TitleMadame Curie
Artist
Mauricio Lasansky
(1914 - 2012)
Date1987
MediumColor etching, drypoint, and soft-ground etching with scraping and burnishing on cream wove paper
DimensionsSheet size: 35 15/16 × 28 1/4 in.
Image size: 29 13/16 × 23 7/8 in.
Mat size: 37 1/4 × 30 in.
EditionEdition of 70.
SignedSigned in graphite LwrCtr: "M LASANSKY / 1987".
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, December 6, 1989
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1989.185
Label TextOne of the best known and longest-standing printmakers in the U.S., Mauricio Lasansky was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and established himself as a printmaker there in the 1930s before winning a Guggenheim Fellowship to come to America. It was in New York in the early 1940s that Lasansky, along with many Americans of his generation, attended Atelier 17, the experimental print workshop established by the influential British artist Stanley William Hayter. After World War II Lasansky was invited to establish the print studio at the University of Iowa, which soon became "the printmaking capital of the U.S." Lasansky oversaw the department, which has produced many distinguished alumni, until his retirement in 1985.While Lasansky emerged at a time when abstraction was becoming an increasingly dominant artistic mode, representation of the human figure never left his work. Beginning with his early works in the 1930s and reaching an apogee with his "Nazi Drawings" of the 1960s, Lasansky continues to place humanist themes at the center of his prints. "Madame Curie" is an homage to the distinguished Polish-French scientist in the field of radioactivity and part of a series of works the artist created in the 1980s honoring great thinkers, artists, and scientists in history. The work is also something of a technical achievement and the color intaglio process uses thirteen different plates and combines etching, engraving, soft ground, and scraping and burnishing to create the image.
