Rival Cuts: Artworks
Created as a tribute to Dürer’s celebrated 1515 woodcut The Rhinoceros, seen in the introduction, Hück’s The Great War-Madillo lays bare the contemporary artist’s rebellious streak as well as his great admiration for the history of print. Hück reimagines Dürer’s rhinoceros as an armadillo on a grand scale, looming over its captors, a distortion in size that creates a jarring and humorous scene when combined with the human-like armor it wears.
Woodcut is a relief method of printmaking in which an artist carves or gouges away pieces of a wooden block until the desired image remains raised (in relief) on the surface of the block. The raised lines are inked and printed to a sheet of paper using a woodblock press. Like all forms of printmaking, the image must be composed in reverse so that the paper displays the desired image when pulled from the block.
This already complicated technique is made more so by the hard and resistant nature or carving wood. As Hück says, “This shit fights you. It doesn’t want you to carve the dashes out of it.”
The concept of artistic rivalry is not a modern one. It existed even between the artists of the Renaissance, who vied with each other for both reputation and patronage. Dürer, the most celebrated printmaker of the German Renaissance, achieved fame by his late twenties. He was ambitious, owned his own print shop, and sold and distributed his own prints. Without having to rely solely on patronage for a living, Dürer was able to create prints based on his own interests. One subject to which he returned six times throughout his career concerns the biblical narrative of Christ’s Passion as described in the Gospels.Pilate Washing His Hands comes from Dürer’s Engraved Passion, a series of eleven rich engravings meant to be contemplated by the viewer at length. Rather than the figure of Pilate, however, it is the central figure of a servant who captures the viewer’s gaze such that the receding figure of Christ in the right background is almost an afterthought. The servant, with his unusual hat and striking facial features, dominates the scene.Hendrick Goltzius later recreated this figure in The Circumsicion, also included in the exhibition, an engraving done entirely in the manner of Dürer.
“I just remember that at a certain point, I wanted to make prints as great as my heroes.”
—Tom Hück
Like Dürer, Hendrick Goltzius frequently returned to images of the life of Christ and the Virgin throughout his career. He considered toiling over and perfecting a copperplate as an act of devotion and praise for the God that, in both Goltzius’ and Dürer’s estimation, bestowed the artist with his talent. For Goltzius, the act of emulation was also a tribute to his predecessors and their artistic mastery. His Life of the Virgin, a series of five engravings in the manner of various masters, replicated and perfected the hand of each such that Goltzius’ print could stand as a work created by that artist.
Goltzius chose the manner of Dürer for The Circumcision. Goltzius’ rendition of Dürer’s servant appears in the right foreground alongside an ensemble of Dürer’s other characters from the Engraved Passion, again as largest figure in the image. By turning the figure’s back to the viewer, Goltzius creates an alternative perspective that allows one of Dürer’s most memorable characters from the Engraved Passion to be seen “in the round.”
Not to be sublimated by Dürer, Goltzius placed his own self-portrait among the group—the bearded figure in the right background who alone holds the gaze of the viewer. This confrontation cues the viewer that Goltzius, rather than Dürer, composed this scene, so perfect in its imitation of Dürer’s hand that it could stand as, if not supplant, the work of the earlier artist. Combined with the larger scale of the print, the figure of Goltzius amongst Dürer’s characters declares Goltzius as an equal. His hand emulates those of the masters, but also initiates a form of rivalry in which Dürer, now deceased, had no chance to respond.
Completed around 1498, Dürer’s Martyrdom of St. Catherine depicts the moments just prior to Catherine’s death at the hands of the emperor Maxentius in the early fourth century. According to the traditional narrative, Catherine, a royal daughter of the governor of Alexandria in Egypt, became a Christian at a young age. She was ordered to be put to death after she debated a number of Maxentius’ pagan philosophers and priests so well that they converted to Christianity. The proposed tool of her execution was a bladed weapon called the “breaking wheel.” The vicious wheel shattered as it touched her, however, so she was later decapitated by a headsman, seen here with his sword raised and back turned to the viewer.
Dürer composed many of his prints, especially his early woodcuts, around a strong, central diagonal that directs the viewer’s gaze through the image. He employed specific compositional elements to direct the viewer’s looking as well. This packed composition demands that the viewer dwell at length on the image, following visual cues in order to interpret it. Here, the repeated visual motifs include sword blades, streaking fireballs, fire and shrapnel splitting the clouds, and the flames licking the hands of St. Catherine before rotating upward to converge with the flames in the sky around the swordsman who takes cover beneath his cloak.
Hück utilizes similar compositional elements to direct viewers through his raucous scenes. For example, he drew direct inspiration from specific motifs found in Dürer’s St. Catherine for the central panel of his monumental triptych Electric Baloneyland, also included in the exhibition. These include the blades of the spinning wheel intended to kill Catherine, which transform into the knife stabbing the central figure of “Lady Liberty,” depicted as a mermaid. Likewise, Dürer’s flames transform into a headpiece, while the figure of the spinning wheel becomes a ferris wheel at the county fair.
“Why has God given me such magnificent talent? It is a curse as well as a great blessing.”—Albrecht Dürer
The precocious Dürer began three woodcut series on religious topics while still in his twenties—The Apocalypse, The Large Passion, and The Life of the Virgin—and worked on them concurrently through their completion in his early thirties. He created six full Passion cycles during his lifetime, affirming an insistent, personal interest in the topic. A tenet of Christian theology, the biblical Passion narrative describes Christ’s experiences between the Last Supper and the Crucifixion, although Dürer added scenes to his renditions, such as Christ in Limbo, also known as the Harrowing of Hell, which occurs after the Crucifixion in the narrative.
Some scholars have argued that Dürer continually revisited the story of Christ’s Passion to provide a version for each of his various audiences—from collectors and connoisseurs to the illiterate—while others see his re-imagination of the topic as an act of devotion and praise for his own creative abilities rather than motivation for financial gain. In Dürer’s own treatise on art he argues that it is the artist’s responsibility to express his or her creative abilities in ways that honor God.
Although The Crucifixion and Christ in Limbo were ultimately included in Dürer’s Large Passion series, they were created over a decade apart and display a drastic shift in style. The Crucifixion, created in 1496, fore-grounds the body of Christ, whose blood flows garishly from the wounds in his hands, feet, and side into angels’ chalices. The Latin term horror vacuii, or fear of open spaces in works of art, can be applied to this print’s collapsed perspective and crowded composition. Dürer’s complex, destabilizing scene layers figures such that the viewer collides with the the lifeless form of Christ and the emotional reactions of the witnesses, especially the visceral sorrow of Mary and John the Evangelist, who supports her sagging body.
Dürer created Christ in Limbo (Harrowing of Hell) around 1510, just after returning from his second sojourn to Italy, where he was profoundly influenced by the masters of the Italian Renaissance and classical sculpture and architecture. His subsequent prints, like this one, feature heightened atmospheric perspective, subtle tonalities, and a greater understanding of human anatomy than did his earlier, more linear prints. For example, the figure of Adam, one of the souls that Christ saves during his descent into Hell in the biblical narrative displays the naturalistic, “contrapposto” stance favored by classical sculptors and the Italian masters.
The imaginative, grotesque figures prized by Hück populate this scene, appearing as demonic figures emerging from craggy, root-like structures and the arched doorways of Hell. Holdovers from the Middle Ages and the earlier printmakers of the Northern Renaissance like Schongauer, Dürer brings them out of the medieval bestiary and imbues them with the same tonal depth as the figures of Adam and Christ, making them all the more startling in their realism. In fact, Hück was so taken with the horn-blowing demon at the top of this woodcut that it became his first tattoo.
These two woodcuts from Dürer’s Large Passion series further demonstrate Dürer’s importance and his impact on the medium of printmaking well after his death. It was not unusual for woodblocks to be acquired and reissued posthumously during the early modern era. Jacob Koppmayer purchased the woodblocks for Dürer’s Large Passion and published them in Augsburg in 1675. These woodcuts, printed on a brownish-colored paper typical for the time period, are from this Augsburg edition.
In contrast to Dürer’s Engraved Passion and Large Passion cycles, in which the artist invites the viewer to dwell at length on the scene, his Small Passion emphasizes only a single narrative element in each print, often in gory detail. Dürer created thirty-six woodcuts for this series, by far the longest of his career. Designed as a pictorial “reading” experience, the Small Passion propels the viewer through the narrative using visual cues that urge forward progression—the Crown of Thorns appearing on the right arm of the cross and the artist’s monogram in these two examples.
Even in these diminutive and focused prints, Dürer’s imagery corresponds to the process of woodcarving, which as a medium lends itself to brutal, disturbing imagery. On the left, the leaden body of Christ is lowered from the cross. Although Dürer obscures Christ’s lifeless face, the notion of death is mirrored in the skull-like features of Joseph’s cap, pressed to the side of Christ’s head. Likewise, in Christ Appearing to the Apostles, also included in the exhibition, the risen figure of Christ grabs the wrist of the Apostle Thomas and thrusts it into the wound on his side to prove his identity. Delineated with a scant few gouges, this visceral detail repels viewers as much as it attracts them, a concept that Hück magnifies in his work.
These two large woodcuts from the series Two Weeks in August: 14 Rural Absurdities, mark the beginning of Hück’s life as a printmaker. Hück based Two Weeks in August on fourteen strange happenings in the history of his tiny hometown of Potosi, Missouri. Packed with imagery, this series evokes the horror vacuii and diagonal composition of Dürer’s early woodcuts perhaps more than any other series by Hück.
In Kohler City Revisited, Hück recounts a trip with his mother to a Potosi variety store called “Kohler City.” Among other odd items, the store offered used dentures. The print is inspired by the young Hück’s experience as he witnessed patrons trying these dentures on for size. It translates the memory of a horrified yet fascinated child in exaggerated, satirical detail. Pile upon towering pile of dentures spill from display barrels and litter the floor, while patrons and employees rummage through the stacks in search of the perfect pair of used teeth. Hück uses the piles as a tool to create a remarkable amount of depth and tone from foreground to background, which stabilizes the otherwise chaotic scene. The diagonal composition flows from a Christ-like background figure who tenderly cradles a collection of dentures like a lamb. His sorrowful face gazes out at the viewer, beckoning and plaintive. More than just a satirical image of a humorous story, this figure acts as a cue to alert the viewer to a subtler message—the need and poverty that fueled the existence of used dentures as a sundry good.
In Exhuming Moses, Hück recounts a foiled plot to steal the remains of Moses Austin, the founder of Potosi, Missouri, and father to Stephen Austin, the well-known “Father of Texas.” According to the tale, many Texans believed that the remains of Moses should lie beside those of his son at the Texas State Cemetery in Austin. A small group of Texans took action, traveling to Potosi to exhume Moses under the cover of night. They planned to smuggle the body out by chopping it into sections, but an elderly woman spotted them and shouted for the authorities.
A Dürer-esque diagonal drives this tumultuous composition in the form of the dark coffin that dominates the image. Hück accentuates the themes of death and resurrection-through-disinterment by littering the scene with bones, seen in the bucket, through the desiccated skin of Moses, and in the skeletal forms of the distant clouds. He uses the tools of the would be grave-robbers—shovels, a flashlight, and knife—to urge the viewer through the seemingly endless details of the nefarious scheme. He peppers the image with repeated motifs like the Star of Texas, seen on the armbands worn by two of the thieves and in the form of a bumper sticker appended to the bucket, visual rewards that delight as much as they ground the narrative.
Abduction on a Unicorn, one of only five etchings that Dürer created in his lifetime, represents the artist’s attempt to synthesize draughtsmanship and printmaking. Etching as a printmaking method had only been developed around ten years earlier. The method required the addition of a waxy ground to the surface of a metal plate. The artist then drew into the waxy coating with an etching needle rather than carving directly into the plate, a much more painstaking and laborious process. Once the design was completed the plate was dipped into acid, which “bit” the image into the plate. This immediate process allowed for fluid line work more akin to the lines of a drawing. Nearly impossible to achieve in woodcut or engraving, it allowed a freedom of expression that Dürer had never experienced in the medium of print.
Dürer transforms the unicorn, typically a symbol of virtue, into a cloven-hooved beast with flaring nostrils and a blade-like horn, features that were closely associated with demonic lore. Despite the wild, fraught nature of the nocturnal setting, Dürer arrests the viewer’s gaze by joining it with the gaze of the male figure. His sorrowful, placid expression contrasts with the woman’s features, frozen in terror, and provides the central element around which the entire composition swirls, much like the plaintive, bearded character in Hück’s Kohler City Revisited.
The arcane subject matter has yet to be fully interpreted. The most commonly accepted interpretations argue that the scene depicts the abduction of Proserpine, the daughter of Roman goddess of agriculture and fertility, Ceres, by Pluto, god of the Underworld. The etching has also been interpreted allegorically as the threat of evil and death over purity and life. Given Dürer’s interest in witchcraft imagery, a third interpretation holds that the scene depicts a popular tale depicted in the Nuremberg Chronicle in which an English sorceress was abducted by the devil.
"If Dürer had plywood, it would be a whole different ballgame now, but he didn't."
—Tom Hück
Like Two Weeks in August, Hück’s Bloody Bucket series depicts folkloric events reimagined in dense, large scale woodcuts. In this case, the stories surrounded a short-lived, but notoriously violent bar called the Bloody Bucket, which existed in Potosi from 1948-1951. This scene, a rendering of the type of activity that Hück imagines occurring at the bar, depicts a scantily-clad woman refereeing a “cock fight” between two bar patrons who are shown riding ostriches.
Hück’s adept rendering of the large birds represents another nod to the naturalism favored by Dürer in his mature prints. Dürer often created drawings and prints based on animals he had never observed in life, including The Rhinoceros, seen in the introduction to the exhibition, on which Hück based The Great War-Madillo. Dürer returned to exotic animals not native to Germany throughout his career, like the parrot in Adam and Eve, and the lion in St. Jerome in His Study.
While a passion for naturalistic imagery might seem incongruous with Hück’s exaggerated and grotesque forms, the dedicated realism of the birds’ dark eyes, feathered necks, and bridled beaks display Hück’s own technical prowess, draughtsmanship, and observational skills alongside those of his printmaking idol.
Hück’s love for the art of the Northern Renaissance extends beyond Dürer and the print medium to the famed triptych altarpieces of Flemish masters like Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden. This monumental woodcut triptych, the third of Hück’s career and the first using the chiaroscuro woodcut method, explores the dissolution that Hück sees lying beneath the surface of America’s small towns, expressed allegorically through events and people at a traditional county fair. Hück packs each panel in Electric Baloneyland by layering figures, livestock, crowds, and rides on top of one another. He wants his tumultuous compositions to overwhelm as much as entertain, to enliven just as they arrest the viewer and demand close looking. His messages, often transgressive and anti-authoritarian, are never given away completely; rather, he leaves interpretation up to the viewer, “if they can handle it.”
Hück follows British satirist William Hogarth, who held a mirror up to contemporary society, exposing ignorance, corruption, and the carefully disguised flaws of humanity. Hück also echoes the sentiment of cartoonist R. Crumb, who famously said of his provocative work “it’s only lines on paper, folks!” Historically made to approach on an intimate, personal level, works on paper are generally small and easy to apprehend. Unfortunately, their fragility and ephemeral quality can also make them easy to disregard. Hück, however, carves on large sheets of finish-grade birch plywood, exploding the dimensions of traditional prints. The confrontational size of his work, especially in the triptych format, combined with his bold carving style and blistering satire, can be divisive in terms of audience reception. As Hück says proudly, “viewers either love it or hate it.”
The first panel depicts a raucous ride at the county fair. For this print, Hück drew inspiration from satirist Honoré Daumier’s Gargantua, a controversial 1831 lithograph featuring the French monarch Louis-Phillipe gorging on coin bags collected from the poverty-stricken lower classes. Hück’s version reverses Daumier’s conveyor belt and shows a gun-toting Uncle Sam spewing a track and cars, the top three bearing the acronym NRA. He populates the cars with a Davy Crockett-like figure wearing a bandolier, who points a gun toward the deer-headed car behind him; white supremacist Klansmen with attributes of the Nazi and neo-Nazi movements; as well as a figure bearing peace signs, which have also been associated with the Nazi era.
Hück takes quotes from Dürer’s The Martyrdom of St. Catherine, also included in the exhibition, and works them into the visual vocabulary of Electric Baloneyland’s central panel. The attributes of St. Catherine—the “breaking wheel,” the bladed wheel on which she was to be impaled, the sword that eventually ended her life, and the crown that symbolized her royal status—reappear in the central panel, where Hück’s “Lady Liberty” takes the form of a mermaid. Hück transforms the jewels on St. Catherine’s crown into studs for the crown of his toughened up “Lady Liberty,” while the flames beneath Dürer’s “breaking wheel” resemble her crown’s bedraggled tines. Dürer’s bladed wheel of death becomes a ferris wheel at Hück’s county fair, and is also referenced in the shurikin, Japanese throwing stars, that have impaled the mermaid’s tail, and by the print’s jagged perimeter. The sword that eventually beheaded St. Catherine becomes a blade that spears the mermaid. Hück alludes to the method of her capture through the activities of the figures around her, engaged in a type of hand-fishing called “noodling.” This technique involves thrusting a bare arm into a muddy catfish hole. If all goes well, the catfish latches on to the “noodler’s” arm and is yanked from the hole. The various stages of this practice are performed by figures in the background and by the dog and female figure in the foreground. The dog’s head and the hands of the fisherwoman penetrate the lower panel, where they grasp a catfish rendered in the style of a Japanese woodblock.
In the chiaroscuro woodcut process used to create Electric Baloneyland, Hück used two woodblocks to render an image in two colors, here black and gold. One is carved to create the primary image, while the second is carved to contribute the second color as well as white highlights. Creating this monumental work took over two years. During this time, Hück typically spent eight to nine hours in the studio per day, sometimes only completing a 2 x 2 inch square.
Two brothers, wearing cow pelvises in an outlandish attempt to disguise their faces, flee the scene of a bank robbery riding double on a child’s bicycle. Hück’s imaginative recreation of another legendary tale from the Bloody Bucket bar catapults the viewer into the action through drastic shifts in scale between the near life-size foreground figures and the diminutive cityscape in the background. The bicycle’s banana seat and handlebar streamers, along with the barrel of the rifle, propel the viewer through the scene of the escape, while the handcuffs dangling from the wrist of one brother point to earlier run-ins with law enforcement.
Hück expands the collapsed perspective of his prints from the Two Weeks in August series. The brothers, one in a cut-off denim vest and the other an ill-fitting, stained t-shirt, loom before the viewer astride their escape vehicle. The background, no longer rendered in harsh flashes of black and white, is filled with the townscape of tiny Potosi, complete with a picket fence. Black rather than the typical white picket fences that have become a symbol of idyllic small-town life, this fence symbolizes the darker, more turbulent history described in the scathing satire of an artist who himself escaped.