Mauricio Lasansky

continued

Meanwhile he made an important decision not to return to Argentina, but to bring his wife and two children here, and settle permanently in the United States. Such a decision required courage, for his fortunes were at a low ebb. He was a foreigner with little facility in English, he had responsibility for a growing family, and no prospect of a job. Some reflection of this whole period of stress appears in La Lagrima (nostalgia for home and family) and Self Portrait with Beard, so different in mood from the elegant Auto Retrato of 1943. Late in 1945 he was invited to be Visiting Lecturer for Graphic Arts at the State University of Iowa. To strike roots in the country fitted in well with his inclination. In Argentina, too, he had left the capital, Buenos Aires, to settle down in the provinces at Córdoba. Now, he threw himself heart and soul into teaching, and his success was immediate. He wangled new equipment, and re-organized the whole Department of Graphic Arts. In one year he was made Assistant Professor, in the following year Associate Professor, and in 1948 he achieved tenure as a full Professor. Above all he started training students, who in turn established teaching centers for graphic arts in colleges throughout the Middle and Far West. In a decade he had established one of the most dynamic graphic workshops, especially for intaglio work, to be found anywhere in the country and had become, through his own work and his students, an important and far-reaching influence in American printmaking.

Mauricio Lasansky is a born teacher. He has the gift of imparting enthusiasm, a passion for the print and its creation. He does much more than dispense technical information; he works upon character and emotional response. He treats each student as an individual problem. My ambition with my students, he has said, is to give each one a rationale for his work. When the students come to our workshop, they are generally unaware of how to use their emotional and intellectual experiences. In addition they lack technical knowledge. The purpose, the responsibility, the integrity of the artist is obscure to them . . . There are no formulas. Freedom, backed by self-discipline, will eventually help the student to find himself in his work. If I teach anything at all, it is the sense of responsibility one must have as an artist.

Unlike many modern artists and teachers, Lasansky believes strongly in the continuity and validity of tradition, and he encourages students to respond to whatever influences, in the past and present, for which their own inner natures have affinity. This makes for diversity of creative approach among them. He never consciously seeks to impose his own aesthetic upon his students; they are never allowed to enter his studio, nor do they see his own work except by accident. They learn by doing and by profiting from their own mistakes. For this reason he favors the copper plate as a teaching medium. Just to engrave on a tough material such as copper demands discipline, but even more willpower and self discipline are required to scrape off and hammer out a mis-handled area. It is an educational exercise which makes or breaks a student. Although he has nothing against lithography in the hands of a master, he does not favor the medium as a teaching aid; it does not offer enough resistance. To make good lithographs one must know how to draw, and very few students nowadays have that accomplishment. Real freedom cannot exist without discipline. By discipline I mean all those things that are synthesized in a mature personality: understanding and love, honesty, control and order, self criticisms, and, above all, the ability to see reality without fear. Lasansky requires each student to make a self portrait, and he says that the average young American student finds this task the most formidable of all. It will be seen that his teaching program embraces many things beside art and technique.

Along with his teaching he is involved, devotedly, with his own creative work. He is a master of his craft in the old and true sense of the word. He has mastered technique; it has become an instrument over which he has full and sure control, leaving his energies free to develop the creative idea in all its complexity. This process of conversion and growth is a slow and absorbing activity; images have to be dragged up out of the unconscious, leading motifs have to be built up and minor ones put in their place, fascinating bypaths have to be explored for relevance and possibly suppressed, the relation between form and form, between color and color, has to be tested in concrete terms. I asked if this gestation could not be accomplished in the mind without recourse to actual material. For him, he said, it could not; that was the way he worked—thinking and feeling with his hands. The intaglios, and even some of the early drypoints, seldom attained completion in less than twenty-five states, some of these involving drastic changes in the copper plate. Such alterations necessitated a terrific amount of physical labor, but the artist was never one to shrink from any effort whatsoever to accomplish his purpose.

A glimpse of the transformation undergone by a single plate is given in a trial proof of Bodas de Sangre shown in the present exhibition. To a certain extent the subject matter demanded complex treatment. The elaborate synthesis of thought and feeling involved in this theme, inspired by Garcia Lorca's drama of the same name, could not be achieved lightly. It was not simple illustration, but a recapitulation in another medium of the passions and dramatic conflicts implicit in Lorca's tragedy. The mixed copper-plate techniques (engraving, etching, soft-ground, aquatint, gouging, and graining) which he has designated as intaglio, in color or black and white, are well adapted for the interpretation of imaginative themes, such as Bodas de Sangre, Firebird or Pieta, as well as his impassioned commentaries on social themes and world events. In 1946 he was deeply affected by the revelations of the atrocities in the Nazi concentration camps—a concern which found expression in Dachau and the sequence For An Eye An Eye, over which he worked for two years. Ten years later he visited Spain, and was profoundly moved by the tragic plight of that country, for which he felt an attachment through his early cultural ties, in spite of his hatred for Franco. He was so wrought up about it that he could not sleep. Eventually he found a certain catharsis for his obsessive preoccupation in such plates as Vision and España, the latter to my mind being one of his most moving compositions.

He has also done certain prints quite apart from those mentioned above; they are what he calls his portraits. They seem to be simple and direct projections of an image in contrast to the shifting and elusive imagery so characteristic of his other work. They are not literal representations, for he is as imaginative and not a realistic artist, and no doubt they are not intended to be portraits as such. They are more like concrete embodiments of types or characters. It is significant that they all relate to himself or his family, and thus become, as it were, an extension of his own ego and its ambiance. Artists are by nature genial egoists; Lasansky here is frankly so. These pictures are not portrayals but personifications of MY Boy, MY Daughter, MY Wife and Tomas, and the like. Similarly, his self portraits are not of the whole man, but are more or less facets of his character which he has assumed or would like to assume. He has private nicknames for them all. In line with the immediacy and spontaneity of the portraits, it is interesting to note that in some of the later ones, such as Self-Portait in Profile, 1957, the artist has worked on a magnesium plate, which does not permit corrections or erasures; the lines are engraved once and for all.

Critics have discovered traces of influence in Lasansky's work—El Greco, Goya, Modigliani, Chagall, Hayter, Picasso—but there seems little point in such enumeration. Lasansky is not an eclectic. What he has taken he has made his very own because it serves his innate drive. Who among living artists, with all the world's art behind them, can truly say that they are without influence and owe nothing to tradition? The abstract expressionists, to be sure, make a claim that they have broken with tradition. Lasansky confesses to a detached curiosity about action painting or the dynamics of painting, although he says it has no place in printmaking. Recently, in the summer, he amused himself by making collages of weathered shingles; such flat abstract patterns he calls exercises in thinking without feeling. He believes in a fusion of thinking and feeling; and, as a maker of prints, he believes that they should have content and meaning as well as expressive form.

Lasansky is not a prolific artist; his aesthetic demands brooding and reflection and a tremendous amount of plain hard work. He prints all his own plates, and this likewise consumes much time. Furthermore, he has his teaching, which he takes very seriously. He acts as guide and counselor to his students, identifies himself with their problems, and advises them about jobs and exhibitions. His concern with critical acclaim for himself and his students is to a certain extent dictated by the necessity of making good in an environment where art is not the ruling passion. As far as his own work is concerned, he does not make prints of that special variety known as "exhibition pictures." He does not live in that kind of world. He would rather face reality alone on the prairie than buzz among the ivory towers of New York. He is an independent fellow, unpredictable, a bit peppery at times, a real maverick. But then, the mavericks are the ones the world remembers.

Reprinted from "Mauricio Lasansky," a monograph published on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition of Maurico Lasansky's work, 1960. The article was written by Carl Zigrosser for the American Federation of Arts under a grant received from the Ford Foundation Program in the Humanities.

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