Current or Recent Showings
Selected Prints by Louis Schanker
An
exhibition of selected prints by Louis Schanker on loan from the Susan Teller
Gallery, New York, will be presented in the League's first-floor office. Louis
Schanker (1908-1981) began his art studies at the League in the 1920s. By the
1930s he had taken up printmaking and became a graphic arts supervisor for the
WPA. As a member of The Ten, Schanker advocated for experimentation and
tolerance in art. His own graphic work established his reputation as an
innovator in the field.
September 8 - October 8, 2009
Location: This
exhibition is will be held in the League's first-floor office.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Luce Foundation Center for American Art
Discover America's Stories Through Its Art
Abstract
Man
Black
and White
Treetops
CMS at the Schanker Studio,
Stamford Connecticut September 14-21, 2008
University of
Kentucky Art Museum
BREAKING TRADITION, FORGING AHEAD:
WPA Prints from the Collection
May 10 - September 15, 2008
http://www.uky.edu/ArtMuseum/wpa.htm
Mercury Gallery
Louis
Schanker
8 Newbury Street, 2nd floor
Boston, MA 02116
617 859 0054
Louis Schanker
February 7 - March 4, 2008
Boston Globe Review
Paintings from the WPA September 15 - October 9, 2007
Works on Paper
April 28 - May 22, 2007
Susan Teller Gallery
Louis
Schanker
568 Broadway, Room 103A
New York, New York, 10012
212 941 7335
American Modernists - Pastels July 11 - August 24, 2007
Picturing Oz February 16 - March 24, 2007
Jundt Art Museum "Sports
of All Sorts," December 1, 2006 - March 10,
2007
Gonzaga University
Spokane Washington
Loeb Art Center, "For
the People, American Mural Drawings of the 30's and 40's"
Vassar
College,
January 12th - March 11th 2007
Poughkeepsie, New York
Prints with/out Pressure: American Relief Prints
from the 1940's through the 1960's
New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue and 42nd. Street
October 28th 2005 through January 29th 2006
From the catalog.......
Louis Schanker was a key figure
in the resurgence of interest in the color relief print. As a technically
innovative
printmaker and as a teacher, he influenced many of the
artists in this exhibition. Trained at Cooper Union,
the Education Alliance, and the Art Students League, he made
his first woodcut in 1935, a challenging
seven-color print, which already reflected his appreciation
for the School of Paris (he traveled abroad from
1931 to 1933), German Expressionism, and the Japanese
woodcut. Though his early imagery was figurative,
his work became increasingly abstract, concerned with Cubist
distortions of form and space, realized with
bright colors and tactile surfaces. While a member of the
Graphic Arts Division of the Federal Art Project,
and later the supervisor of color woodblock printing there,
he developed new printing techniques. He layered
oil-based inks on top of each other, often before the
previous layer had dried, to realize dense, inky surfaces;
he also printed colors over black ink, giving the colors a
special luminosity. For a time Schanker shared a
teaching studio at the New School with Stanley William Hayter,
another passionate experimenter, though with
intaglio processes. Schanker believed that
“The possibility of invention … is one of the most intriguing aspects of the
woodcut.”