Exquisite printmaking craft and an array of imagery that
sustains a respectful awareness of historical precedent, while opening new
doors of personal perception, marked this exhibition mounted by artists of the
venerable SAGA, in February of 2012 .
For nearly a century its printmakers have held meetings at their address
on Union Square, in New York City, and many SAGA members are in fact proud New
Yorkers, drawn to the inspiration and art market of the Big Apple. Brief stories of their works follow.
Landscape engages certain printmakers. Vast, brooding skies hover above a dark
ocean in the Romantic, Journey of Three,
by Michael Hew Wing, a small mezzotint redolent of the cloud-portraits of
Constable and Stieglitz. His Pillar
and Face both present skies of broken clouds that mask a
half-hidden moon, with a mystery like a seascape by Caspar David
Friedrich. ÔRound the
Town, a meticulously crafted, aquatint
etching by William Behnken, is a birdÕs-eye vista of skyscraper-studded
Manhattan. An evening glow over the tower-tops is elegantly captured, as are
spotlight-effects of lighting Ôround Columbus Circle. Lithographs of the 1930s touch this stylized subject, but
Behnken replaces the transparencies of those historic lithos with a personal,
dense, and granular etching-ink. A
past president of SAGA, Behnken will be honored by the group later this year
with a dinner ceremony. Scepter, an aquatint etching by Barbara Minton, captures a
little urban nook. A humble, stony
baluster supporting an iron fence at the sidewalk becomes a dream-like,
phallic, magically alive, scepter-and-orb, suited to a mythical giant, for a
conflation that Max Ernst would enjoy.
Craft sings out its perfect practice in a few prints. A great range of qualities in a lyrical
city-scene, Marcy Avenue, etched by Joe
Essig, enliven three realms -- the dark railroad tracks below, where a heavy
stench of axle grease and creosote hangs in the air, only to play against the
bubble-light church dome reaching skyward, albeit a dome metaphorically dwarfed
by two skeletal steel-truss towers.
Above these constructions of today soars the lightest sweep of
feather-clouds, Nature triumphant.
Cherries and Blue Ribbon,
by Marion Lerner-Levine, a still-life of gardening books, is an aquatint ˆ la poupŽe, where traces of transparent color are inserted into
open areas wiped clean on the plate by a doll-like clutch of gauze. Each print of the edition is unique,
though all contrast a dark area of wide ribbon bordered in blossoms, with
delicate veils of color. Hand
to Mouth, is a large print by Shelley
Thorstensen, current president of SAGA.
It dreamily evokes and superimposes both male and female frontal torsos,
with a surreal sensuousness. The
musical, contrapuntal play of smoky hazes of color and crisp accents of line,
evinces a masterful meld of technical procedures, etching, relief, and
mezzotint. A chalice, in faint
silhouette, levitates in bright light where the heart might lie, echoes the
vase-form of the torso itself, seizes the sacral. This suggests traditional prints of the somatic chakras of
India and the glowing, sacred heart of Jesus.
A stark color-lithograph by Tomomi Ono, Day and Night Sky, frames an empty, infinitely deep space, a cosmic
enormity where myriad planets seem the size of mere raindrops, caught by a gust
of wind upon a windowpane. Pale
orbs fade into invisibility on the light ground, but gleam brilliantly against
the darkness, perhaps a metaphor as to where hope lies. The open vastness of OnoÕs vista
contrasts utterly with the teeming, choked elaborateness of the mythic
phantasmagoria, Drowning Saturn,
a stone-lithograph by Amir Hariri, a pullulating, intricately drawn anti-war
statement, his exercise in a nightmarish horror vacui.
Starkly different as well, is the uninhabitable, claustrophobic space
trapped between sleek, blade-like pointed leaves and twisting ribbons, in a
silk-screen print by Masaaki Noda, Forefront.
Perhaps this is the realm of insects among grass-blades in an anime
film, or quotes from spiraling sheets of
steel, shaped by Antoine Pevsner or Max Bill. NodaÕs symbolic colors have the hard sheen of anodized
metal. Almost There, a complex print, in intaglio, soft-ground etching,
and mezzotint, by Merle Perlmutter, curves space, as though by a fish-eye
camera lens, aimed within an architectural interior that speaks of the 1920s of
LeCorbusier. The sweep of bending
walls, delicately toned and smoothly textured, suggests that a metamorphosis is
underway, as though a catalogue of architectural motifs -- hallways, cabinets,
doorways -- were being flexed by enormous forces.
Some prints illustrate little stories. At the Window, by Ellen
Nathan Singer, shows a reticent womanÕs half-length figure, flattened and
framed above an orange-colored handrail, its vertical spindles cutting across
the green steps of a 19th-century brownstone. Dominant in the design is rhythmical
color, much of it subdued, redolent of the prints of Vuillard, in their
earth-tones and grays. This is a
small color-woodcut made with multiple blocks, where pattern speaks rather than
psychology. Florence Putterman
offers the mock-heroic story, Captain Caleb Loses His Hat, a simply made lino-cut, that comically plays with
the idea of a great drama at sea, a parody on an 18th-century
sea-captain who may or may not have existed. We take a birdÕs eye view of him, as he lounges against the
coaming of his little boat. His companion
oddly wears a spherical glass helmet of recent date, while a vortex swirls the
sea all about them, with little but comic-book menace. Her Encounter at Sea, shows a lone woman diver plunging headlong into
wavy waters, crowded with four colossal fish and two large rodent-like
creatures, one clinging to a bit of flotsam. Have the rats deserted a sinking ship? As though we didnÕt know. Putterman presents allegories, the
latter one with a brute power that recalls the giant fish and diving man of Max
Beckman. A story told by Steven
WalkerÕs Composition in Red and Blue,
done in the etching, aquatint, and woodcut processes, is his homage to the
appropriated images of Robert Rauschenberg, and perhaps to the chronicles of
Anselm Kiefer, albeit in a brighter palette, in the mode of Hans Hoffman. Its dense surface has received multiple
passes of the press, registering dramatic fragments of faces and lettering, in
a lush visual tapestry. Repeated
woodcuts of glamour girlsÕ masks, cuts of a man in a fedora, some five imprints
of the Marlboro logo, and two images of an open-truss bridge in Manhattan, all
share an evocative goal.
Variety of conceptual approach and sheer technical mastery
place these hand-pulled prints at the pinnacle of the SAGA endeavor, a pleasure
to behold.
Glenn F. Benge
Dr. Benge is Professor Emeritus of Art History at Temple
University. His wide-ranging
research currently studies woodcuts to the early printed books cited and quoted
in, The Garden of Earthly Delights, by
Hieronymus Bosch.