Paul Landacre

Paul Hambleton Landacre (July 9, 1893, Columbus, Ohio - June 3, 1963, Los Angeles, California) participated in the Southern California artistic Renaissance between the world wars and is regarded as one of the outstanding printmakers of the modern era. His stylistic innovations and technical virtuosity gained wood engraving a foothold as an art form in twentieth-century America. Landacre's linocuts and wood engravings of landscapes, still lifes, nudes, and abstractions are celebrated for their consummate design and mastery of material. He used the finest inks and Japanese papers and, with few exceptions, printed his wood engravings on a nineteenth-century Washington Hand Press, which is now in the collection of the International Printing Museum in Carson, California.

Paul Landacre's indomitable spirit figures prominently in his storied career as an award-winning wood engraver. His early promise as a track and field athlete at Ohio State University was clipped by a debilitating illness that left his right leg permanently stiffened. The crisis spurred him to leave Ohio in 1917 for the more healthful climate of San Diego. He soon resettled in Los Angeles where his diligence and good fortune recast his professional prospects as a budding commercial draftsman. In 1925, Margaret McCreery, an advertising copywriter he met a few years earlier, became his lifelong companion and wife, fully complicit in the realization of his artistic gifts as a draftsman and printmaker.

Although he took some life-drawing classes at the Otis Art Institute between 1923 and 1925, Landacre largely taught himself the art of printmaking. He experimented with the technically demanding art of carving linoleum blocks and, eventually, woodblocks for both wood engravings and woodcuts. His fascination with printmaking and his ambition to make a place for himself in the world of fine art coalesced in the late 1920s when he met Jake Zeitlin. Zeitlin's antiquarian bookshop in Los Angeles--a cultural hub that survived into the 1980s--included a small gallery space for the showing of artworks, primarily prints and drawings, and it is there in 1929 that Landacre's first prints were exhibited. In early 1930 Zeitlin gave Landacre his first significant solo exhibition in southern California. Zeitlin's ever-widening circle of artists included Edward Weston, a photographer, and Henrietta Shore, a painter and printmaker, each of whom shared the modernist vision that so captivated Landacre. Well-connected to the New York art scene, Zeitlin associated himself with the circle of artists represented by Carl Zigrosser, director of the Weyhe Gallery in Manhattan and, later, curator of prints at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. By 1936 Zigrosser considered Landacre to be "one of the few graphic artists worth watching" in America, and included him among his portraits of 24 contemporary American printmakers in his seminal work, "The Artist in America" (Knopf 1942). Rockwell Kent also praised Landacre as, without exception, the finest wood engraver in America. (Los Angeles Times, July 2, 1939, C7) Elected a member of the National Academy in 1946, Landacre was honored in 1947 with a solo exhibition of his wood engravings at the Smithsonian Museum, its graphic arts division under the curatorial leadership of Jacob Kainen.

...
Wikipedia