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. In 2019, he wrote “I have always retained a strong and positive memory of your city and especially of your institution which I visited on a regular basis and where I learned so much about the history of art.”
In preparation for cutting his printing block for this woodcut, Haas chose to freely paint the composition with a Japanese brush rather than carefully drawing it with a pencil. In doing so, he was taking inspiration from Abstract Expressionists, such as Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell. The result is tension between representation and abstraction.
