Garo Z. Antreasian: Reflections on Life and Art

By Garo Z. Antreasian and William Peterson

Garo Z. Antreasian (b. 1922) belongs to the great generation of innovators in mid-twentieth-century American art. While influenced by a variety of European artists in his early years, it was his involvement with Tamarind Lithography Workshop starting in 1960 that transformed his work. As Tamarind’s founding technical director, he revolutionized the medium of lithography. He discovered how to manipulate the spontaneous possibilities of lithography in the manner of the Abstract Expressionist painters. In addition to reflecting on his work, he writes movingly about his Armenian heritage and its importance in his art, his teaching, and his love affair with all sorts of artistic media. Illustrating his drawings, paintings, and prints, this book reveals Antreasian as a major American artist.

This book was made possible in part by generous contributions from the Frederick Hammersley Foundation and Gerald Peters Gallery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9780826355423

Garo Z. Antreasian

Garo Z. Antreasian is a professor emeritus in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of New Mexico. He was the founding technical director of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, a position he also held when Tamarind moved to the University of New Mexico and was renamed the Tamarind Institute. Antreasian was the principal author of The Tamarind Book of Lithography: Art and Techniques (coauthored by Clinton Adams). His award-winning work has been featured in more than seventy exhibitions and is held in numerous public and private collections.

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Introduction

Garo Z. Antreasian: An American Regenerator

William Peterson

You know? said Barbara Rose, That’s just good painting.

She was leafing through the Spring 1984 issue of Artspace Magazine and had stopped at a spread on the art of Garo Antreasian. Highly regarded as a New York critic and historian of American art, she is also well-known as a defender of the art of painting at a time in the 1970s and ’80s when it was fashionably declared dead. It’s not clear if she recognized the artist’s name, but she knew good painting when she saw it.

Garo Zareh Antreasian belongs to a maverick generation in American art. He was born in 1922, the same year as Richard Diebenkorn, Grace Hartigan, Beverly Pepper, Leon Golub, Leonard Baskin, and Jules Olitski, and just a year ahead of Ellsworth Kelly, Sam Francis, Roy Lichtenstein, and Larry Rivers. This is a generation of singular artists who occupy a difficult position in the history of twentieth-century American art. By mid-career, the pall of the declared death of painting hung over them. Coming of age as artists at midcentury, they seem always to be in the middle—but not quite at the center—of things.

In a fit of hyperbole, Tom Brokaw called this generation of Americans as a whole the Greatest Generation, for their conduct in response to the Second World War. Like Antreasian, most of the artists had their training interrupted by the war. Government sponsorship of the GI Bill, however, allowed many of them to pick it up again afterward, and they became the first generation of Americans in history to be largely college educated. But while the artists were away the possibilities of art, especially painting, underwent a momentous change. Because this change occurred during their absence, they had a lot of catching up to do. Consequently, they were looked upon as followers. Sometimes they were referred to as a second generation. They were seen as a generation in the middle, caught between the earth-changing Abstract Expressionists of the 1940s and the generation of the 1960s that produced Pop and Minimalism. It was in the logic of Minimalism, and its austere insistence on probing the physical bases of art, that painting was seen as superseded. Antreasian’s generation nevertheless persisted. They knew there was a middle way.

Although Antreasian has always been a painter of extraordinary versatility, as well as an incisive draftsman of bite and power, he is best known for his contribution to printmaking. In the 1960s and ’70s, Antreasian did as much as anyone to regenerate and revolutionize the art of lithography in this country, expanding its technical range, training a new generation of master printers, and building an impressive body of brilliant and masterful prints that stand as a benchmark of achievement in the medium.

His parents were Armenians of the Diaspora who immigrated to Indianapolis. His father, a tailor, chose Indianapolis because he had been told it was a typical American city. As you will see in his plainspoken memoir in this book, Antreasian was raised in the Midwest in a family and neighborhood that considered themselves middle class. The values of a dutiful and responsible work ethic, typical of the middle class, were instilled early on and he received a mostly typical Middle-American education. His ethnic origins, however, gave him a slight edge toward the margin. He did not speak English until he started grade school, and as an outsider in a self-righteously indifferent midwestern society, he would always be conscious of a need to catch up and compete.

Antreasian’s story and the body of work illustrated in these pages shows that significant art can issue from America’s midlands and Southwest, and that ambitious art is not restricted to the east coast of New York or the west coast of California. As with much of American innovation in industry and technology, it was often a technical challenge that sparked Antreasian’s creative response. His involvement with lithography was born of a challenge issued to him as a teenager, and competitive striving has fueled his later efforts in a variety of media. Although he takes it in his stride as a matter of course, on several occasions in his long career he has seen fit to reinvent himself. The first major shift occurred in the late 1940s and early 1950s under the influence of Rouault and Picasso when he sought to uncover the secrets of their expressive procedures. He then moved into a more lighthearted phase warmed by Bonnard’s color and Matisse’s design, but he continued to evolve.

In 1960, while setting up the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles with June Wayne and Clinton Adams, Antreasian transformed his art again. He discovered how to manipulate the spontaneous possibilities of his working process and materials in the manner of the Abstract Expressionist painters. With these methods he produced several series of large prints that could compete with the art of painting. He declared that his aim was "to restore lithography to its rightful place as a major print medium dedicated to ambitious concepts."

In 1967, just three years after joining the faculty at the University of New Mexico, he made another quantum leap in his art, this time taking up the sleek, hard-edged shapes and colors of commercial graphics and duplicating the look of high-tech industrial finish in a luminous tonal blend. This led to the brilliant series of prints in the 1970s with their stripes and shifting planes that produce a nearly kaleidoscopic optical dazzle.

A trip to the Near East in search of his Armenian roots in 1982 initiated yet another profound change in Antreasian’s art. Moved by the intricate qualities of pattern and design in Islamic ornament, he eventually adapted many of its forms and transformed his practice once again. His eyes were opened to a range of ethnic crafts, and in the 1990s he began painting on wood panels that he enhanced with balsa-wood strips to produce an array of rhythmic patterns in relief. This was perhaps the most profound shift in his career. Though they have their base in textiles, these abstract relief panels achieve a complex integrity that is unlike any known form of mainstream modernist painting.

Antreasian likes to refer to himself as a Romantic artist. This designation might surprise viewers who are familiar with the clean-lined geometric abstraction that characterizes his work from the 1960s through the 1980s. But an emotional resonance has always been an underlying factor in his art, and his use of a straight-edge can only be characterized as a passionate geometry. Particularly after 2000, as the impact of Islamic art brought a new flowering of decorative exuberance to his work, he has branched out to embrace a variety of impulses from world cultures with a spirit equal to Delacroix and Matisse.

Yet, throughout his career, Antreasian has also been drawn to a heroic dimension and the architectonic forms and sense of monumental scale associated with Classicism. Bringing these interests together in the ethnically flavored balsa-wood reliefs and grand charcoal drawings of his latter years, Antreasian has been making art of enduring stature. You could say he found a fertile territory in the middle.

Apprenticeship of the Emerging Artist / The American scene and an awakening social conscience informed Antreasian’s early work. The first lithograph that he produced as an eager eighteen-year-old at the Herron School of Art was View of Cincinnati, 1940 (fig. 8), made independently during off hours on the school’s basement press. Inspired by nineteenth-century view prints in the Romantic mode of the Hudson River School, he exaggerated the surrounding hills so that they appear to be a grand mountain looming over the city. (What appear to be tiny stars picked out of the overhead haze, he later admitted, were in fact flaws left by the spittle or sweat of youthful exertion as he labored over the print.) City views would recur in his work over the next two decades, going through as many changes of style and expression as the examples he encountered in his hungry inquiry into the history of printmaking. A more matter-of-fact representation of the American industrial landscape appears in View of Gas Works (fig. 9). The image and style reflect the change of mood that had taken place in American art as it moved from the positive, progress-oriented, machine-age Precisionism of Sheeler and Demuth in the 1920s to the more downcast Social Realism of the WPA printmakers of the 1930s, when the Depression taught that hard work and industry did not always equal prosperity.

Social concerns dominated Antreasian’s art in the years just before and after the Second World War. In addition to the WPA printmakers, he had the example of George Bellows’ lithographs and the earlier nineteenth-century work of Daumier. In 1942, he responded with humanitarian compassion to the plight of refugees displaced by the onset of hostilities in Europe in both Aid to the Stricken (fig. 10) and Aftermath (Plate 1), which won a prize and toured the nation in an exhibit urgently circulated to raise money for the Red Cross. In the same year, Towers of Babel (Plate 2) reflected America’s mounting defensive posture and the dark rumblings of doom after Pearl Harbor. As the country girded itself for war—note the ruined steel girders that barricade the black and watchful watchtower—all available resources were drawn into stoking the world’s gigantic hubris. With the belching chimneys of the defense industry massed behind it, Antreasian’s hunkered-down medieval tower is anthropomorphized in the style of the great editorial cartoonists of the day. As a child he had grown up copying illustrations and cartoons in the daily newspapers. When, inevitably, he was himself drawn into the conflict, he enlisted in the Coast Guard and asked to serve as a combat artist. Deployed in the Pacific, he brought to his assignments the same keen eye for characterizing the immediacy of unfolding events that he had learned from those newspaper artists.

After the war, Antreasian’s social conscience took a different turn. He allegorized the postwar sense of displacement, loss, and existential disillusion in the haunting Beached Boat of 1946 (fig. 36). That lonely mood of abandonment continues in Signs of the Times, 1947 (Plate 59), where it is differently interpreted in the dark facades that form the backdrop of a street emptied of people and divided by streetcar tracks. Strewn with limp banners and littered with street signs—the most prominent of which indicates one way—the vacant scene conveys a feeling of post-election letdown. The parade is over. Silence prevails. Change, apparently, does not. And any hope in the power of the vote simply flaps in the wind. If the mood and style seem reminiscent of Edward Hopper, it might be noted that Hopper gave this painting a $1,000 jury prize when it was first exhibited—a whopping amount in 1947. Yet it’s also worth noting that the abstract rhythms of its verticals, and its basic red, yellow, blue, green, and black color scheme will be seen to recur in Antreasian’s art. Compare it, for example, with such later abstract paintings as Pennant from 1989 (Plate 76) and Luna Park, 2003 (Plate 109).

When Antreasian graduated from the Herron School of Art in 1948, he was immediately offered a teaching post at the school. He was also a recipient of the school’s most prestigious honor, the Mary Milliken Memorial award for travel and further study. Facing responsibilities as a new teacher and a new father, Antreasian decided to break his stipend into two abbreviated trips eastward. He would visit major museums in the summer of 1948, and in 1949 he would study printmaking in New York with Will Barnet at the Art Students League and with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17.

Antreasian’s two journeys to New York in 1948 and 1949 broadened his artistic horizons and provided him with tools to better express his social concerns. A hands-on encounter with George Rouault’s abrasive Miserere prints at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) proved provocative, both for their technical complexity and the emotional power of their imagery, influencing his rendering of the scarred souls of the Factory Workers (Plate 3) (Antreasian’s first color lithograph) and also the desolate commuters of The City (Plate 4). His sympathy for the condition of the ethnic outsider was restimulated by New York street life, as seen in Flowers and Figure, 1949 (fig. 24), in which Antreasian’s innate feeling for rhythmic design takes on the dark overtones of Charles Burchfield’s alienated Expressionism.

Two other images drawn from his 1948 New York trip reveal the range of Antreasian’s developing concerns. Pastime, 1949 (fig. 38), illustrates two urbanites marking graffiti on a wall. Formally, it is a brilliant study of the tensions between the solid modeling of the figures in action and the surface flatness of the wall with its raw outpouring of linear scrawls. But Pastime is also a powerful reportorial statement. Within the era’s postwar malaise, graffiti was usually condemned as another of the signs of the times, a perverse gesture of antisocial defiance and a defacing of the public facade. But it was also recognized as a cry from the heart, giving public voice to the voiceless and a subversive power to leave a trace of one’s passing for those swept along by forces beyond their control or comprehension. Tellingly, Antreasian even includes the ubiquitous Kilroy character (partly rubbed out in the lower center) that American GIs left behind everywhere as they fought their way across Europe.

Antreasian’s fascination with the graphic qualities of unsophisticated graffiti was shared in those days by Ben Shahn and the photographer Aaron Siskind. Shahn’s graffiti-influenced style was also indebted to Paul Klee, and Antreasian’s Slum Clearance, 1949 (fig. 35), reflects the considerable impact that Shahn and Klee had at the time. Antreasian’s view of a man-made wilderness of demolition discovers a dark beauty in the midst of destruction. With the remains of iron girders still reaching fragilely upward among the piles of rubble, and with the desolate urban buildings beyond, the scene could be that of bombed-out Europe. As it happens, Antreasian based his image on his observation of the site that was being cleared on New York’s Upper East Side for the new United Nations building. That information, however, is not part of the title, and the picture has to be seen as a meditation on loss and the postwar task of clearing away the old way of life, the ruins of the past. The idea that an element of forceful violence lies behind any effort of building anew is also the subject of The Apparition (fig. 40), in which the nightmare of war continues to haunt a piece of road-building equipment. Also in 1949, and in a radically different graphic language that makes eloquent use of erasure, Antreasian paid homage to the great Cathedral at Cologne (Plate 5), which miraculously survived Armageddon.

To describe the texture of the piles of rubble in Slum Clearance, Antreasian utilized an intricate network of gestural lines inspired by Shahn’s textural effects. Mark Tobey would soon base his entire artistic career on elaborating this kind of white writing. But Antreasian was never willing to tie himself down to any single-minded stylistic direction. Instead, this was for him a period of rich experimentation. Nevertheless, an underlying continuity within the eclecticism of these years can still be seen by comparing the abstract outlines that describe the machine shapes of the Concrete Mixer (fig. 37) or the rail lines of The City (Plate 4), both 1948, with the linear armature of Antreasian’s very first abstract print, the Josef Albers-inspired No. 1, 1949 (Plate 6). The latter remained unique in his career for many years, but he was sufficiently pleased with it to submit it to the first International Biennial of Contemporary Color Lithography at the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1950.

Slum Clearance was shown at New York’s Metropolitan Museum in 1950 in the exhibition American Artists under Thirty-Six. Antreasian had been aggressively exhibiting his art since 1947, submitting it to regional and national shows and competitions and earning some eighteen awards over the next decade. He had work in the 1947 Corcoran Biennial in Washington and in the prestigious Paintings of the Year exhibition of 1948, one of a series of highly competitive exhibitions sponsored by Pepsi-Cola at the National Academy of Design. And in addition to routine showings at a variety of regional venues in Indiana, he participated regularly in national print exhibitions held at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Print Club, and the Library of Congress, as well as the major national print annual that was established in 1949 at the Brooklyn Museum. In 1949, his prize-winning painting at the Old Northwest Territory Exhibition, Early Spring, South Side (fig. 23) was featured in the pages of Time magazine in an article on regional art. In 1952, he had his first one-man show in New York at the Esther Gentle Gallery. All of this exhibition activity exposed Antreasian to a vast variety of current work and to a challenging range of artistic styles and approaches at a time when the American art world was on the verge of coming into its own.

A Lithographic Paradigm Shift: From Drawing to Painting / The Cincinnati Museum’s International Biennial of Contemporary Color Lithography, initiated in 1950 and organized by Gustave von Groschwitz, was especially significant for American lithographers, since it provided a chance for them to see their work in context with prints by such leading European artists as Picasso, Braque, Miró, Chagall, and Léger. Antreasian was so deeply impressed by the five prints of Picasso in the 1950 show that he decided to set aside his painting for a while and concentrate on lithography, determined to probe the mysteries of Picasso’s techniques and working method.

In the immediate postwar years, Picasso had turned his attention increasingly to printmaking. Given free rein at the Paris lithography studio of Fernand Mourlot, he became particularly intrigued by the possibilities that lithography allowed for reworking the image, either on transfer paper or directly on the stone or plate, scraping it back and putting it through a series of formal metamorphoses while preserving each state along the way. (His black-and-white carving of The Bull went through eleven states, from a ruggedly realistic rendering to a thin line drawing like a prehistoric pictograph, as if reversing the process of developing an image.) Although his attempts to produce a color lithograph ended in failure, Picasso became intrigued by the variations that occur in making separate plates for each color. Since bits of information would drop out of the image on one plate only to appear in ghostly isolation on another, each of these would stimulate further improvisation on their forms. In 1947, Mourlot published a multi-volume catalogue raisonné of Picasso’s lithographs, which reproduced the several states of each image and discussed Picasso’s use of transfer techniques for applying drawings, washes, and even cutout collage elements during the printmaking process.

Antreasian’s Still Life No. 1, 1950 (Plate 7), shows his adoption of Picasso’s cutout collage technique. Cock, 1951 (Plate 9), takes up a favorite macho subject of Picasso, but rivals the old master in its forceful draftsmanship and in Antreasian’s own brand of folk-art-based patterned design. In the startling Prehistoric Bird, 1951 (Plate 8), Antreasian actually anticipates certain aspects of hard-edged, curvilinear design that Picasso himself would not explore until seven years later in his series of linocut prints. Antreasian also noticed that Picasso was borrowing from Miró at the time. In the spirit of Miró, Antreasian based his image on a Mesozoic bird fossil, nearly 150 million years old, which was discovered inside a lithography stone from the renowned Solnhofen limestone quarries in Germany. It was as if the monster had emerged from the earth’s subconscious. Then, introducing a bit of hand-coloring by placing a smudged red thumbprint on the bird’s Miró-like heart, Antreasian touched the ancient creature and brought it back to life.

Working alone in the cramped space of the Herron print shop, Antreasian had no hydraulic lift or dollies to move the heavy litho stones. So when he began a large lithograph based loosely on Picasso’s Femme au fauteuil No. 1 (1948), he decided to keep the massive stone in place on the press. In order to do a multicolor print, he revived a nontraditional method in which the drawing for each successive layer was applied and printed in sequence using the one stone, building the image as he went along instead of having separate stones for each color. This additive approach was almost exactly the opposite of the subtractive method that Picasso would later use for his linocuts, where each successive printing from the single block was made as an overlay after he had cut away the parts of the image wherever he wanted to retain any previously printed color.

Antreasian titled this large-scale print from 1952 The Queen (Plate 10) (perhaps in honor of his mother, whose Armenian name, Takouhie, translates as queen; or perhaps because it is as flat and brightly colored as a playing card). He also recognized that Picasso’s rather regal seated portrait of Françoise Gilot contains a number of sly references to Matisse, and for a while he, too, gave free play to his admiration for Matisse. It can be seen in the delight in oriental patterning of Home of the Patriot, 1951 (fig. 6), and also in the patterned organization of the table-top still-life paintings, Still Life on Gold Ground, 1951 (fig. 42), and On the Table, 1955 (Plate 60), which echo Matisse’s Interior with Egyptian Curtain at the Phillips Gallery. Matisse’s presence can be felt as well in the rhythmic design and flattened space of the multicolor print Twenty-One Pears, 1959 (Plate 13). And the boldly colored lithograph Flowers (fig. 52), commissioned by the International Graphic Arts Society in 1959, pays homage to the master’s late cutouts.

This period saw a major paradigm shift in Antreasian’s printmaking as he moved away from an aesthetic based in drawing to one more deeply connected to the concerns of painting. His immersion in Picasso’s work had reinforced his earlier hands-on encounter with the prints of Rouault. Seeing the actual prints of Rouault made me aware of how layered and compressed each image was by the multiple technical means employed and the progressive proofing, he said. Traditionally and for practical reasons, we produced a drawn image, processed and proofed it, printed the image, and then moved on. Whereas, in painting we labored the image over a long period of time and that labor is imbedded in the work, giving it substance and giving weight to the idea. Likewise, I wanted this in lithography.

As the decade progressed Antreasian’s printmaking began to compete with his painting, especially in its rich layering of color. With multiple runs, he laid down a series of subtle veils of wash-like applications and began building a richness of surface that had rarely been attempted in lithography. It was at this time, too, that he began to look at the work of Pierre Bonnard, one of the great colorists among the School of Paris painters. When Antreasian speaks of the influence of Post-Impressionism on his work of the 1950s, it’s Bonnard’s luminous extension of Impressionism that he has in mind. Bonnard’s great gift was his ability to make light appear to emanate from within his paintings, which he achieved by bathing his imagery in high-key yellows and intense oranges against which he juxtaposed pale touches of complementary blue, green, and violet. Antreasian’s Tropicana, 1959 (fig. 39), a luscious painting of fruit spread on a white tablecloth with a shimmering harbor scene in the distance, indicates how far he had assimilated Bonnard’s approach. He achieved a similar luminosity in the lithograph Limes, Leaves, and Flowers (Plate 12) by employing thinly scumbled washes in a series of veiled layers of pastel inks, which allow the white paper to show through like light from within. The image was drawn using crayon and brushed tusche on transfer paper and printed from a single stone in four shades of green, plus accent areas of magenta, purple, yellow, orange, blue, white, and black. That’s as many as eleven press runs. A technical tour de force, it’s no wonder that this piece took top prize in the exhibition 50 Indiana Prints and represented Antreasian in the second International Biennial of Contemporary Color Lithography at the Cincinnati Museum.

It becomes evident in the lithographs of the 1950s that Antreasian is competing not only with his own paintings, but with other contemporary forms of printmaking as well. Ascension, 1958 (Plate 11), for example, with its scuffed textures and luminous color overlays, is clearly meant to rival effects that are achieved in soft-ground etching and the kind of improvisation and multiple inking processes that he witnessed at Hayter’s workshop in New York. And if Antreasian’s Blind Boy, 1959 (fig. 51), seems to challenge the widely exhibited etchings of Leonard Baskin and Mauricio Lasansky in those days, other works, such as the 1949 Cathedral and the 1951 Cock, are intended to compete with the woodcuts of Antonio Frasconi and others in a medium that was experiencing widespread popularity at the time owing to a renewed interest in early German Expressionist prints.

Expressionism was gaining a new urgency in midcentury America, spurred on by the breakthrough into a new form of spontaneous gestural abstraction in New York. The new Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still, and Mark Rothko had emerged from a concern for process and materials, which were regarded as the basis of all art-making, the means by which the most basic creative urge manifests itself in an immediate give-and-take. The idea was to bypass all picturing of secondary subject matter in order to go directly to the heart of the matter—the living expression of conscious response. Stuart Davis, an older artist who was not an Abstract Expressionist (but was nevertheless an inspiration to many of them), perhaps put it best when he said, The act of painting is not a duplication of experience, but the extension of experience on the plane of formal invention.

Although, like many others in the Midwest, Antreasian trailed a little behind the cutting edge of New York, he was working hard to catch up. Cracking open a fiery fissure in a dark and densely modeled field, Antreasian made his print Ascension (Plate 11) resemble a painting by Clyfford Still. But he derived its erupting, upsurging imagery from pictures of rocket launches and of guided missiles blasting off from their gantries—America testing its arsenal in the ongoing arms race of the Cold War. As an image of awesome apocalyptic aspiration, however, it was perhaps not surprising when a local religious leader took it to be an abstract interpretation of Christ’s ascension into heaven.

The Mountain, 1957 (fig. 50), is still tied to subject matter, but its main concern is for material forces welling up from within the earth itself. These forces are expressed in mounting brush marks and energetic drawing, the basic components of art-making. And it is this emphasis on the expressive possibilities within the material basis of his art that would lead to a new breakthrough in 1960, when a cross-country trip to join in the birth of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop on the West Coast provided him with a new appreciation for the underlying substance and vastness of the land as well. Aesthetic and technical concerns coincided, confirmed on the road in an experience of the material and concrete.

Murals and the First Acrylic Paints / Before looking into the birth of Tamarind and the next phase of Antreasian’s art, some further aspects of Antreasian’s painting in the 1950s need to be noted. As could be seen in Still Life on Gold Ground, 1951 (fig. 42), and On the Table, 1955 (Plate 60), he was experimenting with materials for building up textural surfaces, thickening his pigments with gritty admixtures and working with a palette knife to give a feeling of weight and tactile solidity. There’s an almost Byzantine formality and even monumentality, which are a reminder that he was also at work on several large mural projects during this period.

In 1952 Antreasian was commissioned to paint a mural for the WFBM television station. Depicting an overview of Indianapolis in a lighthearted decorative style reminiscent of the populist See America posters of the 1930s, the mural is now preserved in the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. A similar commission followed from the First National Bank, which was completed in six panels in 1956. That year he also received a commission from Indiana University, Bloomington, to produce a mural depicting the history of the university for the men’s dining hall in the Wright Quad dormitories (figs. 44–46). Consisting of six forty-foot panels that had to be painted in place in a high clerestory area above the dining hall, the mural presented a number of technical challenges, including the erection of elaborate scaffolding. One of the more interesting technical developments, however, has entered the history of painting in the twentieth century. It was while painting the Wright Quad murals in 1956 that Antreasian became the first to use industrially formulated acrylic paints for artists.

Always somewhat impatient with oil paints, Antreasian had been experimenting with Rhoplex and other synthetics and trying out various additives, like many other artists at that time. For the university murals, he recognized he would need pigments in a very fluid medium and in sufficient quantities to apply broad, flat areas of brilliant color. In the previous murals, he had used commercial house paints; but while these provided fluid coverage, they were limited in the intensity and range of their colors. It was then that he was approached by Henry Levison, a chemist and owner of Permanent Pigments, a supplier of artists’ oil paints. Levison had formulated a new kind of gesso for priming canvas, which utilized an acrylic polymer emulsion and which he was marketing under the name Liquitex (liquid/texture). In discussion, Antreasian and Levison determined that the formula could be used with pigments. Antreasian ordered colors and Levison mixed and supplied them in quart and gallon batches. They worked out so successfully in the mural that this was the beginning of the Liquitex brand of acrylic paints for artists. This development in the manufacture of artists’ supplies was as significant for the art of painting in the twentieth century as the first production of pre-mixed oil paints in convenient lead tubes had been in the nineteenth, which freed the Impressionists to go out into the country and paint en plein air.

Nevertheless, for his next mural project Antreasian did not use acrylic paints. When he won the competition to produce a mural on the theme of Abraham Lincoln’s early life in Indiana for the new State Office Building in 1958 (figs. 48 and 49), he turned instead to the ancient Byzantine tradition and did it as a mosaic. Stylistically, as in the Indiana University murals, Antreasian’s Lincoln imagery was an updating of the civic-conscious Post Office murals produced under the New Deal’s Federal Art Project. Vignettes of Lincoln’s life are linked by a ribbonlike Ohio River, which sweeps through like the framing borders in Thomas Hart Benton’s historical narratives, tying everything together. Technically, however, the project was extraordinarily challenging. All of the tiny tiles had to be ordered from Murano, Italy, according to elaborate formulas for figuring amounts and coverage for each color that would be used, and Antreasian wanted all color areas to be blended from differently colored tiles. Held up for a while by political wrangling over its costs, the mural would not be completed and dedicated until 1962.

The younger Pop artist Robert Indiana, who, like Antreasian, studied with Sara Bard at Arsenal Tech, and who adopted the name of his home state, would later adopt the style of Antreasian’s populist Americana in the State Office mural when he designed sets and costumes for the Gertrude Stein/Virgil Thomson opera The Mother of Us All. First presented at the Guthrie Theater in 1967, it was revived in Santa Fe in 1976 for the American Bicentennial.

In 1960, with work on the mural stalled by politics, Antreasian was called away. He was invited to join June Wayne and Clinton Adams in founding the new Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. Taking a year’s leave of absence from Herron, he went west to participate in a new venture in the revival of creative lithography.

Why Lithography? / At one point I had to ask: Why lithography? What was it that drew Antreasian to it? As a printmaking medium, lithography is basically reproductive, invented to provide multiple copies. But he doesn’t seem to be particularly interested in that aspect. His early edition sizes are usually quite small—sometimes only three copies were printed. So it would seem that something else attracted him.

Antreasian answered by saying that the feeling of the impressed image, seemingly fused into the paper by the pressure of the press, had been an early attraction. But he allowed that while the chance to have multiple copies of an image was always a nice side benefit, it was never the crucial concern.

No, he said. It wasn’t that. It was the challenge of the unknown.

Continuing, he explained, It was the technical mystery, right from the first. The process of lithography is basically simple, but so rich in its possibilities, and so subtle in the way that the stone responds. But there was so little technical information about its processes available to me at the time. What I wanted to know would always seem just out of reach. There was always something more to figure out, a problem to solve, to learn just how a particular effect might be achieved. It’s what we don’t know that draws us in and pushes us on.

Without question, the major printmakers are those who are masters of invention and technical resource, Antreasian wrote in 1959 in an article that was a call of alarm concerning the state of creative lithography in America. Titled Special Problems Relative to Artistic Lithography Antreasian’s manifesto was published in the June issue of News of Prints, the journal of the Print Council of America. It would lead to a turning point in his career.

Contrary to prevailing opinion, he wrote, the field of artistic lithography has not kept pace with that of its sister mediums, such as woodcut and intaglio, in the resurgence of printmaking in recent years. Acknowledging the contributions of such gifted artist-teachers as Stanley Hayter, Mauricio Lasansky, Misch Kohn, and Leonard Baskin, by whose efforts in other printmaking media the aesthetic of the print itself has been changed, expanded and enlarged, Antreasian decried that little encouragement has been given to lithography. He saw several factors behind lithography’s lagging status, foremost among these is the absence of a central figure or workshop with stature sufficient to forge a vital and fresh concept.

The situation in Europe was different, where there was a longstanding tradition of craftsmen trained as printers, often with generations of accumulated expertise at their fingertips. In the United States, he continued, there are too few first-class litho workshops amply equipped for the artist to draw and print work. And, Fewer still are lithographic printers with sufficient knowledge or subsidy to produce work on the level of quality of their counterparts in Europe.

This paucity of professional expertise, Antreasian felt, was compounded by the lack of technical information and supplies. The significance of the transfer process is little understood or practiced in America due to the unavailability of the special paper necessary for its many-faceted possibilities. In Europe this is one of the major methods used by artists to produce qualities impossible by other means. He noted the general scarcity of shop material. Lithographic stones and presses have all but disappeared. Equipment for large-sized work is practically non-existent. Papers have to be imported and are expensive; quality tusches used in Europe are unavailable