Mauricio Lasansky’s ‘Nazi Drawings’ donated to National Gallery of Art in Washington
The Gazette
Sep. 29, 2024
In the 1960s, world-renowned University of Iowa printmaker used primarily pencils to express outrage over Holocaust atrocities.
Considered one of the fathers of 20th century American printmaking, the late Mauricio Lasansky of Iowa City was world-renowned for his innovative, complex intaglio techniques, training generations of artists and educators through four decades at the printmaking department he revolutionized at the University of Iowa, beginning in 1945.
“He didn’t stay in his lane. He broke down barriers in different printmaking processes,” said Sean Ulmer, executive director at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, which in 1989, dedicated a permanent 5,000-square-foot Lasansky Wing on the second floor, to display his prints and works in other media.
But it’s when he put aside his press and metal plates to pick up a pencil in 1961 that Lasansky created “The Nazi Drawings,” 33 life-size or larger works expressing his outrage over World War II atrocities and his disgust at reactions to them, especially from the Catholic Church. He worked through the mid-60s to complete the first 30 pieces, and by 1971, finished the final three as a triptych.
And now those drawings have a new home at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to be held, exhibited, loaned and maintained for perpetuity.
In his own words in 1966, Lasansky said: “Dignity is not a symbol bestowed on man, nor does the word itself possess force. Man's dignity is a force and the only modus vivendi by which man and his history survive. When mid-twentieth century Germany did not let man live and die with this right, man became an animal. No matter how technologically advanced or sophisticated, when man negates this divine right, he not only becomes self-destructive, but castrates his history and poisons our future. This is what ‘The Nazi Drawings’ are about.”
No. 16 in "The Nazi Drawings" by Mauricio Lasansky includes this text from Professor Edwin Honig, created for the 1967 exhibition catalog at the Philadelphia Museum of Art: "If one were not so familiar by now with the skull-helmet motif, it would seem simply a trick of the eye to discover that the crouching skeleton's head is on the executioner's shoulder inclining toward the dead woman (or child, or prostitute figure) — that is, the skeleton is sharing the same head with the executioner. In the sixteenth drawing the simple chiaroscuro patterning is again a sufficient device to dramatize the severity and grimness of the representation." (Lasansky Corporation Gallery)
Lasansky sold the collection to the Richard Levitt Foundation in Des Moines in 1972, which preserved the pieces, managed and financed their showings, before recently donating them to the National Gallery.
“‘The Nazi Drawings’ are an extraordinarily powerful suite of works that depict the trauma and violence of the Holocaust. The series also emphasizes the repercussions of this unfathomable tragedy of the 20th century,” Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art, said on the gallery’s website.
Online
For more information: lasanskyart.com, lasanskyart.com/the-nazi-drawings and nga.gov/press/acquisitions/2024/mauricio-lasansky.html
“Lasansky represents an important generation of artists — many of whom are not as well-known as they should be — who emigrated to the United States during the global political turmoil of the 1940s and became citizens who played an important role in shaping American art and culture,” Feldman added. “We are grateful to Richard and Jeanne Levitt and the Levitt family for their generosity in sharing this landmark series with the nation.”
Previously, when the pieces weren’t being exhibited, they were housed at the UI. Their visceral message has been delivered through major museums across the country and in Mexico, as well as in art museums at the UI and in Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, Chicago and Minneapolis.
As part of the national collection, they will continue to propel their stories to viewers in art galleries large and small across the country, as Lasansky and the Levitt family intended, said grandson Diego Lasansky, 29, of Iowa City.
Diego Lasansky, Iowa City artist and University of Iowa graduate (Supplied photo)
“If there were many goals that my grandfather had for the series, in terms of their life and what would happen to them, I think the core goal would be he wanted them to be displayed and seen by the general public,” Diego Lasansky said.
“ … He wanted the next generation and the next generation to see them. And it was really important to him, because as history is forgotten, you then repeat history. Wars happen again as things are forgotten. And so I think that was all part of his goal and sort of mission with these drawings, and they’re really, for me, a powerful work.”
Evolution
The son of a banknote engraver, Mauricio Lasansky was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on Oct. 12, 1914, the middle child of Jewish parents Abraham and Ana Kahan Lasansky, who had emigrated from Lithuania. He died April 2, 2012, in Iowa City at 97.
An educator and an artist from his earliest years, by age 22 he became director of the Free Fine Arts School in Argentina. He married Emilia Barragan on Dec. 16, 1937, and in 1943, he received the first of five Guggenheim Fellowships that allowed him to study the print collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
The following year, his second Guggenheim Fellowship allowed him to move his family to the United States and continue his studies. Three more rounds of Guggenheim funding followed, and he became a U.S. citizen in 1952.
The impetus for “The Nazi Drawings” came while watching a U.S. military documentary on Holocaust victims and its aftermath.
Beginning in 1961, he worked on the pieces in his Vinalhaven, Maine, studio during UI summer breaks, transporting the drawings between Maine and Iowa City.
The late Mauricio and Emilia Lasansky are shown April 5, 2000, in front of No. 28, one of "The Nazi Drawings," at the University of Iowa. (The Gazette)
“He didn’t have as large of a printing complex at his studio in Maine, and so he focused a lot more on smaller prints and drawings, and then in Iowa City was more of a focus on printmaking,” said Diego Lasansky, who grew up drawing in his grandfather’s Iowa City studio, which is now his own printmaking and art studio, using his grandfather’s press.
“The Nazi Drawings” primarily are done in shades of black and gray, some with splashes and drips of red. They are characterized by urgency in his technique. Lasansky used lead pencil, water- and turpentine-based washes and collage elements, including bits of newspaper and Bible passages on common commercial paper.
As quoted on his website, the artist said: “I tried to keep not only the vision of ‘The Nazi Drawings’ simple and direct but also the materials I used in making them. I wanted them to be done with a tool used by everyone everywhere. From the cradle to the grave, meaning the pencil. I felt if I could use a tool like that, this would keep me away from the virtuosity that a more sophisticated medium would demand.”
And instead of using titles, each piece is simply numbered. The National Gallery said the works can be grouped in four categories, by subject matter:
“Nos. 1-5 focus on images of Nazi soldiers, characterized by monstrous features and an evolving ‘death’ helmet in the shape of a skull. Nos. 7-13 address the Nazis’ physical abuse of women, which included forced prostitution in concentration camps. Nos. 15-17, 19-20, and 25-28 document the plight of women and children, the experiences of anguish and death, calling to mind a modern-day Massacre of the Innocents. Nos. 18, 21-23, and 29 criticize elements of the Catholic Church for their response to the Holocaust.
“The stenciled number ‘5,602,715’ appears — either in whole or in part, sometimes repeatedly — in several of the drawings, referencing what was at one point believed to be the total number of Jews murdered by the Nazis. (That number was later revised to over 6 million.) The number also recalls the dehumanizing, permanent tattoos imprinted on concentration camp inmates for tracking purposes.
“The final drawing, no. 30, is an astonishing self-portrait. A skeleton figure sits on the artist’s shoulders, pressing its bony fingers into his eyes. Dripping blood seems to blind the artist, shown nude, whose own bloodied left hand grasps at the skeleton’s leg. His other hand holds a stick of chalk or pencil with which he has written both ‘The Nazi Drawings’ and his signature in a bloody patch of ground below. With this concluding work of the initial 30 drawings, Lasansky seems to allude to the harm wrought when we turn a blind eye to injustice.”
After debuting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1967, the 30 initial drawings were included in the opening exhibition at the new Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City that year. According to the artist’s website: “Lines wrapped around the block with people awaiting entrance to the exhibition. Articles were published about ‘The Nazi Drawings’ in Time and Look magazines as well as The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.”
The nine-city tour concluded in Iowa City in 1970, and while the drawings were on the road, Lasansky worked on the final three pieces.
Latest chapter
The collection had been on an extended loan to the UI, but with the university’s Museum of Art impacted by the 2008 flood, the UI’s new Stanley Museum of Art didn’t open until Aug. 22, 2022. So Diego Lasansky said the Levitt family used the time to let the pieces rest, and from 2016 to 1017, had the framing restored to meet current conservation practices.
“And that’s when they were approached by the Minneapolis Institute of Art to do a big show of them and make a new published catalog of them,” Diego Lasansky said. With the success of the show, which ran from Oct. 16, 2021, to June 26, 2022, he said the Levitt family began considering donating the entire set to a museum.
The most recent showing was at the Baker Museum in Naples, Fla., from Sept. 17, 2022, to March 5, 2023.
Diego Lasansky was thrilled when the Levitt family reached out to him and his uncle, Tomas Lasansky, who together manage the Lasansky Corporation Gallery, to have a say in the donation.
Richard Levitt died in 2017 at 87 and his wife, Jeanne Levitt, recently turned 93. So according to the National Gallery, their children, Randall and Mark Levitt, and grandchildren Elliot Levitt and Rachel Federowicz, made the donation decision in consultation with Jeanne and the Lasanskys.
They spent about three years “putting out feelers” to museums they would like to see the collection go to, followed by interviews to see which ones would be the best fit.
“Ultimately, the decision of the National Gallery was made by the Levitt family, mostly just because it’s our nation's capital, it’s one of the most heavily visited museums in the world, and also just some of the educational side that the museum was going to offer,” Diego Lasansky said.
It also brings Mauricio Lasansky’s work full circle.
“The National Gallery was really a very important museum for my grandfather when he immigrated to this country,” Diego Lasansky said. “ … The National Gallery in the late ’40s was one of the only museums in this country that started to do real exhibitions on printmaking.”
The choice is especially meaningful for the Lasansky family.
“The National Gallery, very early in his career (after) coming to the United States, was very important for him and the development of his work, and showing his work, that especially for family members who were around at that time … it meant so much, because those museums were pivotal in making printmaking what it is today,” Diego Lasansky said.
“The whole goal of these artists that were part of this early group in the ’40s was trying to establish printmaking to make it an equal craft to painting or sculpture, because for so long, printmaking was (considered) a reproductive media. ... It was a struggle for many decades for artists who were seriously working in printmaking to say, ‘Hey, prints are original pieces of art, and they deserve to be shown in a museum.’ ”
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