I am consciously sensitive to that influence in much that I have tried to express through the medium of my chosen craft.

I love this fertile land, and the simple way of life and its rugged people. I love the very temperament of the land in all its moods. If I have succeeded at all, it is this deep sense of the all-pervading mood of the land and sky which possesses me, and which I seek to express in my own medium of interpretation.

And, it is this quality of the inner mood of the scene which beguiled me and waylaid me in my summer wandering “down Montgomery way” in old Vermont.

 

Eve Clendenin (American, 1900–1974)

Eve Clendenin was a painter and printmaker who lived and worked in New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts. She studied at Oxford University and at the Sorbonne in Paris, and attended the Banff School of Fine Art in Alberta, Canada, and the Royal Academy in London. In New York her mentors were Ralph Pierson and Hans Hoffman, and she was a member of the American Abstract Artists group, formed in 1936 to introduce the American public to abstraction through annual exhibitions, lectures, and occasional publications.

Eve Clendenin (American, 1900–1974)
Seven Forms (II)
Color woodcut, 1947
Norrie Fund

 

Robert Conover (American, 1920–1998)

Robert Conover made his first prints at the Art Students League after World War II (Will Barnet and George Grosz were among his teachers). Later he studied painting at the Brooklyn Museum School, where he was part of a circle of young artists and instructors on the G.I. Bill, including Edmond Casarella and Vincent Longo, who were particularly interested in relief printmaking. As an abstract painter and a printmaker he first drew inspiration from urban landscapes, but by the mid-1950s nature had replaced industrial subjects as a source for his imagery. It was nature’s energy and power that he captured in his savagely cut, but subtly textured, hand-printed relief prints in the 1950s and 1960s. Guided only by a sketch on the block, Conover worked the block with assurance and immediacy, finding in the woodcut a graphic equivalent to the freedom and gesture of Abstract Expressionism.

Robert Conover (American, 1920–1998)
Collision
Woodcut, 1959
Gift in memory of Adolf Dehn by the Society of American Graphic Artists

 

Worden Day (American, 1916–1986)

After supervising the color offset lithography shop at the Graphic Arts Workshop of the WPA in 1936, Worden Day studied printmaking with Will Barnet and Harry Sternberg at the Art Students League, and painting with Hans Hofmann. Although she lived only periodically in New York during the 1940s, she was part of the circle of artists who enjoyed the “international atmosphere” of Hofmann’s studio, Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery, and Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 (even teaching a color woodcut class there in the mid-1950s). After World War II she traveled frequently to Paris to work with Hayter when he reestablished the workshop there. She was one of the original members of the group “14 Painter Printmakers,” a loose association of artists (comparable to several other informal societies of avant-garde artists who exhibited together, including The Printmakers, The Graphic Circle, and the Vanguard group) who shared a modern sensibility, and for whom printmaking was another tool for personal expression. Nature was always an important source of inspiration for Day, and she incorporated abstract allusions to landscapes into her personal calligraphic language of pictographic notations.

Worden Day (American, 1916–1986)
Runic Traces
Woodcut, colored with stencils, 1948
Norrie Fund

 

John De Pol (American, 1913–2004)

John De Pol was born in Greenwich Village, and as a boy often sketched views of his native city. As a young man he worked on Wall Street by day, and attended lithography classes at the Art Students League by night. During World War II he served in the Air Force, and while stationed in Northern Ireland continued his studies at the College of Arts in Belfast. His sketches of Ireland from that period subsequently became the groundwork for many of his prints and illustrations. After the war he returned to New York, and continued to make prints at the Art Students League. Although he had previously concentrated on lithography and etching, from 1949 on he devoted himself almost entirely to wood engraving. After the war, De Pol worked for a commercial printing firm, while continuing to do freelance illustrations for a number of commercial publishing companies and independent presses. A prolific printmaker, he created thousands of images during his roughly seventy years of artistic activity.

John De Pol (American, 1913–2004)
County Derry
Wood engraving, issued by the Print Club of Albany, 1959
Norrie Fund, purchased on subscription to the Print Club of Albany

 

Arthur Deshaies (American, born 1920)

Arthur Deshaies was a precocious artist, who boasted that he made his first prints (drypoints on aluminum) at age ten. While a graduate student and later a faculty member at Indiana University in charge of a printmaking program, Deshaies used stencils to create biomorphic, surrealist “fantasies.” By the mid-1950s he had taken up wood engraving, incising gestural images into the end-grain woodblock. When the size of the wood block limited the growing scale of his prints, he switched to large sheets of Lucite and Plexiglas. Plastic had other advantages as well. Deshaies could place a drawing under the clear sheet as a guide, and vigorously tackle the matrix with burin, drypoint needles, gouges, chisels, and even an electric router. He would then run an ink-charged roller over the plate (checking the evenness and density of the ink by holding the plate to the light), leaving uninked the intricate and swirling network of incised lines. Many of Deshaies’s Plexiglas engravings were inspired by his fascination with the ocean and aquatic life, which came to symbolize for the artist the belief “that man’s turmoil, his disaster and triumph, parallel the turmoil and disaster, and the triumph of the sea.”

Arthur Deshaies (American, born 1920)
A Cycle of a Small Sea: Fowl, from Eleven Prints by Eleven Printmakers
New York: Pratt Graphic Arts Center, 1961
Lucite engraving, printed as a relief print
Norrie Fund

 

Werner Drewes (American, born Germany, 1899–1985)

When Werner Drewes immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1930, he brought with him the German Expressionist woodcut tradition and a Bauhaus education. His training at the Bauhaus, first at Weimar and later at Dessau, had been punctuated by periods of travel around the globe, but it was the changing political climate in Germany that convinced Drewes to move to New York. There he continued his commitment to printmaking, initially as a student at the Art Students League, then as a teacher at the Brooklyn Museum School, Columbia University, and, later, Washington University in St. Louis. He was director of the Graphic Arts Division of the New York City Federal Art Project in 1940 and 1941.

Drewes paid homage to New York on his arrival in the United States with a series of futuristic woodcuts of the city (including two views of The New York Public Library). His work became increasingly abstract in the 1940s, and color played a more prominent role. He usually printed his color woodcuts by hand on soft Japanese paper, rubbing the back of the dampened sheet against the block to capture the subtleties of the wood grain, and to vary and control the effects of ink on paper.

Werner Drewes (American, born Germany, 1899–1985)
Indian Motif
Color woodcut, 1943–44
Prints Fund, purchased from the Nierendorf Galleries


Werner Drewes (American, born Germany, 1899–1985)
No. 3—Abstraction
Woodcut and linoleum cut, 1943–44
Gift of the artist through the American Institute of Graphic Arts

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