Faust Gallery

Mauricio Lasansky

Printmaker & Educator

b. 1914, Buenos Aires, Argentina  ·  d. 2012, Iowa City, Iowa

Mauricio Lasansky editioning the master plate for Maria Jimena, Iowa City, Iowa, 1989

Mauricio Lasansky was one of the fathers of modern American printmaking. Born in Buenos Aires in 1914, he learned engraving from his father, a Polish immigrant, and entered the city’s Superior School of Fine Arts in 1933. By his early twenties he was directing the Free Fine Arts School in Villa María, and in 1943 Buenos Aires gave him a solo retrospective.

That same year he won the first of five Guggenheim Fellowships and moved to New York. He studied the print collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and worked at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17, the workshop where much of modern intaglio was being invented. He counted Picasso, Goya, and El Greco among his lasting influences.

In 1945 the University of Iowa hired him as a visiting lecturer. Within three years he was a full professor, and he went on to build a printmaking program that offered one of the first Master of Fine Arts degrees in the field. His students went on to lead printmaking departments across the country, and in the 1960s Time magazine called him the nation’s most influential printmaker. He retired from teaching in 1984 and kept working in the studio until his death in Iowa City in 2012, at 97.

Lasansky worked in etching, engraving, drypoint, and relief, and he pushed intaglio to a new scale—some of his color prints were pulled from dozens of separate plates. His most searing work, The Nazi Drawings (1961–1966), is a cycle of thirty monumental drawings and a triptych in graphite and watercolor wash confronting the brutality of the Holocaust. First shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1967, the series is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art.

Lasansky’s legacy continues in his family. His son Tomas Lasansky, also represented by Faust Gallery, carries the printmaking tradition forward in his own work.