BeepBeesBeep!: Zimmerli Art Museum: Blocks of Color Show

For this class's gallery visit I chose good ol' Zimmerli Art Museum conveniently located in the lovely city of New Brunswick. Did I mention it was also free? Happiness. There was a show going on (still is...until January 3rd) of contemporary (early 1900s and on) American wood block prints. I found it to be a lovely show, really diverse, and very interesting to explore. I feel the show really gave a great overview of how differently woodblocks can be used and the Japanese traditional style is by no means the only way it can be done.
Though there were numerous different ways the artists used the wood block, some of my favorites were in the traditional Japanese style. Helen Hyde had a great deal of prints in the show and, as I found out from a women giving a tour, Hyde truly does the prints in the traditional Japanese style. She designs the print, it is carved by a master carver and then printed by a master printer. She even went to Japan in order to learn this style. Some of my favorites by her were, Complaints (1914) and The Family Umbrella (1915).

Bertha Lum also followed the traditional style, though her prints caught my eye even more because they reminded me of anime. I love the grapic style and her use of such a fluid line. A good line makes me go crazy. Tanabata (1912) stuck out to me.

I was excited to see they had on display a print and then the block it was actually printed from. Blanche Lazzell's West Virginia Hills (1919) was shown with the hand painted two-sided woodblock next to it. It was interesting to see how it looks carved and then transfered. I like the block itslef; it looked like a wooden painting. This print of course looked nothing like the Japanese style, but was still very astetically pleasing. There were bright, solid colors and thick, printerly lines and spaces.
As the show progressed, things got more interesting and prints looked less and less conventional. Donald Judd's Untitled (1994) was hanging there and I thought it was funny because it was so obviously his.

Finally, one of my favorites was Dan Walsh's OVG Orange, OVG Green, and OVG Violet (2007). They were very simple but beautiful in the way the thick lines of color were layered and created a myriad of lovely, lovely colors. They were a combination of my two favorite things in art pieces: colors and lines. I looked at them for a while.