September Frost

 

Hildegarde Haas

  1926 - 2002 (biography)

1949  

color woodcut 

16 x 9 1/2" image 

pencil, lower right 

8 of 25  

dted after the signature and titled in the lower left margin 

 

ivory wove Japanese 

published 

artist 

11269 

$700.00 

Haas had a condition called "synesthesia" ("visual thinking") which allowed her to visualize music into colors and shapes so she would work while listening to music. As can be witnessed in "September Frost," her woodcuts leaned toward rhythmic and calligraphic abstraction. Hildegarde Haas was born in Frankfort, Germany in 1926 and her family moved to the U.S. in 1937. Her education included summer classes at the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center followed by two years at the University of Chicago. She received a scholarship to the Art Students' League, where she studied under Vaclav Vytlacil and Morris Kantor. She was completely self-taught as a printmaker and explored the woodcut medium with other students at the ASL and "learned as she went." Haas was a member of The Printmakers, an established group of New York graphic artists whose ranks included Ross Abrams, Seong Moy, William Rose, Peter Kahn, Ruben Reif, Jim Forsberg, Wolf Kahn, Dorothy Morton, and Aaron Kurzen. She was included in the "Young American Printmakers" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1953.