Cameron Booth (1892–1980)
Untitled Abstraction, 1952. Lithograph, edition 3/10. Printed by Robert Blackburn, New York City.
Created in 1952, this boldly gestural lithograph captures Cameron Booth at a pivotal moment: sixty years old, teaching simultaneously at the Art Students League in New York and the Minneapolis School of Art, and fully committed to the abstract language that would define the final decades of his long career. Known as the dean of Minnesota artists, Booth brought to New York a mature artistic intelligence shaped by decades of Regionalist painting, European modernism, and Hans Hofmann's color theory — all of it distilled here into sweeping calligraphic forms, biomorphic shapes, and atmospheric tonal passages characteristic of lithographic crayon and tusche wash technique. Large looping arcs dominate the composition, enclosing suggestions of landscape — faint rooftops, cliffs, organic forms — while a sharp triangular spike rises from center-bottom and a rounded seed-pod shape anchors the right, the whole animated by a cluster of small circular marks at the left. The high-contrast black and white palette intensifies the print's raw energy, evoking both Miró's biomorphism and the gestural freedom of Abstract Expressionism at its most confident.
The impression bears the stamp of Robert Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop, New York City — a distinction of considerable significance. Blackburn's cooperative studio was the preeminent lithography workshop in mid-century America, its presses sought out by the most serious printmakers of the era. That Booth had this edition of ten pulled at Blackburn's shop in 1952 — the very period when Blackburn and Will Barnet were producing technically groundbreaking color lithographs that appeared in ARTnews — places this work at the center of New York's graphic arts renaissance. The Blackburn blind stamp is effectively a hallmark of craft and seriousness.
Edition 3 of 10.