A word about Fine Prints

An Introduction to Prints
Collected by
West Valley Art Museum
George Palovich,
Curator
The labeled reproduction on each
page is the print on display owned by
WVAM, others are additional
examples of the artist’s work.
Biographies were obtained from many sources including widely
disseminated coverage on the internet.
What is a show of “Fine Prints”?
The exhibition entitled “George’s Favorite Things: Prints From The Collection” is
an exhibition of “Fine Prints”. An explanation is in order since in this age of mass
reproduction and “giclee”, many are confused about what constitutes a “Fine
Print”
In the main, and generally agreed on by most people in the business of art, a
“fine print” has participation by the artist, either doing the preparation of the
plates/blocks and the printing himself/herself, or working with a master printer.
The differences in opinion come from the degree of participation necessary to
qualify as a “fine print”. Some are willing to let the participation be minimal and
the artist doing little more than signing and numbering the prints. A number of
artists have allowed their plates to be inherited and printed by their progeny.
Posthumous prints, as in the case of the series of etchings by Goya, were first
printed in an edition by his son 35 years after his death, and later for six more
editions by various publishers!
This curator draws the line at the first edition, and preferably while the artist is
still alive to judge the quality of the printing. The definition here, then, is one of
active participation in the plate preparation and printing by the artist. All of the
works on display in this exhibition fall into this definition.
Fritz Scholder, Claire Falkenstein, Andy Warhol and Alexander Calder all worked
with master printers to create their prints. Others, such as E.B. Rothwell, Marie
Macpherson, and Marion Greenwood did their own printing.
Most often, artists doing Lithography, engage a master printer partly because
of the equipment necessary and if it is stone lithography, the weight of the stones
for large prints is daunting. All methods, however, have utilized printers. Many of
these printers have their own “blind” stamp on the prints. It is merely a raised
stamp in the paper much like a Braille letter or logo.
Lithography works on the principle of oil and water not mixing, with a greasy
medium used to do the original on the stone or plate. Etching involves printing
from a metal plate that has been etched or engraved by the action of acid and
the printing done from the ink being held in the grooves. Woodcut and linocut
(linoleum blocks) plates are printed from the raised portions of the block.
Serigraphs or silk screens are done with an actual screen on a hinged frame with
a stencil blocking out the parts not to be printed. Stencils can be cut from paper
or film or be painted in with a blockout liquid. In a Monoprint or Monotype there
is only one image printed. The ink is applied to a smooth surfaced plate and
either wiped away (subtractive) or painted on (additive). The difference between
the two is that the monoprint has elements that are repeatable and could be
called variations on a theme. The method is not new. Etchers as early as the 17th
century such as Rembrandt would wipe etched plates differently to obtain unique
images. Monotype images are unique although “cognate” or second pulls are
sometimes done with the second printing being the more subtle and preferred
image.
Alexander Calder
One of America's best known sculptors, "Sandy" Calder became
most famous for his kinetic abstract mobiles. He also did floor pieces,
was a painter in watercolor, oil and gouache, did etchings and
serigraphs, and made jewelry and tapestries as well designed theater
stage settings and architectural interiors .
He was born in Philadelphia, the son of Alexander Sterling Calder
and the grandson of Alexander Milne Calder, well-known sculptors of
public monumental works. His mother, Nanette Lederer Calder, was a
professional portrait painter. Obviously he was nurtured in an
environment of art, and from an early age, he was making figures
from found objects. Because of the father's ill health and the
necessity for a drier climate, the family moved to Oracle, Arizona in
1905 and five years later to Pasadena, California. When Sandy was a
teenager, the family returned to Pennsylvania.
He was unable to make a decision about a vocation, but his
fascination with machines led to his earning a degree in mechanical
engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1919. He
tried a variety of jobs including working in the boiler room of a cruise
ship, and in 1923 enrolled in the Art Students League in New York
City, where his teachers were John Sloan, Guy Pene Du Bois, and
Boardman Robinson. In classes there he did numerous oil paintings
and also humorous drawings of sporting events for the "National
Police Gazette."
In 1925, he produced an illustrated book titled "Animal Sketching,"
one-line drawings that foreshadowed his early wire sculptures of
figures and animals. In 1926, encouraged by an engineer friend of his
father to follow his talent, he went to Paris where he lived the next
seven years and shortly after his arrival began doing wire sculpture.
During this period, his mother gave him seventy-five dollars a month
for living expenses.
He assembled a "Circus," of miniature, hand activated one-wire
figures with which he gave performances in his studio. These pieces
were made by bending and twisting a single wire into humorous
portraits, animals, and figure groups.
He also met many of the leading avant-garde artists of the day
including Piet Mondrian, who influenced Calder's geometric, nonobjective constructions that he began producing in 1931. His floor
pieces, named "stabiles" by Jean Arp, were exhibited in a gallery
exhibition organized by Marcel Duchamp, who coined the word
"mobile" for the hanging, kinetic pieces. Soon Calder was creating
many of these wind-driven works.
Calder's mobiles were first shown in the United States in 1932, and
the next year he returned to America and purchased a home in
Roxbury, Connecticut where he lived the remainder of his life and
gained much attention from that time.
Dancer Martha Graham used several of his sculptures in her
modern dance performances, and personnel at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York began purchasing pieces from him including
his first large-scale piece called "Whale" in 1937.
During World War II when metal was scarce, he made mobiles and
stabiles from carved, painted wood, and in the early 1950s he added
to his repertoire wall pieces and mobiles that incorporated sound.
Many federal agencies and businesses commissioned works by him,
and most major American museums have his pieces in their
collections.
His death in 1976 occurred coincidentally with a major retrospective
of his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
“Landscape” West Valley Art Museum
Permanent Collection
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol Bio from Art Cellar Exchange:
Andy Warhol began his career as a commercial illustrator, developing
ads for the I. Miller Department store in New York. His first exhibition
was in 1962, at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, which included all 32
of his Campbell's Soup Can renditions.
Born in Pittsburgh in 1928 as Andrew Warhola, Andy Warhol came to
represent more than just the American condition. He became pivotal in
the evolution of artistic production in relationship to mainstream massproduced culture and commercialism. The founder and most influential
figure of the Pop Art movement, Warhol received his training in graphic
design from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949. He then
moved to New York City to begin his career as a commercial artist
where he gained phenomenal success. By 1955, Warhol was the most
successful and most-influential commercial artist in New York.
His career took flight when he produced the first of his window displays
using enlarged comic strip images. Characters such as Superman and
Popeye were among the popular images he incorporated into designer
fashion. Needless to say, his department store windows drew a lot of
attention, and Warhol garnered a reputation for the extreme. One of
Warhol's most important developments was his use of enlarged
photographic images which were silk screened directly onto canvas
and/or paper. This technique enabled him to produce quickly and
cheaply a series of mass-media images that he marketed to the public.
Iconographic objects such as Soup Cans, U.S. Dollar Bills, Coca-Cola
Bottles, as well as the various faces of celebrities and politicians
became highly sought after by art aficionados.
In the late 1960s, Warhol experimented with the medium of film
exploring such rhetorical topics as time, boredom, and repetition. He
founded inter/VIEW magazine in 1969 (later changed to Interview in
1971), published 'The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and
Back Again' and continued to produce silkscreens until his death in
1987.--Karen Daniels, Art Cellar Exchange
“Mao” Silkscreen West Valley Art
Museum Permanent Collection
Arthur Secunda
Secunda was born in New Jersey in 1927 and his career includes
being recognized as a painter, printmaker, sculptor, teacher and critic.
In 1947, after a year in the U.S. Air Force as a staff artist, he attended
New York University and the Art Students League in New York where
he studied with Harry Sternberg, Reginald Marsh and Julian Levi. He
later continued his education in Paris and Rome Where he studied
sculpture with Ossip Zadkine and painting with Andre l'hote.
'
His first one man show was at the Galerie Lucien Gout in MontplUier
in 1950. Since that time, he has exhibited widely all over the U.S.,
Europe and Japan in over 150 galleries, museums and universities, as
well as major art fairs in New Yourk, Paris, Basel and Cologne.
Secunda is known for his brilliant collages with deliberate layering
and contrasting of colored papers to create a range of depth of color
and texture. His innovation in the fine art of printmaking resulted in two
grants to the Tamarind Lithography Workshop and a residency at the
Centre Genevois de Gravure Contemporain ,in Geneva.
Over the years, he has maintained studios in New York, Paris and'
Beverly Hills; and currently maintains one in Arizona. He travels and
exhibits extensively and is currently living with his artist wife and son,
Alexandre, in Arizona.
“The Face From Outer Space” monotype West
Valley Art Museum Permanent Collection
Charles O’Conner
Our so-called “mystery artist” search has yielded no results so far and this
has included consulting several “authorities” in looking for information about
him. There are still many more avenues to pursue. There are about a half
dozen prints in the collection by O’Conner and several titles have locations
in England in them such as “Godstone, Surrey or “Tillingdown near
Catesham, Surrey”. The prints appear to be woodcuts with an emphasis on
fine white lines within larger silhouette shapes.
O’Conner (yes, that is with an “er” not an “or”), may have originated in
England and may have traveled to the US during his lifetime. It is possible
he may have traveled in the southwest or to the west coast. In any event,
his work traveled with him or made its way here through collectors.
All his prints are well designed and well executed. Eventually more
information is sure to surface and there are five more prints to show in the
future. Stay tuned.
George Palovich
All woodcuts on this page are in West Valley Art Museum
Permanent Collection
“Portrait of a Mexican”
Woodcut
Charles O’Conner
In Exhibit
Claes Oldenburg
Whimsical sculpture of pop culture objects, many of them large and
out-of-doors, is the signature work of Swedish-born Claes Oldenburg
who became one of America's leading Pop Artists. His art is derived
from his surroundings.
His father was a diplomat and moved his family from Stockholm
during Claes' childhood to a variety of locations including New York
State; Oslo, Norway; and Chicago, Illinois; but Claes did not become
an American citizen until 1950.
He began his formal art training at Yale University, graduating in
1951, and then enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1952 to
1954. In 1953, some of his satirical drawings were included in his
first group show at the Club St. Elmo, Chicago, and he also painted at
the Oxbow School of Painting in Michigan.
In 1956, he moved to New York where he drew and painted while
working as a clerk in the art libraries of Cooper-Union. He became
interested in environmental art through Allan Kaprow and his
"Happenings," and in 1959, had his first one-man show, held at the
Judson Gallery, New York where he exhibited wood and newspaper
sculpture and painted papier-mache objects. During this time, he was
influenced by the whimsical work of French artist, Bernard Buffet, and
he experimented materials and images of the junk-filled streets of
New York.
In 1960, he created his first Pop-Art environments and Happenings
in a mock store full of plaster objects. Around 1965 he was making 3
versions of each object-a hard one, a "ghost" one (on canvas), and a
soft one (vinyl). About the same time, he did colossal-sized public
sculpture such as pairs of scissors, ironing boards, and a typewriter
eraser. Lipstick mounted on a moveable tractor was the first to be
executed and was placed outdoors on the Yale University campus in
1969.
Using Lippincott, Inc., a fabrication firm, he made some of the
objects in metal such as Geometric Mouse and Colossal Ashtray and
in 1976, a forty-foot clothespin in Philadelphia.
His work has been shown in many exhibitions of Pop and
contemporary art including the 1964 Venice Biennale.
“Mickey” lithograph West Valley Art
Museum Permanent Collection
Claire Falkenstein
Falkenstein was born in the first decade of the century and was
still hard at work in the last. Her life was precisely coincident with
the 20th century, and she was a full participant in the tumultuous
events in the art world. Her work incorporated modern
technology, process, assemblage, chance, light, space, and what
has been called “anti-form” as creative principles.
Falkenstein was a contemporary of the Abstract Expressionists
but, in fact, started sooner, lasted longer, and surpassed them in
formal vocabulary, in the variety of materials she used and in her
highly experimental techniques. Starting her career, (working,
teaching and exhibiting) in San Francisco until 1950 when she
moved to Paris for a dozen years, Falkenstein then relocated in
Los Angeles. In other words, like a heat-seeking missile, she
found and participated in the liveliest and most challenging art
centers of the time. Putting her in the immediate milieu of many
of the century’s greatest artists, she studied, worked, competed,
collaborated and, in several cases, became close personal
friends with several, including Alexander Archipenko, Clyfford
Still, David Smith, Hans Arp, Mark Tobey, Antoni Tapies, and
Alberto Giacometti.
Many years later, she said: “. . . there were marvelous things,
marvelous people, but I took it all in stride. I was completely
engrossed in what I was doing. There were people who were
accustomed to being treated with deference and I guess I didn’t –
and I guess that’s why they got interested.” (Falkenstein, Oral
History, UCLA)
Throughout Falkenstein's career, she created a prodigious
amount and variety of work, well beyond the traditional categories
of painting and sculpture. She explored printmaking, ceramics,
functional art, jewelry, and public monuments -- ranging from the
miniature (jewelry) to the colossal (50’ fountains and 100’ stained
glass windows). And in each of these areas, her accomplishment
has been consistently and unmistakably of historical significance.
Louis Stern Fine Arts is the exclusive representative of the Estate
of Claire Falkenstein.
Biography written by Maren Henderson
Relief print West Valley Art
Museum Permanent Collection
Clifton Karhu
Clifton Karhu was born in Duluth, Minnesota
in 1927. From 1946-48 he was stationed in
Sasebo, an American navy base in Japan. Back
in the USA, Clifton studied at the Minneapolis
Art School from 1950-52.
In 1952 Karhu returned to Japan as a
missionary of the Lutheran Church. He made
extensive travels through Japan selling Bibles
door-to-door. After a while he became
disillusioned and in 1958 he resigned as a
missionary and returned to arts. Karhu settled
in Gifu prefecture, where he painted and
attracted some attention with local art
exhibitions. His reputation grew and in 1961 he
won the first prize in The Middle Pacific
Artgroup Exhibition. The same year he had his
first solo exhibit in the Shin Gifu Gallery in Gifu
prefecture.
In 1963 Karhu moved to Kyoto where he
became interested in woodblock prints. A year
later he had his first woodblocks exhibited in the
Yamada Gallery. This marked the beginning of
a successful career as a woodblock print artist.
Karhu mostly carves and prints himself. His
subjects are typical Japanese scenes - often
old Japanese houses or details taken from
these. The source of his inspiration is the old
town of Kyoto, where the artist lives. There he
is something like an icon - a local celebrity.
Images of his prints are used on towels,
calendars or t-shirts.
Clifton Karhu prints have sometimes been
criticized as being too decorative - Japan as an
American would like to see it. The artist simply
replied, "If you do not like my pictures, then
hang them upside down."
Karhu woodcut West Valley Art Museum
Permanent Collection
Fritz Scholder
Fritz Scholder was born in Breckenridge, Missouri. He was the fifth
consecutive male of his family to bear this name. His paternal grandmother
was a member of the Luiseño tribe of Mission Indians. Although Scholder
did not consider himself an Indian, he was regarded by many as a leader of
the New American Indian Art movement.
Throughout his childhood, the painter's family moved frequently, living
mostly in small towns in the Dakotas and Wisconsin. In the long winter
evenings, young Fritz amused himself by drawing, an interest that was soon
channeled into serious art study. The painter Oscar Howe, a Sioux Indian,
introduced him to modern art while he was still in high school. In 1957, the
family settled in Sacramento, where Scholder earned a Bachelor of Arts
degree at Sacramento State University. At Sacramento, the painter Wayne
Thiebaud exposed Scholder to the Pop Art movement. Thiebaud also
arranged Scholder's first solo exhibition.
After graduation, Scholder taught public school in Sacramento. In 1961,
he won a scholarship to the Southwest Indian Art Project at the University of
Arizona, where he earned a Master's of Fine Arts degree.
From 1964 to 1969 he taught painting and art history at the Institute of
American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. From the beginning, he
struggled to represent the landscape and people of the Southwest without
indulging in the romantic clichés of genre art on the Native themes. In time
he created an extraordinary fusion of abstract expressionism, surrealism and
pop art to expresss his unique vision of the Southwestern scene and the
Native experience.
Early in his career, he received support from the Rockefeller, Whitney and
Ford Foundations. After five years in Santa Fe, he retired from teaching to
paint full-time. For the next few years he traveled in Europe and North Africa.
He added sculpture and printmaking to his activities, creating mixed media
constructions, bronzes, lithographs, etchings and monotypes. From the
beginning, he created works in series: women, landscapes, Indians,
butterflies, cats, dogs, dreams, the Empire State Building, ancient Egypt.
Beginning in the late '60s, Fritz Scholder was a guest artist or artist-inresidence at American University, Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts, the
Oklahoma Arts Institute, Santa Fe institute of Fine Arts, and Dartmouth
College. He received grants from the American Academy of Arts and
Letters, as well as arts organizations in France and Germany.
Over a dozen books have been published on Fritz Scholder and his work,
and he has been profiled in two documentaries for public television. In a
single year, exhibitions of his work were seen in Japan, France, China,
Germany and at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. For
many years, he maintained his primary residence in Scottsdale, Arizona.
He died in 2005 at the age of 67.
Scholder had an association with West Valley Art Museum for many years.
He exhibited here in 1993 in “Egyptian Echoes” showing not only his
Egyptian influenced paintings but also numerous pieces of Egyptian artifacts
from his collection. He was a guest on several panel discussion over the
years and exhibited his work here on other occasions as well. The Museum
owns a large number of Scholder’s lithographs
and those will be featured in a future exhibition.
“Figure” lithograph West Valley Art
Museum Permanent Collection
Kaoru Kawano
Kaoru Kawano was born in Hokkaido and
studied at the Kawabata Art School beginning
in 1934. He had his first prints accepted by
the Japan Print Association in 1944. By the
1950s he began to exhibit more frequently in
shows around the world.
Some of his prints lean toward the
sentimental, particularly his depictions of
young children, but his best works are
restrained and introduce an effective balance
of design elements, some of which are
sculptural in quality and arrangement.
Kawano made effective use of woodgrain
patterns for both the background and the body
of the crane, which provide depth and texture.
This use of plywood surface textures was
characteristic of the works of many sosaku
hanga artists.
Another common element was the
simplification of forms. Kawano arranges
simple shapes to images of figures, birds and
animals. Overall, there is a pleasing balance
among all the elements and a feeling of
timelessness.
Sosaku hanga artists took pride in cutting
the blocks and printing their own works, in
contrast to 'shin hanga' artists, who continued
to collaborate with professional block cutters
and printers. Occasionally, sosaku hanga
artists included stamps or labels like the one
illustrated to indicate that the prints were selfcarved and self-printed.
Kawano woodcut West Valley Art Museum
Permanent Collection
Kan Kawada
There are few biographical details available for Kawada. Some quotes
from various publications on the internet are as follows:
From the catalog for the 37th CWAJ Print Show at the Tokyo
American Club, 1992:
(p. 170)
Born: 1924, Tokyo
Residence: Tokyo
Education: Bunka Gakuin College
Exhibitions: 1990 Solo Exhibition, Tokyo ; 1992 Solo
Exhibition, Bordeaux, France
CWAJ Print Show: 25th Year
From Collecting Modern Japanese Prints: Then and Now by Mary and
Norman Tolman, Tuttle, Tokyo: 1994:
"Kawada Kan is one of a few Japanese artists active today in the world
of stencil printmaking. He generally works in deep reds and blacks, with
traditional subjects like old farmhouse interiors."
1927, Born in Tokyo; studied under Serizawa Keisuke; graduated
from Ochanomizu Bunka Gakuin Art Institute, Tokyo; 1953-1959,
Kokugakai show; 1960-67, Sankikai Art Exhibition, Sankikai award in 61
and 67; 1973, 76, 87, solo show, Franell gallery, Tokyo; 1982, 83, 84,
Art Now exhbition, Chokoku-no-mori Outdoor Sculpture Garden,
Hakone, grand prize in 82, fuji TV Prize in 83, and Sankei Newspaper
Prize in 84; 1985, Nitten Art Exhibition, grand prize; 1992, solo show,
Bordeaux and Arcachon, France. COLLECTIONS: Setagaya Art
Museum, Tokyo; Cincinnati Art Museum.
From Who's Who in Modern Japanese Prints by Frances Blakemore,
Weatherhill: New York, 1975:
"Kawada, Kan Born 1927 Medium: stencil
These stencil prints combine the intricacy of latticed-window houses
with the reassuring simplicity of open paths and stone walkways. It is
the kind of selective seeing that neither the camera nor the ordinary eye
possesses, recording the surviving sights of ancient Japan that both her
people and foreign visitors love so much: castles, traditional
warehouses, wood-beamed country houses, old-style shops.
The colors are all natural dyes: stone blues, umbers, grayish blacks,
sometime a surprising red or mustard sky. In the stencil technique used
for these prints a master stencil provides the structural elements, which
are dark. Other stencils are used for the accents and colors.
Among the many stencil artists in Japan today, and among the many
print artists specializing in traditional architecture, Kawada stands out
for his satisfying results, based on a patient hand and an eye for both
detail and abstract design qualities."
Kawada stencil print West Valley Art
Museum Permanent Collection
Matsumi Kanemitsu
Matsumi Kanemitsu was born in Ogden, Utah in 1922. He studied
at the Art Students League in New York. Known for his abstract
graphics as well as paintings and drawings, he had exhi9bitions at
the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Whitney Museum of
American Art. Matsumi grew up in Japan but returned to the US to
pursue his career. His circle of friends in New York in the 1950s
included many of the most influential artists of the period. The
abstractions he created were enriched by his Japanese heritage.
He participated in a film in 1973 entitled “Four Stones for
Kanemitsu” which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary.
This classic film produced at Tamarind Lithography Workshop shows
the collaboration between the artist and Master Printer Serge
Lozingot as they create a four-color lithograph. Beginning with the
graining of the stones, the camera follows the process through the
esthetic and technical challenges in drawing, printing, and proofing
this complex image. Never before has the actual sense of making a
color lithograph in a professional workshop been so vividly and
effectively captured in this superb film.
Kanemitsu lithograph West Valley Art Museum
Permanent Collection
Leonard Baskin
Printmaker, sculptor and book designer, Leonard Baskin was born in
New Brunswick, New Jersey, the son of a rabbi. In 1937-39 he studied
with the sculptor Maurice Glickman, and in 1939 had his first one-man
show in NewYork. He attended New York (1939-41) and Yale (194143) universities and then served in the U.S. Navy during World War 11
before continuing his studies at the New School for Social Research in
New York.
The year of his graduation (1949) Baskin began making prints. In
1950 he went to Paris and studied at the Acadamie de la Grande
Chaumiare, and the following year to Florence to work at the
Accademia di Belle Arti. Baskin's traditional training and his conviction
that art should serve one's fellow man made him a rather unique figure
during the 1950s, when abstraction and the expression of one's
personal feelings held sway. Rather than experimenting with new
formal structures, media, or techniques, Baskin developed a mastery of
old techniques -woodcarving, woodcuts, etching, and lithography-and
determined to use his work for social ends. During the 1950s he began
a series of full-length standing figures of "dead men" in stone, bronze,
and wood. Related to these are his "Birdmen" (human figures with bird
heads that are reminiscent of certain statues of Egyptian gods) and his
"Oppressed Men" (often featuring an owl -another favorite themestanding on the head of a man). All of these figures represent
"universal man" struggling with the problems of life and death,
aspiration, immortality, and corruption. In his prints Baskin extends the
psychological overtones of his sculpture even further, frequently
producing powerful brooding, and even tortured, images. Much of the
strength of these works derives from his bold cutting technique, which
exploits the texture of the wood, and from his mastery of black and
white.
Perhaps the two greatest influences on Baskin's work are Japanese
calligraphy and German expressionism (the artists he admires most are
Kaethe Kollwitz and Ernst Barlach). Defending the so-called "literary"
or "journalistic" qualities of his work, Baskin has noted: "All art is
propaganda.... The communication of an artistic idea is an act of
propaganda." He has stated that for him the most important subject is
"anxiety-ridden man, imprisoned in his ungainly self," and has illustrated
this theme in such prints as Hanged Man, Angel of Death, and
Oppressed Bird with Human Aspects.
Like his black ink drawings on white paper, Baskin's graphics are
technically brilliant. His most recent work is a series of bronze
sculptures-many with an elegiac air-on the usual themes of death and
compassion, and like all his work they display an odd combination of
sophistication with the seemingly primitive." Baskin is often termed a
romantic humanist," perhaps a result of his disavowal of the "purely
decorative" and "the private world of the artist."
He has long been interested in book illustration and founded the
Gehenna Press, Northampton, Mass., which prints and publishes
limited editions. A typical volume would be Homed Beetles and Other
Insects, for which Baskin has provided thirty-four etchings; however, his
interest extends beyond illustration into total book design: the
integrating of type, paper, illustrations, and binding to form an esthetic
object. Baskin has taught at Smith College since 1953 and has won
numerous awards including the Printmaking Prize at the Sao Paulo
Biennial (1961) and medals from the American Institute of Graphic Arts
(1965) and the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1969)
Leonard Baskin lithograph West Valley
Art Museum Permanent Collection
Marco Lusini
Marco Lusini was born in Siena, Italy, September 8, 1936.
He attended art school in Siena and early on his interests gathered around painting, sculpture,
poetry and photography emphasizing photography and painting. He moved to Florence in 1960
where he actively participated in the city’s cultural life, becoming friends with writers and poets
who were to exert and influence on his thinking.
Lusini’s work is strongly consistent throughout his career creating as a result an exceptional
vision for the artist. His subject matter divides into the above several series utilizing the human
image as the central subject. Whether man or woman the nudes are strangely asexual and
have a certain stone-like expression or lack of emotion.. Forsaking a more realist approach to
the figures in his compositions, they become part of the landscape they are in yet have a
solidity that keeps a sense of dimension in the picture plane. The concepts in Lusini’s
paintings, partly because of the stylization, communicate more on an intellectual level. There
is, however, a sense of isolation and dismay; a loneliness conveyed as each figure has a
sense of isolation that causes them to relate to the rocks in the landscape more than to each
other. Figures look like boulders – boulders look like figures. There are other elements that
seem to contradict each other as in a storm-laden sky that hovers over a calm body of water.
The artist uses these opposites to create a psychological tension within the painting’s meaning
creating in the observer a sense of unrest. Lusini resorts to this dichotomy of meanings
throughout his work.
There is also in his work a sense of quietude that reads as silent contemplation. The way
color is used particularly in the figures takes away any warmth that might be conveyed and the
end result is a certain coldness. It is Lusini’s habit, though an involved observer of life, to distill
the essence of what he is trying to depict rather than render it in its life-like image. His imagery
is of the mind and what his mind can create; the landscape of the mind and its dreams and
perhaps its nightmares.
George Palovich
Marco Lusini lithograph West Valley Art Museum
Permanent Collection
Marie Macpherson
Unfortunately little information seems to exist concerning the life and career of Marie R.
Macpherson. She was both a painter and a printmaker and during the early 1940's she produced
several color silkscreens in signed editions of fifty impressions. These range from views of New York
harbor and elsewhere to pure fantasy scenes, such as “Spring Fantasy”. Today examples of her
original silkscreen and serigraphic art are housed in the permanent collections of Georgetown
University and Northwestern University.
Of much interest is the fact that Marie Macpherson's silkscreens can be classified as 'incunabula' of
the art medium. Guy Maccoy was perhaps the first to adopt screen-printing as a fine art. His first one
man show of silkscreens took place in New York in 1938. By 1940 such artists as Elizabeth Olds,
Harry Gottlieb, Ruth Chaney, Hyman Warsager, Leonard Pytlak and Edward Landon had begun to
explore the artistic possibilities of this new medium. During this year as well the Silk Screen Group
(later renamed, National Serigraph Society) was formed.
Spring Fantasy thus belongs to the earliest years of the art of silkscreening. Of even greater
significance is that such a large and accomplished full colour printing could emerge during the first,
experimental steps of the artform -- and all this from a relatively obscure artist!
It was printed in an edition of fifty but once source claimed that prints were hard to find, suggesting
that because of its size many may have been irreparably damaged.
Spring Fantasy represents a remarkable, original example of the talents of Marie Macpherson and
of early silkscreen art.
“Spring Fantasy” silkscreen
West Valley Art Museum Permanent Collection
Marion Greenwood
The following is courtesy of Martha Tonissen Mayberry, Registrar, The Mint
Museum of Art, Charlotte, North Carolina:
Marion Greenwood, muralist, easel painter and lithographer who spent
much time in Mexico and the Orient as well as the United States, is one of the
more traveled female artists of the early and mid 20th Century. New York
born, she first studied at the Art Students League in New York City, and at the
Academie Colarossi in Paris. Until 1932, Marion Greenwood worked in oils,
lithography and portraits in New York and the American Indian country of the
Southwest. Then she went to Mexico to study fresco painting and was caught
up in the awakening mural renaissance, and from 1932 to 1936 worked on
fresco murals for the Mexican Government.
In 1936 she returned to New York and embarked upon several large murals
for the Federal Arts Projects till 1940 when, after another visit to Europe, she
returned to easel painting. During the war Miss Greenwood was one of only
two women artist correspondent for the United States Army, creating a series
of paintings for the Army Medical Department depicting the work of that unit in
the rehabilitation of wounded soldiers. She also created many war bond
posters. In 1944 she held her first one-person exhibition of paintings in the
Associated American Artists Galleries in New York.
When in 1946 an opportunity that afforded travel through India and China
presented itself, Marion Greenwood left the United States, and for more than
a year, she created many works of art of her impressions and scenes in that
part of the world. A one-woman exhibition of these works was held in the
Associated American Artists Galleries in December 1947, and again in
Chicago in March 1948. One of the works from this show was acquired for
the permanent collection of the University of Georgia, and more than fifty-five
of her oils, gouaches and sketches were sold to private collections from this
exhibition.
Over the years she has exhibited in all the major national group showsthe
Metropolitan, The Whitney, Brooklyn Museum, the Carnegie International,
National Academy, Corcoran Art Gallery, Worcester Museum, Virginia
Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield Museum, and Art Institute of Chicago. Her
canvases and lithographs have been acquired for many public collections
including that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Pennsylvania Academy
of Fine Arts, the Library of Congress, Newark Museum, Encyclopedia
Britannica, American Academy of Fine Arts, New York Public Library, New
Britain Art Institute, Bibliotheque Nationale Paris, Yale University, and many
private collections Maurice Wertheim, Joseph Hirshhorn, and others.
Her works have been reproduced in many books on American Art, and
several articles have been written about her. In 1952, she was awarded the
First Altman Prize of the 127th National Academy Annual, and in 1951, the
Walter Lippincott Award of the Pennsylvania Academy Annual. She also
received the John Herron Art Institute Lithograph Prize in 1946, the Second
Prize in the Carnegie Annual 1944 as well as popular prize votes of the
Carnegie and Worcester Museum shows.
She traveled to the West Indies where she made some wonderfully exciting
studies of Haitian life and she exhibited this work in the fall of 1952 at the
Associated American Artists Galleries.
In 1954-1955, she was a visiting Professor of Fine Arts at the University of
Tennessee. While at the University she painted a large mural for the
University Center, depicting the music, dance, and folklore of Tennessee.
In an interesting side note another source reveals that Isamu Noguchi and
Marion Greenwood worked together occasionally, having met in Paris in life
drawing sessions at the Academie Colarossi and the Academie de le Grande
Chaumiere. In 1929 he did a cast-iron portrait head of Greenwood, now at
the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum. In the mid thirties he followed her to
Mexico, and she gave him one of her walls to work on at the Abelardo
Rodriguez Market in Mexico City, his first large work of public art.
She died in 1970.
Marion Greenwood lithograph
West Valley Art Museum
Permanent Collection
Paul Pletka
Paul Pletka is a neo-surrealistic painter inspired by his fascination
from early childhood with Native Americans of the Southwest. His style,
described as neo-surrealistic, "is both realistic and deeply spiritual,
being highly sensitive to the inner thoughts of Native Americans."
Paul Pletka was born in southern California in 1946 and currently
resides in New Mexico. After high school, he won a scholarship to
Arizona State University and then transferred to Colorado State
University, but feeling disappointed in his college art training, did not
paint seriously until the late 1960s.
His works of art have been exhibited in one-man shows in Colorado,
New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Illinois, New York, Kansas and Missouri
continuously since 1964. Pletka's paintings are in more than 40 private
and public art collections including the Albany Museum of Art, Albany,
GA; Hallmark Cards, Kansas City, MO; Mel Pfaelzer Collection,
University of Northern Illinois, De Kalb; the Norton Gallery & School of
Art, West Palm Beach, FL; and the United States Department of
Interior, Washington, D.C.
In an interview for ART-TALK, Pletka said, "When I was a youngster
and first enchanted with Indian costume, lore and artifacts, I would
sometimes pretend I was an Indian. I soon realized that was not
intellectually reasonable. I am not an Indian. I am simply an interpreter."
Pletka does constant research on the late 19th century Indians and
meticulously depicts accurate information in his paintings.
Paul Pletka lithograph West Valley Art
Museum Permanent Collection
Peter Max
Peter Max was raised in Shanghai, China where he spent the
first 10 years of his life. Young Max formed lasting
impressions of Flash Gordon, Capitan Marvel, jazz, creativity,
and freedom from American comic books, radio broadcasts,
and movies. Max and his parents traveled through the Tibetan
mountains, India, Africa and Israel where Max first studied
with a Viennese fauve painter. It was in Israel that Max
developed a keen interest in astronomy, a subject that would
later impact his artwork.
In 1953, Max and his family moved to the United States,
settling in New York City. After completing high school, Max
studied painting at the Art Students League. He was
fascinated with commercial illustration and the graphic arts,
and won awards for his album covers and book jackets in his
unique style.
During the 1960s, Max worked in his psychedelic photo
collage period, which later gave way to his "cosmic" 60s style
with its distinctive line work and bold color combinations.
Inspired by his meditative, spiritual teachings, Max's cosmic
art captured the imagination of a generation and launched
Max into fame and fortune.
During the 1970s, Max dropped his commercial work and
pursued canvas painting in earnest. For the 1976 Bicentennial,
Max created the art book Peter Max Paints America, and
began his annual tradition of painting the Statue of Liberty. A
lover of music, Max has been designated the Official Artist for
the Grammy's, the New Orleans Jazz Festival and the
Woodstock Music Festival.
As a painter for four former U.S. Presidents (Carter, Ford, Bush and
Reagan) in 1993, Max was approached by the inaugural committee to
create posters for Bill Clinton's inauguration. He was later invited to the
White House to paint the signing of the Peace Accord.
Peter Max also directed his creative energy to important global events
and has produced posters for many such events, including Summit of
the Americas, Gorbachev's State of the World Forum, and the United
Nations Earth Summit, for which he had designed a series of twelve
stamps that became the best-selling stamps in U.N. history. For the
U.N.'s 50th anniversary, Max produced an installation of fifty paintings
in different color combinations of the landmark United Nations Building.
A lover of music, Max has been designated Official Artist for the
Grammys, The 25th Anniversary of the New Orleans Jazz Festival, and
the Woodstock Music Festival.
In the sports arena, Max has been the Official Artist for five Super
Bowls, The World Cup USA, The U.S. Tennis Open and the NHL AllStar Game.
Always an optimist, Max sees a fabulous new age for the new
millennium, filled with enormous possibilities. He also sees a need for a
greater responsibility to our planet, and he is ever ready to serve as the
"Global Artist."
Peter Max lithograph West Valley Art
Museum Permanent Collection
Rufino Tamayo
Rufino Tamayo was born a full-blooded Zapotec Indian in the Mexican state of
Oaxaca in 1899. Over the course of his lengthy and productive career, Tamayo
became known not only as one of Mexico's greatest painters and a dedicated
and prolific printmaker, but also as one of modern art's major international
masters.
As a boy, Tamayo had little formal schooling and spent most of his time
drawing, often heading to the National Museum to sit and sketch the
archeological treasures of Mexico's past, especially the pre-Colombian objects,
which influenced his art for the rest of his life. At the age of 17, he attended a
commercial art school and he later became the Director of Ethnographic
Drawing at the school. In 1926 he has his first one man show in Mexico which
was shortly followed by his premier in New York. He spent his next ten years in
New York teaching at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and producing a prolific body
of work.
In 1973 Luis and Lea Remba (founders of Mixographia Studios) approached
Tamayo with the idea of making prints. Tamayo was only interested in
printmaking if he could feel confident that he could produce editions that
possessed the same kinds of volume, texture and depth as his paintings. Luis
Remba responded to Tamayo's challenge and developed the new graphic
process, mixographia. This process permitted flexibility and enabled Tamayo to
use a full range of painting abilities, resulting in a variety of textures. It allowed
him to work in high and low relief to attain surfaces in his prints similar to those
in his paintings.
The breakthrough in the mixograph process came when the Rembas created
their own paper. The new paper was heavy in loose pulp which allowed the ink
to fully saturate the paper and created a fresco-like quality in the finished works.
Tamayo was so enamored with this process that he worked exclusively with the
Remba's studio for 17 years. He was extremely pleased with the ability of this
technique to capture the kind of textured luminosity of his paintings. Lea
Remba, the co-founder of Mixographia Studios worked with Tamayo directly on
his mixographs. She speaks of Tamayo as a sensitive man who believed that
"art should be felt with the heart."
In the artwork featured here, "Monologo", Tamayo has combined his affinity
for the native colors of Mexico with his fascination for the simple, yet
monumental, pre-Colombian artifacts. He had an incredible sense of color,
texture and space, all of which are exhibited in this mixograph. Tamayo's
mixographs are even increasing in value and popularity among private,
corporate and museum collections.
A visit to the great monuments of Pre-Colombian Mexico will provide a greater
respect and an appreciation for the contributions that Tamayo made as an
artist. The uniqueness of his work is in his ability to overlap the past with the
present and to forge a modern aesthetic that pays homage to both Mexican
heritage contemporary imagery. Tamayo proved that art no longer requires a
distinct social or political purpose to be relevant.
Rufino Tamayo mixographia print West Valley
Art Museum Permanent Collection
T.C. Cannon
T. C. Cannon (Caddo/Kiowa/Choctaw) died young and left behind a
beautiful, powerful oeuvre. He was born in 1946 in Lawton,
Oklahoma, and died as a result of an automobile accident in Santa Fe
in 1978.
He had attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe,
studying with Fritz Scholder. He seemed somewhat bitter and
distrustful of authority. One of his teachers suggested to T. C.
Cannon that they get in two rocking chairs facing each other and rock
and frown until all the aggression was gone. He was away from
home for the first time, so perhaps his quiet and reflective nature was
misread as bitterness.
T. C. Cannon has mischievousness in his work. He treated the
Indian subject in brightly arrayed costuming as a “dandy.”
He portrayed the Indian of a distant past, but placed him in today’s
world. His people were always dressed to be beautiful.
On his death, his friend Marty Perry wrote: “When his memorial
exhibit, retrospective went on display at the Cowboy Hall of Fame I
told everyone I knew. First, I just started laughing as here is this "art
by an Indian" in a 'cowboy focused museum'. How fitting. He would
have had a great smile over that. All that I viewed, I could feel his
essence in the art, just as he had done when he first saw a Van Gogh
in Paris and I have been to the Louvre and I understand totally what
he felt for the art. . . . .By the way, TC stands for "Tom Cat". He had a
marvelous humor.”
T.C. Cannon woodcut West Valley Art
Museum Permanent Collection
Kuniyoshi Utagawa
Kuniyoshi Utagawa was born in 1797, the son of a silkdyer and was originally named Yoshizo. He was officially
admitted to Toyokuni's studio in 1811, and became one of
his chief pupils. He remained an apprentice until 1814,
when he was given the name Kuniyoshi and set out as an
independent artist.
Like many others of the Utagawa school, he started out
with theatre prints, but his initial lack of success led to
several hard years. He produced a number of heroic
triptychs which were well thought of, and in 1827 he
started the series which was to secure his place, the
Suikoden, or "Hundred and Eight Chinese Heroes". He
went on to become quite successful in a number of fields,
including some excellent landscapes in the early 1830s. In
the 1840s he continued to produce many prints, among
them many triptychs of bijin (Literally, "beautiful person";
the term for a beautiful woman; from which comes bijinga, the term for pictures of bijin, often geishas or
courtesans, that being one of the original canonical forms
for woodblock prints.) and heroes.
His powerful
presence resulted in the splitting of the Utaqawa School of
printmaking into two sections. His character differed from
Kunisada’s and he gained great popularity with his vitality
and surprisingly new ideas.
When he founded his own style it became so popular
that it is said the young men of his time often asked him to
tattoo his designs on their bodies. Famous for his prints of
actors and animals, he also specialized, with invention and
gusto, in illustrations of heroic episodes in Japanese
history (he produced an excellent series on the life of
Nichiren); the best of his few landscapes are considered
equal those of Hiroshige. He had a taste for the bizarre,
the fantastic and the ghoulish. His early style was
comparatively simple, with landscape backgrounds in the
manner of Hiroshige; later his work became increasingly
complex.
Although arrested in the morals-based crackdown of
1842 on the print and theatre world, he escaped with a
fine. In the 1850s the quality of his work started to
decline, and after the great earthquake of 1855, in which
he was given up for dead by his family but survived, he
suffered extensively from illness and depression, and
produced little more. He died in Edo, in 1861.
Occasionally influenced by European models, he was a
most prolific and very uneven artist.
“Man With Frogs” woodblock print from the
Museum’s Permanent Collection
Taken in whole, or in part from:
Roberts, Laurance P. A Dictionary of Japanese Artists:
Painting, Sculpture, Ceramics, Prints, Lacquer. Weatherhill,
Inc: New York. 1986
Japan 101 Information Resource, internet.
Another woodblock print by Kuniyoshi
Utagawa