Cadaver ("Punta Seca")

Mauricio Lasansky

This work is extremely rare. The Thein/Lasansky raisonné incorrectly lists this work as a lithograph and had no impression to illustrate at the time of publication. This plate was done nearly a decade before the Lasansky family left for the U.S. in 1943, while Argentina was embroiled in the "Decada Infame" in which political upheaval exascerbated economic depression and social unrest. At the time of its creation, this image would have been dangerous for Lasansky to edition and sell, as the imagery suggests sympathy toward working class struggles during a time when dictatorship was on the horizon.

In place of a title, in the lower left margin Lasansky has annotated "Punta Seca," which translates in English to "Dry Point." Is this a reference to the media it is done in, or is it a veiled political reference? Then, as today, artists rarely noted the media at all, let alone in place of the title. Since this was printed in Argentina during such intense sociopolitical times, it would have been in his interest to mask the startling title.

The image itself is as powerful today as it was in 1935. A mourning woman stands before a row of bodies, searching for a loved one among the four adults and one child. Behind her a man is bent in grief, holding a hammer in his left hand as a representation of the working class. Beyond the open drapery in the background, three figures seated on a bench await their turn to search.

The 'Década Infame' would lead to Juan Peron's troubled rise to power in 1946. Lasansky, who left for New York on a Guggenheim Fellowship earlier that year, sent for his family to remove them from the continued danger that threatened the daily lives of Argentina's working class.

Museum Director/ print scholar Alan Fern commented about Lasansky's imagery on page 12 of the University of Iowa's catalog "Lasansky: Printmaker": "The drypoints...are lyrical and imaginative, relying on surrealist juxtapositions of interior and exterior space, objects in different scale, and interpenetrations of one form by another. These early works are consciously poetic; many of Lasansky's friends and intellectual heroes were poets and writers, who used language in the Spanish tradition with a rich employment of metaphors, strange juxtapositions of objects and ideas, and the frequent expression of states of mind in similes - equivalents for feelings being made vivid by references to objects." Maurico Lasansky was one of the few modern artists who worked almost exclusively in the graphic media.

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina on October 12, 1914, to an Eastern European immigrant who worked as an engraver of bank notes, Lasansky began attending the Superior School of Fine Arts in 1933. His background was partially responsible for his interest in printmaking and he began his career by making woodcuts. He later turned to intaglio, concentrating on drypoint, and his first solo exhibition was presented in 1935 at Fort General Roca, Argentina.

In 1936, at the age of twenty-two, Lasansky had already become the director of the Free Fine Arts School in Villa Maria, Cordoba, Argentina. Francis Henry Taylor, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, met Lasansky in Argentina in 1941 and was so impressed with his work that, in 1943, he arranged for Lasansky to travel to New York on a Guggenheim Fellowship. Shortly after his arrival, he sent for his wife and children, as "he didn't want to go back to Peron." Lasansky studied the entire print collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and worked at Stanley William Hayter's experimental workshop, Atelier 17 in New York.

With a recommendation from Hayter he was invited by Professor Lester Longman to join the faculty of the University of Iowa; Lasansky relocated to Iowa City in 1946. He swiftly renovated the university's printmaking department which had previously been directed by Emil Ganso who had died of a heart attack at age 46, transforming it from a lithography studio to an intaglio shop. Within two years he was named associate professor of art and the Iowa Print Group was formed under his leadership. In January 1949, an exhibition of the members' prints, entitled A New Direction in Intaglio, was installed at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Lasansky made Iowa a foundational intaglio department and his students, including Ernest Freed, Malcolm Myers, John Paul Jones, Lee Chesney, Glen Alps, Ray French, James Steg, etc. carried on his principles as printmakers running graphic arts departments everywhere from U.C.L.A. to the Universities of Texas, Minnesota, Kansas and Illinois, as well as Tulane, Michigan State and the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Lasansky was made a full professor of art in 1948 and by 1952 he had an impressive exhibition history as well as American citizenship. In 1957, an important retrospective exhibition of his prints was mounted at the Univeristy of Iowa, and in 1960 the Ford Foundation sponsored a retrospective exhibition of his work that was accompanied by a catalogue written by Carl Zigrosser.