La Rosa y el Espejo (The Rose and the Mirror)

Mauricio Lasansky

A portrait of Emilia Lasansky, who was Mauricio's wife (1917-2009). Thein/Lasansky states the zinc plate was double-dropped, printed twice, once in sienna and then in black.

This is a another rare Surreal portrait of Lasansky’s wife Emilia, whom he had married in 1937. The Bottocelli-like portrait emerges in the mirror at the left. She holds a flower while a delicate, surreal “landscape” surrounds the figure and contrasts the intricate, dream-like state of the subject. "La Rosa y el Espejo" was done in Argentina, in 1941, two years before Lasansky left for New York to work at Atelier 17. This rare impression is pencil is numbered "3/5", though the catalogue raisonné entry lists an edition of 10, with the plate having been destroyed.

Alan Fern commented about these drypoints 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."