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.”
These are preparatory sketches for a series of prints that Haas entitled Famous Heads. For the upper left image and the two center ones, Haas based himself on self-portrait etchings that Rembrandt made when he was a young artist starting out in Holland around 1630. Haas coupled his interest in the past with a very contemporary esthetic from the 1960s.
