Hermit Crab, from "Reign of Claws" portfolio

Andre Racz

After traveling to the United States on an arts comission from his native Romania, Andre Racz settled in New York, in 1939. There, he soon began attending Hayter's Atelier 17 after its temporary relocation to Manhattan during the chaos of World War II.

His control of the burin and ability to coax movement and energy from the two dimensional surface of the etching plate is shown brilliantly in "Hermit Crab" which was included in a portfolio titled "The Reign of Claws".

Andre Racz was born in Cluj, Romania on November 21, 1916. He graduated from the University of Bucharest in 1935 and came to the U.S. in 1939 as a member of the Romanian Art Commission in connection with the New York World’s Fair. He then settled in New York where he studied printmaking at Atelier 17 in the 1940s.

Among Racz's works were a variety of illustrated books and volumes of poetry, including the 1950 edition of Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral's Nobel Prize-winning 'Poems de las Madres.' In addition to his career as a fine artist, Racz was a professor of painting and sculpture at Columbia University from 1951 to 1983, at which point he was named a Professor Emeritus and was awarded a Bancroft Distinguished Retired Teacher award.

He divided his spare time between his homes in New Nersey and Vinalhaven, Maine, where he found great inspiration in natural flora and fauna of the Fox Island surroundings. He had numerous solo exhibitions in Europe, South America, and the United States, and the Museum of Modern Art purchased over two dozen of his prints. Among his awards were the Guggenheim fellowship in printmaking in 1956 and a Fullbright scholar grant to study in Chile in 1957.

Racz authored the following portfolios of intaglios: The Reign of Claws (1945), XII Prophets of Aleijadinho (1947), Via Crucis (1948), Mother and Child (1949), and Canciones Negras (1953).

Andre Racz died in Englewood, New Jersey on September 29, 1994.