color prints

MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS. 1954 Etching and engraving, two colors offset from linoleum 16 x 20 in. Ed. 35 CR# 109 photo: Indianapolis Museum of Art — MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS. 1954
Etching and engraving, two colors offset from linoleum
16 x 20 in. Ed. 35 CR#109
photo: Indianapolis Museum of Art

Many classical paintings have been created around a biblical narrative known as the Massacre of the Innocents. Peterdi was familiar with it in works by Rubens, Cranach the Elder, Breugel the Elder, Tintoretto, and Ghirlandaio, to mention a few.

Peterdi’s MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS (1954) is his version—in modern dress. The context is WW II, with aerial bombardment.

As a U.S. soldier at the front, he had survived heavy artillery fire, had seen rotting corpses in battlefields, witnessed the liberation of a Nazi camp. He made drawings of it all, in real-time. Years afterward, he continued to process these images in his paintings and prints.

Ralph E. Shikes wrote,

The theme of Gabor Peterdi’s ‘The Massacre of the Innocents’ is as old as Christian art, the style as young as today, the effect, if studied, as shocking as that of Bruegel’s painting. Bombers attack. Tracer bullets make patterns in the sky. The earth is a shambles of horror, chaos abounds. It is a study in planes, lines, forms—and is a powerful comment. [The Indignant Eye; the Artist as Social Critic in Prints and Drawings from the Fifteenth Century to Picasso (Boston: Beacon Press 1969) p.394]

notes: the title refers to Herod the Great’s order to execute all male children the age of two years or less, in and around Bethlehem; Gospel of Matthew 2:16 [The New English Bible]

To see a partial list of well-known classical images on this theme, try http://www.textweek.com/art/massacre_of_innocents.htm.

HALEAKALA. 1973 Relief etching on zinc; surface and intaglio color 24 x 36 in. Ed. 100, AP 10, HC 7 CR#337 — HALEAKALA. 1973
Relief etching on zinc; surface and intaglio color
24 x 36 in. Ed. 100, AP 10, HC 7 CR#337

Often mistaken for a painting, HALEAKALA is a print. Impressions of it occasionally turn up with margins concealed or completely cut away (as shown here). Its size [2 x 3 feet] may also suggest displaying it as if it were a painting.

The ‘painterly quality’ of the image has been achieved with standard printmaking technique. The vivid color and organic shapes reflect Peterdi’s actual experience of Haleakala Crater during his second artist residency in Hawai’i. One of his students with an appropriately rugged vehicle drove him up the steep and winding road to the very peak [est. 10,000 ft. or more] by which time a strong, cold windstorm was blasting through. “The volcano was not active—but the colors were,” he replied in a letter to Jane Haslem, who had asked him about it. “The ash in the crater was an array of the most gorgeous colors—red, purple, violet …”

Whether creating a painting or a print, Peterdi would have first dreamed it, his dream revealing the intended image as well as the method for achieving it.

“Some things I can do only as a painting; for other things, I must make a print,” he used to say. “In the same way a bird needs two wings to fly, both are equally necessary for me.”

note: Haleakala [‘House of the Sun’] is a massive shield volcano
that forms more than 75% of the Hawaiian Island of Maui.
[Wikipedia]