Richard Haas gained fame in the 1970s for his enormous outdoor murals that transformed blank, drab building facades into grand architectural fantasies. In the early to mid-1960s, he was a graduate student and instructor at the University of Minnesota. While here he experimented with making figurative woodcuts in a free technique that bordered on abstraction. This portrait of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche belongs to series that Haas called Famous Heads.
