Peppy New Year

Gustave Baumann

Like many artists, especially printmakers, Baumann created yearly holiday greeting works that he sent as gifts to friends, colleagues and collectors. He did his first one in 1919 and his last in 1970, the year before he died.

Baumann created this woodcut, "Peppy New Year", holiday card for 1940 in 1939, the same year that he published his illustrated book, "Frijoles Canyon Pictographs". He printed it using a single block and an ochre ink on Ansbach wove paper.

The imagery of a Navajo goatherder with a ten gallon hat relates to a similar image in the book, which illustrated many of the ancient pictographs located in the caves in Frijoles Canyon in New Mexico. Baumann commented: "The ten gallon hat is my contribution, for certainly a Navaho goatherd able to play a flute obligato to his flock is entitled to wear one."

This image is illustrated in Chamberlain, #353, page 547 and in Moss/Leech, page 69.