Art: Iowa’s Printmaker

If there is such a thing as a printmaking capital of the U.S., it could well be the Department of Graphic Arts at the State University of Iowa in Iowa City. It is, perhaps, this glowing success that makes Mauricio Lasansky, the department’s head and the nation’s most influential printmaker. seem personally to be the happiest of men. Yet the world he portrays in his prints is one convulsed with agony. Last week the Brooklyn Museum put on display a Lasansky retrospective that was almost Goyaesque in its sense of nightmare.

Hollow-eyed children wait in vain for food; men and monsters try to devour each other; a little girl’s tear confronts a scene of carnage; men mutilate each other in the name of “an eye for an eye”; a melancholy hovers over even Lasansky’s portrayals of his own family. Sprinkled among the prints is a series of strange self-portraits. They all share the same fierce intensity, but none looks like any other.

From Provincial Argentina. It was in 1941 that the late Francis Taylor, director of Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, came upon Lasansky in Argentina, where the artist was born 47 years ago. Lasansky was then in charge of two provincial art schools; Taylor was so impressed with his work that he arranged to have him come to the U.S. on a Guggenheim fellowship. Once in New York, Lasansky decided that he “didn’t want to goback to Perón,” so he sent for his wife and children. For a few months he spent his time looking at every one of the 150,000 old-master prints in the Met’s collection. Then, in a single day, he got three job offers—from a school in Santa Fe, another in Chicago, and the State University of Iowa. He asked Henry Allen Moe, the secretary of the Guggenheim Foundation, which was the most American. Answer: “Iowa.”

Lasansky took over the anemic Department of Graphic Arts, became an associate professor at the end of two years, a full professor in 1948. He has made Iowa a germinal school; students have gone forth to run graphic arts departments everywhere from U.C.L.A. to the universities of Texas, Minnesota, Kansas and Illinois, as well as Tulane, Michigan State and the Cleveland Institute of Art.

As a teacher, he does not impose his own approach to art upon his students; they are not even allowed inside his studio. He encourages them to use their emotional and intellectual experiences and gives them the knowledge of technique necessary to express themselves. In Europe, the print is apt to be a group effort: one man does the drawing, another makes the pigments, still another does the engraving. At Iowa, the student does everything. Lasansky prefers etching and engraving on copperplate to lithography because the discipline is more rigid. His technique, which he calls intaglio, is really a combination of many methods—engraving, etching with acid, gouging, graining with sand. “We have a new breed,” says he of his students, “the completely trained printmaker.”

The Shredded Image. In his own work, he has always been an experimenter. In some of his early prints, there is the same emotional quality found in the German expressionists. He flirted with cubism, fell briefly under the surrealists’ spell, was for awhile strongly influenced by the shredded image of Picasso. “But my great teacher,” he says, “was the Depression. There were lots of ugly things then.”

This early sense of tragedy has never left him. His self-portraits do not look like each other because they are only facets of himself (he has nicknames for them). But they all have the same brooding eyes. A Lasansky scene can be feverish with clashing lines and spinning faces, or one lonely figure may look up to stare starkly into space. Either way, there is always an air of mourning. The world that Lasansky pictures is really two: the one that is perpetually dying and the other that must watch and grieve.