Raoul Dufy's Insatiable Appetites

The prints of Raoul Dufy are a delight to behold. They carry the same joie de vivre which we see in most of his colorful paintings. Something sparkles, glitters with light and color, even when the image is only black and white. His prints and book plates have a glittering light and we can feel the sweet summer breeze coming in off the Mediterranean when we see his sailor dancing with his paramour, the sway of the leaves of the trees being blown by the gentle sea breezes, the playful quality of the fish and octopus swimming in the sea, sleeping muses floating on the lapping waves like a sailor’s mirage of Venus, and a host of other subjects.

The man loved the coast, the water, and watching sail boats come in and go out of the harbor. It speaks to a life of luxury and freedom, wealth, but moreso the work speaks of a person enjoying life. What could be more French? Matisse, one of Dufy’s heroes, often said his work was meant to reflect a Frenchman’s life; enjoying one’s insatiable appetites, pleasures and desires. Dufy takes that mantra to heart and shows us a life of leisure, enjoyment and happiness.

His marks are playful, even childlike, but they are accurate and give us a sense of distance, place and dream vs. reality. I enjoy his delicately drawn etchings and the sensuousness he lovingly gives his muses. The relief prints are more brutish, but have a curvilinear line that does not take in the seriousness of the German Expressionist prints he admired. His work retains its joy no matter which media he explored. I am glad to have found these prints, and hope you enjoy them as well.

Bio = Raoul Dufy (1877–1953) was a French artist most closely aligned with the Fauvism movement. He developed a colorful, decorative style that popular in ceramics and textile design, and he was also known for his work in drawing, printmaking, illustration, and murals.

Dufy was born into a large family at Le Havre. He left school to work in a coffee-importing company until the age of eighteen. From1895-1900, he took art classes at Le Havre's École des Beaux-Arts. After a brief period of military service, Dufy won a scholarship to attend the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. While there, he was influenced by the works of Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh, Georges Braque and Henri Matisse.

After seeing the work of Matisse in 1905, Dufy painted as a Fauve until 1909, when he saw the work of Paul Cezanne and adapted a more subtle palette. Dufy developed his own style around 1920 which was called ‘stenographic’.

Dufy liked the Expressionists’ use of relief printing and it led him to illustrate books for Apollinaire and Mallarme. In 1911 he began using relief prints to design textiles with fashion designer Paul Poiret. He also designed fabrics for the textile company Bianchini-Ferrier, from 1912-1930. As an accomplished interior designer, he regularly exhibited his work at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs. He also painted murals for public buildings.

Dufy painted in the vicinity of Le Havre, and the beach at Sainte-Adresse. During the 1920s, Dufy's colorful works depict yacht races, the racecourse and the sparkling French Riviera with its parties. His work always had a sense of joie de vivre, and a lot of the work in this article includes his love of being near the sea.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s Dufy exhibited at the annual Salon des Tuileries. By 1950, he struggled with rheumatoid arthritis and took experimental treatments to regain the use of his hands. In 1952 he received the grand prize for painting in the 26th Venice Biennale, and died the next year in Forcalquier, at the age of 76. He was buried in the Cimiez Monastery Cemetery, near Matisse, in a suburb of Nice.

‘My eyes were made to erase all that is ugly’ – Raoul Dufy

He did, indeed.

The Fluidity of Ryan McGinness' Semiotics

Ryan McGinness’ prowess in printmaking circles is becoming quite a known entity. His eye-catching, crisp and clean logo-like motifs are complex in their subject and when overlapped or placed next to other motifs, they sometimes create other shapes. The artists’ homage to semiotics and mass-commercialism is apparent, and his works are widely seen in galleries, online sources, and online merchandising. I will, however, speak to his work in this article.

 McGinness is more known as a young, up-coming painter who has received enormous attention for his intricately, over-lapping designs. They can, at times, resemble the complexity of viewing Islamic designs within a majid, or a host ot graffiti-like tattoos, but his subject matter is more far-reaching, incorporating known designs and creating his own logos for religious symbols, the human form and animals, etc. To McGinness, the more exotic his references are, the better.   The end result of these complex combinations is often successful when applied to his paintings, but his prints aren’t as heavily drenched in color nor in subject. Nor do they need be.

He often lets the white of the printed paper show through and around hsi subjects and it creates a shape of its own. Some of his prints don’t appear ‘finished’ - like some of Paul Cezanne’s watercolors left an openness of the paper for the viewer to fill in the gaps. I can’t say I think McGinness is attempting the same dialogue. To be honest, it would appear that his message isn’t even about the subject-ness of his designs and logos. He appropriates form for building other types of shapes, but as for some inner meaning or referential point, McGinness doesn’t mention anything in particular, and their vagueness leaves one detached.  His deliberate avoidance for some compositional device(more seen in his prints) may also be a form of anti art-statement. In some cases, I am reminded of the work of Carrie Plank, whom I wrote about earlier this year. Her sensibility for combining recognizable form was so disparate, that one couldn’t connect the dots of meaning in her work. Here, I am close to making the same assessment with McGinness’ work, although he does control the design of his logos and their uniformity is in his use of their flat, bright colors.

Where McGinness’ paintings are saturated with line and form and visual “POW!” , his prints are just as complex in their single use of color. I, too, understand wanting to try ‘something else’ in other media, so one can see the artist’s thought-process at work.  I do like the artist’s energy and the fact he is seems to be ever-exploring his imagery.

McGinness’ expansion from geometric form to fluid curvilinear motifs moves us through some earlier 20^th c. art movements like Op Art and the Semiotics of the 1980s, Multi-culturalism and tattoo-graffiti of the 1990s to now. The multi-ethnic source material will be interesting to see evolve, as it has been with earlier artists’ work, but the ambitious nature of his overall projects and producing them in other cultures speaks to the works of his predecessors Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.  We will hope his longevity transcends theirs, as this own path moves forward.

The Artistic Politics of David Alfaro Siqueiros

Okay, my friends, today we are talking about one of Mexico’s heavy-hitters, David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974, born José de Jesús Alfaro Siqueiros).  He was a Mexican painter/printmaker who worked with Diego Rivera and Jose Orozco, as part of the Mexican Muralist movement. Overall, Siqueiros believed art should be public, educational, and ideological. 

During his career, he visited the United sattes, the Soviet Union, and several Latin American countries as a guest lecturer and visiting artist. His prints are stellar examples of mass and volume and expressive abstraction. Their capacity to evoke passion and anger are beyond the world's sometimes limited scope of understanding of printmakers and the work they do. His background as a painter helped keep his original prints from Looking like prints, thus making them unique compared with his colleagues. 

Throughout his career, Siqueiros' art accentuated angles, muscles and joints of the human form in his portrayal of a strong, revolutionary figure. In addition, many works prominently feature hands, which could be interpreted as another symbol of heroic strength through work.

Born in  Chihuahua, but growing up in Guanajuato, many details of Siqueiros’ childhood were confusing, in part because he gave misleading information regarding his life. What is known is that Siqueiros was the second of three children. His father, Cipriano Alfaro, was well-off, and his mother, Teresa Siqueiros, watched after their children: David, his sister, Luz, and his brother "Chucho" (Jesús). When Siqueiros was four years old, his father sent the children to be raised by their paternal grandparents after his mother had died.

The main part of Siqueiros’ life was spent between making his art and his interest in politics. Schooling aside, the opportunity to network with fellow students for political debate and marches and protests was a larger part of his educational experience. While in school, he came across the writings of Dr. Atl, who in 1906 published a manifesto calling for Mexican artists to look toward their ancestral roots to develop a national Mexican art style. This inspired the young artist to become active in politics. At the age of fifteen, Siqueiros was involved in a student strike at the Academy of San Carlos of the National Academy of Fine Arts, which eventually established of an “open-air academy”. Three years later, he and several of his friends from the School of Fine Arts joined Carranza’s Constitutional Army. In 1914, Siqueiros became interested in the army’s “post-revolutionary” infighting.  He traveled throughout Mexico during his military service and saw the difficult conditions of his country’s poor working class.  It instilled in him a lifelong passion to speak for the masses with his art and his political activities.

In 1919, he went to Paris and learned about Cubism, the work of Paul Cezanne and there he met Rivera, with whom he traveled to Italy to study the work of the Renaissance fresco painters. During this period, Siqueiros' artistic and political activities had become conjoined and  by 1921 he wrote a manifesto in Vida Americana, called "A New Direction for the New Generation of American Painters and Sculptors." He called for a "spiritual renewal" to bring back classical painting while infusing "new values" about the “modern machine” and the “contemporary aspects of daily life". Through this style, Siqueiros hoped to create a bridge between a national and universal art.

In 1922, Siqueiros returned to Mexico City work for the government with fellow artists Rivera and José Orozco painting murals in several prominent buildings. In 1923 Siqueiros helped found the Syndicate of Revolutionary Mexican Painters, Sculptors and Engravers, which addressed the problem of widespread public access through its union paper, El Machete, the weekly paper that became the official mouthpiece for the country's Communist Party. 

Siqueiros remained deeply involved in union labor activities, as well as the Mexican Communist Party, until he was jailed and eventually exiled in the early 1930s for his political connections.  Siqueiros produced a series of politically themed lithographs during this period, which were exhibited in the United States. His lithograph Head was shown at the 1930 exhibition “Mexican Artists and Artists of the Mexican School” at The Delphic Studios in New York City.   Siqueiros also worked in Los Angeles, where his murals there told the story of America's forceful relationship with Latin America. Siqueiros’s work was honored at the XXV Venice Biennale in the first ever Mexican exhibition with Orozco, Rivera and Rudolfo Tamayo in 1950, which recognized the international status of Mexican art. 

Siqueiros was involved with the Communist Party who in 1940 unsuccessfully tried to assassinate Leon Trotsky. In 1960, he  was unjustly arrested for openly attacking the President of Mexico and protesting the arrests of striking workers and teachers. While imprisoned Siqueiros continued to paint, and his works continued to sell.

He later settled in Cuernavaca where he lived until his death in 1974.

Most of this man's printmaking efforts were composed of strong figures, and the later colorful works, moved toward abstraction and abstracted brushwork that didn't look like his contemporaries. They are in fact quite curious pieces and call to mind spiritual musing upon his own travails and the seemingly bi-polar nature of his career path. I find the subtlety of his prints color, the massive weight of his self-portraits and the political bent of his action figures a reasonable and persuasive argument for his diverse subjects. In all, they relate closely to his painting style, and the somewhat chopped off compositions which remind me of El Greco's paintings of earthly and heavenly realms simultaneously depicted. There is also an element of Francisco Goya's Disasters of War prints with his butchered figures. Siqueiros butchers the body of Christ, showing his suffering, floating his body between the earth and heaven. 

Some people don't get those weirdly surreal images, but no matter. Siqueiros' work was consistent showing us the suffering of humanity, the suffering of the poor and the suffering of an artist as all artists suffer to bring forth their view of the world. His world wasn't a calm or happy place, but it was real, and it still speaks volumes for present-day Mexico's  suffering masses about the societal and political woes that have befallen that poor abandoned country.

The Mezzo-Manic Prints of Carol Wax

Man, oh Man, OH MAN! I mean Really, my inked up comrades, take a Good look! The images you are about to experience are about the BEST there are to see, and the artist (Carol Wax) has been setting the print world on its ears with these masterpieces. High praise you might say, but honestly, when Wax started exhibiting these prints, people's eyes popped, and one could hear the collective swearing of printmakers the world over, saying, "Damn, how does she DO it?" Well, we printmakers know 'how' she does the process, and it's hard and difficult and most would say its a pain in the a--, but it is a process that has historically, and continues to, yield rich, velvety black tones like no other. Technique aside, because I don't need to delve into that, nor will I, Wax's prints are simply dazzling.

Some obvious things that stand out in Wax's work are the cool, slick, gleam of her subjects; their rich detail and crisp lines. Wax would appear to treat them with a loving and reverent care, as an antique collector would for his/her possessions. She repeatedly produces astoundingly wonderful and complex compositions that invite our eyes to meander through them like one would through Cezanne's highly structured paintings or the Ab Ex brushstrokes of Willem DeKooning. They arrest our attention, but what they do next is transport us to another era, another period where the invention of machines and their design was an art. 

"My mezzotints of prosaic objects reflect my experience of the ordinary as extraordinary. By manipulating light, shadows, repetitive patterns, and skewing perspectives, I strive to reveal the anima in the inanimate."

Well, that's an understament if ever there was one. Wax take objects from a by-gone era of what look like the 1930s and 1940s. Some are portrayed frontally like icons of communication. The mechanics of other objects are mostly splayed out  in some state of dis-assembly. The gears and parts are strewen about, perfectly filling the picture plane. Further, Wax balances the light and shadows pouring over the objects in an engaging and tantalising manner. To be honest, the shadows activate the negative space, caressing the subjects. We'd just like to be able to touch them. 

The effect of Wax's works makes one feels like they're in an old black and white film, a noir, or a Garbo flick, or the film My Man Friday. The flash, the substance of those old objects that transport us to another place and time are all the more interesting when one considers that Wax is describing older mechanisms of communication via an even older tool of visual communication - (the mezzotint rocker). 

One wonders if Wax has a particular fascination for this era since she has spent so much time invested in these items, but in truth it doesn't matter. Who cares? These antiques are ageless and in perfect condition. Wax's choice of subject makes a decided departure from what one normally sees of this process, and for that we are grateful. As she once said in an interview, she understood that realistic images weren't necessarily seen as creative or conceptual, yet she boldly stated that there was a lot of printmaking that wasn't  creative anyway. Sadly, this is true.

I do like the way the artist puts a little chaos into a seemingly inanimate object - as in the case below, the typewriter's ribbon has gone haywire and is completely untangled from its spool. She makes the chaos fun. These images are sleek, sexy and invoke out tactile sensibilities. Granted her choice of subject is far from the norm associated with the process, but that is the beauty of printmaking, it's legacy evolves as do we, and investigative printmakers like Wax have helped propel an older method of making inked up images to give them a fresh look. 

And then, just when we think Wax is the mezzo-manic master of black and white imagery, she shocks us with this colorfully refined gem below. Can't you just hear that thing's keys go clack, clack, clack? I don't tire from looking at her work. She has made a clear and decisive impression upon our field, and we can marvel at what she's achieved. Here's to hoping more of our brethren are inspired to achieve something new with our own work after savouring hers.

Biography:

Carol Wax was born in New York City,1953. She attended the Manhattan School of Music, and earned a Bachelor of Music Degree in 1975 majoring in Flute Performance. She continued as a professional musician until 1980.

In the mid 1970s, she took printmaking courses at the Lake Placid School of Art, and then studied printmaking at the Pratt Graphics Center in New York City.  She looked at the work of Philip Pearlstein and gravitated to the historical process of mezzotint. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Wax  conducted research into historical printmaking techniques while continuing to develop her own work.  She spent several years learning and piecing together the history o her process until in 1990, Harry N. Abrams published The Mezzotint: History and Technique.

Wax has taught printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design,  the State University of New York at New Paltz and at New Tork University, and Montclair State University

In 2002, Wax moved to upstate New York where she continues to work.

Awards:
2011 - Head Juror, First International Mezzotint Festival, Ekaterinberg Museum of Fine Arts, Ekaterinberg,  Russia
2009 -  Individual Support Grant, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation
2004 - Concordia Career Advancement Award
2003 - Artist's Fellowship Grant , New York Foundation for the Arts 
1994 - Louise Nevelson Award for Excellence in Printmaking from the American Academy of Ats and Letters
The MacDowell Colony Residency,  New Hampshire
1996 - designed a system for attaching adjustable weights to the mezzotint rocker, the first improvement to rocker design in over three hundred years.

Collections:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Museum of American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Boston and New York Public Libraries

Contact: 914 788 5329 or cwax@earthlink.net