Grand Canyon

Gustave Baumann

This was Baumann’s final woodcut depicting the Grand Canyon. His first, Cedar Grand Canyon, was created in 1921.

On the subject of the Grand Canyon, Baumann wrote: When one’s working radius, which was four miles in my Nashville days, expands to twelve hundred it gives one a kind of all-over-the-lot feeling in the southwest where intimacy of landscape is hard to find if at all. The mountains are too high and the Grand Canyon too deep to behave properly within the limits of a frame, and yet as a discipline to put man in his place there is nothing like the Grand Canyon. You see it and then you don’t as clouds suddenly tear into it from nowhere. It is a bewildering place, distance means nothing. The nearest habitation on the North Rim is fourteen miles, but you travel two hundred to get there unless you are willing to take a chance on a shaky bridge that crosses the river. Some day “Old Cautious“—that’s me—is going to take the long way around. Probably what I’ll find is that I could have staid [sic] where I was just as well, sitting in my favorite hiding place just under the South Rim.