Lasansky, Mauricio

Artist Bio: Mauricio Lasansky was an Argentinian-born American printmaker. He is best known for his innovative use of drypoint, intaglio, and multiple plates to produce richly worked portraits, figurative abstractions, depictions of public and historical figures, scenes of farmers, and images of the Holocaust. Lasansky cites the work of Francisco Goya, El Greco, Stanley William Hayter, Pablo Picasso, and Marc Chagall among his influences. Born on October 12, 1914 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Eastern European Jewish immigrants, he studied at the Superior School of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires before moving to New York in 1943. The artist accepted a teaching position at the University of Iowa in 1945, where he taught until 1984 and helped to establish the first MFA program in the United States. Lasansky died on April 2, 2012 in Iowa City, IA. His works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others.