The American Scene; Wood Engraved Prints

Good morning. This is Howard Vincent, viewing the arts for the American Scene for Illinois Institute of Technology. We have had a great deal to do in our programs up to now, in the last eight programs, eight or nine programs, with the scholarship, distinguished work in scholarship that's being done in the Chicago area, either by Chicagoans living here in the hour of Chicagoans, who are one of whom moved elsewhere. We've had a little bit to do with the arts too, but today we're going to come back to the Fine Arts, the plastic arts. Today we're coming back to the Fine Arts because four or five weeks ago, I was down in Cincinnati, and had occasion to go out to the Cincinnati Museum, and by quite by accident, because I had another purpose in mind, I ran into a remarkable show, International Print Show, which the Cincinnati Museum was putting on. You may have seen it written up in a time magazine, a very glowing account. Well, it should have been a glowing account, because it was a magnificent exhibition of prints from

artists all around the world. But one of the pleasant sites was to see on the cover, in the Florida League for the Catalog, a print by Mish Kohn, who was one of my colleagues at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and one of the distinguished print makers of America. So it occurred to me that we opt to present Mish Kohn to a wider public than to the large TV public, and so we're having him here today. He was born in Indiana, had his art education at the John Haring Institute at Indianapolis, and came to Chicago, has been a professor at Illinois Institute since 1950, an associate professor since 1950, and of course, he has done a great many prints. He's had two Guggenheim Fellowships to do prints. He has exhibited widely throughout the world, one man shows in with other people, and he has a distinct honor recently, he has had a distinct honor of a grant from the Ford

Foundation, which will subsidize a collection of his prints, rather a complete collection of his prints, about 45 of them, which will be sent around to the major cities of America during the next two years. This is an enormous project, as you can see. It will cover something like 40 cities, I imagine. And this is being gathered together by Karl Z. Grocer, a Philadelphia, the distinguished print authority there. And when this collection is ready, it will open probably next fall in the Book of the Museum, and then move around the country, and I hope sometime coming to Chicago. But let's get to Mishkoan and talk with him about his prints and about printmaking in general. Mish, what about prints in general? Why prints? Why not the larger works? Why prints for an artist? You'd say after all, duplication, isn't it? Well, originally the purpose of the print was to make a number of copies exactly the same, but with the mass communication, the mass media,

time magazine life, and so forth, it's not necessary to have the communication in the form of the fine art print. So instead, the artist has turned to the medium as just another tool for expressing his creative ideas. The medium itself applies a certain restriction on the creative act, and it's this restriction or the in -between force between the artist and the finished work that gives a certain quality to the work. There's an intermediate force between the artists and the work. Well, wouldn't you say also that this is always a struck me that there's a, well, I think it's fairly common equation, between prints and chamber music.

That is, it's a more restricted form, as chamber music is more restricted. It's more delicate, it's more precise, and it has great, finally, great subtly. The lines of the lines are clear, but it isn't like the great canvas, of course, which you can put in everything, but in the print you have to work more delicately. But people have, in general, preferred the large canvases. I myself, frankly, have in the last few years come to prefer prints. More and more, Rembrandt, for example. The little picture, the three themes upon the cross, is more eloquent than sometimes some of the great paintings, I think. And because he's working on such a smaller medium. But the prints are kind of extremely popular these days, have they because of new techniques to remove them? Yes, the change of scale is probably the most important single aspect of prints up until the 20th century. The print was rather small in scale, was kept in the cabinet in books. It was used as book

illustrations, or as giveaway sheets at religious festivals and so forth as in the Middle Ages. So it was a small scale thing, used mostly for book illustration. Now, the artist has freed it from this scale, put it to the room size. I mean, he's actually enlarged the print itself. He's not only enlarged the print, that is, it becomes a very large print. But he has enlarged his concept, so rather than being a small illustration, it becomes a powerful statement that can compete on the wall with the painting. Now, let's say, what about your tiger here? There's an example of both points, isn't it? That it's an enlarged concept. I mean, it holds its own in a room with a large painting. And yet, it is also technically an enlargement, isn't

it? Yes, but in the case of the tiger, there is still the emphasis on the small details. That you get in the early print. At the same time, the overall conception, the structure is the important thing. All of the lines in the structure goes to creating the power, the force of this graceful beast. At the same time, trying to get across some of the ferocity of the painting. But didn't you have to work in a special way there? Isn't that a rather large for wood engraving, I don't know? Yes, that's the first large wood engraving that was done. Up to that time, the larger size was, I think, about an 8 by 10. Oh, this is amazing. How did you enlarge it? Well, I got a craftsman to make a block that large.

The block is a Turkish box wood, and it's very small pieces put together, joined together to create this large surface. And then this is engraved with very fine tools. Does that create problems in printing, then? Well, also with the new technology, we have available the printing press, which allows us to print a larger size block. And so this was printed on a lithographic press. What made you do a tiger? You say you just like the gracefulness of the beast? Well, I think that the tiger was just an excuse around which to build this organization, there is this concept of the sort of, at the moment, leashed power, a certain amount of grace, a sort of compact organization in space that suggested something other than what it

was. Well, I, of course, inevitably doing this press or lip, if you think of William Blake's tiger, tiger, burning bright in the forest of the night. And it has that lethal power. There's a Chinese print, oh, six or seven hundred years old, which I have seen. Lawrence Bidian once showed it, which is a tiger very much. Oh, it's different, quite different, but still, the same sense of lethal power. Yes, I'm familiar with that, and also Buick, the English engraver's tiger that he did for his animal history. But I think perhaps my early interest in Blake did stimulate the original concept, but the literary relationship is very tenuous, I think. Well, surely, surely. It's just, and people who overstress that are making a great mistake. Yes, I think today we're less interested in illustrating a specific idea, but portraying larger concepts.

Well, now this, we have another one here, which also has kind of not a literary, but a story relationship, which I will annoy you by mentioning. The Death Writers, which is what started that, didn't it? Well, Death Writers of Dark Horse actually is a derived from a German folk song that my wife sings occasionally. And it was listening to that song, she plays a lute, and it was very mournful, and the symbol of death struck me as something that I should attempt. So I used the symbol in relation to the context of the song, but actually that's as far as it goes. Then the

illustration of the idea has been discarded, and the whole thing is to all of the lines, all of the movements are to suggest the concept of this death. Well, and this one, the previous one, the Tiger, exactly what was your technique of working? Well, this is also a wooden graving. But a lot of our viewers might not know exactly what to do, you take out a pocket knife and put it out. And no, the tools that we use for wooden graving are very similar to the tools that a jeweler uses in graving your name on the back of a watch. Exactly the same tools. However, the surface that we work on in wooden graving is much harder than silver or gold, and it's actually as hard as steel. So that you have a very strong, resistant force to work

against while you're delineating your form. So you cut out these areas with a great deal of force from the surface of the block. That's quite different from the early part of the 19th century, at least one large group of workers in I know in France. Used to just take a woodblock and draw a little sketch on it, and then they would have handed over to somebody to do the dirty work of the digging. Well, that would be a delightful thing if we had such craftsmen today who could do this. Although certain things would be lost, because from the original conception, through the work in the medium, to the final print, there's a great deal of change in the concept, changing the quality of the form. And this change couldn't take place if you had another person carry out

your ideas. Your ideas would be solidified at this one point. We wouldn't come translate it, don't they, if somebody else takes over. That's right. So it becomes a photographic reproduction, which has no value as far as we're concerned. A number of domies with blocks are very greatly in merit. And the variation, of course, comes from the man who did the work after. That's right. Well, in this literary line, I'm pursuing very tediously. Perhaps it appears in this next print that we have, the print of from Rambo, the French poet's season in Hell. Can you say something about that? Well, it comes very well here. The idea or the concept, I think, was quite separate from the Rambo idea. This is the struggle of one man with himself. The figure is lost and found again, so it is one figure that becomes

one again. The idea is just to show the struggle of the man with himself. It's wonderfully done in terms of the forms, of course, the interlacing lines and the patterns of black and white. I think it's very interesting to contrast the approach of the season in Hell, which was done about 1951 with the three kings that was done in 57. The amount of time elapsing in the development and my own approach to the graphic. You mean this one season in Hell was done before the three kings? That's right. Well, we'll get the three kings on there and see that one. What was the difference? Well, in the approach to the form in the basic concept, the literary concept is nonexistent in the three kings. One could work up one,

just to annoy you, where I can pick up another literary and focal our references to three kings. Well, I tried to figure out just how the three kings came about, because it made such a radical jump from the previous work. And it was about the time that I acquired a Chinese pot that was about a thousand years old. And this pot sat around the house and I was quite interested in the beautiful incrustations on the surface, the changes in the surface due to the time being buried in the water and so forth. The erosion. The erosions and so forth. And then I wanted to do something that would have those same qualities. And also would suggest the idea of, or the symbol of an ancient culture that's lost its grander. You know, the

sort of impotent symbols of a lost grander. But there is a sense of time there, certainly, of extension and time, way into the past. I think you've caught that. But from another material, from a metal pot, you're trying to translate a metal pot in the past? Yes. Well, I think that it wasn't just an exact translation, but it was just the idea of these qualities and the culture that is dead and thinking about all of these things conjured up the three imaginary kings. How many years is this after the Tiger? Five years, four years? The Tiger was done in 49 and this was in 57. So that's eight years. Now you're changing in technique as well as in thinking here? Yes. This is another medium. Now we've gone over to the

etching medium. Just another print medium chosen for its particular qualities that are quite separate from the woodcut, as you could see by the... But is it just a medium that accounts for the difference in your difference in composition here? Well, the differences are more than just the selection of the medium. It's the differences in time and the development of conceptions and so forth. Where there was perhaps some literary stimulus from the early works that no longer exists with this. But I think, of course, the patterning, the composition and the whole has changed so considerably. It's not merely subject, not merely the material you're working in, the etching as you can see engraving, but there's something happening to your hand, let's say. Well, I can demonstrate it perhaps better by the colossus, which is the next print. This also is a

etching engraving and here you have simplification of the environment in which this figure exists. Everything has been done away with except the stark, brutal, sculptural entity of this stone figure. I would say that that is tremendously powerful. I won't take the time. I think of indulge in all kinds of speculation as to you're catching up, you're sensing, you're instinctively capturing the developments in the last 30 or 50 years in our society at our time. Faceless men, the powers that are being unleashed in the world, the political powers, the forces of atomic energy, all these things are sort of implicit. Philosophers who diagnose our

society come up with a kind of image, which is something that is patterned. This is a growing way of our field, but what makes you want to do a colossus? Well, I think that just the brutal, gigantic figure standing alone, faceless, I'm not quite sure. You see now that's related to the tiger. You're dealing with the forest power, a kind of fury in life, unleashed. There, at least the tiger, it was unleashed in the, I imagine the colossus was unleashed too, but there you're interested in that concept. I think all of the discussions is the why, why the subject, why the form are mirror, literary, and progary, really, because all of the things that you

experience and are your inner world are externalized and become visual when you do work. But you withdraw from this inner self, and so all of these things, the society in which we live, the things that are going on today affect us, of course. Well, but perhaps literary is a wrong word. I would, in fact, I'm sure it's a wrong word, but it might be psychological. There are psychological manifestations, and that's much more complicated. That's much more involved. That involves your total self, your inner society too. The world we're talking about society, you have the, you do literally the city. This print of the city that is the next one, is this an etching tour? No, that's a woodcut, but I think we'll see the three visitors before we see the city. The reason for that is that the subject is the same, but the difference in time

is about five years between the two. So, in here you have the hostile forms of the three visitors with entourage from a friendly country. And these visitors are very hostile. Their forms are prickly. All of the things that I've used to draw these figures have been to get across this idea of hostility, although in the title for literary reasons I call it three visitors with entourage from a friendly country. But all the forms are hostile. And for a long time in my work I was accused of certain hostility. Almost all of my forms were rather hostile, and real prickly the forms were always with points.

I think that in the city that comes next the forms are softened quite a bit, but you still have the hostile forms against this city backdrop. Are you used to where it means hostile and that's the tiger, it's the glossus, it's the three visitors, it's the city too. That's one of the dominant themes you deal with. It's not a literary theme, it's a psychological social, it total is I think you say. And if we could have the city here in the city. Yes, the forms have been softened quite a bit in the five years that intervened between the three visitors and the city, but the forms are still there. The hostile forms are still there. The city is very mysterious and

brooding and rather hostile. Now let me be very picky here. What constitutes a hostile form in that picture? Well, I would say these pointed shapes, everywhere there are pointed spiky shapes that go in two directions or all directions. The figures are almost lost in the landscape. You can see this one to the left there with the hat form. Just barely make out the hostile warrior -type figure. The whole composition was one of spiky hostile forms. The city absorbs the people to the complexity. Of course, this discussion again, after the fact I wasn't too aware of the hostility involved at that time, but friends who are

psychiatrists pointed out that these look hostile to them, they have this certain quality. They carry through and so much of my work. Well, you are doing them because the forms have pleased you and you would want to get patterns on the paper. Well, you are doing dogs in this next picture. We have you and dogs are a great deal of wit. This one, by the way, all of you who are looking at this in color are very fortunate because it comes out so beautifully in this program, a color program. And you can get the much more of the wit of it by seeing it in color. What do you call this one then? This is my grandfather's mustache and it's one of a series of portraits of imaginary ancestors. I all done from a slightly humorous point of view, completely imaginary and just for fun. There are about 25 in the series so far and one is called the

general and the other is my other ancestor and so far. They are all very done from a fun point of view. Do you have a regular family tree? Yes, I built my own because I didn't have too many portraits of my ancestors. This is a very, very wedding sort of thing to do. And those three kings might even be regarded as your ancestors. Yes, I also considered those as part of my imaginary ancestors. Well, what fun. These will be a museum for your children. Yes, they'll have a portrait gallery. How many prints do you print up when you run off of the saddle? About 30. That's an arbitrary limitation, a difference with various artists. But there's a certain amount of time involved in printing and so forth and I'd rather spend my time in the creative act rather than just

printing an addition. Although printing an addition is part of the print process and should be done. What's happening with your plates? Well, sometimes they go into museum collections or private collections. I have kept a great many of them. They'll all be saved. I heard correct me if I'm wrong. The Library of Congress is perhaps moving towards getting as many of your plates as possible. Do they have a complete file of your print? Yes, they have a complete collection or they're working on a complete collection of everything that I've done for about the past 20 years. That is the major work, not the small minor pieces, but the large works. Do you have a complete collection yourself? No, I don't. I no longer have, but I have about one of at least three quarters of the

pieces. Will you accompany the show at all that's going around America? No, maybe one or two of the openings, but I may go to one or two. Will it come to Chicago? Yes, I don't know when, but it will. No, I certainly hope so, because this would be a very great move for us. We've had Mishkorn, the print maker, talking about his prints, which are going to be touring the country for the next two years. Thank you very much, Mishkorn.