Born in 1914, Mauricio Lasansky is of the same generation as the most influential artists America had produced, the Abstract Expressionists. By the early 1950s these artists developed abstract visual images with which they tried to express strong emotions. But many viewers were left cold by Abstract Expressionism's relative abandonment of recognizable subject matter. This audience regarded Lasansky's portraits as models for what art should do—recover its "humanism," a term which implied that art should be a readily understandable communication of the human condition and not merely a jumble of lines or a patchwork of color. Lasansky's portraits must have seemed a paradigm because of the assumption that portraying humans constitutes humanism. But if this assumption somehow had been made into a program for all artists to follow, there would have been no increase in art's net amount of humanism. Humanism in art is generated by the nature of the individual artist, not by the nature of his image, abstract or representational.

Despite the difference in appearance, Lasansky's representational works are not antithetical to the creations of the Abstract Expressionists nor a retreat to a comfortable but worn out figurative tradition. It will be argued that although his prints are not in the style of the Abstract Expressionists, Lasansky shares the sensibility of that generation of artists and was shaped by the same economic and social forces. Lasansky found a way to express in prints the same pathos that the Abstract Expressionists conveyed in their paintings. Furthermore, Lasansky's choice and handling of figurative art did not prevent him from achieving what is today accepted as the genuine humanism of Abstract Expressionism; rather, his choice allowed it.

If one is familiar with the development of the Abstract Expressionists and their art one sees common patterns emerge. Lasansky's earliest prints, made in his native Argentina, were of poverty and death. These works have social-realist subjects presented in a style which tends towards the geometricization of form—a style that recalls Philip Guston's pre-Abstract Expressionist works. Like them, they often were most successful when dealing with children made beyond their years in suffering. In 1937 Lasansky turned from these dark subjects to works such as Changos y Burritos and Maternidad which have the enigmatic images, unusual juxtapositions of size, unexpected transparencies in solid objects, and distorted spatial relations which recall Mannerism and which also suggest the Surrealist movement of the artist's own day. Lasansky, then, like most of the future Abstract Expressionists, was at first a representational expressionist (i.e., an artist who strives to express his feelings through not only the choice but also the extremely personal handling of his subject matter) and then a Surrealist (if only stylistically) committed to an art of heavy emotional impact. His work also revealed a geometrical tendency which, typically, could be traced ultimately to Picasso's endless variations on cubism. The imagery, too, became surprisingly like Picasso's—another characteristic shared with the future Abstract Expressionists.

An important experience shared by developing Abstract Expressionists was direct contact with European masters who had been driven to our shores by the war. In 1943 and 1944 Lasansky worked in New York at Stanley William Hayter's famous print workshop, Atelier 17, where he made prints alongside modern masters such as Marc Chagall. It was here that Lasansky encountered another experience which was nearly de riguer for future Abstract Expressionists—first-hand contact with Surrealists. Not only did he get this from Hayter, but Matta came from France and worked during this time too at Atelier 17, and perhaps no other Surrealist had a greater influence through personal contact on the development of Abstract Expressionists. Certainly Matta was an important influence on Jackson Pollock who, like Lasansky, worked at Hayter's studio in 1944 (Lasansky also became acquainted in New York with Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and most of the other Abstract Expressionists). After Lasansky's New York experience, the nature of his Surrealism was realigned with the kind produced by many future Abstract Expressionists. As exemplified in Sol y Luna of 1945 it was mythologically oriented, with strange creatures emerging from the murkiness in a way that coincides with Pollock's paintings of the time. Finally, Lasansky took the penultimate step on the road to Abstract Expressionism: his mythological Surrealism became abstract, and in works like Spring, Fall and Winter of 1947 he created Abstract Surrealist prints comparable to the "inscape" paintings by Matta.

In addition to parallel stylistic developments, Lasansky also participated in a less tangible but none the less real social and cultural ambience shared with the Abstract Expressionists. Most art in the forties was as intense and emotional as the events of that period. There was no Cold War as in the fifties, no impersonal death by "smart bombs" as in the sixties. War was a pressing and powerful disturbance for these artists, not only since Pearl Harbor, but since the disastrous conflicts in Spain. The Spanish Civil War stimulated Picasso's Guernica, Motherwell's series entitled Elegy for the Spanish Republic, and Lasansky's Espana. Adding to these miseries was the Depression, which was enough of an influence on Lasansky that he called it "my great teacher." Finally, the soul-searching precipitated by these circumstances was intensified for those numerous artists who were strangers in New York or who were either immigrants or children of immigrants seeking a firm identity. Lasansky's father was born in Lithuania, lived for a while in Philadelphia, and settled in Argentina; there the artist was born and lived until his arrival in New York. All of these troubling circumstances were reflected in arts and letters: in the fascination with existential philosophy, which questioned the meaning, nature and significance of one's being and identity; in poems such as W.H. Auden's The Age of Anxiety (1947); and in the art of most Abstract Expressionists, who, like Mark Rothko, sought to express "man's primitive fears and motivations."

One by one these artists emerged from this spiritually confusing and dark period, and that emergence can be witnessed in their art—very dramatically in Barnett Newman's Onement No. 1 of 1948 and Pollock's "drip" paintings of the year before. It was at the same time that Lasansky's now characteristic style emerged, as in My Boy of 1947. Even though this work is unlike Abstract Expressionism, I should like to argue that its style was equally as much as progression, maturation, and expression within the ambience of the times.

Lasansky was twenty-eight when he came to America on his first Guggenheim Fellowship in 1943, and he arrived possessing an almost evangelistic dedication to printmaking. He already has been awarded eighteen first prizes, he had been director of two art schools, and he planned to establish a national center for printmaking on his return to Cordoba. The most striking example of the seriousness of his devotion to printmaking was his plan to study every print in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was not the first person who wanted to examine all 150,000 of them, but he was the first person to actually do it. Lasansky wanted to raise printmaking to the status of a major art, rather than a minor art that was merely an inexpensive way to reproduce and distribute pictures to the masses. Lasansky was one of the first major artists whose sole medium was graphics (unlike, for example, Rembrandt or Picasso who are more commonly known for their paintings). He was and is involved in printmaking because it is a medium that can produce physical appearances as unique and distinct as, for example, oil paint or pastel.

Of what use could phases of either Abstract Expressionism—Action Painting or Color Field—be to a committed printmaker? In "Action Painting" the act itself becomes a prominent feature of the work of art. The animated gesturing with paint seems to be in large part a physical acting out of the artist's feelings at the time of the painting. Even though Lasansky was interested in the action style, it had little applicability to a medium that demands unhurried method and craft. Something of the print's integrity and consequent fullest expressive potential would be diluted if a split were forced between the patient and painstaking labor involved in pulling a print and the unleashed spontaneity in creating an image in the action manner—such spontaneity would be false to the medium. Also, the Action Painting appearance in intaglio plates can mainly be achieved by etching or sugarlift aquatint, neither of which is the fullest exploitation of the plate. Lasansky utilized the plate's potential so fully that his prints only could have been made as prints. Color Field painting emphasizes not so much line as its main expressive element, but color. The fewer lines and forms the better, so that the power and intensity of large areas of color can press themselves upon the viewer. This was no better suited to intaglio printmaking. It was at the time inconceivable to create prints large enough to produce a field of color that would interrelate with the viewer in a way that fields by Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman do. And laying down fields of color, if not false to the intaglio print, is not the traditional strength of that graphic medium.

Lasansky took all the steps toward the style of Abstract Expressionism, but to have taken the ultimate step into it would have prevented him from expressing that movement's heavy pathos in his chosen medium of prints. Lasansky perhaps realized that the abstractions he made under the influence of Hayter were rather decorative and lightweight compared to the expressionistic prints he had made before. Only by returning to the figure could he bring to bear in printmaking the Zeitgeist he shared with the Abstract Expressionists. Seen in this perspective, My Boy in 1947 was not a regression but a breakthrough. Perhaps Lasansky became convinced of the inadequacy of abstraction for his own art during the period of 1946-48 when he worked on For an Eye an Eye, a series of dreamlike but figurative prints. The grisly source of inspiration was the unearthing of what had transpired in the concentration camps at Dachau. To communicate these experiences through small abstract designs would have seemed nearly irrelevant.

It must also be pointed out that when Lasansky started For an Eye an Eye in 1946, producing figurative works did not have the same implication for him as it would have had for, say, Rothko, since printmaking and painting have somewhat different histories. The tradition of printmaking may have reached a low ebb in the thirties, but it was far from the overly-exploited and worn out tradition that easel painting seemed to be. It might be proposed that a mere three artists—Durer, Rembrandt, and Goya—created major art in prints during a span of four hundred years, until Daumier. France in the 1890s witnessed the start of an extraordinary resurgence in printmaking which was continued in Germany a decade later. But this hardly was enough to exhaust a tradition. Indeed, it has been argued that while Picasso's quality as a painter deteriorated by the thirties, he was able to maintain high quality through printmaking. Whereas easel painting seemed dead, there was, then, unfinished business in the medium of prints during the forties.

The new image Lasansky brought to printmaking around 1947 incorporated some of the spontaneous handling of Action Painting and the subsequent heightened sense of the artist's presence. This was done by using, in places, a gestural line quality, and also by occasionally allowing a "rejected" line or shape to remain visible, again calling attention to the artist's presence (as with the trace of a second left ear above the dominant one in My Boy). Also, this exposure of the artist's handling was a quality shared with the Abstract Expressionists who often exalted their love of working the paint. But most important, Lasansky's prints after 1946 were richer and more complex in line, chiaroscuro, and the interplay between the two than any of his prints before, and this expanded complexity fulfilled its potential by being put in the service of the heavy emotional quality also found in works by Abstract Expressionists. The prints are so complex that in a typical year he may complete only three; each may pass through fifty states. They often are in several colors, and merely keeping the numerous plates that make up a single large work in register is a formidable job. Most works combine etching, drypoint, aquatint, and engraving. But technique is not an end in itself, and in Lasansky's prints it is rarely sheer bravura.

What is the emotional quality most often conveyed so fully by Lasansky's mastery of techniques? Manet said of Raphael that he painted everything in the springtime of life—"life without wear." But Lasansky, like Rembrandt, shows us people rich in wear. Indeed, there are many interesting similarities between Rembrandt's paintings (especially after 1650) and Lasansky's prints. Rembrandt built up and scraped the surface of his canvas as though he were not only modeling by illusionistically depicting light and dark but actually creating the surface in relief with the impasto. Lasansky works his plates with a similar intensity and thoroughness (his first prize, at age sixteen, was for sculpture, and there is an obvious relation between sculpture, especially in relief, and intaglio printmaking). For both artists the surfaces are worked in a way that suggests how life works over individuals, wearing away youthful smoothness into "character lines." Lasansky also uses a strong chiarscuro that recalls Rembrandt, and in neither artist is this used to mask an inability to articulate anatomy or any other kind of form. Indeed, Lasansky dwells upon eyes, ears, fingers—"things that talk; from the fingers you can know everything." Both use light and dark not only for decorative contrast but for overtones such as joy and sorrow or truth and ignorance. Finally, each artist chooses the same subjects to convey the pathos of life's wear—his wife, his children, and his own face and body.

Lasansky's range of expression encompasses the simple and nearly sentimental Changos (1937), the complex and Manneristic El Presagio (1940-41), the directly affecting and variously somber and amusing self-portraits, and the visually spectacular Quetzalcoatl (1972). But the heart of what Lasansky expresses almost always is constant, and is of the utmost difficulty to communicate without sentimentality because of its profundity—love of humanity, and grief and anguish over its suffering. The expression of love reaches its height in portraits of his family, and his distress over human suffering achieves its strongest statement in The Nazi Drawings executed between 1961 and 1966 (motifs of which can be seen in the Pope and Cardinal prints and Bleeding Heart).

Just as the humanism of an artwork depends upon the humanity of its creator rather than the choice of subject or style, so the quality of the artist determines the quality of the work, regardless of the medium. Certainly some of the traditional prejudices against prints—that they are small or that they lack color—do not apply to Lasansky's often life-sized and richly colored impressions. For some critics, prints never will be as cherished and worthy of concentrated attention as paintings, simply because they exist in more than one impression. But this is quibbling when one realizes that Lasansky found his way to give prints the same emotional weight and impact found in the major paintings of his generation.

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).