It was Waldo Frank who first mentioned the name of Mauricio Lasansky to me. Lasansky, he said, was a brilliant young printmaker in Argentina who was about to come to the United States on a Guggenheim Fellowship. In due course I met him and his work, and I have been following his astounding career ever since.

Mauricio Lasansky is a dedicated—a passionately dedicated—artist. His passion is graphic art. He is constantly fighting for the acceptance of printmaking as a major creative art form. This mission has two aspects: his own substantial contribution to the contemporary graphic field, and his role as a teacher, training and stimulating others toward the same high endeavor.

Lasansky, born in Buenos Aires in 1914, showed early inclination for the arts. At first he wanted to be a musician—and music was to continue to be an influence—but after a brief interval he turned to art and started taking lessons at the age of thirteen. He must have been born, he said, with printer's ink in his veins: both his father and his uncle were printers. His father, who had been born in Poland, spent several years in Philadelphia, printing paper money at the United States Mint, before settling permanently in Buenos Aires. Mauricio was a precocious student: at the age of sixteen he won his first honorable mention for sculpture at the Mutulidad Fine Arts Exhibition. The following year he won a prize at the same institution. In 1933 he entered the Superior School of Fine Arts, taking courses in painting, sculpture, and engraving. In the same year he was already making creditable prints such as Velorio. This was executed in a rather unusual medium, relief etching on zinc, called zincographía in Argentina.

Blake employed it to produce his Prophetic Books, and Posada used it in Mexico for his popular prints. Acid was applied to eat away all those portions of a copper or zinc plate which did not delineate the image; and then the plate was inked and printed as a wood cut. Lasansky says that the process was also used in Poland and that he learned it from his father.

In 1936, at the age of twenty-two, he was appointed Director of the Free Fine Arts School in Córdoba. He continued to exhibit actively both before and after that time, winning many prizes and having one-man shows all over Argentina. In 1943 a retrospective exhibition of his graphic work was held at the Gallería Muller in Buenos Aires. The twenty-eight prints shown there sum up Lasansky's Argentine phase.

The cultural climate of Argentina at that time had, one gathers, a provincial flavor. There was no native graphic tradition to build on, as there was, for example, in Mexico. The avant-garde influences came from France or Spain, and were predominantly literary, since books travel farther and faster than paintings or other works of art. The sophistication achieved by the artists tended to be rootless and unduly precious, expressing itself in poetic symbolism and elegant conceit. One critic, Julio Vanso, spoke of "plastic metaphors," and the very phrase implies a fundamentally literary conception translated into visual terms.

Lasansky's prints were typical of such a milieu, yet stood apart by reason of his technical virtuosity and his experimental approach. Although he experimented with etching, relief etching, and linoleum cut, the bulk of his work was executed in drypoint. They display an extraordinary technical facility; he can suggest the most delicate tones and nuances by this primarily linear medium. He experimented with expressionism, as it were, in Velorio and Cena, possibly with surrealism in Figura, with a pastoral tradition in Changos y Burros, but his most consistent accomplishment appeared in the drypoints, Maternidad, El Presagio and numerous others. They are romantic and poetic compositions of extreme sensibility and refinement.

The year 1943 marked a decisive step in his career. He came to the United States on a Guggenheim Fellowship. It is significant that one of the first things he did upon his arrival in New York was to visit the print room of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and study the old masters. He felt the need to assimilate the ancient graphic tradition, actual examples of which he had not been able to find in Argentina. He was to spend many months in the print room studying the prints of the past. As Francis Taylor, the Director of the Metropolitan Museums, later jocosely remarked: "It took an 'Indian' from South America to have the perseverance and guts to look at every print in the Museum." There were over one hundred and fifty thousand of them!

Concurrently, Lasausky was trying out modern modes of graphic expression in Hayter's Atelier 17. Here he was introduced to burin engraving, soft ground textures by impress, gouging, graining with carborundums, and the like. Above all he discovered Picasso in the original. He was bowled over by the great Spaniard for a period, and translated his imagery into a bravura burin technique in such plates as Doma and Sol y Luna. He pointed out to use that although the imagery was similar to Picasso's, the burin line was very much his own. It should also be pointed out that Picasso's symbolism would come more naturally to Lasansky as a Latin-American than it would to an Anglo-American. In due course he digested Picasso's influence and made it part of his own amalgam, as he did also with the intaglio techniques of Atelier 17.

Meanwhile he made an important decision not to return to Argentina, but to bring his wife and two children here, and settle permanently in the United States. Such a decision required courage, for his fortunes were at a low ebb. He was a foreigner with little facility in English, he had responsibility for a growing family, and no prospect of a job. Some reflection of this whole period of stress appears in La Lagrima (nostalgia for home and family) and Self Portrait with Beard, so different in mood from the elegant Auto Retrato of 1943. Late in 1945 he was invited to be Visiting Lecturer for Graphic Arts at the State University of Iowa. To strike roots in the country fitted in well with his inclination. In Argentina, too, he had left the capital, Buenos Aires, to settle down in the provinces at Córdoba. Now, he threw himself heart and soul into teaching, and his success was immediate. He wangled new equipment, and re-organized the whole Department of Graphic Arts. In one year he was made Assistant Professor, in the following year Associate Professor, and in 1948 he achieved tenure as a full Professor. Above all he started training students, who in turn established teaching centers for graphic arts in colleges throughout the Middle and Far West. In a decade he had established one of the most dynamic graphic workshops, especially for intaglio work, to be found anywhere in the country and had become, through his own work and his students, an important and far-reaching influence in American printmaking.

Mauricio Lasansky is a born teacher. He has the gift of imparting enthusiasm, a passion for the print and its creation. He does much more than dispense technical information; he works upon character and emotional response. He treats each student as an individual problem. My ambition with my students, he has said, is to give each one a rationale for his work. When the students come to our workshop, they are generally unaware of how to use their emotional and intellectual experiences. In addition they lack technical knowledge. The purpose, the responsibility, the integrity of the artist is obscure to them . . . There are no formulas. Freedom, backed by self-discipline, will eventually help the student to find himself in his work. If I teach anything at all, it is the sense of responsibility one must have as an artist.

Unlike many modern artists and teachers, Lasansky believes strongly in the continuity and validity of tradition, and he encourages students to respond to whatever influences, in the past and present, for which their own inner natures have affinity. This makes for diversity of creative approach among them. He never consciously seeks to impose his own aesthetic upon his students; they are never allowed to enter his studio, nor do they see his own work except by accident. They learn by doing and by profiting from their own mistakes. For this reason he favors the copper plate as a teaching medium. Just to engrave on a tough material such as copper demands discipline, but even more willpower and self discipline are required to scrape off and hammer out a mis-handled area. It is an educational exercise which makes or breaks a student. Although he has nothing against lithography in the hands of a master, he does not favor the medium as a teaching aid; it does not offer enough resistance. To make good lithographs one must know how to draw, and very few students nowadays have that accomplishment. Real freedom cannot exist without discipline. By discipline I mean all those things that are synthesized in a mature personality: understanding and love, honesty, control and order, self criticisms, and, above all, the ability to see reality without fear. Lasansky requires each student to make a self portrait, and he says that the average young American student finds this task the most formidable of all. It will be seen that his teaching program embraces many things beside art and technique.

Along with his teaching he is involved, devotedly, with his own creative work. He is a master of his craft in the old and true sense of the word. He has mastered technique; it has become an instrument over which he has full and sure control, leaving his energies free to develop the creative idea in all its complexity. This process of conversion and growth is a slow and absorbing activity; images have to be dragged up out of the unconscious, leading motifs have to be built up and minor ones put in their place, fascinating bypaths have to be explored for relevance and possibly suppressed, the relation between form and form, between color and color, has to be tested in concrete terms. I asked if this gestation could not be accomplished in the mind without recourse to actual material. For him, he said, it could not; that was the way he worked—thinking and feeling with his hands. The intaglios, and even some of the early drypoints, seldom attained completion in less than twenty-five states, some of these involving drastic changes in the copper plate. Such alterations necessitated a terrific amount of physical labor, but the artist was never one to shrink from any effort whatsoever to accomplish his purpose.

A glimpse of the transformation undergone by a single plate is given in a trial proof of Bodas de Sangre shown in the present exhibition. To a certain extent the subject matter demanded complex treatment. The elaborate synthesis of thought and feeling involved in this theme, inspired by Garcia Lorca's drama of the same name, could not be achieved lightly. It was not simple illustration, but a recapitulation in another medium of the passions and dramatic conflicts implicit in Lorca's tragedy. The mixed copper-plate techniques (engraving, etching, soft-ground, aquatint, gouging, and graining) which he has designated as intaglio, in color or black and white, are well adapted for the interpretation of imaginative themes, such as Bodas de Sangre, Firebird or Pieta, as well as his impassioned commentaries on social themes and world events. In 1946 he was deeply affected by the revelations of the atrocities in the Nazi concentration camps—a concern which found expression in Dachau and the sequence For An Eye An Eye, over which he worked for two years. Ten years later he visited Spain, and was profoundly moved by the tragic plight of that country, for which he felt an attachment through his early cultural ties, in spite of his hatred for Franco. He was so wrought up about it that he could not sleep. Eventually he found a certain catharsis for his obsessive preoccupation in such plates as Vision and España, the latter to my mind being one of his most moving compositions.

He has also done certain prints quite apart from those mentioned above; they are what he calls his portraits. They seem to be simple and direct projections of an image in contrast to the shifting and elusive imagery so characteristic of his other work. They are not literal representations, for he is as imaginative and not a realistic artist, and no doubt they are not intended to be portraits as such. They are more like concrete embodiments of types or characters. It is significant that they all relate to himself or his family, and thus become, as it were, an extension of his own ego and its ambiance. Artists are by nature genial egoists; Lasansky here is frankly so. These pictures are not portrayals but personifications of MY Boy, MY Daughter, MY Wife and Tomas, and the like. Similarly, his self portraits are not of the whole man, but are more or less facets of his character which he has assumed or would like to assume. He has private nicknames for them all. In line with the immediacy and spontaneity of the portraits, it is interesting to note that in some of the later ones, such as Self-Portrait in Profile, 1957, the artist has worked on a magnesium plate, which does not permit corrections or erasures; the lines are engraved once and for all.

Critics have discovered traces of influence in Lasansky's work—El Greco, Goya, Modigliani, Chagall, Hayter, Picasso—but there seems little point in such enumeration. Lasansky is not an eclectic. What he has taken he has made his very own because it serves his innate drive. Who among living artists, with all the world's art behind them, can truly say that they are without influence and owe nothing to tradition? The abstract expressionists, to be sure, make a claim that they have broken with tradition. Lasansky confesses to a detached curiosity about action painting or the dynamics of painting, although he says it has no place in printmaking. Recently, in the summer, he amused himself by making collages of weathered shingles; such flat abstract patterns he calls exercises in thinking without feeling. He believes in a fusion of thinking and feeling; and, as a maker of prints, he believes that they should have content and meaning as well as expressive form.

Lasansky is not a prolific artist; his aesthetic demands brooding and reflection and a tremendous amount of plain hard work. He prints all his own plates, and this likewise consumes much time. Furthermore, he has his teaching, which he takes very seriously. He acts as guide and counselor to his students, identifies himself with their problems, and advises them about jobs and exhibitions. His concern with critical acclaim for himself and his students is to a certain extent dictated by the necessity of making good in an environment where art is not the ruling passion. As far as his own work is concerned, he does not make prints of that special variety known as "exhibition pictures." He does not live in that kind of world. He would rather face reality alone on the prairie than buzz among the ivory towers of New York. He is an independent fellow, unpredictable, a bit peppery at times, a real maverick. But then, the mavericks are the ones the world remembers.

Reprinted from "Mauricio Lasansky," a monograph published on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition of Mauricio Lasansky's work, 1960. The article was written by Carl Zigrosser for the American Federation of Arts under a grant received from the Ford Foundation Program in the Humanities.
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