Expressionism in Print: The Early Works of Richard Haas, 1957-64

Richard Haas’s expansive oeuvre is predominantly marked by trompe l'oeil murals and detailed renderings of New York City’s architecture. But before he began recording urban landscapes, Haas sought inspiration from German Expressionist printmakers and Abstract Expressionist painters.

Included in the exhibition are prints produced between 1957 and 1964—a seven-year period that, in many ways, encapsulates the artist’s graphic evolution. While attending the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, a city heavily settled by German immigrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Haas began studying German Expressionism.

Informed by the emotive woodcuts of Edvard Munch, Max Beckmann, and Erich Heckel, Haas’s large-scale prints include abstract portraits of European artists and great thinkers. Haas later moved to pursue an M.F.A. at the University of Minnesota, where he studied under the Abstract Expressionist Jack Tworkov. In the years following, Haas produced etchings and monotypes indicative of Twokov’s gestural abstraction.

Haas’s deep interest in nineteenth-century European history informs many of these early prints. Included in the exhibition are woodcuts from Haas’s Famous Heads series, comprising portraits of Henry VIII, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet, Auguste Rodin, Paul Gauguin, and Albert Einstein.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.