Jan Muhler Let's say someone is preparing an anthology of printmaking and approaches you with the request that you choose six prints which you feel best illustrate your development as a printmaker and/or your attitude toward printmaking in general. Which works would you select and why?

Mauricio Lasansky You pick the prints. You are asking me to say which ones I think are truer than others. I love them all. Whatever I did is as far as I could do it then. Now, all these years past, I could not have done it better; I never made a thing too fast, too slow, it's as far as I could go. I have respect for my infancy. I would not change anything.

I want to be exactly as I am. I have a very strong feeling that people cannot be replaced and that is the way I approach everybody, that is the way I approach my students, and they know it.

You must know that my work is the work of somebody who lives so long, that's all, and keeps making a record of his own feelings, whether or not his own feelings are more important than things around him.

When I made Changos, teaching in an elementary school. I was making sculpture then. A child came into my studio one day and looked at what I was doing and said, "I never saw a head without a body!" It made me stop and think. I soon expanded completely my visions. Something about the kids—something honest about them, something functional—they never do anything to impress anybody. They never make a table that's empty, it always has a plate or a glass—they never make a faucet that's not dripping—they never make a car that's not moving or a train that's not going or people that are not walking—which is interesting. They are so much more related to reality—and reality is an object in space—with all the mechanics of this object, whatever the object is, that conquers space or is conquered by space. You see, that is what you need to decide on—what you are, are you becoming conquered by the space or do you destroy that space and create a new one. And this is the function of an artist—anywhere, always was and always will be—and if it is not like that, artists would not exist anymore, or they would not function in society as they are expected.

J M Changos y Burritos seems to mark a turning point in your work.

M L I had moved out of the city by 1937 to a little town in the mountains in the middle of nowhere. There I discovered the landscape. I was a city boy, like you, like anybody. I did not see a tree in my life. I didn't know what a tree was all about . . . what life is all about.

J M This period [Maternidad and Figura] in your work is sometimes referred to as your "Surrealist Period."

M L I didn't know anything about the French Surrealists then. You must understand that many of the best poets in the Spanish language are Latin American. They always were good. Poetry, metaphor—it's in the Spanish language. See, we can talk in metaphors for three days without repeating ourselves and only a few people would really understand what we were talking about. So my work, at least those prints from the late 1930s, relates to this heritage.

J M How did you get into printmaking?

M L I got into graduate school as a sculptor. One day I just wandered into the print department, and I smelled all that ink and my old ancestors came out. It just hit me. It gets into your veins.

J M How is it that most of your prints deal with the figure?

M L I think the universe is concentrated in a human being. The figure is a vehicle for my expression, the universal.

J M Most of your subjects are members of your family or yourself. Is this because you feel most comfortable with those you know best?

M L Yes, in a way. I feel more comfortable with old shoes. The family still means the human figure and the universal theme.

J M You have done some abstractions.

M L Yes, but always with the figure. You know people do terrible things, they kill each other, terrible things, but still people are the only thing that we have left that are worthwhile fixing, anything else does not matter.

J M Have you done any landscapes? Do you have any interest in them?

M L Yes, I do, I love landscapes, but not as a reproductive medium. I love to walk in them.

J M How about still lifes?

M L I eat them!

J M Why did you give up painting?

M L I never give up anything. When I'm in Mexico I paint and draw—sculpture, too. I have fun, I work. I have many projects going down there now. I love to draw. When I draw I need to be in the right mood. Drawing is supposed to be an extension of all your primitive qualities, without the filter of civilization. Many artists are making drawings and transferring them onto the plates, these are not prints.

J M Who are some of the artists you most admire or who have had some influence on you or your work?

M L Everyone who came before me. Picasso to say somebody. To me Mantegna is one of the most important artists; through him you can decipher the Renaissance. Goya, of course, and Schöngauer. You noticed I skipped Dürer; Schöngauer is cleaner, less skillful. Mantegna, Schöngauer and Rembrandt.

I do respect Picasso. The whole man, not only his work. I'd like to have looked inside his ears and know all the little details that made him such a complex man. We still don't really know what type of man he was. When God made the artist, I think he must have fallen asleep, because when he was pouring in the quantity for Picasso he kept on pouring.

Velazquez is the greatest of all. Goya, yes, but I love Velazquez for what Goya is not. He was cool. He never got involved with the observer. He always was involved with the model. He had such respect for human dignity that all his skills as an artist were on the surface. He glorified man. He made the little dwarf, the most moving thing, it tears your heart out. It is not sentimental at all, it is warm and moving. And to do that, you needed to develop a technique of painting which was alien to the Italian technique. During his time all artists used the Italian technique. The Abstract Expressionists had a hell of a lot to learn from Velazquez. Of course, all the great artists learned a great deal from him. And no props, he never used props. I don't use props either, that's one of the things I learned from Velazquez.

J M Did the idea of printmaking appeal to you because of the idea of making works of art available to a larger audience?

M L No, all I care about is the image and trying to find it. Most of the time it is very elusive—an image that I can find only through the print. Whether I am stupid or not, I like to find things, I like to sweat. It's somewhere between the back of the plate and the front. I need to go through all of the problems each time to find it.

J M How do you begin to make a print? From the beginning, do you start with the drawings?

M L You see, I'm sitting at the telephone and then the call comes and most of the time it's the wrong number, but once in awhile it's right. No, I draw quite a bit, but I don't want to draw on the plate. My point of view is that you need to draw a lot on paper so you don't do all this footwork on the plate. Copper is too expensive. Besides, she has a personality of her own and she does not want to be finagled or tickled with a pencil, she only loves to be worked with the burin. So you need to draw. The ideas are floating somewhere, somewhere in some corner of our heads and they are very abstract. The maternity room is the paper. That's the first step, and with pencils, five cents, cheap ones, and then slowly it comes. Then you go to the plate when you feel you did all you could. In general, you find the image in the paper but what I find is that I develop on the plate the line and the tonal constrast of the object in space. I get the image to come when she wants to. I like to feel that a plate is like a fish. You see a fish has two curves; they can go up, down, sideways, any way. And that's what I'd like to be. I don't want restrictions of any kind except my instinct and the material I work in.

J M I see you working perhaps like the Abstract Expressionist—working out on your plate everything you want as you go—not stopping until you get it, responding to what is happening on the plate.

M L Yes, let me see if I can explain it differently. All I know is that I have something that's alive. That's all. That's what you call life itself. Something that's living and kicking. I don't care where she goes, or I don't ask where she is coming from. I just try to be as close as possible to this thing that's alive, because she is teaching me. I cannot say I will do that or that; I think the Nazi drawings are a good example. I worked five or six years on them, every day, all day, I knew exactly what I wanted to say, but I never said the day I would finish, that I found. It is not like love and what we try with our children. We have it all mapped out—Johnny will be a doctor, Freddy will be an engineer. Well, that is the way prints were made; in reality they were no more than transfers of imitation drawings. It was for a long time.

J M Have you done some woodcuts?

M L Woodcut is a lot of fun. I did some, but you can't do everything. It takes time, and the mood, I suppose. And remember, I am teaching too, this is a full-time job.

J M Could you comment on the basic intaglio techniques.

M L To me intaglio is everything. What does it say at the top of the New York Times? Under the title? It says, "Anything that's fit to print." That's what intaglio is, any technique that's fit to print. That's really what I mean. Etching is perhaps a classical technique. With Rembrandt he would etch to get his tonality, then to get the real kick he added drypoint. I need to explain graphically the real difference between an etch and a drypoint. That is where the secret is. You should visualize an etched line, take a surface of a copper plate, put a ground which is resistant, cut a few lines, different thicknesses, etch the lines with ten different bites, five minutes, stop out, another five, stop out, and on and on to ten different bites which then vary five minutes each apart. You will end up with ten different tones. Put the ink on the plate, wipe the extra off, put it on the press and print it. Then you will have these ten variations in tone but they will all be the same, like ten sisters—some older, some younger, some smaller and some bigger, but very similar. A unifying tone. Why unifying tone? You have more ink as the line gets deeper, but you still have the same characteristics. But with drypoint it's like plowing a field—it's kind of old fashioned. You keep plowing, and on one side the disk throws the dirt out and on the other side the dirt is thrown out a little higher. One side is a little bigger in weight. That's what drypoint does, it doesn't take any copper anyway. You put the pigment inside the little opening but it also catches on the ridges, too, a little more on one side than the other. When the line is not made by acid and it is made by the hand, it will be different. There will never be two lines just the same. You can't use one without the other, that's why Rembrandt always finished his [etchings] with drypoint. Drypoint is very sensual.

Engraving is a different thing. It just depends on the type of tools. What I use is the Italian burin, it's broad and square. I think some of the best plates done in this medium were made by Bill Hayter; for example, Tarantelle and the Combat.

J M How did yuou happen to cut the edges of the plates?

M L I didn't know then, but now after all these years, I know why. I was trying to work with space and I could not figure out how to put my object in a concrete place in space, and that's when I started to cut the plates—to go into the picture. If you were to touch an object and take your hands and go all the way, all the way on the surface, that's the way I did the plates before. But then, I wanted to touch the sides too, to feel the contours. So I had to work the plates this way to have a tactile feeling for the object in a specific space. It was an interesting approach, you see. I never left it after that. One way or another she always comes back, she still does.

J M The line that cuts through the portrait of Leonardo is from cutting the plate. You did this to set the figure back in space, right?

M L Yes, and I've seen a lot of prints made this way since then, and printmakers have done a lot of that, but I don't think they all know why they are doing it.

J M Why do you use multiple plates? Too much to do one one?

M L The other plates are for colors. A picture is like people—an accumulation of different moments at one time. One day you feel good and look good, another day you look and feel terrible, another perhaps so-so. What I do is an accumulation of all of these.

J M Will you discuss what a state means to you.

M L It's a way of measuring. To me the state is a bearing, a compass, if I am going towards the right direction or the wrong. I try to get to a point; I don't know exactly where it is. The state always does tell me if I am on the right track. In itself, it has no value, except to the observer, you, to try to get closer to how I created my work. It shows you a corner of my personality that even I perhaps don't know, I take it for granted.

I'll tell you what I tell the students, I say, "you keep one print exactly as you have it, and then give me four or five different solutions to the same problem." And boy, when they get to the third, they don't know what else to do, where else to go. And that is the same persistence in my work—see, black, white, wham, the changes are violent! Sometimes you need just to turn around and go the other way, and then come back. You see on this plate [Bodas de Sangre], there is not a spot left except here, of the original white. Technically, I believe that you need to have this original white so you know where you've been. I recommend to students to leave a white. And an important part is what you make out of your black. But the most important part on your plate is the white you can get after you destroy the natural beauty of the plate. The moment you have this white you have a way of measuring.

In the intaglio field it is most difficult to prevent your white from getting dirty; it's very, very difficult technically. I respect paper very much. To me a color print is very much like fresco. It's the same principle, really. You work with the white. Whatever you put on top, the white should always have a presence, always pushing through the color. That's the secret of Velazquez; the luminosity of his painting, it comes from inside. Most painters before him had the light come from outside. His comes from inside, physically. He needed to develop a technique of preparing canvass. His white keeps pushing through the colors, then there's the luminosity.

Anyway, the print should work the same way. You see you must respect the white of the paper but not as a decorative element. [With the recent prints,] I created tremendous technical problems. I need to go to the press four or five times and your white can get dirty. So in this process of trying to keep the white, I print at five levels at one time [as in Quetzalcoatl], physically, five plates, one on top of the other, printed at the same time. And that means I need to use completely different materials, otherwise you pop out the paper. There are tremendous technical problems. You see, I'm getting each time younger and younger, not getting older, it's only my eyes that are not as good as they were. So you see automatically you adjust, your visions too, you don't waste time. I could not do drypoint now if you gave me a million dollars, I could not. I not only don't have the interest to do it, but I just physically could not do it.

J M Would you say that when it comes to an edition a print you end your real involvement with it (the creative process) and then it just becomes a matter of production? Your real involvement is working on the plate?

M L No. Let me make a clarification. That is a hell of a lot of physical work—editioning. The only thing is, being the creator, I play, even with an edition. You will rarely ever find two the same. I get sick and tired and I don't want to. I want to use my time in a creative way, so I keep playing even to the last one. So from a technical point of view printing itself is the experiment or experience continuing. Otherwise I would not do it. I never in my life did anything I don't like to do or that I don't know how to enjoy. I never have and I never will. If I would be dead and buried and I did not feel comfortable, believe me, I would come back.

J M It seems in your work, then, the more difficult it is, the more fun it is for you.

M L You know, I don't whistle when I work, I'm the biggest truck driver you can imagine. If you had a tape recorder when I'm working, I would make a new dictionary of bad words. I swear and I sweat. I enjoy it evidently, otherwise I would not do it, but it is not easy. For me it is like having birth, you go through hell.

J M You said that if you don't put your prints under plexiglass you will continue to work on them, is that right?

M L Yes, I do, otherwise I play. You know, nothing is ever finished. But you are right too, the fun is the riverbanking with the plate. That's really fun.

J M You said that Sol y Luna, Dachau, and For an Eye an Eye are important as preambles to The Nazi Drawings.

M L Yes, it was the same thing, but twenty years too early. I could not do it then—I had to wait. Some people say "Why deal with something that happened so many years ago?" Well, my ideas are like elephants, they take a long, long time to ring the bell and come out.

J M How is it that you made The Nazi Drawings? You were not there to experience it first hand.

M L Some of my best depositions were made in the 14th century, 15th, 16th, 17th, and nobody was there.

I told you at the beginning of this interview, that I am a product of the Depression, and I was fertilized and programmed already; we don't change. We are programmed by the genes or circumstances or a combination of these. And that is what I try to tell the students, that they need to be honest with themselves. Somehow as creative people each one of us is programmed, by inside influences in a larger proportion to outside, sociological influences.

J M You mentioned the other day that your current series of Kaddish prints relate to The Nazi Drawings. How is that?

M L I'm working with a very specific subject, I am working with this concept of the people that were killed, the people in the Nazi drawings. And when I made the Nazi drawings, I made them as an angry young man, I wanted to spit it out, my point of view, no rules, no nothing, an instinctive reaction. I was upset, I wanted people to know that the world was upset. I am the world, so are you! But now you see, I am using the same theme but I want to use it in a positive way, like an old man who is retrospective. I am trying to get people to really think, and use the barbarites we already made in a positive way. This is quite a specific communication. I want to tell something specific, and I want to go straight to the point, and my straight is in the abstract organization of the picture which creates the emotional impact. You will notice in the Kaddish series, they are divided in two, physically. And if they are not physically divided, I make the illusion that they are divided. One is the dove, and the lower part is the figure. Most of them have a mask or use their hands, because I am still ashamed when I think of the suffering all the humans made the people endure. I get embarrassed just thinking of it, so I cover my embarrassment.

J M Can we back up now and talk about your print, Quetzalcoatl, and how you conceived it.

M L Bleeding Heart is where the idea came for breaking up the space like I did in Quetzalcoatl and Nahua Dancer.

J M Was Quetzalcoatl done as a result of your extended stays in Mexico? How long have you been going down there to your studio?

M L I've been going there for the last four or five years, and Quetzalcoatl was the first print I did there. I wanted to conceive it, you see, as a grandiose figure, as a god, kind of powerful, like a god is supposed to be, but very elusive.

It is an identification with the best parts of Mexico. Quetzalcoatl is one of the one million gods in Mexico. He is one of the most beautiful gods. He was attractive, like that [pointing to the print] . . . His mama just swallowed a piece of jade, thinking it was a pea or something, I suppose, and that's the way Quetzalcoatl was conceived.

Quetzalcoatl is a very concrete image, at the same time very evasive. He is a very strong god and people believe in him. Nobody knows why. In reality, Quetzalcoatl represents the physical dreams of what Mexico is supposed to be. He's a very strange figure. He's there—he goes away—very evasive. So if you'll notice the way I saw him—he has no outline—the way the spaces are and the color, it creates an illusion of form. You see, there are two faces—there's the real face and watch it carefully and you will see the jaguar face on top. See the eyes of the jaguar? The jaguar is one of the animals used to represent Quetzalcoatl.

J M Quetzalcoatl is the largest print you ever made, right?

M L I think it's the biggest print ever made in intaglio, at least it felt like that when I was making it. I'm pretty sure. Quetzalcoatl, I think, is a very important plate made in this country, for technical reasons. Why? When young artists will study that plate they will find a completely new approach to working a plate.

And the work! It was quite a job. There are fifty-four plates. Sometimes five or more are printed at one time, one on top of the other, at the same time—some jigsawed together too, of course, and that besides the piling up gives it a three-dimensional quality. The conception, the intellectual energy that goes into the preplanning and preconceiving, I think is much more difficult than planning a building twenty-five or fifty stories. It's so complicated, you need to see it all in your mind. I need to watch a lot of cowboy movies on television. Really! I sit there and never move, but I need action with my eyes. No complications but I need my eyes moving or otherwise my brain does not work. Really the planning is quite methodical, precise. It was one of the prints that is so big, so complicated, that I had to plan way in advance.

J M How many assistants worked with you?

M L Five people, one acted as engineer.

J M He orchestrated the project?

M L Right—Phillip [one of his six children]—he has a fabulous memory. He watched the timing and just watched if the things will work. It was an interesting experiment. There is a thesis written about it. He helped pull the print.

J M How many time did you have to go back to the press when you were editioning Quetzalcoatl?

M L Four or five times. You see, that's where the planning goes. Why? Each time you run, that print has five to ten thousand pounds per line inch pressure. You need to learn how to preserve the paper so that's where your planning goes, too. You have a piece of paper seven feet long and damp. It's been in water twenty-four to forty-eight hours and in the damp box for two or three weeks before we even started—pressed, so it's very soft. If you pick it up she breaks on you. So we developed a most fantastic thing to handle the paper. It's like if it was a god, you couldn't touch it with your hands. You know, each time Michelangelo made a god, Jesus Christ, human hands never touched him. Did you notice that? I think, since I'm making Quetzalcoatl, a god, I can't touch him either.

With this roll [a long cardboard tube with a slot cut out], I lasso the paper, then roll it, go to the press with it and feed it on to the plate.

J M Then what happens at the other end?

M L I turn the plate, that's all. Technique is no more than a good vocabulary, not an end in itself. Most people think it is, though. We solved many technical problems, and I enjoyed every moment of it. We learned a great deal. I must be able to do that, every human being needs that, otherwise we are nothing.

J M What do you hope that a student will get from studying printmaking and related subjects with you?

M L The first thing they will learn is that nothing is so bad and nothing is so good. The main thing is not to be chicken about anything and then start the discipline, do what you want to do and if you don't know how to do it, learn, take your time, and don't be scared, that's all. Draw a lot. And to me drawing is just to take a pencil and then an idea. Each one has his own idea so it means that there are a million different ways of drawing. There is nothing wrong with drawing from the model and there is nothing wrong to draw without the model, just draw. Learn to catch an idea.

You see, to me the most important aspect of a work of art is the image. Now mind you, the image does not always mean that you can read it, that is, realistic; it can be a very abstract image. But it has a moment of truth, let us say, that lasts only maybe two minutes. You work like hell, maybe two years on the plate or painting and for two minutes this fullness, this universe, this whatever-you-want-to-call-it, comes true. This is what keeps you working. The point when this comes, and it does come, you need to be trained so well, otherwise you will miss the train, she will just pass by you. That is why the kids should revise their vision, and still have heart for the freedom as a means for truth and inspiration. You know it is true. Freedom is a discipline, otherwise it is anarchy. If you want to be an artist—then you get back to what I believe Oscar Wilde said, "There are only two kinds of artists, the one that is and the other that looks like it." Lots of kids today like to look like artists, with a beard, La Boheme, and all that. And I don't know if they want to, but they ignore the discipline or they were not trained well enough.

J M How about the problem of self-criticism?

M L Yes, one of the things you teach is to have a sense of synthesis and self-criticism. Self-criticism is pretty hard for a student to develop but you can train him. You ask me what I want them to learn from me, that's one of the qualities, absolutely demand it.

J M Drawing is important, how about art history?

M L Yes, I want a young kid to draw, I don't care what he draws, and to take as much art history as he or she can. I know that some don't like it, I know it takes time from their studio work, I know all that. If I'm right, an artist learns more through the quality of his pores than from anything else. Even if he is in an artist history class, and he closes his eyes and the slides are projected there, he will still see them. I swear it is true—through osmosis, through his pores.

J M How do you feel about training art history students in the studio?

M L I think they should be trained in studio disciplines and they should study with the same intensity they are studying art history. They will be able to work closer to an artist, they will get closer to understanding how a work of art is made in this field so let them go all the way. This studio experience will help them learn to think graphically. Everyone should learn to draw, it's a way of thinking.

Reprinted from "Mauricio Lasansky: a Retrospective Exhibition of His Prints and Drawings," a catalog published on the occasion of an exhibition at the University of Iowa Museum of Art (September 24 - November 28, 1976).