Progressive Printmakers: Wisc Artists and the Print Renaissance - Paperback

by Warrington Colescott (Author), Daniel Murtaugh (Editor)

Denton Welch (1915-48) died at the age of thirty-three after a brief but brilliant career as a writer and painter. The revealing, poignant, impressionistic voice that buoys his novels was much praised by critics and literati in England and has since inspired creative artists from William S. Burroughs to John Waters. His achievements were all the more remarkable because he suffered from debilitating spinal and pelvic injuries incurred in a bicycle accident at age eighteen.

Though German bombs were ravaging Britain, Welch wrote in his published work about the idyllic landscapes and local people he observed in Kent. There, in 1943, he met and fell in love with Eric Oliver, a handsome, intelligent, but rather insecure "landboy"--an agricultural worker with the wartime Land Army. Oliver would become a companion, comrade, lover, and caretaker during the last six years of Welch's life. All fifty-one letters that Welch wrote to Oliver are collected and annotated here for the first time. They offer a historical record of life amidst the hardship, deprivation, and fear of World War II, and also are a timeless testament of one young man's tender and intimate emotions, his immense courage in adversity, and his continual struggle for love and creative existence.

Front Jacket

Printmaking exploded on the American art scene after World War II, rapidly expanding from New York to the Midwest and beyond. Central to this movement and its development was the University of Wisconsin -- Madison, where a group of talented young artists was making prints and developing a print curriculum. Progressive Printmakers documents, in words and stunning pictures, the breakthrough aesthetics and technical innovations that made the Madison printmakers a force in the art world.

In lively memoirs and analyses, the artists tell the story of the evolving print program at Madison. The distinguished print historian, the late James Watrous, provides an introductory overview, placing the program's development in the national context of the American print renaissance. A concluding chapter traces the founding of Tandem Press, an exciting extension of the Wisconsin print curriculum.

As Watrous notes, the university's commitment has been "renewed again and again during a half-century when printmaking flourished in America as never before."

Author Biography

Warrington Colescott is an internationally known artist and the Leo Steppat Professor of Art Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Arthur Hove, special assistant emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, served in a number of capacities during a long association with the University. He was assistant to the chancellor and director of public information from 1970 to 1989. From 1989 until his retirement in 1996 he was special assistant to the provost. In addition to his administrative responsibilities, he also taught courses in the School of Business, the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and the Department of Art. He holds the Distinguished Alumnus Award presented by the Wisconsin Alumni Association and is the author of The University of Wisconsin: A Pictorial History also published by the University of Wisconsin Press.