Only prints

I've gotten tired of not sharing prints I love

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Elena Marttila - Leningraders (1941-1944)

Martilla had just turned 18 when, on September 8th 1941, the city was surrounded by the Nazis. A dedicated young art school graduate, she continued to work throughout the war, creating a series of sketches during the deadly winter of 1941-42, when the daily bread ration dropped to 125g and the death toll was up to 7,000 civilians a day. Memories of war have haunted her ever since. After the war, Elena returned to her studies but refused to follow the strict canons of the state doctrine of Socialist Realism. She developed her sketches into lithographs and engravings on cardboard. In her predominately black and white images, objects appear almost blurry – just as how starving Leningraders perceived them. Looking at them one feels transported through time and connected to the artist’s experiences of the siege. (source)

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M. C. Escher (1898-1972), Dutch

Contrast (Order and Chaos), 1950; lithograph; paper 36.9 x 37.4 cm (14 1/2 x 14 3/4 in.).

From The Graphic Work of M. C. Escher (introduced and explained by the artist):

The process begins with the search for a visual form that will interpret as clearly as possible one's train of thought. Usually a long time elapses before I decide that I have got it clear in my mind. Yet a mental image is something completely different from a visual image, and however much one exerts oneself, one can never manage to capture the fullness of that perfection which hovers in the mind and which one thinks of, quite falsely, as something that is "seen". After a long series of attempts, at last — when I am just about at the end of my resources — I manage to cast my lovely dream in the defective visual mould of a detailed conceptual sketch. After this, to my great relief, there dawns the second phase, that is the making of the graphic print; for now the spirit can take its rest while the work is taken over by the hands.

M. C. Escher's work is on view at the Palazzo Mazzetti, Asti, Italy (November 16, 2024-May 11, 2025), at Les Espaces EDF Bazacle, Toulouse, France (December 20, 2024-June 9, 2025), at the Polo Museale–Castello Conti Acquaviva D’Aragona, Conversano, Italy (March 28-September 28, 2025) and will be on view at the Arlington Museum of Art, Arlington, TX (April 26-August 3, 2025). It is always on view at Het Paleis, The Hague, Netherlands.

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Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945), German

Downtrodden, 1900; line etching, drypoint, aquatint, and burnisher; image 239 x 836 mm, paper 396x982 mm.

Kirsty Bell in Käthe Kollwitz: A Retrospective (MoMA, New York):

"Frau Pankopf was here," Käthe Kollwitz recorded in her diary on September 19, 1908. “She had a completely black eye. Her husband had flown into a rage." Writing from the Berlin apartment she shared with her doctor husband, Karl Kollwitz, and their two sons, Peter and Hans, the artist recounts the story of the local woman, Karl's patient, whose husband became unemployed and was thereafter struck by depression following the death of the youngest of their seven children: The more I see it the better I understand the typical misfortune in worker families. As soon as the husband starts drinking or gets sick and becomes unemployed, always the same symptoms. Either he hangs around his family like a dead weight and lets them take care of him… or he is melancholy or goes crazy or commits suicide. For the wife then always the same complaints. She takes care of the children, has to feed them, nags and complains about her husband. She only sees what has become of him and not how he got there.

Käthe Kollwitz's work is on view at Erie Museum of Art, Erie, PA (January 29, 2025–May 2026) and at Newfields, Indianapolis, IN (February 21, 2025–August 3, 2025). Her work is always in view at the Käthe Kollwitz Museum in Berlin, Germany.

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Lucas Johnson (1940-2002), American

Bottomfeeders, 1981; etching, aquatint; edition of 20, 4 panels 11 x 9 1/2 in. each.

Edmund P. Pillsbury on Lucas Johnson:

The genius of his art lies in the virtuosity of his pen, the subtlety of his tonal variations, and the dexterity of his brush, as well as in the power of his mind in conjuring forth subconscious images of exotic, if not sometimes bizarre, content. There are few parallels in American or even Mexican schools of art. For comparisons, one must return to “The Disasters of War” etchings by Francisco de Goya — or even back to the moral allegories of Pieter Bruegel and the phantasmagoric narratives of Hieronymus Bosch, on the one hand, or Caspar David Friedrich’s transcendental landscapes and even the monumentalizing still-lifes of Caravaggio and Juan Sánchez Cotán, on the other.

Lucas Johnson's work is a part of permanent collection at the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, TX, and is currently on view at the Works on Paper gallery.

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Laura Owens (b. 1970), American

Untitled, 2010; color sugar lift, spit bite and soap ground aquatints, edition of 25, 3 panels; each 31 x 23.25 in.; printed at Crown Point Press

Amy Sillman on Laura Owens:

To upend old-school (i.e., East Coast) formalism, ambitious painters like Owens and her peers threw humor, debasement, and self-reflexivity at it. Owens in particular took liberties with space. Her early work is about wittily reconstructing the spaces within painting, using extruded vanishing points, floors on drunken tilts, and crazy scale shifts, all in the service of literally finding new places for herself to be, in painting terms. In her hands, space is a feeling.

Laura Owens's work is on view at Matthew Marks Gallery, NYC from 2025/02/13 to 2025/04/19.

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Gene Kloss (1903-1996), American

Wind Cloud, 1934; drypoint, etching, aquatint

Image 7 1/2 x 15 in., paper 10 1/8 x 17 1/8 in.

Recent article in Forbes:

“She refused to increase her prices even though her demand and her career did amazing,” Koenig explained. “She wanted her work to be affordable by everyone. When she was alive, her prices never largely increased that much. (She wanted) an average person (to be able) afford to buy amazing art. Now it's at the whims of capitalism and her stock has increased greatly in the last 10 years; enormously.”

Gene Kloss's work is on view at Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, NM [2025/03/15-2025/05/31] and Couse-Sharp Historic Site, Taos, NM [2025/03/18-2025/05/31].