Is this Heaven? (No, it’s Iowa)
Located just three miles from the Blong Family Farm in Northeast Iowa, St. Anthony of Padua Chapel, otherwise known as “the Smallest Church” seats just eight people and was built by a conscript of Napoleon who immigrated to Iowa in the 1840s.
Influences and Confluences that Create Amazing Art
Charting Transcendence is not just the celestially poetic name of my business; it is also the name I give to the active exploration of concrete and abstract forces that shape the interior and exterior landscapes of heart, mind and soul that I practice on a daily basis.
Scouring hundreds upon hundreds of exhibitions per year in search of the best art for clients, in fact, would not be possible were it not for the clarity and passion I have for the cohesive vision I am building and my desire to demonstrate how art ultimately comprises the interconnectedness of all things.
The atypical strongly attracts me, both in art and life. And although I live in Miami — a dynamic, international melting pot — and make regular trips to popular art-spectating destinations, I essentially trace my own path through art and life downstream, keeping my eyes peeled along the way
So let’s start — out of all places — in Iowa — a state traversed by rivers and cornfields (and certainly never to be confused with Ohio or Idaho) wholly within the basin of the mighty Mississippi. Five generations of my family have called the state home, and I’ve visited regularly since I was a child.
What follows is just one example of how I create meaning for those interested in a deeper exploration of art and their own psyche through a brief history lesson, an in-depth exploration of a working state, and an unusually talented and prolific family of Iowa artists.
From my Family Farm Downstream
View (left) from the 115-year-old bridge (right) that spans the confluence of two creeks, tributaries of the Turkey River, on the Blong Family Farm near St. Lucas, Iowa.
I’m writing this newsletter on the porch of a 150-year-old farmhouse, purchased by my great-grandfather Mathias Blong in the early 1920s. Situated just steps away from the confluence of two creeks, yet well over an hour’s drive from the nearest interstate highway, the Blong Family Farm on the Bass Creek has consistently drawn me back over the years for both its bucolic quietude and the lure of reconnecting with decades of family lore.
My family is fairly sure that human habitation along these creeks dates back millennia before the first European settlers arrived in the 1840s and 1850s, and a state-sponsored archeological review is currently underway on our property to confirm this.
My uncle once collected arrowheads in the fields, and my grandmother once played with a little Indian girl whose family used to camp nearby in the summer. Such reminiscences hint at what I find interesting about the clash of European and Native American history in this region in decades leading to the westward expansion of the United States.
Iowa’s competitive advantages as a U.S. state are rooted in its fertile soil spread by the contours of its dozens of rivers, all of which flow to the mighty Mississippi, and a desire to harness these as a transportation network for trade and settlement played a major role in European political intrigue of the late 18th century.
While traversing Iowa’s lush cornfields this week, I recalled that this once untilled prairieland used to be part of French Louisiana, a territory relinquished to Spain in 1763 before reverting to France some 40 years later at a crucial moment in history.
Tamsie Ringler (b. 1963), River of Iron, Mississippi Iron Pour (2015), cast iron and digital film, the result of a performance piece that took place at the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. A visual representation of the entire Mississippi River watershed, this one ton sculpture evokes the industriousness of the American economy that would come to lord over and exploit it from the nineteenth century until today.
Napoleon, just months away from megalomaniacally proclaiming himself emperor, was preparing for ambitious military campaigns in Europe and the Caribbean — and needed cash. Thomas Jefferson, deeply curious about the mysteries of the West, envisioned the American republic stretching beyond the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean.
As part of the fortuitously-timed Louisiana Purchase, the French and Americans quickly reached a deal by late spring 1803 — $15 million or less than $0.03 an acre — allowing both to lay foundations for monumental impressions of their respective ambitions on Europe and America.
Months later, Beethoven, once a fawning acolyte of Napoleon’s “everyman” heroic story, quickly fell out of love with the French dictator and rescinded the dedication of his Eroica Symphony, which would change the history of music forever.
Meanwhile, along Iowa’s western border, Lewis and Clark made their way up the Missouri River, plotting manifest destiny and the dreams of a powerful nation continually expanding its frontier.
By the time the frontier had closed, a famous European composer, keen on identifying the roots of a uniquely American sound, came to a town just ten miles from the Blong Family Farm. Antonin Dvorak would spend the summer in a Czech-American town called Spillville, composing two of his most beloved pieces for violin there. (check out the video I made about Antonin Dvorak’s 1893 visit).
Telling stories like these about places like Iowa is largely what I do when I look for art that speaks deeply to people. In either case, one chooses one’s own adventure in selecting a thread, story, or tributary of a larger watershed to follow downstream.
Envisioning Evil:
How an Iowa Artist Deftly Confronted the Holocaust in Drawings
Mauricio Lasansky (1914-2012) No. 28, graphite and charcoal, brush and red and asphaltum turpentine wash, and cut, torn, and pasted biblical scripture on paper with torn edges. This is the largest in a series of some three dozen drawings, The Nazi Drawings, which took the artist half a decade (1961-66) to complete. It is no small achievement for an artist to delicately address an unspeakable fact of modern history, i.e. the suffering and murder of children at the hands of the Nazis.
Allow me to fast-forward to the twentieth century, when a far eviler megalomaniac also plotted to conquer the world — with massive consequences for humanity.
In the 1930-40s, New York supplanted Paris as the world’s capital of contemporary art thanks to an influx of European artists, fleeing the rise of fascism, who effectively cross-pollinated their talent among American artists, thereby paving the runway for the development of American contemporary art for decades to come.
Leading New York collectors foresaw the massive shift that was underway and identified the country’s need for experts in the centuries-old technique of copper plate printmaking.
By 1943, with war underway in Europe, the Guggenheim family turned to a promising 31-year-old foreigner, artist, and master printmaker, Mauricio Lasansky, inviting him to the United States for the first of five successive fellowships.
By 1945 Lasansky was teaching at the University of Iowa, whose Master of Fine Arts program, founded five years earlier, is the oldest in the United States; he would continue to teach there until retiring in 1984.
The son of Eastern European Jews who had migrated to South America, the Argentine-born Lasansky (1914-2012) would luckily escape confronting the horrors of the Holocaust directly. Yet as the Adolf Eichmann trial unfolded in 1961, he felt deeply distraught and moved to respond — as a fine artist.
Over the next five years, he labored over a series of large-scale, pencil-and-earth-wash-on-paper drawings, now known as The Nazi Drawings.
Some two decades later, having naturalized and settled his growing family in Iowa City, where he had established the University of Iowa’s printmaking program, Lasansky debuted The Nazi Drawings at the 1967 inaugural exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Marcel Breuer-designed building on Madison Avenue.
The exhibition received critical acclaim alongside solo shows by Andrew Wyeth and Louise Nevelson and later traveled to Philadelphia and Chicago. Bear in mind that this was less than a quarter century after the liberation of Auschwitz. Few if any American artists at that time had yet chosen to address such a raw and brutal topic so directly.
These drawings, having recently toured nationally for the first time in decades, most recently at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, are expected to be acquired by a yet-to-be-announced major art institution. They are exceptional treasures of American art for their scale, technical execution, as well as the artist’s bravery for addressing such horrific acts of evil.
Lasansky enjoyed a long career of both teaching and creating a body of painstakingly executed prints and drawings. He also succeeded in training his children and other members of his extended family to follow in his footsteps as artists.
Detail of a drawing by Mauricio Lasansky, demonstrating the artist’s delicate handwork, as well as influence from European old masters such as Francisco Goya (1746-1828), whose work foreshadowed the rise of Modernism. Starting from his association with Atelier 17, Lasansky crossed paths with nearly all the leading modern artists of his age.
Executed contemporaneously with The Nazi Drawings, this large drawing by Mauricio Lasansky is held in the Lasansky Corporation Gallery’s collection in Iowa City. It is one of just a few Lasansky drawings still for sale, as most are already held in major art institutions across Iowa and the United States.
Like the Old Master Dutch painter and printmaker Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), Mauricio Lasansky frequently depicted himself and his family. This print features the artist with his young son, Tomas (b. 1957), now himself a master printmaker and probably Iowa’s leading living artist.
Two enormous prints of the Mexican god Quetzalcoatl (ca. 1970), showing the influence of both Japonisme and geometric abstraction, in different working states, by Mauricio Lasansky. Among the largest and most impressive, these two versions are for sale directly from the Lasansky Corporation Gallery (please contact Charting Transcendence for details).
Art as a Working State: Studio Visit with Iowa’s Most Exceptional Family of Artists
Today, multiple members of the Lasansky family, who still reside in Iowa City within walking distance of the campus of the University of Iowa, work full time as artists in media ranging from drawing and printmaking to painting and sculpture.
A few days ago, an Iowa collector whom I’ve known for years introduced me to Mauricio’s son, Tomas Lasansky (b. 1957). Showing me around his 15,000 square foot home and studio, as well as the historic space once used by his father that now serves as his gallery, Tomas impressed me with his dedication to promoting his father’s legacy and craft.
While painting is a skill that often can be self-taught, printmaking is a highly technical and detailed fine art medium that requires years of apprenticeship and practice to perfect. It is important for many reasons, one of which is that it allows artists to create multiple copies of an artwork, an otherwise laborious or impossible task in the days before modern methods of mass reproduction.
Another reason is that printmaking allows artists to probe multiple iterations on a central motif. These types of prints are referred to as working states, which serially document the iterative steps by which an artist’s vision for a print is executed.
Tomas Lasansky showing a copper plate he has incised with the portrait of Abraham Lincoln. His varied series of prints of prominent figures from American history have long been among his best sellers.
Tomas’s best-selling prints of famous Native Americans like Sitting Bull complement a collection of Navajo rugs and African art, scattered throughout his studio. Such influences derive in part from his father Mauricio’s taste, forming an eclectic and inclusive modernist backdrop to their highly evolved, traditional European printmaking practice.
A painting of American Country singer Willie Nelson still on the easel, by Tomas Lasansky. The artist’s work sells briskly not only from the Lasansky family’s studio and gallery in Iowa City, but also in niche galleries in Santa Fe, NM and Jackson, WY.
Tomas’s detailed print of Martin Luther King Jr., featuring newspaper articles from the Civil Rights era in the background. A master of figurative portraiture, Tomas has long tended to depict American historical and cultural figures in extensive series.
Tomas apprenticed for years in the studio, where he inherited his father’s depression- and war-era frugality. Copper plates are expensive, after all, and so the master often reused and recycled them, transferring fragments of images onto different prints.
Highly prolific and focused on his craft, Tomas told me that he rarely leaves the studio these days, and has not traveled to New York since before 9/11, even though the family once maintained a residence on East 85th Street near 3rd Avenue. He also told me stories about years of summers once spent as a family on the island of Vinalhaven in Maine, where they were neighbors with legendary Pop artist Robert Indiana of iconic LOVE sculpture fame.
The Lasanskys are now widely recognized as Iowa’s leading family of artists, who carry on a complex and technically demanding traditional European medium in the heartland, producing high-quality artworks collected by individuals and institutions across Iowa and the United States.
During my studio visit, I was fortunate enough to meet Tomas’s wife Charlie and nephew Diego, whose work I greatly admire. Each has a distinct style while reflecting influence from patriarch Mauricio. It is evident that Mauricio instilled a very strong Iowa work ethic into his successors.
Charlie Emmert Lasansky (b. 1960), the wife of Tomas Lasansky, is a highly accomplished printmaker and multimedia artist in her own right. This mixed media portrait of poet Amanda Gorman is currently on display at the Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Museum of Art.
Charlie Lasansky’s mixed media portrait of Frida Kahlo contains fabric — a popular material in much contemporary art these days — while also displaying mastery of iterative printmaking techniques.
Print featuring the profile American composer Aaron Copland by Diego Lasansky (b. 1994), grandson of Mauricio and nephew of Tomas. Much as a talent for music ran in the Bach family, a knack for printmaking courses through the Lasansky family until today.
Diego Lasansky demonstrates his fluency with the working state printmaking method inherited from his grandfather with this pair of prints of Jazz musicians.
Lastly, a Few Highlights from Iowa’s Art Museums
Grant Wood (1891-1942), Portrait of John B. Turner, Pioneer (1928-1930). Although his masterpiece American Gothic resides at the Art Institute of Chicago, some of Wood’s other very best works are in Iowa institutions, especially the excellent Cedar Rapids Museum of Art.
British sculptor and land artist Andy Goldsworthy’s (b. 1956) largest North American installation, Three Cairns, on the grounds of the Des Moines Art Center, a museum that punches above its weight for a city as modestly sized as the lovely Iowa capital (pop. 211,000). The entire piece is comprised of two other stone monuments (or cairns) located on either coast, in Westchester County, NY and La Jolla, CA.
Poster celebrating East Village pop artist Keith Haring's (1958-1990) first visit to Iowa City in 1984, in the collection of the Stanley Museum of Art at the University of Iowa. He would make repeated trips to Iowa over the course of the 1980s, creating a mural for a local elementary school just a year before he died of AIDS.
Charles Ray (b. 1953), subject of a 2022 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, completed this untitled sculpture in 1973 while studying at the University of Iowa, which has produced many distinguished artists and continues to be one of the top ranked public university art programs in the country.
