Antonio Frasconi Landscape Prints

Frasconi, Antonio (American, born Argentina, 1919-2013). BREAKERS. Woodcut in colors, 1969. Edition of 50. Signed, titled, dated, and numbered 12/50 in pencil. 7 x 4 5/8 inches. In e...

Amazing woodcut print with whimsical, dynamic portrayal of the sun and the wind by American-Uruguayan artist Antonio Frasconi (1919-2013). Edition number, signature and date signed in pencil lower margin. Presented in an archival mat with vintage, rustic giltwood frame. Art has undergone professional conservation. Image, 16.5"H x 11.88"W. In 1953, Time magazine called Antonio Frasconi America’s foremost practitioner of the ancient art of the woodcut. Four decades later, Art Journal called him the best of his generation. Mr. Frasconi was patient and meticulous in his art. . Before producing a woodcut titled “Sunrise — Fulton Fish Market” in 1953, he spent three months wandering Lower Manhattan’s wharves and the holds of fishing boats. He spent hour upon hour studying “just how a man lifts a box,” he said. He said the capricious nature of wood governed many artistic decisions. He loved the hands-on experience of working with wood, some of which he gathered from the beach in front of his home, which he built, in South Norwalk, Conneticut. The medium of wood offer to Frasconi a very interactive process: "... often you must surrender to the grain, find the movement of the scene, the mood of the work, in the way the grain runs.” Growing up in Uruguay, he dropped out of art school, Circulo de Belles Artes, at age 12 because he was bored with copying from plaster casts of classical sculpture and became a printer’s apprentice. On his own, he made posters deriding Franco and Hitler, which he signed “Chico.” In 1945, he came to New York on a one-year scholarship to study at the Art Students League. The next year he had a show at the Brooklyn Museum. He then studied at The New School for Social Reasearch and later taught there. After moving to California, he worked as a gardener and as a guard at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, where he had an exhibition. Frasconi was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1952. In 1959 he was a runner-up for the Caldecott Medal from the U.S. children's librarians, which annually honors the illustrator of the best American picture book for children. Thus "The House That Jack Built," which he also wrote, is retrospectively termed a Caldecott Honor Book. In 1962 Frasconi won a Horn Book...