Abstract

Emerson S. Woelffer

"Abstract" was done in 1954 and printed by the artist while he was teaching at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. The print was done in an edition of 150 as a gift for members and expanded to 300, the other 150 offered by the Arts Center as a fund raiser for the organization.

The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center hired Woelffer as a director and instructor in 1950 and and added Josef Albers and Robert Motherwell in 1953 as it began to focus on Modernism and Abstract Expressionism that was beginning to flourish on the East Coast.

In the 1950s, Emerson Woelffer embarked on his "Numbers" paintings, a series of hieroglyphic works that are reminiscent of Adolph Gottlieb's early 1940s "pictographs," with letters, numbers, and punctuation establishing a syncopated rhythm across the picture plane, and that also presage the mark making employed in contemporary graffiti art. These calligraphic marks and lines reflect the free form, highly personal approach that Woelffer applied to abstraction throughout his oeuvre.

In 1950 Woelffer also did a series of experimental lithographs at the Arts Center, based on the "Numbers" paintings.