Anne Ryan: The Black-Line Woodcut exhibition will be on view from October 19 through November 19, 2011.
Ryan (1889-1954) made woodcuts for
three or four years stating in 1945. Starting in 1941 she studied printmaking
with Stanley William Hayter at the New York home of Atelier 17, under the
auspices of The New School. She learned woodcut techniques from Louis Schanker,
who also taught at the New School.
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| Capricioso, 1946/47 |
The white--line woodcut technique, as developed by B.J.O.
Nordfeldt, in Provincetown, Massachusetts, during the First World War,
simplified the printing of color relief prints. An image was drawn on a piece
of soft pine and these lines were then cut away, making grooves. The primary
advantage was that these lines isolated different colors and made it possible
to place several inks on the block at once without the wet inks touching. This
drastically reduced the number of blocks needed to make an image, sometimes to
even a single one. Ryan used her fingers as well as more traditional rollers to
apply ink or oil paint onto the matrix. The damped paper could be attached or
folded under the block to ensure registration of colors.
Ryan was a master at layering inks and transferring the ink
to the paper by hand rubbing; each impression is essentially a monoprint.
Further, she used black paper that changed the white line of the Provincetown
prints to black. In the finished images these read as drawn lines and also
outlined shapes and areas. Where the paper showed through the pigments it added
an additional richness to the color. The black sheets themselves were
originally used to wrap photographic papers in stacks of 10 x 8 x 1 inches.
Ryan ironed and sometimes patched them. The creases form lines of their own and
are intrinsic to a particular impression.
In the catalogue for the exhibition A Spectrum of
Innovation, Color Printing in America 1890-1960, David Acton wrote that in
printing on black paper Ryan’s “Colors achieved a saturation and luminosity
quite different from those caused by white papers. In Ryan’s prints, the black
ground read through the thin layers of ink, and an organic mottled texture was
effectively achieved. This extraordinary luminosity and the softness and
subtlety of hue are what distinguish these woodcuts.”
Although a few prints are totally abstract, Ryan explored a
full repertoire of themes in woodcut, while similar compositions might reveal
vases on a table, women under a proscenium arch or on a beach, or boulders on a
gently curving planet. Within a single subject space and light changed from one
impression to another.
Ryan began painting in 1938 when she was nearly
fifty.
Within
an abbreviated career, from 1939 to 1953, she made paintings,
drawings, collages, plaster pieces, and prints. Her first one-woman painting show was at the Pinacotheca Gallery, NY, in
1941. She lived in Greenwich Village; the artists Giorgio Cavallon, Hans
Hofmann, Barnet Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Tony Smith, were among her
friends. The Prismatic Eye: Collages by Anne Ryan, 1948-1954, was shown at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2010
Link to site to view exhibition:
http://gallery.me.com/stg568#100748
