Survivor

 

Elizabeth Catlett

  1915 - 2012 (biography)

1983  

linocut 

9 7/16 x 7 7/16" image 

pencil, lower right margin 

80 of 1000  

pencil titled and editioned 

Hampton 49, illustrated, page 60 

thick, antique-white wove 

published 

 

PAKA127 

SOLD

"Survivor" is a linoleum block print made by Elizabeth Catlett in 1983, based on a photograph by Dorothea Lange called “Ex-slave with a Long Memory” taken in Alabama in 1937 or 1938.

Melanie Herzog wrote in her book An American Artist in Mexico: "Catlett's 'Survivor' of 1983 (plate 21) also depicts a rural Southern U.S. laborer, careworn and strong. Derived directly from Dorothea Lange's 'Ex-slave with a Long Memory', a photograph Lange made in Alabama in 1937-'38 while documenting rural Southern life in the United States for the Farm Security Administration (the woman in Lange's photograph faces left, while Catlett's linocut image, drawn following Lange and reversed in the printing process, faces right), Survivor recalls the TGP's use of well-known photographic images as sources.

"Yet, while the woman in Lange's photograph is seen against the background of the field in which she toils, Catlett's minimally rendered background only suggests topography in its abstract linear pattern. Outlined in white, the woman becomes the unmistakable focus of the image."

As in her earlier linocuts, Catlett utilized various nicks, gouges, and incised lines to delineate her subject's physical presence, but in contrast to her work at the TGP, this image is somewhat more spare, reminiscent of Kollwitz's later woodcuts.