TitleTree Burst
Artist
Edmond Casarella
(American, 1920 - 1996)
Date1958
MediumColor paper relief print on beige laid paper
DimensionsSheet size: 30 15/16 x 22 9/16 in.
Image size: 30 1/16 x 21 7/8 in.
Mat size: 37 1/4 x 30 in.
Edition14/18
SignedSigned lower right in graphite: "E. Casarella '58".
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, May 25, 1994
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1994.19
Label TextEdmond Casarella was a pioneer printmaker and one of a group of artists who refined and perfected the paper relief cut technique in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It was a period of intense experimentation, about which his good friend and fellow printmaker Vincent Longo, NA, has said, "We were all looking at ways to extend [the process of] the relief print." Casarella was born in New Jersey in 1920 and as a young man attended The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art studying under Raymond Dowden and Peppino Mangravite, NA. After graduation Casarella worked with Anthony Velonis, who had been the head of the WPA's Federal Art Project silkscreen printing division. Like many artists of his generation, Casarella served in the army, enlisting in 1944; he saw combat action as part of an antitank unit in the Battle of the Bulge.Following the war, Casarella continued his studies at the Brooklyn Museum Art School where he learned printmaking under Gabor Peterdi, NA. By the late 1940s Casarella and Longo began to develop the paper relief print process using cardboard. This technique, also known as the collagraph, is created by adding layers of paper to a support in order to create the printing surface. As David Acton has noted, the additive process of making the relief print blocks came naturally to Casarella as he was also a talented sculptor. During the 1950s, the relief print process emerged as a viable way for printmakers to express their ideas and by the end of the decade was seen as an acceptable alternative to the more laborious technique of woodcut printing. This process would dominate Casarella's work of the 1950s and 60s, and then again in the 1980s.
One of the attractions of paper relief prints was its versatility. Bernard Chaet, NA used Casarella's "Tree Burst" as a prime example of the medium in a 1958 article for Arts in which he identifies a narrowing gap between painting and printmaking, attributing it to the rise in prints of an unlimited color range. While "Tree Burst" is a quintessential example of relief printing, it is also an archetypal Abstract Expressionist print. The composition emanates from a central, vertical element that recalls a faceted, tree-like shape. While the lower portion of the print is essentially solid dark tones, its upper portion is filled with forms radiating outward from its center. Casarella used groupings of geometric elements to create this effect, but he did so in an extremely gestural way, effectively giving this "tree" its "burst." Despite the overall green and brown tonality of the print, it was a complex technical undertaking, created with six separate blocks and twenty different ink colors. The artist would initially create a study for the work and then print each of the separations before embarking on the final version. "Tree Burst" is a wonderful example of how the influence of Abstract Expressionism reached beyond the medium of painting and permeated nearly every aspect of the arts in the 1950s.
