JIM STEG: NEW WORK TEMPLEMAN GALLERIES | APRIL 7 – OCTOBER 8, 2017
ABOVE: Jack Masey, Jim Steg, 1945, From You on K.P.! Privately published, 1945 FRONT COVER: James L. Steg (American, 1922-2001), In the Land of the Blind, the One-eyed Man is King, 1971, Color etching on paper, Plate: 17 7⁄8 x 17 ¾ inches, Courtesy of Frances Swigart-Steg, 2017.2.81 BACK COVER: Untitled (Autobiography), c. 1970, Photoresist etching ,Plate: 29 7⁄8 x 23 5⁄8 inches, Collection of Frances Swigart-Steg All images © James L. Steg
Jim Steg (American, 1922-2001) was the most influential printmaker to be based in New Orleans in the twentieth century. He arrived in New Orleans in the early 1950s to teach printmaking at Newcomb College, after serving in the United States Army in World War II and training with renowned printmaking professor Mauricio Lasanksy (American, born in Argentina, 1914-2014) in Iowa. During his long and productive career, Steg used almost every known printmaking method of his time and even pioneered several of his own. He also trained countless young artists in his tenure as a beloved professor at Newcomb College for more than forty years. Today, his work resides in major print collections across the country, and his technical achievements are preserved in various compendia and encyclopedias about printmaking and related materials. This exhibition reveals Steg as both an innovator in the field of printmaking and an artist at the forefront of several major twentieth-century movements. Etchings, woodcuts, drawings made during World War II, photoresist etchings, Xerox toner works, and many other works that have never before been on public display are included in Jim Steg: New Work, the artist’s first retrospective exhibition since a monographic show in 1978, which NOMA also presented. James Louis Steg was born in Alexandria, Virginia, but raised on a farm in Churchville, New York, southwest of Rochester. As a high school student, he showed an interest in cartooning and even developed a loopy autograph that he thought befitting of the trade, a signature that occasionally appears on his earliest serious works too. One summer in high school, in 1938 or 1939, Steg attended a workshop at the Art Institute of Chicago where he participated in his first drawing of a live figure. His skill as a figurative artist, at the age of sixteen or seventeen, is already apparent in the surviving figure studies from that class [page 3]. They reveal a strong sense of geometry and modeling, combined with an expressive tendency visible in the enlarged feet, which give the figure a palpable weight. His inscription on the nude’s verso is at once suggestive of both his isolated, rural upbringing, and a charming boyish self-awareness: he signed it “J.L. Steg—with shame.”
Jim Steg: New Work is organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art and is supported by Stephen W. Clayton and the Azby Fund. Additional support is provided by Andrew and Robyn Schwarz, John Abajian and Scott Simmons, and Ann and Holly Barnett.
A few years later, Steg enlisted in the United States Army. Ultimately, he became part of a World War II division now known as the Ghost Army, which was responsible for deceiving the armies of the Third Reich by faking troop movements using inflatable tanks and other theatrical props and equipment. The Ghost Army was comprised of a number of soldiers with artistic or theatrical backgrounds, including artist Ellsworth Kelly and fashion designer Bill Blass. Blass served in the same company as Steg, and both were caricatured by their fellow soldier, Jack Masey (see Masey’s depiction of Steg, at left).1 Steg, Masey, Blass, and many others staged temporary exhibitions of drawings, watercolors, and other works during their service in Europe. Steg seems to have been responsible for designing the notice for the exhibitions: he would hand draw and letter a unique announcement-style folded brochure, which often included handwritten lists of exhibited works on the inside. In one, Steg credits Bill Blass as the exhibition designer. The largest body of work that Steg produced during the war consists of dozens of graphite or watercolor portraits of civilians, soldiers, or refugees that he encountered along the way, portraits that he called “spontaneous impressions.” Steg described his subjects: “These are the people of Europe…The little men of the streets…The people who suffered the most during the war.”2 Steg would ask the people he drew to sign the work in their own hand, alongside his signature, resulting in a powerful collaborative work that today is evidence of Steg’s ability to connect with his subjects, even in wartime. It is very likely that the refugees he depicted were executed upon their return to Russia, making these drawings a haunting, but lasting, legacy of a vanishing people. After the war, Steg exhibited many of these portraits in an exhibition in the fall of 1945 at the Weyhe Gallery in New York. At that time, the Weyhe Gallery was well-known as an active supporter of American printmaking, presenting prints by Rockwell Kent, John Sloan, and Reginald Marsh. Perhaps Steg’s connection
Untitled [Figure Study], c. 1938, Graphite on paper, 24 ¾ x 18 ¾ inches, Courtesy of Frances Swigert-Steg
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Jack Masey, You on K.P.! (1945), this apparently privately printed book includes caricatures by Masey of many of the members of Company B.
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Maude Kemper Riley, Limited Edition, Oct. 1945.
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to the Weyhe Gallery inspired his next decision, to enroll in the newly established MFA printmaking program at the University of Iowa under the guidance of Mauricio Lasansky, an artist who moved from Buenos Aires to New York City in 1943 and is considered by many to be one of the most influential printmakers of the last century. Lasansky’s MFA program was the first in printmaking in the country, and Steg was one of his first graduates. At this time, and no doubt inspired by Lasansky’s own style, Steg’s work begins to combine geometric abstraction with his figurative work, creating pieces like the two works from his American Culture series [pages 8 and 9]. Automobile and The Pin-Ball Machine reveal a dynamic, if dark, representation of American culture. A cluster of figures, one with a large bloodshot eye, hunker over the pinball machine, focusing on the game with an intensity that seems almost compulsive. In the even more abstract Automobile, a group of onlookers appear to marvel at the bold design of the car, which is reduced to a few sweeping, attenuated S-curves and the vague suggestion of a chrome bumper. Also beginning in the late 1940s, but continuing throughout his career, Steg showed an interest in the history of printmaking. Sometimes this interest resulted in reinterpretations of classic prints, as in his Bacchanalian Group after Mantegna [page 10], in which he takes the sculpted, knobby, frieze-like figures in the Andrea Mantegna print from the late 15th century and reimagines them as a collection of sharper, hard-edged, modernist figures reminiscent of Pablo Picasso’s more classically inspired works. Later in his career, Steg would use the photo-resist etching process to quote directly from earlier prints: Why?, from 1972, includes a reproduction of Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I, in the small predella-style panel at the top of the print, echoing the introspective nature of the title, and ominously surmounting the seemingly interred visage below it [page 17]. Steg first experimented with the photo-resist etching process he used to reproduce the Dürer image in the 1960s. Although he did not invent the process, he was one of the first artists to begin using it in a collage-like fashion and to combine it with other printmaking processes. Images such as Night Rain demonstrate how he worked the photo-based materials into a composition that is more expressive than narrative, presenting the photographic elements as pieces of a puzzle connected by vast swathes of a masterful manipulation of ink [pages 14 and 15]. Night Rain also reveals Steg’s familiarity with the language of Pop Art from that decade, a language that he would 3
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sometimes embrace, and occasionally critique. Red Field is Steg at his most playful. [page 16] Made with fuzzy wool flocking, Steg combines the high-art formality of a Barnett Newman “zip” with kitschy materials “found in children’s books like Pat the Bunny and in steakhouse wallpaper.”3 In the 1970s, with the rise of copying machines and dry-ink toners, Steg found yet another source of materials with which to experiment. He used these materials in a variety of ways that often combined drawing with elements of printmaking. In his “toner drawings,” for example, Steg would apply dry ink toner to the paper using tools to control the forms. The toner is then bound to the surface with heat or a petroleum solvent. Cornfield [page 19] is a fantastic work that appears to be part additive, part subtractive, with portions seemingly created by scraping away the ink to reveal the white prepared surface underneath. Perhaps the process that Steg is most commonly associated with is the collagraph, or collage intaglio process. The process involves creating a printing place by building up collaged elements on a surface and then coating them with a substance to create a hard printing substrate. Steg was amongst the pioneers of the process, and used it ambitiously, to create compositions that were part figurative, part abstraction. What seems to be truly unique about Steg’s practice is his interest in the surface of the materials that he used. While most collagraph practitioners build up their printing plates to combine recognizable images, Steg used the collagraph plate surface almost like a halftone process, allowing the surface structure of cardboard, for example, to function like a swath of mottled gray in the print pulled from it. For much of his career prior to the 1970s, Steg’s work is stylistically similar to the work of other national contemporary printmakers. This is not to take away from his accomplishments; even in those moments, the works he created were exceptional, not just derivative. But beginning in 1972, Steg developed his own visual language that is unlike any other, establishing himself as a unique voice in the field and producing a body of work with several shared elements. In many of these prints, he used his own body as an implement, often rolling his face across a prepared plate to create a flattened, stretched representation whose ultimate appearance was dictated somewhat by chance. Around this central visual element, he would create scenes that are often interrogations of the human condition. In The Seven Attributes, for example, he identifies seven different human characteristics and inserts his abstracted
Carol Leake “Strategies of Concealment: Figuration in the Work of James L. Steg”
face onto a field filled also with visual “quotations” from other print sources, including some of Francisco Goya’s more gruesome prints. Even in service of illustrating what should be an admirable quality, Steg’s vision takes a dark turn. In the The MedalWearer the protagonist wears a puckered grimace as he is assailed by other heads surrounding him, while visions of ancient wars play out in a panel below him. In Steg’s world, it seems, even achievement is not without its pitfalls. The other path his work takes in the 1970s is toward pure abstraction. A Capturing View [page 18] shows Steg experimenting with a marbling technique that relied on the resistance of oil to water to create swirling, abstract swaths of tone. This print also shows Steg playing with the shape of the printing plate, something he had done back in his earliest printmaking years. Here he creates trapezoidal elements that seem to force the image out and towards the viewer, wrestling with the two-dimensionality of the print surface.
Restlessly inventive, toward the end of his career, Steg also worked with Polaroid prints and sculpted wood with chainsaws, and he created intricate dioramas that often included collaged elements from his own earlier printed work. He also continued to instruct students at Tulane University until his retirement in 1990. When he died in 2001, Steg left behind an incredible legacy of countless past students and a remarkable achievement in a wide variety of media. Today, his prints are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The National Gallery, and many others. In 1975 the New Orleans Museum of Art acquired more than fifty of his works, many of which were presented three years later in Steg’s last major exhibition. This exhibition expands upon the earlier one in 1978 and aims to return Steg to his rightful position as one of the nation’s most innovative, and exciting printmakers. Russell Lord, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Prints and Drawings
Dulken Marsh, Germany, 1945, Watercolor on paper, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. P. Roussel Norman, 75.442
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Portrait of a boy, 1944, Graphite on paper, Courtesy of Frances Swigart-Steg, 2017.2.20
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Portrait of a Girl, 1944, Graphite on paper, Courtesy of Frances Swigart-Steg, 2017.2.22
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American Culture No. 2 (The Pin-Ball Machine), 1946, Etching on paper, 17 7⠄8 x 13 ž in. (plate), Courtesy of Frances Swigart-Steg, 2017.2.69
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American Culture No. #4 (Automobile), 1946, Color etching on paper, 16 x 9 ž in. (plate), Courtesy of John Abajian and Scott Simmons, 2017.2.71
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Bacchanalian Group, after Mantegna, 1948, Engraving on paper, 17 Ÿ x 27 ž in. (plate), from the collection of Deanna Lyons and David Champion, 2017.2.105
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Shoreline at Night, 1957, Color woodcut on paper, 16 3⁄8 x 24 ¼ in. (image), Courtesy of Frances Swigart-Steg and Amanda Winstead, 2017.2.27
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Figures at the Seashore, 1967, Color etching on paper, 17 ž x 23 5⠄8 in. (plate), Courtesy of Frances Swigart-Steg, 2017.2.77
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Night Rain, 1966, Photo-resist etching on paper, 13 ž x 31 ž in. (plate), Courtesy of Frances Swigart-Steg, 2017.2.57
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Red Field, 1968, Flocked serigraph on paper, 26 1⠄8 x 18 ½ in. (image), Courtesy of Frances Swigart-Steg, 2017.2.38
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Why?, 1972 Color etching and photo-resist etching on paper, 23 ž x 18 in. (plate), Courtesy of Frances Swigart-Steg, 2017.2.59
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A Capturing View, 1976, Color etching, with marbling, on paper, 21 ž x 23 ž in. (plate, irregularly shaped), Courtesy of Frances Swigart-Steg, 2017.2.80
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Cornfield, 1985, Toner powder on paper, 19 ¾ x 23 ¾ in. (sheet), Courtesy of Frances Swigart-Steg, 2017.2.107
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