Feb. 22, 2008

By Cate McQuaid

A bold approach
Louis Schanker, a dynamic printmaker of the 1930s and 1940s, has a show of prints
and paintings up at Mercury Gallery. His style varied from Cubist abstraction to lovely
little street scenes. The painting "Banjo Player" (1931) looks like a tamer version of
Picasso's "Guitar" (1913), with the musician's body fracturing and flattening around
the instrument. Schanker was primarily a woodcut printer; the most engaging paintings
here have the look of a woodcut print, with bold, dark lines and aggressive shapes -
such as "Theater Box" (1933), in which block-headed audience members bathe in patches
of color, as if seated in sun shining through stained glass. Those patches of color became
Schanker's trademark. They appear in prints as well, such as the woodcut "Football" (1940).
Frenetic black lines convey athletes tackling and jumping against panes of blue, mauve,
and orange that evoke, as much as the figures do, action and movement. The other works
are skilled - his Parisian street scenes are sweet - but it's images like this, with lines colliding
and passages of color shifting, in which he found his vision.

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