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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