Jubilo (Joy)

Adja Yunkers

"Jubilo" articulates Adja Yunkers' fascination with the Native American petroglyphs and cave paintings he explored while he was living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. An apparently unique impression, this large color woodcut is not in the Brooklyn Museum catalogue raisonné of Yunkers' prints. The composition reflects his interest in the Native American pictographs, petroglyphs and the landscape that he saw in New Mexico, while living and teaching in Albuquerque.

In April of 1953 the Rio Grande flooded and he lost much of his work. The fact that this impression is stamped “Made In USA” on the verso indicates it may have been in an exhibition overseas and is probably the only impression to have survived.

A major twentieth century abstract painter and printmaker, Adja Yunkers studied art in Leningrad, Berlin, Paris and London. Living in Hamburg, he became the protege of the great German Expressionist Emil Nolde, who helped arrange his first solo exhibition in Hamburg in 1921.

For a period of fourteen years, Yunkers lived and worked in Paris. At the outbreak of World War II (1939), he moved to Stockholm, Sweden, where he edited and published the arts magazines, ARS and Creation. Adja Yunkers settled permanently in the United States in 1947.