Lasansky exhibit highlights father's influence
This portrait of Albert Einstein from 2013 by Tomás Lasansky is one of the works included in the exhibit “Mauricio and Tomás Lasansky: Father and Son” through March 15 at the University of Notre Dame’s Snite Museum of Art.
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By EVAN GILLESPIE South Bend Tribune Correspondent - Feb 5, 2015
As an artist, Mauricio Lasansky was broadly influential — he’s typically included on lists of the most important printmakers of the 20th century — but a new exhibition at the Snite Museum of Art provides an opportunity to see how influential Lasansky was within the walls of his own home.
An exhibit of the work of both the elder Lasansky and his youngest son, Tomás, the show brings the direct connections between the two artists’ work to the foreground, but it also emphasizes the differences. In a more subtle way, the show points out how time, generational differences and stylistic choices can, despite the weight of influence, make clearly similar works so distinct in their impact.
Mauricio’s most well-known works, the deeply disturbing “Nazi Drawings,” are not included here, but that’s not to say that the prints that are included are missing the unsettling quality that’s characteristic of much of the artist’s work. Most of the prints are richly layered combinations of multiple printmaking techniques, and they’re colored in somber tones and deep blacks. The large-scale portraits of women and children are haunted; they are simmering with emotion, like the subjects of Expressionist works from the early century, but the subjects avoid direct connection with us, either by turning away or staring out at us with blank, empty eyes.
Where Tomás engages with his father’s work, however, is in the more blatantly iconic subject matter, the portraits of famous people; Abraham Lincoln, Verdi, Einstein and others whose faces and names we take for granted are staples of both artists’ work. But whereas Mauricio’s celebrity portraits have some of the same introspective aims as his other prints, Tomás focuses more on the popular image of the subject, appropriating the likenesses that we already know well and drawing on the influences of Pop Art and postmodernism.
Tomás also explores the idea of iconography for its own sake — his images of a samurai and a Roman centurion explicitly quote his father’s portrait of Quetzcoatl — and his images of Native Americans are more outspokenly political than his father’s; his images of women more overtly sexualized.
There is, too, an element of precision and traditionalism in Tomás’ work that is largely absent in his father’s prints. Tomás’ big portrait drawings are deftly executed by the hand of a talented and well-trained draftsman, and he obviously sees value in the mastery of technical skill; his “Rennaissance Woman,” for example, pays direct homage to the work of Botticelli and the masters of the late 15th century.
His frenetically textured acrylic paintings cohere into surprisingly naturalistic pictures, and even his ink-spatter paintings confine their splotches and splashes to carefully delineated areas so that the overall impression is one of exactness and accuracy.
Mauricio was unquestionably an artist of the 20th century; the influences on Tomás’ work, though, are much more difficult to confine to a particular century.
Tomás Lasansky developed as an artist under the tutelage of one of the 20th century’s greatest printmakers, and this show is proof that he was paying attention to what his father tried to teach him; his affection and respect for his father’s work is a central aspect of his own career. But the show also makes clear that Tomás was paying equal attention to the artistic traditions that were in place long before his father started working and to the drive of his own internal motivation.
The equitable balancing of tradition and influence with innovation is what moves art forward as it passes from generation to generation, and this exhibition gives us a rare chance to see that process so undeniably at work.