garo
antreasian
According to Sandy
Ballatore,
no
modernist painter working today cuts through the eclecticism of contemporary
fashion more surely than does Garo Antreasian. Although he is well known as a
master printmaker/educator, new paintings confirm his position as a master of
classical modernism, in painting as well as in printmaking. Antreasian's
experience with the Art Students League in New York and with Stanley William
Hayter at Atelier 17 in the late forties, set him on a course that brought
classical modernism and technological sophistication to California, New
Mexico, Indiana, Vancouver, Alaska, Connecticut, Texas, Brazil--wherever he
went. His art was last seen in Los Angeles in the fifties when he exhibited
prints. In 1960, he was invited to be the Technical Director of Tamarind
Lithography Workshop, after writing a forward-looking essay on the advancement
of printmaking. He became a leader in the discipline, training master printers
for two decades. They, in turn, revolutionized the field. In 1970, Tamarind
was moved from Los Angeles to the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, where
he worked as Technical Director until 1972. Although teaching, chairing the
art department and working as Acting in Associate Dean drew time from art
making until his retirement in 1987, his work continued in an
inventive and
rigorous vein.
His new paintings restate the heroic grandeur inherent in the art that he
loves: Islamic architecture, metalwork, and tile work discovered when he
visited his Armenian parents' birthplace in Turkey; Cubism; Russian
Constructivism; the works of Robert Motherwell; and hard-edge painting. Yet,
Antreasian's lush planes of thick grays, ivories, terra cottas and soft greens
look like no modernist vision we have seen. Architectonic compositions reveal
mathematical cleverness, rhythm, stabilizing harmonies. Incised within,
around, and through color slabs, taut diagonals stretch like snap-lines used
to mark real walls. "Sooner of later," he states, "the painting finishes
itself whenever it is ready and from the beginning strokes one realized it was
dictating all along what needed to be done."
Garo Antreasian has been involved with lithography since the age of seventeen.
He was first introduced to the medium in the form of an abandoned hand press
at Arsenal Technical High School in his hometown of Indianapolis. In 1960, he
was invited to be the first technical director of the new Tamarind Lithography
Workshop in Los Angeles, which moved to the University of New Mexico in 1970.
As Louise M. Lewis, former assistant director of the University of New Mexico
Fine Arts Museum has written, "The name of Garo Antreasian has been synonymous
with creative lithography in the United States for the past several decades.
Through his teaching and creative activities, his contribution to the
techniques and aesthetics of lithography have had a considerable influence on
the medium in this country." According to the critic V.B. Price, his prints
have "a warmth and elegance which take on the characteristics of an
aristocratic self-control, a mannered passion and vitality, that contradicts
their severities. For all their mathematical precision, the juxtaposition of
the richness of their color with the formal geometry of their design gives
them a feeling of exuberance." 
Photos from L to R: #1.
Untitled by Assadour. #2. Krikor Agopian's Frontieres Fragiles
End of the article.