One of the most fascinating things about Glankoff’s work is its self contained, self referential quality, certainly due in part to the artist’s personality. Glankoff was a very shy and introspective man. It appears that he often saw little need to search for subject matter elsewhere when he could use his own early imagery, rather like a renewable resource, constantly reworking and refining it, virtually recycling old forms again and again. His work is a wonderful opportunity to observe the artistic meaning of the term “to abstract”. For example, this slide done around 1952, about mid career, is a watercolor (left, RYBWC 018), abstract of course, with the essentials refined and removed. As an example of that, the house and other objects in the landscape are reduced to simple rectangles. The tree (below left, F 26), especially, I want to point out because it is reduced to a very geometric form, a pure circle. In fact, he’s emphasized that by drawing a line around it. The circle will become a very important aspect of Glankoff’s art later on.

But Glankoff was not essentially a landscape artist. His abstraction usually derived from the human figure. Here on the left is an abstracted female form (above, PP 1026). Again, simplified outline, the colors obviously not representational, the emphasis again, on the circles of the breasts. Here (above right, C 30), in a sketch, we see an even more abstracted image of that.

We can recognize the figure (below left, PP 1055) to some extent because we've seen where it has come from. The circles are still there, but the bottom of the figure has been separated entirely from the top of the figure. From sketches such as these (below middle, FII 54), Glankoff was to create larger scale works (below right, PP 2025). And again, the relationship becomes clear when seen side by side. However, when viewing a work such as this, one might think there was a totally non objective artist at work. Here, Glankoff has taken the center section out of that work and simply expanded it to make a two-circle work (left, PP 2093) in which the human content seems to be removed.

I'd like to start a longer sequence of comparisons to focus on this life long interest in his own early work as a future source. This woodcut (two above, RBWWdC 2402-25-12) and watercolor (above, FgWC 001) probably date from around 1925. It is possible, as is often the case in prints, that the watercolor came first, and became the model for the print, because after all, the work is reversed. When you make a print designed on the wood block, it doesn't turn out to be backwards, in a sense, when you print it. So this print might have come afterwards. Nevertheless, I want to focus on this X shape form, which you'll notice in the figure here. The leg and the arm start to create an X form.

His technical proficiency, as I said, was very great. He could have been a portrait artist in the woodcut medium, if he had chosen to. On the left we have a portrait of his wife, Frances Kornblum (above left, RBWWdC 4108), and on the right, a portrait of his brother, Mort Glankoff (above right, RBWWdC 2001). But this was not to be his direction.

He continued to look through the expressionist mode, here in works from the mid 30s. You see that he's enlarged the figures (left, RBWWdC 5204). He has made them, again, more abstract. On the right, for example, where we have faces, they become rather like primitive masks. And the white area becomes much more dominating, balancing the black, becoming much more of a purely formal compositional statement.

His interest in color starts to come out with these works, the color linocuts (below, WdCI 02501 and WdCI 02601) of perhaps the 1920s, 1930s, which are, again, probably commercial works, possibly made for book covers or book illustrations. But again, early on we see this interest in intense color and an interest in the simplified form using the female. But the color is very, very...almost, one might say idealized in terms of making color everything. In fact, the woman on the right is surrounded by an aura of color. She literally glows with it. Later on, the further abstracted image is carried on into his works of the 50s and 60s, where his woodcuts become virtually non¬representational.

But it is the print paintings which I'd like to emphasize. Print painting is really an invention of Glankoff's. And it's rather remarkable that in the late twentieth century an artist could really come up with an entirely new technique. Certainly it was based on other techniques. But it had specific qualities and characteristics which Glankoff, through his great experience with the medium, realized had to come together in an entirely new form.

The image is affixed on these boards by using a permanent pigment such as acrylic. This way he could actually print the work over and over and redo it in a different format. He could print it once in these colors, then take away that ink, and because these images were created from the template, from which he'd put the next colors down, he was able to print repeatedly. The monotype, on the other hand, would have been gone.

It's not really a woodcut process because there's no incising into the wood itself. Everything is put directly onto the surface and then transferred over. And then it's not really a painting, even though it seems to have the look of a painting, and Glankoff did in a sense paint directly with his inks and caseins onto the board. But it is a transfer process, so it can't be a painting because that's direct and Glankoff preferred that indirect method.

Glankoff was very practical. He used these small pieces of Japanese paper which determined the size of each individual board. The assemblage of those (uniformly sized) boards determined the size of each individual work. He devised a very carefully worked out registration table by which he could put the paper over the print surface, paint his inks onto the board, slide the paper over, drop it there himself, and working with hand pressure, with a roller, press the inking onto it. The hand pressure was important. The personal touch and various textures that he wanted could not be achieved in a more direct technique, he felt.

He used paper, not only because it was very easy to store and didn't take up much room, but also because this infusion of paint into the surface produces a very, very rich type of color. He was very interested in color experimentation, as you can see in his works. His process made possible the overlay of color and for color added on top of color. The ink seeps directly into the paper and creates an exceedingly rich tone. This was something he realized was best achieved within this transfer process.

When we consider the care and thought that went into Glankoff's art, the skill honed by decades of work the sheer dedication we may feel disappointed that the artist labored in seclusion almost to the end of his life. Certainly towards the end of his life as people finally drew him out of his isolation, there were no regrets on his part. His new found linkage with people, his realization of its importance and the happiness it could bring, impelled Glankoff to produce his most exuberant absolutely joyful (left, PP 6011) works ever. After almost eighty seven years, his art quite literally broke out in a smile. However, Glankoff's work remains very much a reflection of a particular personality and philosophy. And its intensity probably springs from his inward looking single-mindedness of purpose.

The retrospective laid out before us is an extremely personal vision. So it is perhaps fitting, ultimately, and in a peculiar sort of way, that Glankoff did keep his work private. His prints and print paintings were directed by an inner perception. Stored away, they are like pages of a diary, filled with personal meanings. They were created year after year and numbered in the hundreds and hundreds. Though hidden for so long, like Glankoff's talent, they continued to mature and flourish, whether or not they saw the light of day. Fortunately we see them now. Thank you.