Retrato de Emilia

Mauricio Lasansky

This is a rare Surreal portrait of Lasansky’s wife Emilia, whom he had married in 1937. The plate was printed using a sepia/black ink. An unfinished boat with a suggested figure and the delicate “landscape” that stretches to infinity contrasts the intricate, dream-like state of the subject.

"Portrait of Emilia" was done in Argentina, in 1941, two years before Mauricio left for New York to work at Atelier 17. This impression is pencil dedicated "A Brandt y senor".

Alan Fern commented about these drypoints on page 12 of the University of Iowa's catalog "Lasansky: Printmaker":

"The drypoints...are lyrical and imaginative, relying on surrealist juxtapositions of interior and exterior space, objects in different scale, and interpenetrations of one form by another. These early works are consciously poetic; many of Lasansky's friends and intellectual heroes were poets and writers, who used language in the Spanish tradition with a rich employment of metaphors, strange juxtapositions of objects and ideas, and the frequent expression of states of mind in similes - equivalents for feelings being made vivid by references to objects."