Engraver's Tools

Armin Landeck

The artist turns his gaze to his own world, rendering order among the chaos with the precise, radiating outlines he's traced around his oft-used objects. An array of intaglio printmaking tools are laid out carefully on a table, and to the right we can see the left edge of the print "Delmonico's Roof (large plate)". A late-career print that pays homage to a life steeped in the world of printmaking.

These are Landeck's engraving tools and according to him: "this print shows the forms, shapes, and textures of these tools...They are beautiful...They look like what they do...."

Armin Landeck was trained as an architect but moved to printmaking early in his career. His early work was detailed realism, American scene drypoint and lithography. In the mid 1940s he found his way to S.W. Hayter's Atelier 17 in New York where the printmakers were experimenting with Surrealism and automatic line using and inventing primarily engraving techniques.

While at Atelier 17 Landeck began experimenting with engraved lines, burnishing off the burr to create a harder, more defined line and a type of analytical cubism to create his compositions. This experimenting "represents what may be described as the arbitrary - call them also abstract - design elements; that is, shapes which have no relation to structure or to the light sources...".