Flaming Desert

Gabor Peterdi

One needs to view Flaming Desert in person to witness the brilliance of the color palette and the changing surface textures—the texture of the intaglio suggests it was printed from a molten plate. It truly is a tour de force in printing.

In 1952 Peterdi wrote: The uncertainties of our century forced me to express them as they burst into futile and horrible action. But I believe in life, and it is this faith which now compels me to express the creative force of nature as a symbol of the triumph of life over destruction.

In her introduction to Gabor Peterdi Graphics 1934-1969, Una E. Johnson wrote: Landscape and the image of man are the two great themes that occupy the creative thought and energies of Gabor Peterdi. They are woven into his distinguished graphic oeuvre reflecting joyousness or introspection, exaltation or tragedy. Always they reveal an affirmation of life.

Louise S. Richards of the Cleveland Museum of Art wrote in her Peterdi exhibition catalogue of 1962: The one quality common to all of Peterdi’s prints is the fusion of his visual imagination with his mastery of print processes so that his prints develop through the natural interaction of the two—imagination demands appropriate technical invention and technical invention in turn stimulates a new vision.