?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
MAURICIO LASANSKY Sol y Luna.
Engraving, etching, soft-ground etching, aquatint, scraping and burnishing, 1945. 403x530 mm; 15 7/8x20 7/8 inches, wide margins. Signed, titled and numbered 21/35 in pencil, lower margin. A brilliant impression of this very scarce print.
At the age of 22, the precocious Mauricio Lasansky (born 1914) became director of the Free Fine Arts School in Cordoba, Argentina, his native country. Soon after, in 1943, Lasansky was offered the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, bringing him to the United States. His fellowship afforded him the opportunity to study the Metropolitan Museum of Art's extensive print collection, essentially learning the fundamentals of printmaking by seeing and then eventually doing. Lasansky would join the many other artists, and printmakers in particular, that descended upon New York in the employ of the Federal Art Project, WPA graphic arts workshop.
Once the WPA projects were discontinued, Lasasnky joined Hayter's Atelier 17, then one of the only independent American workshops. He experimented extensively at the workshop, formulating new methods and creating new techniques for his subjects. The present print, while still indebted to Picasso's subjects and forms, as well as the dark emotions often explored in Surrealist circles, illustrate an eagerness to explore new ways of expanding the medium of printmaking; Lasansky employed nearly every intaglio printmaking technique: engraving, etching (soft-ground too), aquatint and even scraping and burnishing to the achieve the ideals tonal effects of his light and dark subjects.
Many of the well-respected printmakers to come out of Atelier 17 were among the first to begin printmaking programs at universities around the country. Among the most important of these was Lasansky's at the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History that he formed by the late 1940s. University of Iowa 22.
