Art:
Deedy, John
Art THE HCHENBERG IMPACT NO LESS DIRECT AT 82 WHEN Newsweek magazine cited Barry Moser last year as "perhaps the foremost wood engraver in America," it recognized a remarkable graphic artist...
...Yet he remains as humble as the medium he describes as humble: "It's one of the reasons I like it" - wood engraving...
...Look again at "Christ of the Breadline...
...Those who yearn for a peaceable kingdom can be grateful...
...Is the light from the halo, or again is it from a kerosene lamp as on a table down on Mott Street...
...The one in fact suggested the other...
...I grew up with the same mistaken notion, thinking we were German...
...Eichenberg is too modest to speculate to what degree he may have succeeded, but three decades after the initial association he does say that for him the Catholic Worker has become "almost an identification...
...Whether it is the demands of the medium or the fact that the wood engraving print is not as jewel-like as, say, the etching or the drypoint, wood engraving just does not enjoy vogue among new artists...
...JOHN DEEDY (John Deedy, former managing editor of Commonweal, has just completed a book on aging for the Thomas More Press...
...I want people to get caught up and be part of the scene, acting out whatever drama is occurring at the time...
...Why does it work for us...
...I walk around my wood engraving like a stage director," he remarked...
...Indeed so complete is this identification that some are inclined to think of Eichenberg as a Catholic...
...I would say that I had no religion of any kind," Eichenberg once told the Catholic Worker's Robert Ellsberg apropos his roots...
...Eichenberg was born in Cologne in 1901, and he came to this country via Mexico, where he had gone in search of Rivera and Orozco...
...Also prominent are the prophets, the Old Testament God of righteousness, the Peaceable Kingdom of Isaiah 11, in which the lion will eat hay like the ox, and the baby shall play in the cobra's den...
...Art THE HCHENBERG IMPACT NO LESS DIRECT AT 82 WHEN Newsweek magazine cited Barry Moser last year as "perhaps the foremost wood engraver in America," it recognized a remarkable graphic artist working in a medium that curiously attracts few young people these days as an artistic specialty...
...To say 'I'm busy' negates the fact that one is part of a society that functions because everyone pulls together...
...Some of Eichenberg's animal prints can be ferociously blunt, and the suspicion sometimes creeps in of pessimism...
...Eichenberg thrived...
...There is first his civilized taste, as confirmed by the people of literature whom he chooses to illustrate: Erasmus, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, the Bronte sisters, Poe, Dylan Thomas...
...That, of course, is the critical question, and one on which at 82 Fritz Eichenberg has not despaired of contributing an answer...
...and the art which reflects Fritz Eichenberg, pacifist, humanitarian, spreader of good words...
...This political, spiritual, and social pedigree obviously accounts for the man, but of all the contemporary influences the greatest seemingly has been Dorothy's...
...And there is his civilized sense - religious, really - of social and political values for humankind...
...Good art material is provided, including boxwood and tools, generous deadlines, and no censorship of any kind...
...It was the figure of Jesus, "the rebellious Jew...
...His favorite book of illustrations is The Brothers Karamazov...
...Circling from another direction, he remarks: "I try to avoid duplicity...
...He thought at the time that Mexico would be the ideal place for an artist with a social conscience, but seductive New York beckoned and he arrived in time for the Depression...
...This is so mysterious...
...Why doesn't it seem to work for today's so-called statesmen and politicians...
...As a new immigrant he weaned himself on John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis...
...People can take it or leave it...
...Yet, though only a relatively small number are working in the medium, they comprise some of the country's greatest graphic artists: Moser, of course, Clare Leighton, Lynd Ward, Grace Albee, John De Pol - then the master himself, Fritz Eichenberg...
...I continue to have faith in something I really can't define," he told Ellsberg, " - the power that allows us to talk to one another and understand one another...
...Eichenberg became one of the first refugees from Hitler's Germany...
...The color-sketch step is employed to convey weight and three-dimensionality for the artist's guidance...
...But only for a time...
...The wonder of it all...
...I try to express as clearly as I can in my imagery how I feel about a certain thing...
...One Worker graphic, "Christ of the Breadline," is by Eichen-berg's accounting the most popular piece he has ever done...
...With respect to the latter Eichenberg, he says what his art proclaims: "I have a missionary zeal to express my convictions in my work, whether this be popular or not...
...The Federal Arts Project had been set up under the WPA umbrella, and Eichenberg earned $22.75 a week when things were toughest...
...Thus we have the two plateaus of Eichenberg's art: the art which reflects the author - Shakespeare, Tolstoy, whomever...
...In recent years Eichenberg has been anthropomorphizing the animal kingdom to make moral, social, and political statements about the state of the world - an ancient technique...
...And he's as accessible as a house painter...
...he came early under the spell of Francis of Assisi, perhaps the most unambiguous of saints...
...We led a normal bourgeois German life...
...An Eichenberg wood engraving is a four-step process...
...There is no discrimination against new citizens, and there are no strings attached...
...I try to avoid vagueness...
...Eichenberg admits to doubts, but pessimism cuts across the grain of his wood...
...For him it proved not all that bad...
...I owe her much for my concepts of faith, hope, and charity in a corrupt world," says Eichenberg, and it is a debt that he has sought to repay "in a small measure" with illustrations for the Catholic Worker, to which he has contributed since 1949...
...Eichenberg has not been around as long as the medium, although at times it may seem so, his work being that voluminous and he himself that rich in years...
...He has been thriving since, certainly artistically...
...The Christ of the Homeless,'' reprinted on our cover [detail on page 495] and "The Black Crucifixion," below, are among the prints by Fritz Eichenberg that have appeared in the Catholic Worker since 1949...
...It translates to a drama of style, one feature being the mysterious source of the lighting - in the wood engraving as on the stage...
...Accordingly, there is a marked biblical focus in so much of Eichenberg's work, but not only on New Testament themes...
...Actually he is a Quaker out of a non-practicing Jewish background...
...Eichenberg was a teacher at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn when Dorothy first approached him, challenging him in effect to touch people through images as she was trying to do through Self Portrait, by Fritz Eichenberg words, thus communicating the spirit of the Catholic Worker to people who perhaps could not read the articles she and others were writing...
...and then of course there was Dorothy Day, whose directness of approach so perfectly matched his as to make the two friends and collaborators...
...If I hate one word," he said recently in his library-studio in Peace Dale, R.I., "it's'I'm busy.' Everyone is busy with something...
...Eichenberg's civility works itself out in two distinct ways...
...But it was not so much the parallel reflectiveness in Quakerism which made that religion ultimately attractive to Eichenberg - the silent meeting, for instance, where individuals waited for God to speak to them with a message then to be conveyed to the larger group...
...A rough sketch, a more exact pen and ink drawing, and a color sketch precede the transfer of the image to end-grain wood with an engraving tool so fine as to allow the artist to control the line in one stroke...
...His book illustrations, single prints, portfolios, and books of prose and fables (a 700-page manuscript of autobiography is presently in an agent's hands and a major exhibition of his work is scheduled to open in early October at the Mary Ryan Gallery in Manhattan) have made Eichenberg's name one of the most renowned in American art...
...I feel defeated if people come up to me and say, 'What do you mean by that?' " Actually, it is difficult to imagine anyone accusing Eichenberg of duplicity and vagueness in thought or in art...
...Eichenberg's "Peaceable Kingdom" is a Christmas-card favorite with thousands...
...I try to be civilized, as I expect everyone else would be...
...this was the overpowering influence...
...We were not a religiously motivated family...
...He arrived at Quakerism through Zen Buddhism and the quietness of the Zen form of meditation - "to sit and empty your mind, to let the spirit of the Great Tao stream into you and fill you...
Vol. 110 • September 1983 • No. 16
