From the vaults of the Lehman Loeb

Show pulls contemporary prints from Art Center’s vast collection

Marcella Veneziale Arts Editor

Presses, Pop, and Pomade: American Prints Since the Sixties, the current feature exhibit at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, traces printmaking in America from the 1960s through the 1980s, with a stop at the show’s end in more recent years. This period saw a drastic shift away from traditional artistic media and towards innovations in the mass-production and mechanization of creating art. The rise of the Pop Art, Minimalist, and, later, Neo-Expressionist movements signaled a shift away from more traditional composition and toward an open, more fruitful arena to discuss the turbulent social and political events of the times, with the mass media—newspaper, movies, television, comics—as the primary vehicle for such transition.

All of the prints in the show have come from the storage vaults below the Art Center, which means Presses works not only as a display of contemporary prints in the last forty years, but as a small inventory of the Lehman Loeb’s vast 16,000 work collection, of which roughly 1,000 are prints and drawings, according to Patricia Phagan, The Philip and Lynn Straus Curator of Prints and Drawings. “I’ve been here a little over five years, and [in preparing the show] I saw that most of them had never been exhibited before, ever,” said Phagan. While the Art Center has a vast, popular collection of old master prints by Rembrandt and Doré, Phagan said she saw Presses as an opportunity to shine light on these perhaps overshadowed contemporary prints, some of which had never been set up for display before. “Many were still un-matted, stored in flat file, unframed,” she said in the print study room of the Art Center.

James Mundy, The Anne Hendricks Bass Director of the Art Center, said he viewed an exhibition like Presses as a way of “certainly surprising people with the quality of the holdings [in storage],” while simultaneously “broadcasting that success and taking stock of your collection.” And besides, as Mundy said, “the imagery itself is so arresting and some of the works are so large, they substitute for painting.”

Some of these arresting prints hang on the title wall of the first room, which is devoted to the 1960s. The exhibition is divided chronologically in three rooms into works produced in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. On the title wall hang single prints by Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and James Rosenquist, all icons of the period. “These three were put on the title wall so that someone would be confronted when they entered, by these personages from the Sixties,” Phagan explained. She said that these three prints were exemplary of the show since the Lichtenstein and Warhol prints visibly convey the printmaking process, and since the Rosenquist has clear political intentions, as it depicts controversial Chicago Mayor Richard Daley.

That the show can explain the printmaking process through “working prints, trial proofs, in-progress works,” as Phagan said, is evident in Warhol’s “Marilyn” of 1967 and Lichtenstein’s “The Melody Haunts My Reverie” of 1965. “In the published print, Warhol used a lilac green instead of the aqua blue here,” for the actress’s famous face, Phagan noted. And Lichtenstein, she said, who was collaborating with a commercial printer in 1965, “was working out the size of the ben-day dots on the face [of the woman] here.”

In the widely-seen published print for which this was a study, the ben-day dots on the woman’s face are smaller, Phagan said, proof that “these works are foresight into what the artist was thinking then, as well as, most of all, being iconic of the era.”

Helen Frankenthaler and Ad Reinhardt represent the Minimalists in the show, and share space opposite the title wall. Frankenthaler’s 1969-1970 “Weather Vane,” a woodblock print, shows splashes of vibrant color in the corners of the otherwise beige, cream work.

Reinhardt’s “5” from 1966 produces an interaction of dense, dark colors, particularly dark green, navy blue, and black, with emphasis is certainly placed on the arrangement of the blocks of color. Similarly, Bauhaus-trained Josef Albers’ “DR-b” of 1968 explores color and the relation of depth and surface.

Dadaist layering effects are also influential throughout works from all three decades. Ron B. Kitaj takes a literal page from the book of civic virtue in his 1967 “Civic Virtue,” which incorporates a torn page from a pocket book of civic virtues with images of men, monsters, and building facades. Several years later, in 1971, Robert Rauschenberg continued with his own style of layering in the mixed media work “Opal Gospel, 9 American Indian Poems.” Also in 1971, Jasper Johns completed “Decoy,” which draws from the Dada elements—an amputated leg hovering near the top of the canvas—combines the methods of lithograph, stencil, traditional painting, and photographic images.

Red Grooms’ 1971 “Taxi Pretzel” truthfully portrays the hectic buzz of urban life with its interwoven composition, bright coloration, and clear influence from cartoons. In the same period, 1970-1971, Robert Motherwell produced “Untitled,” nearly antithetical to the mad crush of “Taxi Pretzel” with its field of solid blue color broken by blueprint-like white lines. The work’s slight irregularity of line distinguishes it from a traditional mechanical drawing and plays with ideas of depth and surface accents.

Not all artists of the time remained within the dominant Pop Art and Minimalist trends of the 1960s and 1970s, and William T. Wiley’s 1972 “Moon Mullings” is a clear example of this independence. By using depictions of the moon’s different phases to roughly anchor the corners and center of the work, which features the text of a letter to his wife, some elements of the trends of the time—a square within a rectangle—are implemented.

The body in distress is evident in prints from the 1980s, as seen in Richard Bosman’s 1986 “Besieged” and Michael Mazur’s pendant “Gate of Hell, Charon” and “Gate of Hell, Limbo.” Bosman, Visiting Assistant Professor of Art here at Vassar, depicts a figure attacked by bats, part of a series of a similar theme entitled “The Atelier Project.” Mazur’s figures, shown in black and white, are shadowed, anonymous bodies lodged in the rivers of the underworld in “Charon,” then floating throughout the work in “Limbo.”

The exhibit’s most recent work is Ellen Gallagher’s 2004 “Duke,” which presents portraits of black men ripped from the pages of a 1960s Ebony magazine. The portraits are small and assembled in the style of photo negatives, with the only color coming from the use of black hair pomade. The work is a collection of racial and cultural stereotypes, as the Duke brand manufactured a popular hair and skin bleach throughout the 1960s. The work combines elements which surface throughout the show, from the presence of human figures in contemporary art to sociopolitical commentary.

Presses, Pop, and Pomade runs until March 19. A printmaking demonstration by Professor Bosman will be held on Monday, Feb. 6 from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in the Doubleday Studio Arts Building, Room 206.

Additional reporting by Freddy Deknatel, Arts Editor.