^
Died on 21 April 2003: Robert
H. Blackburn, Black US printmaker, born on 10 December 1920,
in Summit NJ.
 <--
Portrait of Robert Blackburn in the studio (1937, 40x31cm)
by Ronald Joseph [1910-1992]
— He was introduced to printmaking in
1938 at the WPA's Harlem Community Art Center, where his teachers and colleagues
included Harlem
Renaissance artists Charles
Alston [1907-1977], Romare
Bearden [02 Sep 1914 – 1988], Jacob
Lawrence [1917-2000], and Augusta
Savage [1892-1962]. At the Art Students League in 1941 he studied lithography
under Will Barnet. In 1948 Blackburn started an informal cooperative for
lithography which would become the Printmaking Workshop, whose users would
include Benny
Andrews [1930~], Nell Blaine, Mel
Edwards [1937~], Michi Itami, Lucio
Pozzi [1935~], Faith
Ringgold [1930~], Betye
Saar [1926~], Juan Sanchez, Michelle
Stuart [1940~], Ursula von Rydingsvard [1942~], Kay
WalkingStick, and William T. Williams. . From 1957 to 1963 Blackburn
was the first master printer at Universal Limited Art Editions on Long Island,
where he printed for an emerging generation of artists that included Larry
Rivers [1923-2002], Helen
Frankenthaler [1928~], Jasper
Johns [1930~], and Robert
Rauschenberg [1925~]. After that, Blackburn devoted his energy to administering
the Printmaking Workshop; and to his own art, which had gradually shifted
from figurative work to a highly colored abstraction.
— Born in 1920 in Summit, New Jersey, Robert Blackburn studied art
in New York City at the Art Students League after graduating from DeWitt
Clinton High School. Throughout much of his career, he has been at the center
of the Black art world and has worked with many of the major two-dimensional
artists. His unique position in the art world resulted in part from his
Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Located in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan,
it has served as a center for many artists. Blackburn first went to "the
street" (17th Street) in 1948 after having migrated downtown from Harlem.
He started the workshop primarily as a place in which to create and disseminate
his own work at a time when there were very few opportunities for Black
artists. Though now located at a different site, he has been on 17th Street
ever since.
Blackburn studied with the best. He studied
under Rex Goreleigh at the Harlem Community Art Center at the same time
as Jacob Lawrence. In the New York public schools, Countee Cullen was one
of Blackburn's English teachers. Other teachers important in his life were
Riva Helfond (his first teacher in lithography), Henry "Mike" Bannarn (his
first inspiration), and Charles "Spinky" Alston. While still a student in
junior high school, he worked at the Harmon Foundation. Blackburn's extensive
facilities still cater to those artists who want to use and master traditional
methods of lithography, etching, and woodcut. Hundreds of examples of the
work done by artists who have passed through the workshop decorate the walls
of the building, and Blackburn recorded the artists who have worked there
in many thick albums filled with photographs. They are an impressive visual
display of the importance of the workshop's place in the art world.
At a time when computer-generated images occupy
a greater prominence in the visual world, the workshop holds to its traditions.
The workshop has become the home for a community of artists, including many
loyal supporters. One of the younger generation of artists who has found
a home in the workshop is a Nigerian who prefers to be known simply as Augustino.
Jayne Cortez and Mel Edwards have worked there, too. The importance of the
very act of making prints cannot be underestimated. Prints are less expensive
on the open market than one-of-a-kind drawings or paintings in part because
of the multiple images. This means that more people can afford to own them,
and thus an image created in this way potentially has a wide impact. The
act of making prints makes art more accessible and aids in the dissemination
of the art. As a visual artist and principal administrator of the workshop,
Blackburn wears two hats. He has also taught at every major art school in
New York, including New York University, Columbia University, the School
of Visual Arts, and Pratt Institute.
— Blackburn changed the course of US art through his graphic work
and the Printmaking Workshop, which he founded in New York City in 1948
(55 West 17th Street, New York NY 10025). His pioneering contributions to
the technical and aesthetic development of abstract color lithography is
as legendary as his generosity in encouraging and training thousands of
diverse artists to experiment in the graphic medium.
Growing up in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s,
Blackburn was influenced by the intellectual and artistic legacies of the
Harlem Renaissance as well as European abstraction and the artistic ideologies
and political tendencies of both US social realism and Mexican modernism.
He learned lithography as a teenager at a community center on 125th Street
sponsored by the Depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA). While
in his twenties, he studied at the Art Students League for three years.
Later, he did freelance artistic work for institutions such as the Harmon
Foundation and began to forge his signature abstract style amidst the varied
modernist currents he encountered. In 1948, he opened his own studio, the
Printmaking Workshop, launching the oldest and largest non-profit print
workshop in the United States.
After a period of travel and study in Europe,
in 1957 Blackburn became the first master printer for the prestigious Universal
Limited Art Editions (ULAE). He printed the first seventy-nine editions
for the seminal workshop, setting the standard by which ULAE exerted a powerful
influence on modernist printmaking in America. His own complicated, varicolored
abstractions prefigured or complemented more familiar ULAE works. In particular,
his experiments in color lithography during the 1950s helped fuel the explosion
of graphic art that occurred in the next decade.
In 1971, the Printmaking Workshop became a
non-profit corporation, with a mission to maintain creative and artistic
quality, support and encourage innovation, create opportunities for Third
World and minority artists, and foster public appreciation of the fine art
print. The Printmaking Workshop was renowned for its open, informal, and
accommodating atmosphere. Through the workshop, Blackburn has been teacher
and friend to thousands of artists--as master printer, technical advisor,
fund raiser, diplomat, catalyst, and instigator.
— During his youth, Robert Blackburn
was mentored and shaped by Harlem Renaissance artists including Charles
"Spinky" Alston, Augusta Savage, and James Lesesne Wells. From age thirteen,
he created and studied art at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public
Library and the Harlem YMCA. At DeWitt Clinton High School, he contributed
artwork, stories, and poetry to the school's literary magazine, The Magpie.
He also participated in the Harlem Arts Workshop, the Uptown Art Laboratory,
and the Harlem arts salon known as "306."
Following his high school graduation in 1940,
Blackburn attended the Art Students League in New York on scholarship until
1943. There he worked with painter and printmaker Will Barnet, who became
a life-long friend. For four years, Blackburn freelanced as a graphic artist
for institutions including the philanthropic Harmon Foundation, the China
Institute of America, and Associated American Artists, while his vision
of a career in printmaking developed. By late 1947, he had acquired his
own lithographic press. In 1948, he opened his own studio in Chelsea, printing
for artists and encouraging his friends to experiment in lithography. In
1950, when the innovative Parisian printmaking studio, Atelier 17 returned
to Europe after a war-time hiatus in New York, Blackburn installed an intaglio
press at his shop a few blocks away. Between 1951 and 1952, he worked with
Barnet on a groundbreaking suite of color lithographs that were featured
in the contemporary art journal ARTnews.
Lithography classes offered at the WPA-sponsored
Harlem Community Art Center introduced him to the art of printmaking. The
center, initiated by Savage and artist and writer, Gwendolyn Bennett, became
a model for Blackburn's own workshop years later. Among his colleagues at
this time were artists Romare Bearden, Ernest Crichlow, Roy
DeCarava [1919~], and Jacob Lawrence. Also key to his artistic development
were his lithography teacher, Riva Helfond, and his friend, the artist Ronald
Joseph. Blackburn's drawings and lithographs from this period won national
acclaim in exhibitions from Chicago to New York and were cited and praised
by such art critics as Alain Locke and James Porter.
Prominent artist Will
Barnet [1911~] was an early teacher of and mentor to Robert Blackburn
as well as a founding member of the Printmaking Workshop. As their relationship
evolved from teacher and student to colleague and friend, the two printmakers
were eager to explore the artistic and technical potential of lithography.
During the mid 1950s Robert Blackburn's printmaking
workshop was run by a loose cooperative of artist-friends while he spent
a year and a half in Paris and Europe, under the auspices of a prestigious
John Hay Whitney Traveling Fellowship. After his return, he was hired in
1957 as the first master printer at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE),
the lithographic venture founded by Tatyana and Maurice Grosman, based in
West Islip, Long Island. At ULAE, he printed for an emerging generation
of artists including Larry Rivers, Grace
Hartigan [1922~], Helen Frankenthaler, and Robert Rauschenberg. His
own predilections and fluency with the medium contributed to the new "look"
of these works, which would go on to define the US's "graphics boom."
During this active period, Blackburn's color
graphics reached a creative and technical zenith. In 1963, he began to operate
his own Manhattan workshop full time, providing an open graphics studio
for artists of diverse social and economic backgrounds, ethnicities, styles,
and levels of expertise. Under his direction, the Printmaking Workshop became
one of the most vital collaborative art studios in the world.
Blackburn spent 1953 and 1954 in Europe (primarily
Paris) on a Jay Hay Whitney Traveling Fellowship. When he returned to New
York in 1955, he entered a new creative period. During the 1950s and 1960s,
he produced a series of small, Cubistic
table top views in both intaglio and lithography. His explorations of this
theme show Blackburn's continuing interest in mark-making as a representational
sign or as an abstracted, compositional element.
From 1957-1963, Blackburn served as the first
master printer at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE). As he helped other,
better-known artists with their productions, his own work reached its zenith
in color abstraction, as seen in Color Symphony. At ULAE, Blackburn
collaborated with prominent artist practitioners of Abstract Expressionism
and Pop
Art, including Jim
Dine [1935~], Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg.
In most cases, he taught the artists how to make lithographs, sharing his
sensibility of the medium and his approach to the stone.
With incorporation came increased sponsorship
and funding from sources such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the
New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of
Cultural Affairs. Their contributions allowed Blackburn to invite a wide
range of artists to his workshop. He conceived and produced varied, ambitious,
collaborative projects such as Impressions: Our World (1974), a
portfolio by notable Black US artists with introductory texts by artist
Romare Bearden and art historian Edmund Barry Gaither.
The lively intellectual exchange within his
workshop stimulated Blackburn's own graphic pursuits. He investigated abstract
color woodcuts throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. During this period,
artist Krishna Reddy taught his innovative viscosity technique at the Printmaking
Workshop. Romare Bearden's work in photoetching and stenciled monoprints
also inspired both Blackburn and the workshop community.
— Man
With Load (or The Toiler, Toil) (1936) _ Blackburn absorbed the lessons
of the Mexican muralists through his teacher Charles Alston [1907-1977],
who met Diego Rivera [1866-1957] in 1933 at Rockefeller Center. Man
with Load reprises a "burden carriers" theme that also appeared in
Rivera's works. Many of Blackburn's early drawings draw on the conventions
of monumentalism found in Mexican mural painting, as well as social realist
iconography.
— Refugees
(1938) — Interior
(1958) — Color
Symphony (1960)
— Girl
in Red (1950) _ This is a pivotal work in Blackburn's development as
he turned towards abstraction and away from figurative work. Using a rich
color palette, Blackburn combines age-old artistic themes of still life,
landscape, and portraiture. His subject, a young Black girl, engages the
viewer directly and wryly, her arms crossed.
— Heavy
Forms, Pink (1958) _ Heavy
Forms (1961) _ From 1958 to 1961, Blackburn worked on variations of
the lithograph Heavy Forms. The imagery can be seen as deriving from Blackburn's
earlier tabletop still lifes. However here, the image matches its "tabletop"
to the printed surface, tipping it up to mimic the linked edge of the lithographic
stone and print process itself. Blackburn treated the stone with tremendous
fluidity, re-orienting the image and frequently signing his work on both
top and bottom margins, allowing options for viewing.
— Faux
Pas (1963) _ In this lithograph, Robert Blackburn winks with reference
to Robert Rauschenberg's Accident (1963), the "gaffe" which would
become such a key event in the history of contemporary printmaking. Through
the middle of the image, a white stripe of paper breaks the image, alluding
to the fragile nature of the limestone. Blackburn would continue to explore
the broken stone concept with a suite of elegantly calligraphic works, including
Curious Stone, that also recall his interest in Sumi ink drawing. —
Curious
Stone (1970)
— Red
Inside (1972) — Woodscape
(1984) — Three
Ovals (1980) _ These three prints are from a series of related woodcuts
Blackburn created between the 1960s and 1980s. Reworking several large blocks,
he created images that were bold and masterfully graphic. He began with
a monochrome image of three ovals, framed by black lines of varying widths—hearkening
back to his earlier exploration of Cubist language and revealing the texture
of the wood itself. A later experiment, in which he filled certain areas
with directly printed woodgrain, led him to create Woodscape, which
vertically reorients the imagery in Three Ovals.
— Yellow
Flash (1972) _ In this woodcut, Blackburn creates a heavenly space where
the seam of the blocks reads like a revelatory crack in the heavens. It
registers as a jewel-like yellow diamond embraced by red. This is part of
a series of large related woodcuts, in which Blackburn continued his practice
of recycling and re-visioning blocks and imagery.
|
—
[“Where there's a Wille, there's a Waye?”] 
