The following essay appeared as the introduction to the exhibit catalogue for the Neuberger Museum, State University of New York at Purchase, Fall-Winter 1988-89.

. . . the phantasma was the bridge between the soul, prisoner of the body, and the exterior world (worlds). The phantasma is, once again, the mediator between the world of here and the world of there.

-- Octavio Paz

When I print, the fingerprints are mine.

-- Mauricio Lasansky

Mauricio Lasansky has worked for over fifty years almost entirely in the intaglio medium. Throughout his career, he has explored epic scenes of violence, and then countered them with prints of tender human emotion. It has been largely due to Lasansky's achievements that the model of an artist working exclusively in the print media has been legitimized. He has moved printmaking from the realm of mere reproduction, and redefined the nature of intaglio printmaking itself. Another of his major contributions to the field of graphics was to make prints equal in scale to monumental paintings. Finally, through his sympathetic teaching, he enabled a great many artists to find a language of their own.

On October 12, 1914, Mauricio Lasansky was born in Buenos Aires, a port city which attracted waves of European immigrants at the turn of the century. Lasansky's family, Jews from eastern Europe, was lured to the Argentine capital by the government's promise of prosperity. Before settling in Argentina in the early 1900's, Lasansky's family had emigrated to Philadelphia, where the artists father and uncle were engravers and printers of bank-notes at the United States Mint. Their commitment to their craft explains Lasansky's claim of having printer's ink in his veins.

As a teenager, Lasansky's first inclination was to become a musician. But a hearing loss, which turned out to be temporary, made him redirect his creative energies to the visual arts. Precocious at 16, he won an honorable mention for a sculpture in an exhibition of seasoned professionals. Three years later, in 1933, he entered the Superior School of Fine arts in Buenos Aires where he studied sculpture, painting, and printmaking.

For Latin American artists of the 1930s, the study of prints was limited to woodcuts which illustrated 16th- and 17th-century Bibles and prayer books brought to the continent by catholic missionaries eager to propagate their faith. These straightforward woodcuts provided Lasansky with a model for the creation of inexpensive works of art in keeping with his populist beliefs. His prints from the 1930s treat the themes of poverty and despair. Suicidas (Suicide) of 1935, like many of his earliest prints, is a zinc relief-etching, an unconventional technique developed by William Blake in the late 18th century which Lasansky learned from his father. In this technique, the negative areas of the plate are etched away and, like a woodcut, the raised surfaces are inked and printed. In Suicidas, young emaciated lovers who have taken their own lives lie drowned in a tidal pool. Sea foam encircles them and, like a serpent, coils back to the sea. The sidewinding quality of the water, which leads from the couple in the foreground to an expanse of sea in the background, evokes the archetypal snake which devours its tail. The universal serpent is a symbol of the cyclical nature of life and death, and a reminder that the sea is the primal element from which all men and women arise and return.

By 1936 Lasansky had become a very big fish in a pond that was soon to become turbulent. That year he was appointed director of the Free Fine Arts School of Cordoba, Argentina. Three years later he was promoted to the directorship of the Taller Manualidades in the same rural town. He married Emilia Barragan, the sister of a muralist with whom he had worked, and they started a family. There was great peace and joy in his personal life, but a sour mood had descended on the country. In 1939, Argentina witnessed the most fraudulent election in its history. By the mid-1940s, an unruly, right-wing nationalist movement paralleling the totalitarian governments in Europe arose in Argentina, headed by military strong-man Juan Peron.

Terrible as the 1940s were, the decade marked Lasansky's greatest artistic growth. In Auto Retrato (Self Portrait), a drypoint of zinc of 1943, Lasansky presents himself as a Renaissance prince, not as a humble artisan in a printer's apron. The antiquated and picturesque costume shows his desire to escape from the realities of the moment. The regal three-quarter pose gives expression to his strong personality and new sense of self-awareness. That same year, Auto Retrato was included in a retrospective of Lasansky's work in Buenos Aires, celebrating his achievements as Argentina's leading graphic artist. It was the last print Lasansky made before leaving the country. He has never returned.

In 1943, with the support of the Guggenheim Foundation, Lasansky came to the United States. His fellowship allowed him to work with Stanley William Hayter at Atélier 17, then located in New York. At Atélier 17, Lasansky worked side by side with such Abstract Expressionists as Adolph Gottlieb and Jackson Pollock, and with such European emigré artists as Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, and the Chilean-born Surrealist Matta. Great intellectual ferment was generated among this group. They worked their copper plates around one large table questioning and observing each other in a true spirit of cooperation and discovery. The support of Lasansky's fellowship also provided him with the resources to use copper, the most sensitive intaglio materials, in place of less expensive zinc. The new degree of directness and technical resolution reflected the fresh ideas, new materials, and sense of freedom that he found in New York. While there, Lasansky was also a welcome visitor to the print room of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Francis H. Taylor, the director of the Metropolitan who championed his work, remarked "It took an 'Indian' from South America to have the perseverance and guts to look at every print in the Museum." At the Met Lasansky discovered original prints by Mantegna, Durer, and Rembrandt. He also saw at first-hand the prints of Picasso.

The intensity of his encounter with Picasso's prints led to Lasansky's bravura engraving Doma (Horse Breaker) of 1944. Doma was Lasansky's tribute to Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who was brutally murdered in 1936 by Franco's troops. For Lasansky and many Latin Americans, Lorca's courage was a symbol of resistance. In Lasansky's print the violent combat between the two figures — a man and a hybrid of a man and horse — recalls the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. In Doma, however, Theseus, the youthful spirit of Greece, becomes a tormented headless figure representing Spain under seige. The monstrous hybrid, like the Minotaur in the classical myth, is a symbol of unbridled forces. The print thus depicts not only the conflict between reason and passion, but the tension between a free Spain and the uncontrollable violence of Franco's militia. The intensity of the wrestling combat in Doma matches the intensity of Lasansky's hand in the physical creation of the print. It is engraved, a technique in which the image is incised directly into the metal with an extremely sharp tool called a burin, the most difficult of all printmaking vocabularies to master. The dynamic power is Doma results from expressive marks of the burin and the resistance of that tool to the copperplate. Lasansky's masterful control over the hard edges of his engraved line enabled him to extend his visual language to include an ambiguity of merging forms within the twisting figures in Doma.

Sol Y Luna (Sun and Moon), an intaglio from 1945, was Lasansky's last graphic created in New York. It reveals the impact of his experience there on both his forms and iconography. Sol Y Luna shows Hayter's emphasis on Surrealism's discovery of automatic drawing as a way of unleashing the unconscious. In Lasansky's print, the curving female figure with spiked, mace-like breasts confronts two angular stallions. Surrounded by light, the female figure represents the sun, whereas the horses, shrouded in darkness, are the moon. This arrangement inverts the usual symbolic order, but in the oldest of cultures, such as those of Africa, the first man is represented as the moon. Whether or not this interpretation of myth was at the forefront of Lasansky's mind, Sol Y Luna, like Doma, investigates the confrontation of opposites — a major theme in all of Lasansky's work.

Sol Y Luna demonstrates Lasansky's inventive use of intaglio. In this complex process the positive lines that are printed are incised into the surface area of the plate, either by the etching process or direct line engraving. When the plate is printed in a cylinder press under a great deal of pressure, the paper is forced down into the incised lines to pick up the ink. Intaglio may be one technique, such as etching, or it may be mixed techniques, such as aquatint, drypoint, soft-ground, and engraving. Lasansky revived the various techniques which he saw at the Metropolitan Print Room, best exemplified in the prints of Goya and Rembrandt who used many means to alter their plates. Like Rembrandt, Lasansky reworked his plates and experimented with wiping, so that no two proofs were exactly alike.

When asked to organize a graphic arts program at the University of Iowa in 1945, Lasansky did not hesitate. For Lasansky, Iowa City, a bucolic spot in the heart of the Midwest, represented the quintessential America, the ideal spot to work and raise a family. Lasansky taught continuously throughout his adult life. As a teacher, he had an uncanny knack for determining just what each student needed to hear, whether it be encouragement or a harsh criticism. Lasansky respected those who came to study with him as artists, fledglings perhaps, but artists nonetheless.

At Iowa Lasansky continued making prints three or four times larger than the previously acceptable size of eight by ten inches. To force the issue of size he enlisted his best students to submit oversized works to major print exhibitions. At first these works were rejected by the print establishment, but the message got through and size restrictions of this type were eventually abolished. Lasansky's combination of monumental scale and innovative technical investigations created intaglio prints which were no longer reproductions of paintings made by skilled technicians, but powerful works of art in their own right.

Dachua, an intaglio of 1946, was one of Lasansky's first large-scale graphics created at Iowa. The dark image does not speak of Midwestern surroundings. He has never been attracted to recording literal landscapes; Dachau extends the iconography Lasansky was developing in New York. He continued to explore the richness of automatic drawing. He looked to Mantegna for direct use of burin engraving and Goya for a graphic model of the cruelty and oppression of war. The horror of the Holocaust in Europe became an important subject in Lasansky's work of the mid-1940's. Dachau, titled after one of the most horrifying of the Nazi concentration camps, shows that Lasansky had absorbed lessons provided by Goya's Los Desastres de le Guerra (The Disasters of War) of 1810-12. Both artists created foreboding forms that barely merge from the surrounding darkness.

For Dachau, he painstakingly worked over, gouged, and scraped raw the copper plate. The plate has been bitten by acid and stopped out at so many levels that, like Doma, the violence of its creation parallels the power of its imagery. The white areas of the print vibrate with intensity. Lasansky cut out areas of the plate itself to insure that the whites left in certain parts of Dachau's composition were unsullied by the barely discernible plate tone. The surface of the copper is extremely textural and tactile, so much so that one senses Lasansky resuscitated his earlier sculptural background to create the plate for this edition of prints. Lasansky himself said: "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 only find 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 to find it."

With the four prints in the series For An Eye An Eye of 1946-48, Lasansky continues to examine the theme of the Holocaust. Here the message is communicated not through abstraction, but with the narrative power of a Greek tragedy. With each successive print, like a new scene, a fuller Chorus of voices joins in. Each print in the series begins with the same composition, with figural prototypes paying homage to Picasso. By Plate IV, the violence and bestiality have escalated to a frenzied pitch. The shallow space, the extreme crowding of the picture plane, and the theatrical gestures of the figures create the nightmarish quality of these prints. The theme of this series is the dehumanization of war, and its title, For An Eye An Eye, comes in spirit from the Babylonian King Hammurabi's retaliatory and primitive code of law. Lasansky's source material was the unearthening of the atrocities of the Third Reich, and For An Eye An Eye remains a powerful warning that human beings must curb the destructiveness of aggressive behavior.

At the same time Lasansky was working on the monumental sequence For An Eye An Eye, he created the tender print My Boy of 1947. Instead of the hatred and malice of For An Eye An Eye, love and hope are expressed in the universal theme of family. For Lasansky, this family is at the heart of the regeneration of society. In this print the mature characteristics of Lasansky's style emerged. Gone is the elegant style of Auto Retrato. This state of My Boy, a pull from the unfinished plate of the print, shows the direction in which Lasansky was moving. In this early state, the trace of the artist's hand is more clearly visible than in the finished edition. Lasansky allowed the vestiges of the first etched lines to remain in an earlier jawline and the right ear which hover behind the drawn image. Prior to My Boy, Lasansky had used color as an enhancement to the black-and-white structures of his prints. Often, he tinted them by a double printing method. Reusing the same plate for two colors exactly registered. In 1945 the artist began to use color in his prints in a more autonomous role, using separate plates for each color and transparent layers of lithographic ink. Lasansky usually printed the key plate first, inked in black with the other colors laid over it in transparent glazes, thus imparting a great luminosity to the finished print.

In the 1950s, a fourth Guggenheim Fellowship enabled Lasansky to study in Spain, a country with which he felt a great cultural kinship. In Spain he examined the painted caves of Altamira, as well as the works of Velazquez, a painter he greatly admires. Just as the atrocities committed in Germany shaped his work in the 1940s, the destructive power of the Spanish Civil War shaped his work in the 1950s. Although the Spanish Civil War ended in 1939, the Spain Lasansky visited in the 1950s still lay in rubble, both materially and physically. Lasansky was so intellectually and emotionally torn by the Spanish conflict that he lay awake at night unable to sleep. The haunting print Espana, an intaglio of 1956, was his catharsis.

Espana is an oculus through which to view Lasansky's entire body of work. The phantasmic, yet monumental, figure in Espana, and the mother standing in grief over her dead child behind the mounted figure, contribute to Lasansky's dark statement against all wars, not just the Spanish Civil War. In Espana the spectral figure bears witness to the tragedy of life but is not defeated by it. Espana is one print in which Lasansky merged the monumental with the personal. Lasansky's spectral equestrian figure summons the ghostlike figure of El Cid, Spain's exemplar of love of country. On a more universal level, the figure is death, the rider of the pale horse who gallops through the Apocalypse.

In the 1960s Lasansky worked on the scabrous Nazi Drawings, a series of thirty-three, large-scale compositions for which, apart from his impressive graphic work, he is best known. The Nazi Drawings were, due to their title, misconceived to be pro-fascist. This caused such an outcry that the public formed picket lines in from of New York's Whitney Museum when the works were shown in 1967. When Lasansky invited the public into the Whitney to view the works, they were moved to tears by the pathos of the drawings. In the same decade he created two prints that depict different phases of life with serenity and opulence, Portrait of a Young Artist and Old Lady with Hands on Face. Portrait of a Young Artist, a color intaglio of 1965, presents a calmly dignified and extremely self-possessed young woman. By contrast, Old Lady with Hands on Face, an intaglio of 1969, Lasansky emulates Rembrandt in showing a person "rich in wear." With her gnarled and arthritic hand resting thoughtfully on her chin, the old woman seems to contemplate the past and the impending future.

In the 1970s the mood of Lasansky's prints on the theme of war became reconciliatory. His palette brightened and his prints became larger and lighter in tone and in message. This is exemplified in a series of eight prints of 1976, based on the Kaddish, the mourner's prayer of the Jewish Community. From this prayer comes the beneficent line: "may there be abundant peace from heaven and life, for us and for all of Israel; and say, Amen." This is the elegiacally expansive spirit that he developed in the series.

The prints are split into upper and lower registers. There is a single figure at the bottom of each; these range from idealized to sinister German officers, like those in the Nazi Drawings, helmeted in the skulls of their victims. A totemic, transcendent dove of peace occupies the upper space. All of the prints contain anonymous, stenciled numbers which are symbolic of those the Nazis tattooed on the arms of millions of victims. With these insistent numerals, Lasansky reminds us that the Nazis used numbers to objectify the people they executed.

Hands are the focal point of this series. Of their prominence in the prints, Lasansky has said: "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 about it, so I cover my embarrassment." Each print in the group looks at suffering from a different vantage point; Kaddish I is a self-portrait in which wounds appear on the palms of the artist's hands which are raised in a priestly gesture of benediction. While the stigmata is primarily identified with the wounds of Christ, the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah prescribes gashing the palms of the hands to provide succor for the ghosts of the departed. The fingertips are bloodied; thus the artist implies all humanity shares in this massive genocide. The leather bands wrapped around the hands may be phylacteries which contain slips of scriptural passages and are traditionally worn by Jewish men during prayer. The glowing candles, figuratively balanced on the tops of the fingers, could refer to the candles of mourning that burn continuously for seven days in a Jewish household after a loved one's death. By contrast, in Kaddish V the figure in the lower register is not a witness, but a helpless child whose tiny hands prop up a mask to cover its face.

Primary colors hallmark The Kaddish series, which is among Lasansky's most technically complex. The prints were composed of many jigsaw-like plates of varying sizes which Lasansky fit together like a huge puzzle on the bed of the press. A plate covered in color, rather than black ink, often became the master plate, contrary to convention and his own earlier practices. Kaddish I is composed of ten plates, Kaddish V of nineteen. In an extension of this procedure, he has even used the record amount of fifty-two separate plates. The plates vary both in size and materials. Metals used are copper, zinc, and galvanized steel. While this practice seems new for the 1970s, Lasansky had cut a plate with irregular borders as early as 1938, and removed parts of the plate in many of the prints he made to use the crisp white of the paper in his composition.

In 1982 Mauricio Lasansky began a new series of eight large drawings; the biggest among them is six by nine feet. These are based upon the plight of over 6,000 Argentines who, in their own country, were kidnapped, tortured and executed by undercover military units in the mid-1970s. The death squads, against whom charges of anti-Semitism have been leveled, were called patotas, a slang term for a street gang. Their innocent victims were called Los Desaparecidos, the disappeared. In keeping with his practice of addressing large public topics alongside private views, he recently began a series portraying visual artists, writers, musicians, scientists, and politicians who exemplify the highest human ideals. Among those figures are Goya, Tolstoy, Verdi, Pasteur, and Lincoln. The larger-than-life print Madame Curie, an intaglio of 1987, represents Marie Curie, not in her laboratory surrounded by apparatus in the midst of discovery, but contemplatively sitting in profile with an overwhelming richness and detail of dress. Contrary to expectations, in all of these prints Lasansky offers a glimpse into the intimate sides of their characters.

It will be fascinating to see what new understandings of the human condition Lasansky will explore in the future. He has the artistic breadth of vision to align himself with both the benign and evil aspects of life. Lasansky is an artist who recreates the world and invests himself in all aspects of it. As he himself has said with his wry wit: "The devil knows more when he is an old devil."