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Intaglio printmaker3/3/2023 Much of the art to which he had access had a strongly provincial or academic flavor. Although he had been an accomplished printmaker before he came to New York, the physical isolation of Argentina from the centers of modern art had limited his creative development. The opportunity to work side by side with prominent European artists and the emphasis placed on technical experimentation at Hayter's workshop were of great importance to Lasansky. Mauricio Lasansky was invited by Hayter to join the workshop within months after his arrival in the United States, and for almost two years he became part of this international vanguard of artists whose work radically altered the course of intaglio printmaking in America. Some of the emigré artists worked at Atelier 17, the printmaking workshop that Hayter had transplanted from Paris to New York in 1940. Their involvement with the graphic media gave new stature to prints in the estimation of many Americans who has previously considered prints to be minor works of art. Among the emigrés to the United States were such artists as Marc Chagall, André Masson, Yves Tanguy, George Grosz, and Jacques Lipchitz, who made prints as well as paintings and sculpture. Well-known modern artists, such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Max Ernst, were also accomplished printmakers. Some of the greatest European artists have shown a strong interest in printmaking throughout their careers the prints of Dürer, Rembrandt, and Goya are as handsome and powerful as their paintings. Printmaking had a much longer and more dynamic tradition in Europe. During World War II and the following years, the emphasis in American printmaking shifted to stylistic and technical experimentation.Īn important factor in this revitalization of American printmaking was the major influx of European emigré artists to the United States just prior to and during the Second World War. It was not until the 1940s that artists working in the various print media discovered that color, texture, abstraction, and large scale were not necessarily alien to printmaking. Despite the proliferation of prints that resulted, few artists challenged the stylistic and technical limitations that had been traditionally ascribed to printmaking. The WPA Federal Art Projects brought art to public places, and printmaking was seen as a means of bringing multiple original works of art into the possession of large numbers of people. The upheaval and discontent spawned by the Depression contributed to a democratization of art in the 1930s. They valued precise draughtsmanship and technical virtuosity more highly than innovation. The exhibition of prints was controlled largely by conservative print societies, such as the American Institute of Graphic Arts and the Society of American Etchers. Some artists emulated the Old Masters, but most printmakers remained within the strong American tradition of realism, modified at times with selected elements of abstraction, expressionism, or surrealism. Modern stylistic developments introduced into the United States at the famous Armory Show of 1913 had little effect on American printmakers. Although many excellent prints were created, most of them were small in size, black and white, linear in conception, and technically conservative. Prior to the 1940s, the standards by which prints were made and judged in the United States were conceived largely in terms of established artistic tradition. At Stanley William Hayter's workshop in New York, artists were exploring new ways of working in the medium of intaglio printmaking. Louis Schanker and Werner Drewes were re-evaluating and expanding the possibilities of the color woodcut. Serigraphy, a technique developed on one of the federal art projects, was emerging as an imaginative new method of color printing. During the early 1940s, artists fresh from the WPA graphic art projects were eager to continue their work in printmaking. Lasansky arrived in New York at a time when printmaking in the United States was undergoing a major redirection and revitalization. When he was offered a Guggenheim Fellowship to study printmaking in New York in 1943, he welcomed the opportunity to broaden his experience. Although he had achieved recognition and prominence as a young man, Lasansky did not become complacent. At the age of twenty-two, Lasansky was asked to direct the Free School of Fine arts in Cordoba, where he avidly pursued his interest in printmaking. As a student he worked with various media, including painting and sculpture, but already by the age of nineteen he began to concentrate on printmaking at the Superior School of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the city of his birth. Mauricio Lasansky is one of the very few modern artists who have limited their work almost exclusively to the graphic media. Mauricio Lasansky and Intaglio Printmaking
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