The following essay appeared as the introduction to Lasansky: Printmaker
(The University of Iowa Press, 1975). Reprinted with permission.

Mauricio Lasansky has been making prints for more than forty years. First in his native Argentina, then in New York City, and (for almost thirty years) in Iowa City, he has devoted himself to exploring the expressive possibilities of the graphic arts. In doing so, he has left behind a series of prints that are among the most powerful and impressive works by a contemporary artist in any medium, and he has done as much as any individual to establish printmaking as a meaningful concern for the serious student of the arts. As a result, among the important printmakers of the younger generation, and the teachers of printmaking in scores of American art schools and universities, are scores of Lasansky students.

This is not the first publication devoted to the prints of Lasansky, and, since he is working with unremitting vigor, it will not be the last. The present book presents the existing corpus of Lasansky's prints, in as much detail and with as much accuracy as the compilers could muster; since Lasansky himself was fully involved with the process of cataloguing, the entries that follow are of the greatest possible authenticity, based on his memory and records, and corrected through consultation of as many published sources as could be examined.

Lasansky has been generous in sharing his ideas with the author of this essay, and what follows is an attempt to give the reader a reasonably accurate account of Lasansky's thoughts about his work and about art in general. Among a considerable number of useful publications on Lasansky, perhaps the most extensive and certainly the most useful is the essay and catalogue published in 1960 by Carl Zigrosser. If some of the statements in these pages reflect Zigrosser's text, it is because his work was so itelligent and thorough that no writer about Lasansky could better express the points Zigrosser makes. Since that catalogue was published, however, Lasansky's work has taken a new direction: the prints have become more complex in color; a greater number of plates are used in each print; and there has been a remarkable change in mood and imagery.

Lasansky himself has characterized the development in his work as an evolution from romance, the classic, to "contemporary" to — or back to — humanism; schematic as it is; his account of his stylistic growth is revealing for what it says about his attitude towards his work. The subject has remained the human being — his condition, his relationships, his society — but the great change has been in Lasansky's command of the visual arts, and in his relationship to the work of other artists. In his full maturity, Lasansky expresses his art in terms of its themes; until then, he had thought of it in relationship to stylistic conceptions.

Mauricio Lasansky was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1914, the son of an immigrant printer of banknote engravings. Mauricio's father was born in Eastern Europe (his country of origin has been described, at various times, as Russia, Poland, and Lithuania), and had worked at his trade in Philadelphia before settling in Argentina. Buenos Aires, during Mauricio's formative years, was a reasonably lively cultural center, supporting a number of theaters, many serious musicians, and an academy of art; it was oriented to Europe, but generally conservative in taste.

Lasansky's first interest was in music, which he studied seriously until his fourteenth year, when a slight (and — it turned out — temporary) hearing impairment caused him to change to the study of sculpture. He graduated in 1933, at the age of nineteen, and commenced postgraduate work in printmaking at the Superior School of Fine Arts.

Since he had been familiar with the processes of printing from hearing his father and an uncle talk about their work as engravers, Lasansky found printmaking particularly sympathetic. Almost at once, he worked with an assured hand. His earliest prints were in relief etching (according to Zigrosser, his father had known the technique in Europe), and in linoleum cuts, but before long Lasansky was working in drypoint. His drypoints were unconventional both in technique, and in conception. Lasansky used the drypoint needle to create fully modeled tones, in contrast to the linear quality traditionally associated with the technique, and worked to far larger scale than is common in drypoint. Moreover, while the first relief prints he made were direct social statements, stressing the grim poverty of ordinary life, the drypoints — a few years later — are lyrical and imaginative, relying on surrealist juxtapositions of interior and exterior space, objects in different scale, and interpenetrations of one form by another.

These early works are consciously poetic; many of Lasansky's friends and intellectual heroes were poets and writers, who used language in the Spanish tradition with a rich employment of metaphors, strange juxtapositions of objects and ideas, and the frequent expression of objects and ideas, and the frequent expression of states of mind in similes — equivalents for feelings being made vivid by reference to objects. Despite the richness of this aspect of his cultural life, Lasansky felt that in the visual arts Argentina was isolated. Exhibitions of work from abroad were infrequent in Buenos Aires, and scarcer still in Cordoba (where he moved in 1936, to direct the Free School of Fine Arts), and such work as was shown reflected the more conservative official French and British taste, lacking the more daring and experimental work discussed and reproduced in the few serious art publications that came into the country from abroad. Though his work was exhibited and recognized, and though he had been able to get a responsible teaching position while still in his early twenties, Lasansky dreamed of finding a way to become familiar with the larger world of the arts.

His dream took a step towards realization when Francis Henry Taylor, on a South American trip in 1940, saw his work, met Lasansky, and recommended him for a Guggenheim Fellowship to study printmaking. As director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Taylor was an influential and respected sponsor, so in 1943 Lasansky arrived in New York and commenced two projects: a systematic study of the entire(!) print collection of the Metropolitan Museum, and technical study with Stanley William Hayter in the New York "Atélier 17."

A few years earlier, Hayter had established a remarkable workshop in Paris, called "Atélier 17" after its address on the Rue Campagne Premiere (and retaining its name thereafter, no matter where it was located), devoted to the discovery of the technical and aesthetic possibilities of the intaglio printmaking process. The studio was a center for serious experimentation in intaglio printmaking, and many of Hayter's artist friends came to apply his techniques to their own work; Picasso, Miró, Chagall, and many others of international renown, engraved and printed in Atélier 17 in Paris, and those who found themselves in New York after the outbreak of World War II came to work with their old friend.

Thus it was that Lasansky, newly arrived from Argentina, found himself working next to artists of the international avant-garde in New York, as well as joining and a number of younger artists in becoming exposed to Hayter's particular approach to printmaking. Coupled with his exhaustive study of the print collections at the Metropolitan Museum, his approach to art changed totally. Lasansky came to realize at this time that the physical resistance of the copper plate and the precision, tautness, and varying depths of the directly cut line in the copper were the most singular characteristics of printmaking, and he responded instinctively to the tension and control he was able to exert as the forms emerged in the process of engraving. In New York he explored new ways of imposing textured areas on the plate, and of creatively using retroussage to bring brilliant white accents into a composition. Perhaps, too, the beauty of the engraved plate attracted the now-latent sculptor in Lasansky; to this day he takes visible physical pleasure in the varied surfaces and channels of the plates, which he views as objects in their own right apart from their use as printing masters.

The presence of such contemporary masters as Miró and Chagall, during Lasansky's time in New York, must have contributed notably to his development, as did his exposure to the prints of Picasso, with whom Hayter had worked closely in Paris. These artists had a profound effect on Lasansky's imagery, and in various prints of the later 1940s and 1950s, he clearly displays his debt to Hayter's abstract web of curving and spiky lines, Chagall's airborne figures, and Picasso's agonized Guernica victims. While in Argentina, Lasansky's poetic analogies had been expressed in reasonably conventional drawing, even when certain surrealistic elements came into his compositions, now he adopted a freer approach to the human figure and a stronger sense of line, and liberated himself from the profusion of observed detail that had been so much a part of his earlier drypoints. The tonality that was to characterize his work for the next fifteen years appeared at this time, too.

In this last respect, he owed a debt to Goya, and to the other Spanish artists for whom he felt such a deep affinity at this point in his career. If the days in Atélier 17 had brought him into touch with living work by live artists, his studies at the Metropolitan Museum put the powerful work of the past directly into his hands, often in examples of unsurpassed quality. Whereas, the prints of Goya in reproduction might be most compelling for their imagery, the physical richness of color was inescapable in actual examples of his aquatints and etchings, and impressed Lasansky profoundly.

Realizing that the possibilities for further development of his own career were far better in the United States than in Argentina, and feeling more than ever that the atmosphere of Cordoba was stiflingly provincial, Lasansky made up his mind to try to remain in North America. In 1944 he requested, and received, and extension of his Guggenheim Fellowship, sent for his wife and children, and discussed with Henry Allen Moe, the president of the Guggenheim Foundation, the prospect of making a new career. There appeared to be two possibilities: to stay in New York, and compete with scores of artists for attention and patronage, or to live and work in a smaller center where his attentions would be less diverted by concerns marginal to his work as an artist. Having preferred to live in a smaller city in Argentina, Lasansky felt that he would prefer to make the same choice here; moreover, printmaking was anything but an established career for an artist in the United States, in 1945.

It may seem hard to believe, in this day of flourishing print workshops, impressive print exhibitions, and the virtually universal teaching of printmaking in universities and art schools, that before the Second World War printmaking was widely regarded as the province of a few, specialized artists, appealing to a few, finicky collectors. Not many museums had serious print rooms, and even if prints were among their collections they mounted few exhibitions of the graphic arts. The Federal Arts Project established printmaking workshops in several cities during the depression of the 1930s, and many artists were exposed to printmaking techniques thereby, but somehow even those projects failed to engender a truly widespread and innovative interest in printmaking.

This is not to say that American artists never made prints. Many made them abroad, as Whistler, Mary Cassatt, and others had in the nineteenth century, and as Feininger and Max Weber did in the twentieth. Others, like "the Eight" in New York, Thomas Hart Benton in Missouri, and Grant Wood in Iowa, frequently turned to the print to record their responses to the American scene. Benton and Wood, however, preferred to work in lithography, with the aid of experienced printers, so they remained more concerned with their subjects than with the technical aspects of their prints. While this kept them from creating anything in printmaking that was different from their painting, it did at least remind other artists and collectors that the print was a valid medium of expression, not just a reproductive tool, or pastime for the conservative purist.

In the later 1940s, when education in the arts was beginning to expand after the war, several far-sighted administrators recognized the potential importance of printmaking in the art curriculum, and Lester D. Longman, at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, was one of those prescient individuals. At Iowa the creative arts were given a unique place among the academic disciplines, and were regarded as entirely proper concerns for graduate study. University president Virgil Hancher appears to have fully realized that this was an area in which the university could take an innovative stand, and the development of the writers workshop, music school, and art department under his term attracted widespread attention.

The first artist-in-residence at Iowa who reflected this embryonic interest in printmaking was the German-born Emil Ganso, a vital and gregarious man, self-taught and a printmaker, but committed to the graphic arts as a basic medium of expression in the visual arts, not just as an adjunct to painting. Unfortunately, in 1941 Ganso died suddenly. As soon as the war ended, Professor Longman set about to find a successor.

Just at this time, Henry Allen Moe was trying to help Lasansky find a teaching position away from New York, and he persuaded Hancher to consider Lasansky as a successor to Ganso. Professor Longman had other candidates in mind, but agreed to meet the young, obscure immigrant in New York for an interview. Lasansky recalls that their meeting took place at a Whitney Museum opening, where they somehow found a quiet corner in which to talk. The next year, Lasansky went to Iowa "for one year." He has been there ever since.

Lasansky is not a large man, and he prefers to speak in a quiet voice. What he accomplished in his first years at Iowa, therefore, speaks volumes for his determination, his powerful will, and the intellectual equipment he brought to the task, for he could not have physically awed or vocally harangued his colleagues enough to bring them to share his understanding of what prints could be, and printmaking do, for the young artists being trained at the university. He established an extensive studio, found presses and equipment, set up working procedures, and by experiment discovered the right blend of personal direction and forced independence to teach the student appropriate habits and attitudes without making him a slavish imitator of his teacher. Lasansky's own studio was traditionally closed to the student, to give the artist the time and place to develop his own work without fear that it would exert undue unfluence on the student, yet he spent hours each day helping the students to solve their own problems and to master the difficult craft of intaglio.

He turned out to be a teacher of genius, and the students in those postwar years (frequently returning veterans of uncommonly serious purpose, to make up for the "lost" war years) helped to create an atmosphere of serious endeavor, strong personalities, and lively exploration.

Since even before his time in New York, Lasansky had settled upon the metal plate as the ideal medium for printmaking, and now he made intaglio printing the central focus of his curriculum. It is not that he has anything against the woodcut or the lithograph, but rather that the discipline imposed by the metal seems to have at once a liberating and a controlling effect on the artist. Once one has learned to command the material, in Lasansky's view, then one is freely able to create in full consciousness of where the process will lead; other techniques may be too easy, too similar to other manipulations in the visual arts, to yield the strong character he likes to see in prints.

In his first years at Iowa, Lasansky undertook work in two directions. First, there was a continuing series of self-portraits and portraits of his family, often playful, sometimes theatrical, but always exuding gentle sympathy and warmth. In contrast, there were brooding, more abstract prints, like the series For an Eye an Eye, or Bodas de Sangre, with complex iconography, intentional echoes of Picasso (of the Guernica period) and Chagall, and a sense of violence imposed upon humanity. Whether confronting the plight of Spain, the heartbreak of war, or the dignity of children, Lasansky maintains a sobriety in these works through his use of the frontal or direct profile representation of the human figure, and through his subtle use of colors in combination with deep, dark tonalities.

Both the formal and the iconographic development of Lasansky's work reached a climax in The Nazi Drawings of 1961-1966. For Lasansky, this was both an artistic watershed and an emotional catharsis, during which he turned his major creative energies away from the print to give physical embodiment to his seething reaction against the Nazi holocaust. He saw the unleashing of bestiality in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s as a brutal attack on man's dignity, and felt it carried the potential seeds of man's self-destruction. Elements of his earlier prints reappear in The Nazi Drawings, but transformed into powerful visual equivalents for the perpetrators and victims of the tragedy as well as the paralyzed bystanders.

When Lasansky emerged from the crucible of The Nazi Drawings, his prints again dealt with the child, the woman, the bishop (or the cardinal, often in a less morbid context or a more optimistic vein), but the fragmentation of form, new treatment of color, and lighter tonal environment of the drawings now transformed his prints.

He has described one of the basic characteristics of each artist as residing in the use of scale, especially in the relationship of the size of the figure to the picture area. Here Lasansky has kept to a remarkably consistent course, as if to prove his own point; the figure is always large on the plate, and the plate is often so large that the figure is represented almost life size. Moreover, the figure is kept at a dignified distance from the viewer, as people in conversation conventionally assume a certain distance from one another. Through these means, Lasansky's prints set up a very specific kind of conversation with the viewer; the figures he creates exist in a world of his particular invention.

Although color has often been present in Lasansky's work, the sense of the prints of the 1940s and 1950s is almost monochromatic — with richness provided through the introduction of few hues in each print. With the prints of the past decade, however, Lasansky has brightened and complicated his colors, taking pleasure in the luminosity and transparency of the ink over the brilliant white of his paper. He has likened his recent use of color to working in fresco, and he takes care not to lose the freshness of a color by deadening it against an unsympathetic tone.

Along with the growing complexity of color, the recent prints are composed of a considerable number of plates of varying sizes, composed elaborately on the bed of his enormous press after a complex series of inkings. These prints are large, and the mechanical difficulty of realizing them is considerable, so the appearance of freshness and spontaneity they preserve is testimony to Lasansky's technical command of his medium. The more recent prints seem to show Lasansky turning from Spanish to an Italianate mood, from blacks and browns to the primaries, from mysterious shadows to open emotion. This may seem particularly curious in his very latest work, dealing with Mexican themes (inspired, no doubt, by the pleasure taken by the artist in the second residence they maintain in Mexico), but it may be a fair comment that the Mexican light, spirit, and civilization are as different from the Italian as is the Spanish. In any case, the gods and natural presences of the recent prints have little in common with the early Argentinian work of Lasansky, beyond their shared sense of scale and human representation. The work of the last two years displays a freedom as well as a fluency that indicate Lasansky has liberated himself from his earlier influences without abandoning the discoveries those influences had led him to make.

In a sense, Lasansky's whole life has been a search for freedom. He has sought political, academic, and intellectual freedom, and he has labored to free himself from the physical restraints of his medium. His work expresses these two aspects of freedom: the masterly fluency of a printmaker, and the insistence that dignity and humanity triumph over meanness and bestiality.

To describe someone as a "master," in the sense that he has subdued his materials and ceased to struggle with the problems that interfere with expression through his craft, also may suggest another sense of the word — that implied in the phrase "master and apprentice." This is an unfashionable role for a pedagogue today, and it is a relationship that Lasansky has consciously tried to avoid — not always with success. His personality and temperament are so compelling that many of his students either have been overwhelmed or have reacted to him for a time, but when this passes, as it has with his successful students, it can be seen that Lasansky's emphatic pedagogy has had its desired effect. What he has tried to do, above all, at Iowa, is to surround himself with a group of serious fellow artists, less experienced and less sure of themselves than he is, and to give them a sense of value, a series of basic insights into the relationships between vision and materials, and the example that a confident artist can be a generous teacher without losing his identity. His former students are not only printmakers of note, but teachers of distinction.

Apart from Lasansky's immense contribution as a teacher, he has become one of this country's most powerful creators of images. He never turned away from the representation of the human figure, even when abstract expressionism was the order of the day, but retained a humanist's orientation making man the measure of all other things. Although not a political artist in the usual sense of the word, he has always displayed a sense of outrage, culminating in The Nazi Drawings, at the all too frequent displays of imbecility and inhumanity with which he has been confronted. He has leavened his powerful imagery and strong outrage with works of tenderness and intimacy, and with a remarkable series of psychological studies of himself displaying various states of mind ranging from amusement to misery.

His is a rich art, drawing from literature, politics, theatre, the dance, reflecting an affinity for the Latin civilizations, and a delight in the masks and costumes in which people have cloaked their roles in life. Most of all, though, Mauricio Lasansky has been instrumental in establishing the print in America as a viable, independent art form, and creating prints of unmistakable individual character that are, above all, eloquent visual statements. He has been industrious, but, since his prints evolve gradually through many stages, not prolific. He has been imaginative and individual, but not obscure or idiosyncratic. Most of all, he has mastered his medium thoroughly, and he has transmitted a sense of the value of that mastery to all who have seen his prints or studied with him.

Reprinted from "Lasansky: Printmaker" (The University of Iowa Press, 1975).
Reprinted with permission.