"Day and Night"

Antonio Frasconi
"Day and Night"
1952
Woodcut on Japanese handmade paper
Cover of exhibition catalogue for The Cleveland Museum of Art
10"x13"
Signed and dated in pencil lower right

Excellent Condition - Minor wear consistent with age and history

Born on April 28, 1919 in Montevideo, Uruguay to parents who had emigrated from Italy during World War I. By age twelve he was apprenticing at a local printmaker's shop and in the 1940s Frasconi began experimenting with woodcuts. Inspired by the prints of Heckel and Grosz, he soon thereafter began publishing his cartoons in satirical newspapers. In 1945 he received a scholarship from the Art Students' League, and moved to New York to begin his formal education. He worked at the ASL with Yasao Kuniyoshi and in 1946 traveled to California where he had his first exhibition at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. By the 1950s he had become widely recognized as a leading graphic artist, especially in woodblock printing. He married artist Leona Pierce in 1951 and in 1955 published "See and Say, A Picture Book in Four Languages", for their son. Over the course of the next fifty years he would illustrate and design over 100 books including the poems of Langston Hughes: Let America be America Again and Pablo Neruda's Bestiary/Bestiario, the images of America's Vietnam, and A Whitman Portrait. The dictatorship in Uruguay was long and hard, finally coming to an end in 1985, four years after the artist began work on his magnum opus, Los Desaparecidos, or The Disappeared, a series of woodcuts and monotypes. Dark, graphically strong, and echoing the book format, Frasconi's art successfully portrays the horrors of torture, incarceration, and killing while specifically preserving the memory of real people.