Indian Dance

Louis Schanker

This remarkable woodcut by Louis Schanker is titled "Indian Dance" in the Brooklyn Museum catalogue of his prints. Schanker was known for his unorthodox and creative approach to the color woodcut. Printing with oil-based inks he would often print a second, third or fourth color before the previous ones had dried, creating a merging of the color on the paper and making each impression unique, a monoprint, even though it is editioned at 25. This impression has rich color, printed on a thin wove paper whose verso displays evidence of artist's process, the movement of the wooden spoon or baren showing in energetic lines.

Born in 1903, Louis Schanker quit school as a teenager and joined the circus, worked in the wheat fields of the Great Plains, and rode the rails. In 1919, he went to New York and began studying art. He spent 1931 and 1932 in Paris and came back "something of a Cubist", becoming a muralist and graphic arts supervisor for the WPA and a founding member of The Ten, to which he was attached from start to finish. By 1937, however, even a hostile New York Times critic conceded, "Mr. Schanker had a touch of lyric feeling." And in 1938, a writer for Art News declared that “Louis Schanker's delightful 'Street Scene From My Window' calls forth admiration for its delicacy of color and kaleidoscopic forms in plane geometry."

Schanker was also a founder of the American Abstract Artists and participated in its first annual exhibition in 1937. But a decade later he wrote: "Though much of my work is generally classified as abstract, all of my work develops from natural forms. I have great respect for the forms of nature and an inherent need to express myself in relation to those forms." Schanker taught for many years, first at the New School for Social Research and then, from 1949 until his retirement, at Bard College.