Merchant of Venice

Ernest Bradfield Freed

Ernest Freed had to build a special press and order oversize paper in order to print a series of large, experimental intaglios he was working on, based on Shakespearean subjects. He was helped in the printing process by his son.

Freed had studied painting at Iowa with Grant Wood in 1935. He returned to Iowa in 1945 as the Director of Art Education, where he also learned printmaking with Mauricio Lasansky and was not afraid to move from realism to abstraction and take on a large format using varying intaglio techniques. For these works he also cut up old plates and arranged them on the new composition as well as adding fabrics and other materials to the plate surface. He printed them himself with the aid of his family. Though he set editions they were not all completed.

Freed commented about the process he used to developed these large images. [the image] "was executed on a very large plate with color shapes developed by the use of mahogany plywood panels. The forms of the [merchant] emerges from an inky blackness of uncertainty and irrationality. Although the imagery is apparent, there are shifting and submerging shapes which are constantly equivocal.

The physical strain of developing and printing this work seems to be an inseparable part of the total experience. The methods used in developing it involved a trial and error process to find the right movement of form. As the plate grew, the imagery became more clearly understood.

Technique is an involved process serving this end, but never is displayed for its own sake. In fact, the means to the end results are so covered as to be unrecognizable, or for that fact, even remembered."