When Andy Warhol first branched out into silkscreen painting, the technology was mostly used for signs. He actually painted by hand Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) and was thinking about signs outside supermarkets that might advertise their sale. However, his first silkscreens had monetary value. In his epic biography WarholBlake Gopnik suggests that this may have been inspired by an old Carnegie Institute of Technology professor who “talked about the US dollar bill, with a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington, as a work of art that we all carry in our pockets.”
“Deep Cuts: Block Printing Across Cultures,” a new exhibition in the Resnick Pavilion at LACMA, attempts to make a similar argument about one of the oldest and most democratic ways of making an image. Curator Erin Maines pulled out more than 200 objects, most of them from the museum’s own collection, and arranged them not by geography or the usual century but by four things a mass can do: transport, pattern, process, and express. These four subjects allow for a wide medium range, from a Japanese prayer scroll printed around 764 to contemporary wall-sized woodcuts. Add in some Albrecht Dürer, Indian Cotton, and Bruck’s German Expressionist Manifesto (1906) so rare that only five survive, and you see that this exhibition demonstrates the breadth that emerges from a medium so cheap to produce.
The resulting work tends to satisfy in an instinctive way. Take Karl Otto Šiška, for example Textile fragment, “Waldidyll” (Forest Idyll) (1910-1911), a block-printed linen piece showing two crouching deer in an overgrown forest scene. Jugendstil’s style treats the forest as pure ornament, piercing the brutality of black. One feels the middle ground in the mirrored nature of the design, and the fact that the curling leaves take up every inch of the design – empty space is a waste of mass! A 1916 photo shows Gustav Klimt wearing a robe made of this fabric at an artists’ festival, and one can see how he would have felt with this level of Dan Flasz-like sophistication.
This work was about ‘pattern’, and about ‘process’ Press (1934) by Paul Landacre. The process is actually at work in this work, as the pictured press was found rusty in the ghost town of Bodie in 1929 and restored by Landacre, who insisted that the hand press beat electric presses because of the pressure he felt while pulling the lever. It’s hard to argue with the results. His woodcut has deep textures, as if he needed to feel this great instrument because it is otherwise too mysterious to him.
Alison is delightful High Cotton II (2018) show that after many years, the medium still rewards innovation. The title refers to the best of times, to the fortunate era, but it has a different meaning for the woman depicted. What better way to demonstrate this disconnect than with the wild differences between the delicate, vintage texture of cotton and the frayed tension within her skin?
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