Garo Z. Antreasian
UNIV ERSIT Y OF NE W ME X IC O PRESS
|
A L BUQ UERQ UE
Garo Z. Antreasian
Relections on Life and Art
Garo Z. Antreasian
|
Introduction by William Peterson
I dedicate this book to my tireless mother and father,
Takouhie and Zareh Antreasian,
and to the indomitable strength and wisdom of my grandmother,
Arousiag Daniel.
Contents
xi
xiii
1
Preface
120
Indianapolis, 1961–1964
Acknowledgments
Introduction Garo Z. Antreasian: An American
123
My Armenian Family Background
28
My Pre–Grade School Years, 1922–1928
37
Boyhood Play and Competitive Pastimes
46
My Grade School Years: Awakening to Art,
1928–1936
50
55
61
1964–1970
129
My Early Years at the University of
New Mexico, 1964–1970
137
The 1970s: Turbulent Times and the Transfer
of Tamarind to UNM
145
The 1980s: Art Department Politics and
a Journey of Disappointment and Discovery
My High School Years at Arsenal Tech,
1936–1940
The Tamarind Epoch, Part Three:
Continuation of the Los Angeles Workshop,
Regenerator by William Peterson
21
The Tamarind Epoch, Part Two: Return to
152
The Pursuit of Art: An Overview of My
Artwork, 1970s–1990s
The Herron School of Art, Pre-War Years,
1940–1941
163
Confronting the Millennium
A Second Year at Herron, under a Cloud
170
The Enduring Ties
of War, 1942
65
74
The War Years: A Coast Guard Artist in the
Plates
Paciic, 1942–1945
179
Prints
The Postwar Years: Marriage, Return to School,
223
Paintings
and Study in New York, 1946–1949
311
Drawings
84
Jeanne: Her Life and Her Family, 1921–2010
90
Beginning Professional Life in the 1950s: Course
333
Biography, Exhibitions, and Publications
Development and Artistic Advances
339
References
101
The Lure of Lithography
340
Checklist
104
Prologue to the Tamarind Epoch: A Chance to
347
Index
Revitalize Lithography in America
111
The Tamarind Epoch, Part One: The
Tamarind Lithography Workshop Opens,
1960–1961
ix
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Preface
Many of the books that I have read about contemporary artists have concentrated almost exclusively on
the historical, stylistic, or aesthetic signiicance of their
work. After reading such books I am often left with little
or no knowledge about that artist as a person. It is as
if the author, whether a critic, scholar, or journalist, was
uninterested in the fundamental shaping circumstances
of that artist’s life. To me, such circumstances are of
enormous consequence for one’s creativity, skill, and
individuality. And it is just such factors that imbue the
work with qualities that distinguish it from the rest of
society.
Addressing the absence of personality is one of the
underlying intentions of this book’s content. It begins
with a critical essay by William Peterson to provide
a historical and theoretical perspective on my work.
Accompanying that is a selective collection of personal
memoirs and musings, which I hope will illustrate my
individual path and lend substance to my work as artist
and teacher. This is followed by generous portfolios of
my paintings, prints, and charcoals.
By way of introduction, some primary tenets have
formed the foundations of my life. I cannot emphasize strongly enough the importance of my Armenian
heritage as the irstborn son of survivors of the 1915
Armenian genocide. Early on, I was taught pride in my
historical roots and my relationship and responsibilities
in a mixed culture. Out of that grew a kind of romanticism about this ancient background, mixed with a
highly modern foreground. To complicate matters, once
I was old enough to play in the street, I was inwardly
aware in an indeinable way that I was diferent from
those around me. From that time to this, even more so
lately, I have been conscious of my Armenianness.
From my earliest memories of getting on, I have
always been a follower. Let me explain.
Even before grade school years, my playmates
were always a bit older than me, and more at ease with
their own culture. Yet, even though I was a foreigner in
the neighborhood and unable at irst to speak English,
I was accepted into group activities. My position, however, was mostly at the rear of the pack. Consequently,
I was challenged from the very beginning to keep up
by trying to understand what was being said and then
trying to adapt to what was being done. The rapidity
of the learning process of youth remains a source of
amazement and wonder for me. My playmates always
had a leader who was either stronger, more experienced, or more imaginative than the others. The leader
determined the activity of the moment. The rest of the
group went along—unless someone had a better idea.
Here began my understanding of the luidity of leadership, which depended on trust, cunning, power, and
circumstances. An important requirement for me as a
follower was learning how to catch up and adapt. To do
so required observation: to see how others do whatever
they do and then to teach myself the necessary skill,
whether roller-skating, shooting marbles, or kicking a
football. Once mastered, and pulling abreast, the next
challenge was to surpass. This trait required ambition,
drive, competitiveness, and a measure of intellect and
skill.
Beginning at an elementary level, these qualities of
cognition and action are but a few of the basic elements of growth and behavior in my life. Add to them
others, such as self-evaluation, introspection, aspiration, desire, and motivation, all of which weigh heavily in
my makeup and are relected directly or indirectly in my
memoirs.
Alongside living my life as a follower I grew an
insatiable need to know. Accordingly, from grade
school through art school days, I tended to hang out
with those I thought knew. From them I learned more
about literature, tennis, model-aircraft building, or
stamp collecting, and always at a highly serious level.
Ultimately, this transpired into an ever-evolving group
xi
of long- and short-term friendships. Along the way I
experienced times during which no matter how hard
I tried I was unable to catch up. Sometimes I simply
lost interest in a particular endeavor once I concluded I
had reached my limits. I taught myself how to confront
reality and accepted failure by turning my attention to
other pursuits.
With the aforesaid in mind, I invite the reader to
take this book for what it is: a mixture of fact, serious appraisal, a bit of whimsy, and not without a little
vanity, along with the dreamlike memories of a ninetythree-year-old man privileged to have experienced this
particular adventure.
xii
Acknowledgments
Little did I realize that a book such as this would require
the assistance of so many individuals and institutions
during the course of its development. Now that I am
more fully aware, I am deeply humbled by the genuine willingness shown by everyone to respond to our
needs.
Beginning with my personal team, those who
have been closest to me on a nearly daily basis from
beginning to end, I am indebted far more than I can
ever express to:
William Peterson, the critical essayist and preliminary editor, for his perceptive portrayal of my
professional life, and for being my patient and
encouraging partner in all literary matters.
David Antreasian, my elder son, instructor and
wizard of digital electronics, organizer and recorder
of documents, photo proofs, and related needs, for
his intelligent, strong right hand as project manager.
Also, to his wife, Jo, who has provided necessary
perspective throughout.
Thomas Antreasian, my younger son, curator of
exhibits at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and
History. He is my strong left hand who supported
whenever needed. Tom located early materials and
undertook initial scanning of my paintings in the
museum collection and all along the way ofered
practical advice regarding technical matters pertaining to the procedures of publishing.
I would be remiss without expressing my great
pleasure working with the University of New Mexico
Press: John Byram, director; Elise McHugh, senior
acquisitions editor; and Lisa Tremaine, art director, for
her brilliant design.
My very special appreciation for providing a subvention for the book goes to Kathleen Shields, executive
director and president of the Frederick Hammersley
Foundation, and to Gerald Peters, director of the Gerald
Peters Gallery.
I also single out Dean Gianopoulos of Accord
Creative, Albuquerque, New Mexico, for my particular
admiration for his commitment to excellence and detail
in the preparation of quality digital images for this book.
The following are individuals and institutions that
provided innumerable services great and small and
for whom I have the highest regard. Please accept my
sincere thanks:
Marjorie Devon, Director, Tamarind Institute,
Albuquerque, NM
Bill Lagattuta, Master Printer and Shop Manager,
Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, NM
Bud Shark, Shark’s Ink., Lyons, Colorado
Jack Lemon, Director, Landfall Press, Santa Fe,
New Mexico
Ken Tyler and Marabeth Cohen-Tyler, Sharon,
Connecticut
Kymberly Pinder, Dean, College of Fine Arts,
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM
Bonnie Verardo, Former Collections Manager,
University Art Museum, University of New Mexico,
Albuquerque, NM
Stephen Lockwood, Collections Manager, University Art Museum, University of New Mexico,
Albuquerque, NM
Christopher Geherin, Library Services Coordinator,
Center for Southwest Research, University of New
Mexico, Albuquerque, NM
Eileen Price, Archivist, Center for Southwest
xiii
Research, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque,
New Mexico
David Nufer, Photographer, Albuquerque,
New Mexico
Sherri Brueggemann, Director of Urban Enhancement Program, Albuquerque, New Mexico
Marvin Silver, Photographer, Los Angeles,
California
Dan Fuller, Collections Manager, Public Art Urban
Enhancement Program, Albuquerque, New Mexico
Robert A. Lisak, Photographer, New Haven,
Connecticut
Cathy Wright, Director, Albuquerque Museum of
Art and History, Albuquerque, New Mexico
Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell,
New Mexico
Mark Ruschman, Chief Fine Arts Curator, Indiana
State Museum and Historic Sites, Indianapolis,
Indiana
Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona
Anne Young, Manager of Rights and Reproductions, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis,
Indiana
Gayle Maxon-Edgerton, former Director of Contemporary Art, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe,
New Mexico
Evan Feldman, Administrative Director of Contemporary Art, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, New
Mexico
Louis Newman, David Findlay Jr. Gallery, New
York, New York
Margot Geist, Photographer, Geistlight,
Albuquerque, New Mexico
xiv
Lastly, singular acknowledgment goes to Martin
Krause, curator of prints, drawings, and photographs at
the Indianapolis Museum of Art, not only for his prompt
assistance with our book’s needs, but as well for his
authorship of Garo Antreasian Written on Stone: Catalog
Raisonné of Prints 1940–1995, which has kept us on
track throughout and has been a godsend reference for
my failing memory.
For an additional aid in recalling the early history of
Tamarind Lithography Workshop, I turned to the doctoral dissertation by Elizabeth Jones-Popescu: American Lithography and Tamarind Lithography Workshop/
Tamarind Institute (1900–1980), University of New
Mexico, 1980.
—Garo Z. Antreasian
Introduction
Garo Z. Antreasian:
An American Regenerator
William Peterson
“You know?” said Barbara Rose, “That’s just good
painting.”
She was leaing through the Spring 1984 issue of
Artspace Magazine and had stopped at a spread on
the art of Garo Antreasian. Highly regarded as a New
York critic and historian of American art, she is also
well-known as a defender of the art of painting at a time
in the 1970s and ’80s when it was fashionably declared
dead. It’s not clear if she recognized the artist’s name,
but she knew good painting when she saw it.
Garo Zareh Antreasian belongs to a maverick generation in American art. He was born in 1922, the same
year as Richard Diebenkorn, Grace Hartigan, Beverly
Pepper, Leon Golub, Leonard Baskin, and Jules Olitski,
and just a year ahead of Ellsworth Kelly, Sam Francis,
Roy Lichtenstein, and Larry Rivers. This is a generation
of singular artists who occupy a diicult position in the
history of twentieth-century American art. By midcareer, the pall of the declared death of painting hung
over them. Coming of age as artists at midcentury, they
seem always to be in the middle—but not quite at the
center—of things.
In a it of hyperbole, Tom Brokaw called this generation of Americans as a whole “the Greatest Generation,” for their conduct in response to the Second World
War. Like Antreasian, most of the artists had their training interrupted by the war. Government sponsorship of
the GI Bill, however, allowed many of them to pick it up
again afterward, and they became the irst generation
of Americans in history to be largely college educated.
But while the artists were away the possibilities of art,
especially painting, underwent a momentous change.
Because this change occurred during their absence,
they had a lot of catching up to do. Consequently, they
were looked upon as followers. Sometimes they were
referred to as a “second generation.” They were seen
as a generation in the middle, caught between the
earth-changing Abstract Expressionists of the 1940s
1
2
and the generation of the 1960s that produced Pop
and Minimalism. It was in the logic of Minimalism, and
its austere insistence on probing the physical bases of
art, that painting was seen as superseded. Antreasian’s
generation nevertheless persisted. They knew there
was a middle way.
Although Antreasian has always been a painter of
extraordinary versatility, as well as an incisive draftsman
of bite and power, he is best known for his contribution
to printmaking. In the 1960s and ’70s, Antreasian did
as much as anyone to regenerate and revolutionize the
art of lithography in this country, expanding its technical
range, training a new generation of master printers, and
building an impressive body of brilliant and masterful
prints that stand as a benchmark of achievement in the
medium.
His parents were Armenians of the Diaspora who
immigrated to Indianapolis. His father, a tailor, chose
Indianapolis because he had been told it was a “typical”
American city. As you will see in his plainspoken memoir in this book, Antreasian was raised in the Midwest in
a family and neighborhood that considered themselves
middle class. The values of a dutiful and responsible
work ethic, typical of the middle class, were instilled
early on and he received a mostly typical MiddleAmerican education. His ethnic origins, however, gave
him a slight edge toward the margin. He did not speak
English until he started grade school, and as an outsider in a self-righteously indiferent midwestern society,
he would always be conscious of a need to catch up
and compete.
Antreasian’s story and the body of work illustrated
in these pages shows that signiicant art can issue from
America’s midlands and Southwest, and that ambitious
art is not restricted to the east coast of New York or
the west coast of California. As with much of American
innovation in industry and technology, it was often a
technical challenge that sparked Antreasian’s creative
response. His involvement with lithography was born of
a challenge issued to him as a teenager, and competitive striving has fueled his later eforts in a variety of
media. Although he takes it in his stride as a matter of
course, on several occasions in his long career he has
seen it to reinvent himself. The irst major shift occurred
in the late 1940s and early 1950s under the inluence
of Rouault and Picasso when he sought to uncover the
secrets of their expressive procedures. He then moved
into a more lighthearted phase warmed by Bonnard’s
color and Matisse’s design, but he continued to evolve.
In 1960, while setting up the Tamarind Lithography
Workshop in Los Angeles with June Wayne and Clinton
Adams, Antreasian transformed his art again. He discovered how to manipulate the spontaneous possibilities of
his working process and materials in the manner of the
Abstract Expressionist painters. With these methods he
produced several series of large prints that could compete with the art of painting. He declared that his aim
was “to restore lithography to its rightful place as a major
print medium dedicated to ambitious concepts.”
In 1967, just three years after joining the faculty
at the University of New Mexico, he made another
“quantum leap” in his art, this time taking up the sleek,
hard-edged shapes and colors of commercial graphics
and duplicating the look of high-tech industrial inish in
a luminous tonal blend. This led to the brilliant series of
prints in the 1970s with their stripes and shifting planes
that produce a nearly kaleidoscopic optical dazzle.
A trip to the Near East in search of his Armenian
roots in 1982 initiated yet another profound change
in Antreasian’s art. Moved by the intricate qualities of
pattern and design in Islamic ornament, he eventually
adapted many of its forms and transformed his practice
once again. His eyes were opened to a range of ethnic
crafts, and in the 1990s he began painting on wood
panels that he enhanced with balsa-wood strips to
produce an array of rhythmic patterns in relief. This was
perhaps the most profound shift in his career. Though
they have their base in textiles, these abstract relief
panels achieve a complex integrity that is unlike any
known form of mainstream modernist painting.
Antreasian likes to refer to himself as a “Romantic”
artist. This designation might surprise viewers who
are familiar with the clean-lined geometric abstraction
that characterizes his work from the 1960s through the
1980s. But an emotional resonance has always been
an underlying factor in his art, and his use of a straightedge can only be characterized as a passionate geometry. Particularly after 2000, as the impact of Islamic
art brought a new lowering of decorative exuberance
to his work, he has branched out to embrace a variety
of impulses from world cultures with a spirit equal to
Delacroix and Matisse.
Yet, throughout his career, Antreasian has also
been drawn to a heroic dimension and the architectonic
forms and sense of monumental scale associated with
Classicism. Bringing these interests together in the
ethnically lavored balsa-wood reliefs and grand charcoal drawings of his latter years, Antreasian has been
making art of enduring stature. You could say he found
a fertile territory in the middle.
Introduction: Garo Z. Antreasian
Apprenticeship of the Emerging Artist / The
American scene and an awakening social conscience
informed Antreasian’s early work. The irst lithograph
that he produced as an eager eighteen-year-old at the
Herron School of Art was View of Cincinnati, 1940
(ig. 8), made independently during of hours on the
school’s basement press. Inspired by nineteenthcentury “view” prints in the Romantic mode of the
Hudson River School, he exaggerated the surrounding hills so that they appear to be a grand mountain
looming over the city. (What appear to be tiny stars
picked out of the overhead haze, he later admitted,
were in fact laws left by the spittle or sweat of youthful
exertion as he labored over the print.) City views would
recur in his work over the next two decades, going
through as many changes of style and expression as
the examples he encountered in his hungry inquiry into
the history of printmaking. A more matter-of-fact representation of the American industrial landscape appears
in View of Gas Works (ig. 9). The image and style
relect the change of mood that had taken place in
American art as it moved from the positive, progressoriented, machine-age Precisionism of Sheeler and
Demuth in the 1920s to the more downcast Social
Realism of the WPA printmakers of the 1930s, when
the Depression taught that hard work and industry did
not always equal prosperity.
Social concerns dominated Antreasian’s art in the
years just before and after the Second World War. In
addition to the WPA printmakers, he had the example of
George Bellows’ lithographs and the earlier nineteenth-
century work of Daumier. In 1942, he responded with
humanitarian compassion to the plight of refugees displaced by the onset of hostilities in Europe in both Aid
to the Stricken (ig. 10) and Aftermath (Plate 1), which
won a prize and toured the nation in an exhibit urgently
circulated to raise money for the Red Cross. In the
same year, Towers of Babel (Plate 2) relected America’s
mounting defensive posture and the dark rumblings of
doom after Pearl Harbor. As the country girded itself
for war—note the ruined steel girders that barricade the
black and watchful watchtower—all available resources
were drawn into stoking the world’s gigantic hubris.
With the belching chimneys of the “defense industry”
massed behind it, Antreasian’s hunkered-down medieval tower is anthropomorphized in the style of the great
editorial cartoonists of the day. As a child he had grown
up copying illustrations and cartoons in the daily newspapers. When, inevitably, he was himself drawn into
the conlict, he enlisted in the Coast Guard and asked
to serve as a combat artist. Deployed in the Paciic,
he brought to his assignments the same keen eye for
characterizing the immediacy of unfolding events that
he had learned from those newspaper artists.
After the war, Antreasian’s social conscience took
a diferent turn. He allegorized the postwar sense of
displacement, loss, and existential disillusion in the
haunting Beached Boat of 1946 (ig. 36). That lonely
mood of abandonment continues in Signs of the Times,
1947 (Plate 59), where it is diferently interpreted in the
dark facades that form the backdrop of a street emptied of people and divided by streetcar tracks. Strewn
with limp banners and littered with street signs—the
most prominent of which indicates “one way”—the
vacant scene conveys a feeling of post-election letdown. The parade is over. Silence prevails. Change,
apparently, does not. And any hope in the power of
the vote simply laps in the wind. If the mood and style
seem reminiscent of Edward Hopper, it might be noted
that Hopper gave this painting a $1,000 jury prize when
it was irst exhibited—a whopping amount in 1947. Yet
it’s also worth noting that the abstract rhythms of its
verticals, and its basic red, yellow, blue, green, and
black color scheme will be seen to recur in Antreasian’s
art. Compare it, for example, with such later abstract
3
4
paintings as Pennant from 1989 (Plate 76) and Luna
Park, 2003 (Plate 109).
When Antreasian graduated from the Herron
School of Art in 1948, he was immediately ofered a
teaching post at the school. He was also a recipient of
the school’s most prestigious honor, the Mary Milliken
Memorial award for travel and further study. Facing
responsibilities as a new teacher and a new father,
Antreasian decided to break his stipend into two abbreviated trips eastward. He would visit major museums in
the summer of 1948, and in 1949 he would study printmaking in New York with Will Barnet at the Art Students
League and with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17.
Antreasian’s two journeys to New York in 1948
and 1949 broadened his artistic horizons and provided
him with tools to better express his social concerns. A
hands-on encounter with George Rouault’s abrasive
Miserere prints at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
proved provocative, both for their technical complexity
and the emotional power of their imagery, inluencing his rendering of the scarred souls of the Factory
Workers (Plate 3) (Antreasian’s irst color lithograph) and
also the desolate commuters of The City (Plate 4). His
sympathy for the condition of the ethnic outsider was
restimulated by New York street life, as seen in Flowers
and Figure, 1949 (ig. 24), in which Antreasian’s innate
feeling for rhythmic design takes on the dark overtones
of Charles Burchield’s alienated Expressionism.
Two other images drawn from his 1948 New York
trip reveal the range of Antreasian’s developing concerns. Pastime, 1949 (ig. 38), illustrates two urbanites
marking graiti on a wall. Formally, it is a brilliant study
of the tensions between the solid modeling of the
igures in action and the surface latness of the wall with
its raw outpouring of linear scrawls. But Pastime is also
a powerful reportorial statement. Within the era’s postwar malaise, graiti was usually condemned as another
of the “signs of the times,” a perverse gesture of
antisocial deiance and a defacing of the public facade.
But it was also recognized as a cry from the heart,
giving public voice to the voiceless and a subversive
power to leave a trace of one’s passing for those swept
along by forces beyond their control or comprehension.
Tellingly, Antreasian even includes the ubiquitous Kilroy
character (partly rubbed out in the lower center) that
American GIs left behind everywhere as they fought
their way across Europe.
Antreasian’s fascination with the graphic qualities
of unsophisticated graiti was shared in those days
by Ben Shahn and the photographer Aaron Siskind.
Shahn’s graiti-inluenced style was also indebted to
Paul Klee, and Antreasian’s Slum Clearance, 1949
(ig. 35), relects the considerable impact that Shahn
and Klee had at the time. Antreasian’s view of a manmade wilderness of demolition discovers a dark beauty
in the midst of destruction. With the remains of iron
girders still reaching fragilely upward among the piles of
rubble, and with the desolate urban buildings beyond,
the scene could be that of bombed-out Europe. As it
happens, Antreasian based his image on his observation of the site that was being cleared on New York’s
Upper East Side for the new United Nations building.
That information, however, is not part of the title, and
the picture has to be seen as a meditation on loss
and the postwar task of clearing away the old way of
life, the ruins of the past. The idea that an element of
forceful violence lies behind any efort of building anew
is also the subject of The Apparition (ig. 40), in which
the nightmare of war continues to haunt a piece of
road-building equipment. Also in 1949, and in a radically diferent graphic language that makes eloquent
use of erasure, Antreasian paid homage to the great
Cathedral at Cologne (Plate 5), which miraculously
survived Armageddon.
To describe the texture of the piles of rubble in
Slum Clearance, Antreasian utilized an intricate network
of gestural lines inspired by Shahn’s textural efects.
Mark Tobey would soon base his entire artistic career
on elaborating this kind of “white writing.” But Antreasian
was never willing to tie himself down to any singleminded stylistic direction. Instead, this was for him a
period of rich experimentation. Nevertheless, an underlying continuity within the eclecticism of these years can
still be seen by comparing the abstract outlines that
describe the machine shapes of the Concrete Mixer
(ig. 37) or the rail lines of The City (Plate 4), both 1948,
with the linear armature of Antreasian’s very irst abstract
print, the Josef Albers-inspired No. 1, 1949 (Plate 6). The
latter remained unique in his career for many years, but
he was suiciently pleased with it to submit it to the irst
International Biennial of Contemporary Color Lithography
at the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1950.
Slum Clearance was shown at New York’s Metropolitan Museum in 1950 in the exhibition American Artists under Thirty-Six. Antreasian had been aggressively
exhibiting his art since 1947, submitting it to regional
and national shows and competitions and earning some
eighteen awards over the next decade. He had work in
the 1947 Corcoran Biennial in Washington and in the
prestigious Paintings of the Year exhibition of 1948, one
of a series of highly competitive exhibitions sponsored by
Pepsi-Cola at the National Academy of Design. And in
addition to routine showings at a variety of regional venues in Indiana, he participated regularly in national print
exhibitions held at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine
Arts, the Philadelphia Print Club, and the Library of Congress, as well as the major national print annual that was
established in 1949 at the Brooklyn Museum. In 1949,
his prize-winning painting at the Old Northwest Territory
Exhibition, Early Spring, South Side (ig. 23) was featured
in the pages of Time magazine in an article on regional
art. In 1952, he had his irst one-man show in New York
at the Esther Gentle Gallery. All of this exhibition activity
exposed Antreasian to a vast variety of current work and
to a challenging range of artistic styles and approaches
at a time when the American art world was on the verge
of coming into its own.
Introduction: Garo Z. Antreasian
A Lithographic Paradigm Shift: From Drawing
to Painting / The Cincinnati Museum’s International
Biennial of Contemporary Color Lithography, initiated
in 1950 and organized by Gustave von Groschwitz,
was especially signiicant for American lithographers,
since it provided a chance for them to see their work in
context with prints by such leading European artists as
Picasso, Braque, Miró, Chagall, and Léger. Antreasian
was so deeply impressed by the ive prints of Picasso in
the 1950 show that he decided to set aside his painting
for a while and concentrate on lithography, determined
to probe the mysteries of Picasso’s techniques and
working method.
In the immediate postwar years, Picasso had
turned his attention increasingly to printmaking. Given
free rein at the Paris lithography studio of Fernand
Mourlot, he became particularly intrigued by the
possibilities that lithography allowed for reworking
the image, either on transfer paper or directly on the
stone or plate, scraping it back and putting it through a
series of formal metamorphoses while preserving each
state along the way. (His black-and-white “carving” of
The Bull went through eleven states, from a ruggedly
realistic rendering to a thin line drawing like a prehistoric pictograph, as if reversing the process of developing an image.) Although his attempts to produce
a color lithograph ended in failure, Picasso became
intrigued by the variations that occur in making
separate plates for each color. Since bits of information would drop out of the image on one plate only to
appear in ghostly isolation on another, each of these
would stimulate further improvisation on their forms.
In 1947, Mourlot published a multi-volume catalogue
raisonné of Picasso’s lithographs, which reproduced
the several states of each image and discussed Picasso’s use of transfer techniques for applying drawings,
washes, and even cutout collage elements during the
printmaking process.
Antreasian’s Still Life No. 1, 1950 (Plate 7), shows
his adoption of Picasso’s cutout collage technique.
Cock, 1951 (Plate 9), takes up a favorite macho subject
of Picasso, but rivals the old master in its forceful
draftsmanship and in Antreasian’s own brand of folkart-based patterned design. In the startling Prehistoric
Bird, 1951 (Plate 8), Antreasian actually anticipates
certain aspects of hard-edged, curvilinear design that
Picasso himself would not explore until seven years
later in his series of linocut prints. Antreasian also
noticed that Picasso was borrowing from Miró at the
time. In the spirit of Miró, Antreasian based his image
on a Mesozoic bird fossil, nearly 150 million years
old, which was discovered inside a lithography stone
from the renowned Solnhofen limestone quarries in
Germany. It was as if the monster had emerged from
the earth’s subconscious. Then, introducing a bit of
“hand-coloring” by placing a smudged red thumbprint
on the bird’s Miró-like heart, Antreasian touched the
ancient creature and brought it back to life.
5
6
Working alone in the cramped space of the Herron
print shop, Antreasian had no hydraulic lift or dollies to
move the heavy litho stones. So when he began a large
lithograph based loosely on Picasso’s Femme au fauteuil
No. 1 (1948), he decided to keep the massive stone in
place on the press. In order to do a multicolor print, he
revived a nontraditional method in which the drawing
for each successive layer was applied and printed in
sequence using the one stone, building the image as he
went along instead of having separate stones for each
color. This additive approach was almost exactly the
opposite of the subtractive method that Picasso would
later use for his linocuts, where each successive printing
from the single block was made as an overlay after he
had cut away the parts of the image wherever he wanted
to retain any previously printed color.
Antreasian titled this large-scale print from 1952
The Queen (Plate 10) (perhaps in honor of his mother,
whose Armenian name, Takouhie, translates as queen;
or perhaps because it is as lat and brightly colored
as a playing card). He also recognized that Picasso’s
rather regal seated portrait of Françoise Gilot contains a
number of sly references to Matisse, and for a while he,
too, gave free play to his admiration for Matisse. It can be
seen in the delight in oriental patterning of Home of the
Patriot, 1951 (ig. 6), and also in the patterned organization of the table-top still-life paintings, Still Life on Gold
Ground, 1951 (ig. 42), and On the Table, 1955 (Plate 60),
which echo Matisse’s Interior with Egyptian Curtain at the
Phillips Gallery. Matisse’s presence can be felt as well in
the rhythmic design and lattened space of the multicolor
print Twenty-One Pears, 1959 (Plate 13). And the boldly
colored lithograph Flowers (ig. 52), commissioned by the
International Graphic Arts Society in 1959, pays homage
to the master’s late cutouts.
This period saw a major paradigm shift in Antreasian’s printmaking as he moved away from an aesthetic
based in drawing to one more deeply connected to the
concerns of painting. His immersion in Picasso’s work
had reinforced his earlier hands-on encounter with the
prints of Rouault. “Seeing the actual prints of Rouault
made me aware of how layered and compressed each
image was by the multiple technical means employed
and the progressive prooing,” he said. “Traditionally
and for practical reasons, we produced a drawn image,
processed and proofed it, printed the image, and then
moved on. Whereas, in painting we labored the image
over a long period of time and that labor is imbedded in
the work, giving it substance and giving weight to the
idea. Likewise, I wanted this in lithography.”
As the decade progressed Antreasian’s printmaking began to compete with his painting, especially in its
rich layering of color. With multiple runs, he laid down
a series of subtle veils of wash-like applications and
began building a richness of surface that had rarely
been attempted in lithography. It was at this time, too,
that he began to look at the work of Pierre Bonnard,
one of the great colorists among the School of Paris
painters. When Antreasian speaks of the inluence of
“Post-Impressionism” on his work of the 1950s, it’s
Bonnard’s luminous extension of Impressionism that he
has in mind. Bonnard’s great gift was his ability to make
light appear to emanate from within his paintings, which
he achieved by bathing his imagery in high-key yellows
and intense oranges against which he juxtaposed pale
touches of complementary blue, green, and violet.
Antreasian’s Tropicana, 1959 (ig. 39), a luscious painting of fruit spread on a white tablecloth with a shimmering harbor scene in the distance, indicates how far
he had assimilated Bonnard’s approach. He achieved
a similar luminosity in the lithograph Limes, Leaves,
and Flowers (Plate 12) by employing thinly scumbled
washes in a series of veiled layers of pastel inks, which
allow the white paper to show through like light from
within. The image was drawn using crayon and brushed
tusche on transfer paper and printed from a single
stone in four shades of green, plus accent areas of
magenta, purple, yellow, orange, blue, white, and black.
That’s as many as eleven press runs. A technical tour
de force, it’s no wonder that this piece took top prize in
the exhibition 50 Indiana Prints and represented Antreasian in the second International Biennial of Contemporary Color Lithography at the Cincinnati Museum.
It becomes evident in the lithographs of the 1950s
that Antreasian is competing not only with his own
paintings, but with other contemporary forms of printmaking as well. Ascension, 1958 (Plate 11), for example,
with its scufed textures and luminous color overlays,
matter, but its main concern is for material forces
welling up from within the earth itself. These forces
are expressed in mounting brush marks and energetic
drawing, the basic components of art-making. And it
is this emphasis on the expressive possibilities within
the material basis of his art that would lead to a new
breakthrough in 1960, when a cross-country trip to join
in the birth of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop on
the West Coast provided him with a new appreciation
for the underlying substance and vastness of the land
as well. Aesthetic and technical concerns coincided,
conirmed on the road in an experience of the material
and concrete.
Murals and the First Acrylic Paints / Before looking
into the birth of Tamarind and the next phase of Antreasian’s art, some further aspects of Antreasian’s painting
in the 1950s need to be noted. As could be seen in Still
Life on Gold Ground, 1951 (ig. 42), and On the Table,
1955 (Plate 60), he was experimenting with materials for
building up textural surfaces, thickening his pigments
with gritty admixtures and working with a palette knife
to give a feeling of weight and tactile solidity. There’s
an almost Byzantine formality and even monumentality, which are a reminder that he was also at work on
several large mural projects during this period.
In 1952 Antreasian was commissioned to paint
a mural for the WFBM television station. Depicting an
overview of Indianapolis in a lighthearted decorative
style reminiscent of the populist “See America” posters
of the 1930s, the mural is now preserved in the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. A similar commission
followed from the First National Bank, which was completed in six panels in 1956. That year he also received
a commission from Indiana University, Bloomington, to
produce a mural depicting the history of the university
for the men’s dining hall in the Wright Quad dormitories
(igs. 44–46). Consisting of six forty-foot panels that
had to be painted in place in a high clerestory area
above the dining hall, the mural presented a number of
technical challenges, including the erection of elaborate
scafolding. One of the more interesting technical developments, however, has entered the history of painting
in the twentieth century. It was while painting the Wright
Introduction: Garo Z. Antreasian
is clearly meant to rival efects that are achieved in
soft-ground etching and the kind of improvisation and
multiple inking processes that he witnessed at Hayter’s
workshop in New York. And if Antreasian’s Blind Boy,
1959 (ig. 51), seems to challenge the widely exhibited
etchings of Leonard Baskin and Mauricio Lasansky in
those days, other works, such as the 1949 Cathedral
and the 1951 Cock, are intended to compete with the
woodcuts of Antonio Frasconi and others in a medium
that was experiencing widespread popularity at the
time owing to a renewed interest in early German
Expressionist prints.
Expressionism was gaining a new urgency in
midcentury America, spurred on by the breakthrough
into a new form of spontaneous gestural abstraction in
New York. The new Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Clyford Still, and
Mark Rothko had emerged from a concern for process
and materials, which were regarded as the basis of
all art-making, the means by which the most basic
creative urge manifests itself in an immediate give-andtake. The idea was to bypass all picturing of secondary
subject matter in order to go directly to the heart of the
matter—the living expression of conscious response.
Stuart Davis, an older artist who was not an Abstract
Expressionist (but was nevertheless an inspiration to
many of them), perhaps put it best when he said, “The
act of painting is not a duplication of experience, but
the extension of experience on the plane of formal
invention.”
Although, like many others in the Midwest, Antreasian trailed a little behind the cutting edge of New York,
he was working hard to catch up. Cracking open a iery
issure in a dark and densely modeled ield, Antreasian
made his print Ascension (Plate 11) resemble a painting
by Clyford Still. But he derived its erupting, upsurging
imagery from pictures of rocket launches and of guided
missiles blasting of from their gantries—America
testing its arsenal in the ongoing arms race of the Cold
War. As an image of awesome apocalyptic aspiration,
however, it was perhaps not surprising when a local
religious leader took it to be an abstract interpretation
of Christ’s ascension into heaven.
The Mountain, 1957 (ig. 50), is still tied to subject
7
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Quad murals in 1956 that Antreasian became the irst
to use industrially formulated acrylic paints for artists.
Always somewhat impatient with oil paints, Antreasian had been experimenting with Rhoplex and other
synthetics and trying out various additives, like many
other artists at that time. For the university murals, he
recognized he would need pigments in a very luid
medium and in suicient quantities to apply broad,
lat areas of brilliant color. In the previous murals, he
had used commercial house paints; but while these
provided luid coverage, they were limited in the intensity and range of their colors. It was then that he was
approached by Henry Levison, a chemist and owner
of Permanent Pigments, a supplier of artists’ oil paints.
Levison had formulated a new kind of gesso for priming
canvas, which utilized an acrylic polymer emulsion
and which he was marketing under the name Liquitex (“liquid”/“texture”). In discussion, Antreasian and
Levison determined that the formula could be used with
pigments. Antreasian ordered colors and Levison mixed
and supplied them in quart and gallon batches. They
worked out so successfully in the mural that this was
the beginning of the Liquitex brand of acrylic paints for
artists. This development in the manufacture of artists’
supplies was as signiicant for the art of painting in the
twentieth century as the irst production of pre-mixed
oil paints in convenient lead tubes had been in the nineteenth, which freed the Impressionists to go out into the
country and paint en plein air.
Nevertheless, for his next mural project Antreasian
did not use acrylic paints. When he won the competition to produce a mural on the theme of Abraham
Lincoln’s early life in Indiana for the new State Oice
Building in 1958 (igs. 48 and 49), he turned instead
to the ancient Byzantine tradition and did it as a
mosaic. Stylistically, as in the Indiana University murals,
Antreasian’s Lincoln imagery was an updating of the
civic-conscious Post Oice murals produced under the
New Deal’s Federal Art Project. Vignettes of Lincoln’s
life are linked by a ribbonlike Ohio River, which sweeps
through like the framing borders in Thomas Hart Benton’s historical narratives, tying everything together.
Technically, however, the project was extraordinarily
challenging. All of the tiny tiles had to be ordered
from Murano, Italy, according to elaborate formulas
for iguring amounts and coverage for each color that
would be used, and Antreasian wanted all color areas
to be blended from diferently colored tiles. Held up for
a while by political wrangling over its costs, the mural
would not be completed and dedicated until 1962.
The younger Pop artist Robert Indiana, who, like
Antreasian, studied with Sara Bard at Arsenal Tech,
and who adopted the name of his home state, would
later adopt the style of Antreasian’s populist Americana
in the State Oice mural when he designed sets and
costumes for the Gertrude Stein/Virgil Thomson opera
The Mother of Us All. First presented at the Guthrie
Theater in 1967, it was revived in Santa Fe in 1976 for
the American Bicentennial.
In 1960, with work on the mural stalled by politics,
Antreasian was called away. He was invited to join
June Wayne and Clinton Adams in founding the new
Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. Taking
a year’s leave of absence from Herron, he went west
to participate in a new venture in the revival of creative
lithography.
Why Lithography? / At one point I had to ask: Why
lithography? What was it that drew Antreasian to it?
As a printmaking medium, lithography is basically
reproductive, invented to provide multiple copies. But
he doesn’t seem to be particularly interested in that
aspect. His early edition sizes are usually quite small—
sometimes only three copies were printed. So it would
seem that something else attracted him.
Antreasian answered by saying that the feeling of
the impressed image, seemingly fused into the paper
by the pressure of the press, had been an early attraction. But he allowed that while the chance to have multiple copies of an image was always a nice side beneit, it
was never the crucial concern.
“No,” he said. “It wasn’t that. It was the challenge
of the unknown.”
Continuing, he explained, “It was the technical
mystery, right from the irst. The process of lithography
is basically simple, but so rich in its possibilities, and
so subtle in the way that the stone responds. But there
was so little technical information about its processes
qualities impossible by other means.” He noted the
general “scarcity of shop material. Lithographic stones
and presses have all but disappeared. Equipment for
large-sized work is practically non-existent.” Papers
have to be imported and are expensive; quality tusches
used in Europe are unavailable here; and “ink of stif
consistency especially compounded for hand printing is
diicult to ind and quite costly.” Such things, he wrote,
“have virtually disappeared from the American scene
largely due to the standardization of the commercial
printing industry and the relatively small demand for
these specialty products.”
To remedy this state of afairs, he called for the
setting up of “several large shops . . . in key geographical locations . . . to serve as focal centers . . . [and] to
disperse trained personnel.” He also suggested that
“a program of research, involving technicians working
in collaboration with artists to investigate pertinent
problems would produce measurable results.” And he
recommended that “grants to key artists should also
be set up for individual investigation of speciic facets
of this medium.” At the time, he felt that “It would be
imperative that a central agency be formed, especially
suited for the responsibility of coordinating, assembling,
reviewing, and publishing accumulated material.”
Shortly after Antreasian’s article appeared, he
received a request from the Ford Foundation to review
a grant proposal from artist June Wayne. She was
seeking to establish a workshop for the revival of creative lithography in this country and for the training of
printers capable of collaborating with artists to further
advance the medium’s potential and prestige. Soon he
was contacted by Wayne, herself. And after she had
come to Indianapolis to work with him in the lithography
studio at Herron, she invited him to join her as technical
director of the newly funded workshop endeavor in Los
Angeles. It would be called the Tamarind Lithography
Workshop, after its address at 1112 Tamarind Avenue.
Tamarind: Artistic Arrival / On his cross-country
drive, Antreasian experienced the vastness of the land
of the American West as it stretched away from the
moving vehicle on all sides like a living substance, its
terrain ever changing. Soon after his arrival, he would
Introduction: Garo Z. Antreasian
available to me at the time. What I wanted to know
would always seem just out of reach. There was always
something more to igure out, a problem to solve, to
learn just how a particular efect might be achieved. It’s
what we don’t know that draws us in and pushes us on.”
“Without question, the major printmakers are those
who are masters of invention and technical resource,”
Antreasian wrote in 1959 in an article that was a call
of alarm concerning the state of creative lithography in
America. Titled “Special Problems Relative to Artistic
Lithography” Antreasian’s “manifesto” was published in
the June issue of News of Prints, the journal of the Print
Council of America. It would lead to a turning point in
his career.
“Contrary to prevailing opinion,” he wrote, “the ield
of artistic lithography has not kept pace with that of its
sister mediums, such as woodcut and intaglio, in the
resurgence of printmaking in recent years.” Acknowledging the contributions of such “gifted artist-teachers”
as Stanley Hayter, Mauricio Lasansky, Misch Kohn,
and Leonard Baskin, by whose eforts in other printmaking media “the aesthetic of the print itself has been
changed, expanded and enlarged,” Antreasian decried
that “little encouragement has been given to lithography.” He saw several factors behind lithography’s
lagging status, “foremost among these is the absence
of a central igure or workshop with stature suicient to
forge a vital and fresh concept.”
The situation in Europe was diferent, where there
was a longstanding tradition of craftsmen trained
as printers, often with generations of accumulated
expertise at their ingertips. “In the United States,” he
continued, “there are too few irst-class litho workshops
amply equipped for the artist to draw and print work.”
And, “Fewer still are lithographic printers with suicient
knowledge or subsidy to produce work on the level of
quality of their counterparts in Europe.”
This paucity of professional expertise, Antreasian
felt, was compounded by the lack of technical information and supplies. “The signiicance of the transfer
process is little understood or practiced in America
due to the unavailability of the special paper necessary for its many-faceted possibilities. In Europe this is
one of the major methods used by artists to produce
9