Kudos to The Baker Museum!

Getting to know the work of Mauricio Lasansky, an Argentinian Jewish artist in the United States.

By Luba Laufer Rotsztain

For some of us, the ones calling Naples home and the snowbirds enjoying Greater Naples part-time, the word “paradise” is fitting.

In many ways, we live in “paradise” — great weather, amazing sunsets and nature, and numerous stimulating activities to enrich our lives.

The programs provided by Artis— Naples, with its music, ballet, opera and theater presentations, and The Baker Museum’s exhibitions of all kinds featuring international and local artists, stand at the top of the list of reasons I love living in this city.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the first Masterwork concert of the 2022- 23 season and, being late to attend the “prelude” before the performance, decided to visit the museum and look at the new exhibitions.

Only a minute or so after I entered the main floor exhibition, I had to stop, surprised and very deeply moved by what I was looking at.

The exhibition is by Mauricio Lasansky. Titled “Envisioning Evil: ‘The Nazi Drawings,’” it is a series of 33 monumental graphite and charcoal drawings the artist started in 1961 as his way to grapple with the atrocities of the Holocaust.

Mauricio Lasansky working on “The Nazi Drawings” in his studio, 1962, Vinalhaven, Maine. Photo courtesy the Lasansky Corporation

“Envisioning Evil: ‘The Nazi Drawings’ by Mauricio Lasansky” is organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Art and lent by The Levitt Foundation.

The exhibition is organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Art and lent by The Levitt Foundation. The presentation of it at The Baker Museum is curated by Rangsook Yoon, Ph.D., curator of modern art.

My initial surprise was due to where those powerful drawings were — not in a Holocaust Museum or a Jewish institution, but at The Baker Museum, a small, excellent museum in the city of Naples. In a museum that I felt wants to carry out the important task of uniting the teaching of history and the power of art to enlighten the community where I live. Hats off to the museum. I applaud management’s “guts.”

My strong impression was followed by the realization that I had a personal connection with the artist and the exhibition.

Mauricio Lasansky, born in Argentina, started the series of drawings in 1961, at the time Adolf Eichman was being tried in Jerusalem for his criminal participation in the Holocaust.

Like Lasansky, I was born in Argentina, where thousands of Jews were finding, in a piecemeal way, the atrocities occurring in Europe and looking feverishly at survivors lists to see if, by luck, any name was familiar.

There was not one person among the thousands in Buenos Aires, where I lived at the time, who did not have a family member, a friend, a neighbor killed in the Holocaust. And I remember as a child, going with my parents to the services in their memory, where everyone was crying, all terribly sad but comforted by being together and by lighting the big white candles, one of which was for the killed children.

I was in Buenos Aires in 1960, when the Mosad found Eichman, Nazi war criminal and the creator of the “Final Solution,” living in the middle of the city. They whisked him away to Israel to stand trial.

With the news all over the city, plus the political crisis, it was a horrendous awakening for me.

How could this happen in the beautiful city where I lived? So far from Germany, with seemingly no connection with the happenings there and where we Jews have learned to avoid conflicts and lead quite a peaceful existence and … suddenly, this horrible Nazi, the perpetrator of the most horrendous crimes in history, responsible for the death of millions, is found living a bus ride away from where I lived?

It was incredible and terrifying but, as I remember it now, it should have been a call to being more attentive to what was happening around me.

Only years later, when honeymooning in Bariloche, a beautiful resort in Patagonia, I learned of the large number of Nazis living unperturbed in my country.

I was also living in Israel in 1961, when the Eichman trial was underway and 90 Holocaust survivors testified against him. It was so emotionally disturbing to watch Eichman, sitting in the glass booth, looking like an ordinary office worker, undisturbed by the emotional testimonies. He did not look like a mass murderer, and yet …

This is why I felt emotionally connected to Lasansky when I was viewing “The Nazi Drawings.”

Lasansky started creating the series, coinciding with the televised trial of Adolf Eichman, as the magnitude of the atrocities became known to the world and as the world finally began to understand what the Holocaust was.

Lasansky focused on the horror of the Holocaust in “The Nazi Drawings.” He also wanted to remember all the Nazi victims — the Roma, the Sinti, the ethnic Polish children, the Soviet POWs, and more — and he worried that minorities in the future were at risk of similar genocides. He wanted to universalize the tragedy with the apathy and indifference of the bystanders.

These are not subtle works; they are executed with a purpose and with profound feeling, combining Lasansky’s rage with his extraordinary craftsmanship

The drawings are intense and upsetting, haunting and formidable — and they will stay with you.

Lasansky chose to record his reaction to the Holocaust with the simplest media available: five-cent pencils, earth colors and a turpentine wash on common commercial paper.

The drawings were designed as a unit, numbered in sequential order. He made the drawings life-size to give the feeling of a one-to-one interaction with the viewer. And each drawing, which could have been a caricature, became a brutal documentary of a horrible event in the mid-20th century.

The drawings elicit an emotion no history book could ever communicate.

I invite all of you to visit the exhibition. You will be moved and inspired.

When the community gathered a few weeks ago for the 84th Kristallnacht commemoration program, we repeated out loud, “Never again.”

If we are going to live up to the moral of never again, we have to look at these drawings and learn from them. If we learn from history, we know that never again will happen only when we all do our part.

When we react against bigotry, persecution and evil actions, we can all do something.

This exhibition is telling me that we owe it to those we mourn at Kristallnacht, and we owe it to our children and future generations. I hope you’ll feel the same.

Some artists feel compelled to provide art not just to be viewed, but to be acted upon, to be judged less on aesthetic grounds than by the power of its convictions.

I found these words inspiring and fully expressed in Lasansky’s drawings.

About the artist

Mauricio Leib Lasansky (Oct. 12, 1914) was an Argentine artist and educator known both for his advanced techniques in significantly expanding the possibilities of intaglio printmaking, a process in which an image is created on the surface of a metal plate using a range of techniques such as etching, dry point, aquatint and engraving

The son of Eastern European Jews, he first studied printmaking and engraving from his Polish father, who had made a living in those fields.

He displayed early promise, showing favorably at the Mutualidad Fine Arts Exhibition in Buenos Aires with an honorable mention at age 16 and a prize at age 17 for sculpture.

He entered the Superior School of Fine Arts in his hometown in 1933. Three years later, Lasansky began his career as director of the Free Fine Arts School in Villa María, Argentina.

Through school and the decade, he held this directorship while exhibiting extensively, culminating in a solo retrospective exhibition at the Galleria Muller in Buenos Aires in 1943.

Argentina was at a time of political unrest. Perón was getting more powerful, and it became more difficult for artists to express themselves openly.

Francis Taylor, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at that time, saw some of Lasansky’s work while on a trip to Argentina. Under his recommendation, Lasansky was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in New York, the first of five Guggenheim Awards the artist would receive.

He relocated to New York City in 1943 and eventually chose to remain, becoming a citizen of the United States.

He dedicated his first several months in the United States to studying the extensive print collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, experimenting with modern art techniques in his own work at Atelier 17 in New York, absorbing techniques in intaglio and particularly investigating the work of Picasso, who was a major influence.

Other influences include El Greco, Goya, Modigliani, Chagall and Stanley William Hayter.

In 1945, he took his first position at the University of Iowa as a visiting lecturer for graphic arts.

Within three years, he would become a full professor and ultimately would establish its school of printmaking, offering the first master of fine arts program in the field in the United States.

In the 1960s, Time magazine dubbed him “the nation’s most influential printmaker, and the Department of Graphic Arts at the University of Iowa as the Printmaking Capital of the United States.”

He remained with the program until his retirement in 1984, whereafter he continued as a practicing artist.

He also became involved in Atelier 17, the printmaking workshop founded by eminent English artist Stanley William Hayter. Many artists, including Lasansky, worked extensively at the Atelier 17, formulating new methods and creating new techniques for their subjects as well as their prints. Several were later invited to develop printshops in university art departments around the country. continued on page 5A

In 1967, when “The Nazi Drawings” was exhibited at the Whitney, Lasansky spoke with The New York Times about the work’s long, difficult gestation.

“The Hitler years were in my belly, and I tried many times to do the drawings,” he said. “But I was too worldly about them, too aesthetic. The trouble was, I thought of them as art. But then I decided, the hell with it. Why don’t I just put down what I feel? The fact is that people were killed — how cool can you play that? I was full of hate, poison and I wanted to spit it out.”

By 1952, he had received a great deal of recognition, prizes and awards. To this day, it serves as a model for numerous other university printmaking departments led by many of Lasansky’s former students.

Best known for large scale prints in which he uses multiple plates and full ranges of color, Lasansky combines a spectrum of graphic techniques including etching, dry point, aquatint and engraving.

Lasansky has devoted himself to exploring the expressive possibilities of graphic arts. He has amassed a body of prints considered to be some of the most powerful and impressive in contemporary art. As a result, he has become one of the first in a generation of important printmakers to teach scores of students, who, in turn, are teaching scores of future generations in this country.

For all these reasons, he is considered to be one of the “Fathers of 20th Century American Printmaking.”

His work is represented in more than 100 public collections. His prints are in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, and elsewhere.

Internationally recognized, he has been exhibited throughout North America, South America, Europe and Russia. Sotheby’s identifies him as one of the fathers of modern printmaking.

Jody Hovland, the narrator of the You- Tube video “Inside the Image,” produced by the University of Iowa, says about Lasansky’s work, “he taught a whole generation of new American printmakers, who later developed programs in colleges across the nation. His work has been enjoyed all over the world. It has touched and inspired people and persuaded us to think.”

Lasansky was one of the most influential artists, teachers and philosophers in the art world. He brought printing to the status of painting and sculpture along with creating innovating printmaking techniques.

Quoting Lasansky about how to approach a work of art: “The first lesson about looking at a work of art is you get naked to look at, no preconceptions, let the work guide you, if it does not guide you… it’s not a work of art…”

Mauricio Lasansky died in Iowa City on April 2, 2012. He was 97 years old.

Information for this article taken from different websites on the internet about Mauricio Lasansky; video by the Minneapolis Institute of Art, lent by the Lewitt Foundation, “Envisioning Evil, The Nazi Drawings,” Mauricio Lasansky; and You- Tube video by the University of Iowa: “Inside the Image.”