Tag: printmaking

Sekino Jun’ichirō

Woodblock prints by Sekino Jun’ichirō

Born in 1914 at the historic Yasukata district of the Aomori Prefecture, Sekino Jun’ichirō (関野 凖一郎) was a Japanese woodblock printer and one of the major postwar artists of the Sōsaku Hanga (創作版画 Creative Print) movement. This woodblock printing movement stressed the artist as the sole creator motivated by a desire for self-expression. The artist was responsible for all divisions of the labor, the drawing, carving and printing, as opposed to the traditional collaborative system of ukiyo-e (浮世絵).

The son of a merchant dealing in agricultural products, Sekino Jun’ichirō explored oil painting and printmaking from an early age. He studied intaglio etching and lithography under Kon Junzō and, later, at the Nihon Etching Institute under its founder Nishida Takeo (西田武雄). In 1935, Sekino won a first prize at the government sponsored exhibition in Teiten for his 1935 “Aomori Harbor”. In the following year, he won an etching prize at the juried Annual Imperial Exhibition held in Bunten.

In 1937, Sekino became a member of the Nihon Hanga Kyôkai (日本版画協会), an association of Japanese printmakers founded in 1918 to promote printmaking as a modern art form. Sekino moved to Tokyo in 1938 where he studied woodblock printing under Kôshirô Onchi (恩地 孝四郎), printmaker, photographer and founder of the Sōsaku Hanga movement. He became an associate of Kôshirô and a founding member of his teacher’s Ichimokukai (一木会 First Thursday Society), an informal study group that supported aspiring print artists. 

During the Second World War, Sekino Jun’ichirō worked in an ammunition factory. The war years uniquely challenged Japanese printmakers as access to the Western markets, particularly the United States, was disrupted leaving many struggling financially. Paper and ink became scarce and further limited printmaking, eventually bringing it almost to a standstill by 1945. After the war years, Sekino supported himself and his wife, Katsuko, through illustrating books and creating realistic woodblock print portraits that gradually led to international recognition.  

In 1953, Sekino had his first solo exhibition at Tokyo’s Yoseido Gallery which specialized in contemporary modern Japanese prints. In 1958, he received an invitation from the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Japan Society that began a series of international travels. Sekino’s work appeared in international exhibitions, print biennials, and such prestigious institutions as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.  

Sekino Jun’ichirō taught printmaking in 1958 at New York’s Pratt Institute. In 1963, American artist and educator Gordon Waverly Gilkey, in his position as first dean of the College of Liberal Arts, hired Sekino to teach a class at Oregon State University. Sekino also taught at the University of Washington and worked in New Mexico’s Tamarind Studio where he studied with printmaker Glen Alps, the developer of the collographic printing process. In 1969, Sekino returned to teaching at Oregon State University.

Sekino launched his “Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido” at the end of 1959. This series, depicting the system of roads linking the city of Edo with the then-capital of Kyoto, was a popular subject for artists, most notable of which was master printmaker Utagawa Hiroshige (歌川 広重) who began his Ukiyo-e woodblock prints in 1832. Sekino designed and carved all of his woodblocks himself and gave the responsibility of printing the series to skilled artisans Yoneda Minoru, Kobayashi Sokichi and “Living National Treasure” Iwase Koichi. Sekino received Japan’s 1975 Ministry of Education Award for this fourteen-yearlong series. In 1975, Oregon State University exhibited Sekino’s “Fifty-Three Stations” alongside Hiroshige’s 1834 version..

Sekino Jun’ichirō passed away of lung cancer in April of 1988 at the age of seventy-three. His second son Sekino Yowsaku is a Tokyo woodblock printmaker who often incorporates gold leaf into his images. Sekino Junpei, the eldest son, is a retired mathematics professor who is known for his digital art and fractal computer graphics.

The Imperial Household Agency awarded Sekino Jun’ichirō with two Medals of Honor, the Shijuhosho in 1981 and the Kyokujitsu Shojusho in 1987, for his cultural contributions. The Imperial Household frequently purchased his woodblock prints to be used as gifts to foreign dignitaries when members of the Imperial family traveled abroad to promote Japan’s friendly international relations. 

Sekino’s woodblock prints are currently in the permanent collections of Ashmolean Museum of Oxford, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the British Museum, Cincinnati Art Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), Tokyo’s National Museum of Modern Art, the Portland Art Museum, University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, and Royal Ontario Museum, among others. 

Notes: Japanese names in modern times consist of a family name (surname) followed by the given name, thus, 関野 凖一郎 Sekino (family name)  Jun’ichirō (given name), a traditional form I use for my articles. Beginning in the Meiji period of Japan during the turn of the twentieth-century, many English-language publications began to place the family name in the last position. Many Japanese people when writing and speaking English have now adopted this Western naming order.

The Fort Wayne Museum of Art has a 2023 article entitled “Treasures from the Vault: Jun’ichrō Sekino” that discusses Sekino’s contribution to Japanese printmaking: https://fwmoa.blog/2022/09/19/treasures-from-the-vault-junichiro-sekino/

For those interested in a deeper study of Japanese printmaking, the JSTOR site has a free journal article by Oliver Statler entitled “Modern Japanese Creative Prints” from the July 1955 “Monumenta Nipponica” at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2382817

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Sekino Jun’ichirō”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Windy City Times, January 5 2011, Chicago

Second Insert Image: Sekino Jun’ichirō, “Jun Morning in Kyoto”, 1979, Woodblock Print, 68 of 98 Edition, 85 x 57.8 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Sekino Jun’ichirō, “Yoshid”, Woodblock Print, No. 35 of “Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido”, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Sekino Jun’ichirō, “Falling Leaves”, 1960-1970s, Woodblock Print, 55 of 128 Edition, 46.4 x 69.2 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Sekino Jun’ichirō, “Ki’iroi Ochiba (Yellow Fallen Leaf”, circa 1990, 43 x 60.5 cm, Private Collection

Yashima Gakutei

Yashima Gakutei, “Carp Ascending a Waterfall”, 1892 (Edo Period), Surimono, Woodblock Print with ink and Color on Paper, 18.8 x 21.6 cm, Private Collection

Born in the Honshu city of Osaka circa 1786, Yashima Gakutei (八島岳亭) was a Japanese poet and artist known for the quality of his woodblock prints and his artistic contribution to Ukiyo-e (浮世絵)  a traditional poetic art form that flourished from the seventeenth to the nineteenth-century. Among the images depicted in ukiyo-e woodblock prints and paintings were landscapes, wrestlers and kabuki actors, dancers and courtesans, folk tales and historic scenes, and images of an erotic nature. 

Gakutei was the illegitimate son of the samurai Hirata under the Tokugawa shogunate established by Tokugawa Ieyasu (徳川 家康), one of the three Great Unifiers of Japan during the Edo period. Gakutei’s mother later married into the Yashima clan, thus granting him the name of Yashima Gakutei. He received his art training from master ukiyo-e printmakers Totya Hokkei (魚屋 北渓) and Katsushika Hokusai (葛飾 北斎) who, though best known for his woodblock print series “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, worked in multiple mediums including book illustration.

After his training, Yashima Gakutei settled at Osaka in the 1830s. He was known for his technical precision, his embossing skill, and his specialization in the traditional surimono art form, which some critics say surpassed that of his teacher Totya Hokkei. These surimono (摺物) woodblock prints were deluxe editions privately commissioned by poetry societies and wealthy patrons of the arts for special occasions, poetry competitions, and the celebration of the New Year. Gakutei employed lavish printing techniques on the finest homemade papers with generous use of gold, silver, bronze, and mica highlights, as well as embossing and lacquer-like effects. 

During his career, Gakutei also created images of landscapes and seascapes for books, a rarity among those artists who had studied under Hokusai. He received a commission to provide all the illustrations for the “Kyōka Suikoden (狂歌水滸伝)”, a volume of traditional Japanese poetry. Among Gakutei’s other works are a series of five surimono woodblock prints that featured young female musicians performing gagaku (雅楽), the traditional imperial court music from the Heian period (794 to 1185); a series of embossed woodblock prints depicting all the gods of fortune as beautiful women, or bijin (美人); and a privately issued and embossed surimono tetraptych entitled “The Ascent to Heaven”, a four-panel scene depicting the well known Japanese fairy story “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter”. 

As a poet, Yashima Gakutei wrote and illustrated many humorous poems in the kyōka (狂歌) style, a genre of Japanese tanka poetry that was prevalent in the Edo region, now the area of modern Tokyo. Formed within the tanka meter of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables per line, these short poems placed mundane or vulgar humor within elegant, poetic settings. Wordplay and puns were often used; a classic styled poem would often be given a vulgar twist at the end. 

As a translator, Gakutei is known for his translation of the sixteenth-century Chinese novel “Journey to the West (西遊記)”, one of the Classic Chinese Novels that is attributed to Ming dynasty poet and novelist Wu Cheng’en (吳承恩). This account of the legendary pilgrimage of Tang dynasty Buddhist monk Xuanzang was illustrated with woodblock prints created by Gakutei. 

Yashima Gakutei died in 1868, the same year as the Meiji Restoration that replaced the Tokugawa shogunate military government with a reinstallation of Emperor Meiji under a constitutional monarchy, thus ending Japan’s Edo period.

Notes: Many of the details of Yashima Gakutei’s life are shrouded in mystery. The Art Institute of Chicago indicates that he was known by several names including Yashima Harunobu, Horikawa Tarô,  and Gakutei Kyûzan, among others. The Ronin Gallery, the largest collection of Japanese prints in the United States, lists his birthplace as Edo under the name of Harunobu Sugawara. For my article, I am relying on information from the Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, Maine, which lists his birthplace as Osaka. 

Top Insert Image: Yashima Gakutei, “Hotei”, circa 1927, “Allusions to the Seven Lucky Gods”, Woodblock Print with Karazuri Printing and Metallic Pigment, 21 x 18.4 cm, Ronin Gallery

Second Insert Image: Yashima Gakutei, “Muneyuki Shoots a Tiger”, circa 1829, Woodblock Print Surimono, 21 x 18.4 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Yashima Gakutei, “Furuichi Dance”, circa 1822, Woodblock Print with Ink and Color, Embossing and Metallic Pigments, 21 x 19 cm, Private Collection

Hon-Chew Hee

The Artwork of Hon-Chew Hee

Born in Kahului on the Hawaiian island of Maui in January of 1906, Hon-Chew Hee was an American muralist, watercolorist and printmaker. An educator in both China and Hawaii, he founded the Chinese Art Association in 1935 and the Hawaii Watercolor Society in 1962. 

From the age of five to fourteen, Hon-Chew Hee lived with his parents in Zhongshan, Guangdong, China, where he was trained in the art of Chinese brush painting. In 1921, Hee returned to Hawaii where he continued his elementary education. He began his art education in United States in 1929 as a part-time student at the California School of Fine Art, now the San Francisco Art Institute. Completed during this period was Hee’s earliest known painting, “Spring in Southern San Francisco”, an exercise in the Western techniques of light, color and composition. Hee had the opportunity to study fresco painting under Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, who had been encouraged by sculptor Ralph Stackpole and collector Albert Bender to visit San Francisco.

From 1929 until the beginning of World War II, Hee lived in San Francisco where he founded the Chinese Art Association. He entered his work in various exhibitions during this period. For the 1937 second annual National Exhibition of American Art, Hee presented his “Waimea Canyon”, a colorful canvas depicting the natural reddish canyon located on Kaua’i Island. For the March 1940 opening of New York’s Schoenemann Galleries on Madison Avenue, he had a solo exhibition of forty-three watercolors and drawings that received favorable reviews.  Single figure studies dominated this show, among these was his “Sleeping Chinese Boy”.

Hon-Chew Hee registered for the military draft in October of 1940. In October of 1945 in Honolulu, he married Marjorie Yuk Lin Wong who earned her degrees in medicine from Columbia University and the University of Hawaii. At this time, Hee was employed at the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard and taught painting classes at the Nuuanu YMCA. The painter and printmaker Isami Doi was also teaching at the YMCA and instructed Hee in the art of wood engraving. In 1948, Hee entered his artwork, which included the “Farmer’s Blessing”, in the July non-jury exhibition at New York State’s  Woodstock Gallery.

After a period of study at the Art Students League in New York, Hee traveled in September of 1949 aboard the luxury liner Ile de France to Le Havre, France. He stayed in Paris for a three-year study program with Fernand Léger and Andre L’hote, both French Cubist painters, and German painter George Grosz, best known for his 1920s Berlin scenes. Hee adopted the techniques of Cubism for his 1952 “Coffee Hour” by the use of colored blocks as sections of the coffee machine. However, his work always retained a sense of realism in its use of Eastern and Western concepts that were overlaid with traditional Chinese line-work.

Upon his return to Hawaii, Hon-Chew Hee settled in Kāneʻohe, the largest of the communities on Kāneʻohe Bay of O’ahu Island, his home for the rest of his life. Hee completed six murals fot the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts as well as a set of murals for the Inter-Island Terminal of the Honolulu International Airport. He created commissioned murals for the Manoa Library, Enchanted Lake Elementary School, Maui’s Pukalani Elementary School, the Hilo Hospital, and Kauai Community College.

Hon-Chew Hee died on the island of O’ahu in 1993. The Hon-Chew Hee Estate Foundation established a scholarship in 2009 for residents of Hawaii pursuing a degree in the fine arts. Hee’s work can be found in many private collections and such public institutions as the Hawaii State Arm Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the National Taiwan Museum and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. 

Second Insert Image: Hon-Chew Hee, “Coffee Hour”, 1952, Oil on Canvas, 61 x 76.5 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Hon-Chew Hee, “Waiting”, Date Unkniown, Oil on Canvas 40.5 x 30.5 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Hon-Chew Hee, “Serigraphs”, 1973, Portfolio of 30 Serigraphs, Edition of 500, Publisher Hon-Chew Hee Studio

Max Beckmann

The Artwork of Max Beckmann

Born in February of 1884 at Leipzig in the Province of Saxony, Max Carl Friedrich Beckmann was a German painter, printmaker, sculptor and writer who is often classified as an Expressionist artist, a term and movement he rejected during his lifetime. He pursued a very personal artistic path that examined the themes of redemption, terror, eternity and fate.

The youngest child born to Carl and Antonie Beckmann, Max Beckmann exhibited artistic talent at an early age. At the age of sixteen, he enrolled at the Weimar Grand Ducal Art Academy where he completed his studies in three years. Beckmann moved to Paris in 1903 and was deeply impressed by the works of Paul Cézanne. Returning to Germany in 1904, he settled in Berlin and, in 1910, began exhibiting work with the Berlin Secessionist artists. Beckmann also had a show at Galerie Paul Cassirer, which represented the Secessionists and French artists, notably Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh. 

At a time when abstractionist work was developing in Germany, Beckmann was exploring figuration and narrative works with fragments of myths, bible stories, and obscure allegories. He was recognized for his history paintings and portraits of muted palettes and impressionistic brushwork. At the outbreak of World War I, Beckmann volunteered as a medical orderly in Belgium; however, the traumatic experiences he suffered in the field led to a nervous breakdown in July of 1915. He was eventually discharged from military service in 1917. 

Max Beckmann relocated to Frankfurt for his recovery, but his experiences in the war changed the scope of his work. The romantic compositions of his early work were replaced by more angular forms; his use of paint became more subdued and his palette darkened. Beckmann’s post-war subjects, often depicted more violently, centered around issues of political intolerance, social injustice and poverty. His cynical, crowded, and turbulently colored canvases were populated by characters caught in the chaos of post-World War I urban life. During this immediate post-war period, Beckmann also focused on etching and lithography. He created several black and white print portfolios, among which was the 1918-1919 “Hell” which featured scenes of a devastated Berlin.

Beckmann began teaching a master class in 1925 at Frankfurt’s Städel School and its School for Applied Arts. Having achieved widespread critical and commercial success, he was widely exhibited in Europe and America and his work was held in important museums and many private collections. Beckmann was among the leading artists who practiced the new realist style known as the Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity. His work was among those featured in art historian Gustav Hartlaub’s public survey on New Objectivity held at the Kunsthalle Mannheim in 1924. 

As the National Socialist Party in Germany increased its dominance in the early 1930s, modern art became increasingly under attack. Beginning in 1933, exhibitions of modern art toured several German cities solely for the purpose of defaming the work of modern artists, which included Max Beckmann and his contemporaries. The director of Berlin’s National Gallery, Ludwig Justi, attempted to protect its modern art collection by establishing special exhibition rooms in its Museum of Contemporary Art. However, after Adolf Hitler assumed power, Beckmann’s paintings were among those collected and exhibited in the Degenerate Art Exhibition that toured Germany until 1939.

Although he attempted to keep a low profile, Beckmann lost his teaching position in April of 1933. On the day the Degenerate Art Exhibition opened in March of 1937, he and his second wife Quappi relocated to Amsterdam, never to return to Germany. Beckmann joined a large exiled community and remained in contact with his supporters. During this period, he held a teaching position and created over two hundred and fifty paintings, the majority of which were his self-portraits. In 1938, Beckmann traveled to London and gave a speech at the New Burlington Galleries as part of the Exhibition of Twentieth Century German Art.

In September of 1947, Max Beckmann relocated to the United States and was given a teaching position at Saint Louis’s Washington University Art School where he taught alongside German-American printmaker Werner Drewes. In 1948, Beckmann had his first retrospective in the United States at the City Art Museum in Saint Louis. Art collector Morton D. May became his patron and student; he later donated a large collection of Beckmann’s work to the City Art Museum.

In the autumn of 1949, Beckmann and his wife Quappi relocated to a 69th Street apartment in Manhattan, New York where he accepted a teaching professorship at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. In 1950, Beckmann had a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale and also painted his “Falling Man”, an oil on canvas work similar to the falling men illustrations he created for a 1943-1944 edition of Goethe’s “Faust II”. On the twenty-seventh of December in 1950, Max Beckmann was struck down by a heart attack not far from his building while on his way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to view one of his paintings. 

After his death, Max Beckmann’s work was rarely seen in the United States, except for retrospectives held in 1964 and 1965 by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. However since the late twentieth century, retrospectives have been held in major cities throughout Europe and the United States. Many of his late paintings are displayed in American museums, with the Saint Louis Art Museum holding the largest public collection in the world. A new record for a German Expressionist work occurred with the 2017 sale of Max Beckmann’s 1938 “Hölle der Vögel (Birds’ Hell)” at Christie’s London for 45.8 million dollars (42.09 million Euros).

Notes: The Harvard Art Museums has a collection of eighty-five works by Max Beckmann, the majority of which consists of prints and drawings. Images of this collection can be found at: https://harvardartmuseums.org/collections/person/27201

A biography of Max Beckmann and short articles on six of his more important paintings can be found at the non-profit Art Story site located at: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/beckmann-max/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Max Beckmann in Armchair”, circa 1920-1930, Black and White Print, 8.5 x 5.9 cm, Tate Museum, London

Second Insert Image: Max Beckmann, “Frontal Self Portrait with House Gable in Background”, 1918, Drypoint Print, 49.8 x 37.5 cm, Harvard Museums/Fogg Museum

Third Insert Image: Max Beckmann, “Café Music”, 1918, Drypoint Print, Harvard Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Fourth Insert Image: Max Beckmann, “Self Portrait (Still Life with Globe as the Cover of Portfolio)”, 1946, “Day and Dream” Portfolio Series, Lithograph, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Art Museum

Bottom Insert Image: Mas Beckmann, “Der Vorhang hebt sich (The Curtain Rises)”, 1923, Drypoint Print, 29.7 x 21.7 cm, Harvard Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum

Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn

The Meditation Drawing Screenprints of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn

Born in London in October of 1881, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn was a Dutch spiritualist, theosophist, scholar and printmaker. Her father was Albertus Kapteyn, an engineer, inventor and the older brother of astronomer Jacobus Kapteyn. After working six years at the London site of the Westinghouse Air Brake Company, he was appointed Director General in 1887. Olga Kapteyn’s mother was Truus Muysken, an activist in social renewal and women’s emancipation. Among her circle of friends were playwright George Bernard Shaw and Russian anarchist Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin. 

Olga Kapteyn’s initial education was at the North London Collegiate School where she became close friends with Marie Stopes who became a leading plant paleobotanist and founder of Britain’s first birth control clinic. Near the turn of the century, the Kapteyn family moved to Zürich, Switzerland where Olga attended the School of Applied Arts. She continued her education with a major in Art History at the University of Zürich. 

In 1909, Olga Kapteyn married Iwan Hermann Fröbe, a Croatian-Austrian conductor and flutist with Zürich’s opera orchestra; his conducting career took the couple first to Munich and later in 1910 to Berlin. At the outset of World War I, Olga and Iwan left Berlin and returned to Zürich. After the birth of twin daughters, tragedy struck the family; Iwan Fröbe perished in a September 1915 plane crash near the city of Vienna. 

Five years later, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn traveled with her father to the Swiss village of Ascona, home to the Monte Verità Sanatorium. Albertus Kapteyn bought a nearby ancient farmhouse, the Casa Gabriella, which from 1920 onwards became Olga’s home. Fröbe-Kapteyn began to study Vedic philosophy, meditation and theosophy, a philosophical system which draws its teachings predominantly from Russian author and mystic Helena Blavatsky’s writings. Among her friends and influences at this time were Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, German poet Ludwig Derieth, and sinologist and theologian Richard Wilhelm whose translation of the “I Ching” is still regarded as one of the finest.

In 1928, Fröbe-Kapteyn built an informal research center near her home. Religion historian Rudolf Otto suggested a name derived from the ancient Greek for the center, Eranos, which translates as a banquet to which guests bring contributions. Carl Jung suggested its conference room serve as a symposium site for interdisciplinary discussion and research. The annual lecture program, Eranos Tagungen, began in August of 1933. A roster of intellecuals from various disciplines were invited to give lectures on a particular topic; these lectures were then published in the Eranos year book. To illustrate each symposium, Fröbe-Kapteyn devoted her time to finding images and symbols that would best illustrate the topic.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn’s research in archetypes took her to major libraries in Europe and America. These included, among others, the British Museum, the Vatican Library, New York City’s Morgan Library and Museum, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and Athen’s Archaeological Museum. Fröbe-Kapteyn created the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism, ARAS, which housed photographs of works of art, ritual images, and artifacts of sacred traditions, as well as, world-wide contemporary art. She amassed a collection of over six-thousand works, many of which were later used to illustrate Carl Jung’s writings. Today the New York-based institution, now under the auspices of the C.G. Jung Foundation, contains more than seventeen thousand images which are currently available online.

Fröbe-Kapteyn was interested in iconography since her childhood, an interest developed as she watched her father create images from photographic film in the darkroom. After following a lengthly series of meticulously drawn experiments in geometric abstraction, she produced a series of elaborate screen-prints between 1927 and 1934. Those prints combined the high energy of the Futurist art movement with her intense study of archetypical signs and symbols. Fröbe-Kapteyn’s prints were directly influenced by the English theosophist Alice Bailey, whom she met in the late 1920s. Bailey had used art as a tool in psychotherapy; through the drawing process, subconscious messages would be placed on paper or canvas. 

Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn’s prints and paintings exhibit great precision in their geometric shapes. They include diagrams of intersecting circles, which serve as an impetus for meditation, as well as, cryptic symbols enhanced with gold leaf and obscure figurative work. Fröbe-Kapteyn used a limited color palette, predominated by blue, red, gold and black. The rigid geometry of the image is reinforced by the choice of mostly cold colors which are opposed by the color black, symbolic of shadow and death, and the color gold, symbolic of light and life. The actual number of the screen-print sets Fröbe-Kapteyn produced is unknown.

A Swiss resident for most of her life, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn passed away at her Casa Gabriella in 1962 at the age of eighty-one years. The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism is still an active organization today and continues its mission with a new generation of lecturers and researchers.

Notes: A fourteen piece set of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn’s Meditation Drawing Screenprints, produced in 1930, is housed in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicage. They are available for viewing at: https://www.artic.edu/collection?artist_ids=Olga%20Fröbe-Kapteyn

Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn’s Meditation Drawing Screenprints,  available for sale, can also be found at the online site of Gerrish Fine Art located at: https://gerrishfineart.com/artist/olga-frobe-kapteyn/

The online site of the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism is located at: https://aras.org

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, Ascona”, 1933, Gelatin Silver Print, Fondazione Eranos Ascona

Second Insert Image: Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, “Reincarnation”, 1930, Screenprint, 49.7 x 36 cm Paper Size, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, “Swastika Meditation Drawing”, Screenprint with Gold Foil, Dimensions Unknown, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn and Guests”, 1958 Eranos Jungian Psychoanalysts’ Conference, Monte Verità, Ascona, Switzerland, Gelatin Silver Print, The Israeli Museum, Jerusalem

Radek Husak

The Artwork of Radek Husak

Born in Poland in 1984, Radek Husak ia a contemporary process-driven mixed-media artist whose works in the expanded field of print. He earned his Master of Fine Arts from the Royal College of Art and is currently based in London. 

Through his research and experimentation, Husak developed a new approach to printmaking. He works with pigment transfers twinned with carbon-drawn elements that are either placed on paper or sandblasted aluminum panels. Blasting through the outer layer of aluminum reveals a reflective inner core upon which the pigment transfers are placed. These images are then embellished with paint, soft pastels, bodycolor, and carbon and color pencils.

Radek Husak’s work is inspired by art history, fashion, and queer theory. He combines the tradition of the nude with the large color-elements of 1950s and 1960s Pop Culture. Husak’s images, with their overlapping figurative forms, create in essence a static glitch. The edges of one body blurs and melts into the next, thereby creating  sense of movement. The resulting movement effect of these bold, modern images bring to mind the early movement studies by French scientist and photographer Étienne-Jules Marey, which he produced in the 1800s. 

Husak creates works in the abstract form and constructs these images by taking elements of nature, such as skies, clouds and anatomical features, fragmenting and rearranging them to form flowing patterns. He also has produced figurative work in other mediums including ceramics and stained glass. 

Radek Husak has shown his work in 2021 and 2011 at the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair in London. The Grove Gallery and Quantus Gallery, both in London, are the venues for Husak’s first solo show, entitled “Duality” which is running from November 23 until December 22 in 2022. 

Radek Husak’s work can be seen at his website located at: http://www.rhusak.co.uk   His work can also be seen at Artsy located at: https://www.artsy.net/show/grove-gallery-duality?sort=partner_show_position

Bottom Insert Image: Radek Husak, “Saint Sebastian (SS5)”, 2022, Pigment Transfer, Bodycolor, Carbon and Color Pencils and Collage on Sandblasted Aluminum, Edition of 3, 84 x 60 cm, Private Collection

Walter Claude Flight

Walter Claude Flight, Title Unknown, (Swimmers). Date Unknown, Linocut Print

Walter Claude Flight was a world renown British printmaker born in London, England, in the year 1881. He attended the Heatherly School of Fine Art in London, England; and he subsequently taught at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London.

Flight was a member of a group called the ‘Seven and Five Society’, composed of seven painters and five sculptors that all produced modernist styles of art. The group included sculptor and printmaker Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hapworth. Flight was known for pioneering and popularizing the linoleum cut technique. He also painted, illustrated, and made wood cuts.

Influenced by Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism, Flight’s work expressed dynamic rhythm through bold, simple forms. His linocut prints show his interest in depicting speed and movement.

Okiie Hashimoto

Okiie Hashimoto, “Sand Garden Scene”, 1959, Wood Block Print, Edition of 60

Japanese printmaker Okiie Hashimoto graduated from Tokyo School of Fine Art in 1924 with training in Western-style oil painting. He also studied with the printmaker Haratsuka Un’ichi; but it wasn’t untill the 1930s that Hashimoto began to make woodblocks in any great number. After Hashimoto retired from his teaching career in 1955, he concentrated on his printmaking.

Hashimoto’s prints from the period between 1957 and 1966 represent a particular phase of his work which was imbued with complex perspectives and drawn with aspects of Western abstraction. He used modernism with its abstract tendencies to show a subtle view of reality.

Jim Dine

Tool Series: Etchings by Jim Dine

Jim Dine’s work has been the subject of major surveys and retrospectives in venues spanning the globe, and he is represented in museum collections worldwide. While others have often associated his work with the Pop Art movement of the mid-20th century, his fascination with popular imagery and everyday objects has always carried a more personal component.

Dine has extensively explored particular themes in a variety of media throughout his career, such as the universal symbol of the heart and images of tools. These themes have acquired the status of personal iconography and he claims them as part of his vocabulary or his “glossary of terms.”

Jim Dine believes that tools provide a ‘link with our past, the human past, the hand’. They feature in many of his works, and can be seen as a symbol of artistic creation. There is also an autobiographical resonance, as Dine’s family owned a hardware store in Cincinnati.