Moishe Smith

20th century aquatint etching figurative portrait ink unfinished female subject

1962

Moishe Smith was born on January 10, 1929, in Chicago, Illinois. He was a printmaker whose naturalistic realism style interprets the scene for his viewer. His command of the intaglio plate was profound and in print, after print, he displayed his understanding of how to use it to evoke a peaceful landscape or a vibrant city square. He was not a miniaturist, his plates were large and his compositions simple, yet his prints had at the same time a sense of intimacy and a feeling of spaciousness. They were complex without being fussy, allusive without being obscure. His feeling for landscape had been evident from his very earliest prints and he remains a figurative artist, always concerned with the recreation of the visible world. But like Ensor, whose work he echoes (but does not mimic) in The Peasant's Entry into Brussels and A Gothic Tale, Smith added to the familiar world a substantial component of fantasy. Some of his finest prints were pastoral, like the lyrical The Four Seasons or the intimate Pines of Rapallo, but Smith had also remarked on the more grotesque aspects of modern society in a number of satirical works that were almost unknown even to those who have enthusiastically followed his career. In his plates, such as Roman Holiday or The Glory that was Rome, he pulled together the several strands of his earlier work, the exploration of architecture and nature, the treatment of the human figure in the city square and added a new sense of disciplined form and line. Above all, the prints of Moishe Smith are exceptionally personal statements, acknowledging a tradition of masterful printmaking. He died in Logan, Utah on July 5, 1993.