Seven of the artists with whom Peter Blum published print editions can be grouped together by their willful use of the human figure, and other objective elements. Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Eric Fischl, Alex Katz, Josef Felix Müller, and A. R. Penck are artists who participated in the resurgence of figurative elements in art, which came to the notice of the art public in the late 1970s. Katz began painting the figure in the 1950s; the others came to the fore much later. Fischl and Katz are American, the others European; the careers of all the artists developed first in their own countries, before moving abroad. Blum’s movements and intuitions are keys to the stories of these particular collaborations, but they are also more than that; they can be seen now as harbingers of an art community much more international today than it was a quarter of a century ago.
_____Peter Blum was born in New York [City?], but it might not have seemed likely that he would come to make that American city has base, while he was growing up in [city?] Holland and [city] Switzerland, and Paris. His decision to study at Georgetown University in 1969-70 showed a desire to return to American soil, but that was quickly converted, when he moved to Basel to work at the prestigious Galerie Beyeler from 1971 to 1977. That brought Blum to a critical juncture in his life. He could have easily stayed on at Beyeler, perhaps eventually attempting his own establishment on the Beyeler model, but he felt the need for something different, and decided to return to the city of his birth, New York, to study film in that fertile period for the arts of 1977-78. As Blum puts it, “It was a time when I was trying to find my way, trying to find what I really wanted to do.” New York had offered Blum the chance to immerse himself in all the contemporary arts, a quite different experience from Beyeler, which, at that time, tended to look backwards to the masters of 20th century art.
_____On returning to Switzerland in 1978, he stayed not in Basel but in Zürich, where he attended [name of] university, meeting two people who would later be important to him — Jacqueline Burckhardt and Bice Curiger, the future editors of Parkett magazine. He began writing catalogue texts for the Internationale Neue Kunst (International Contemporary Art Center), known by its acronym, INK. INK was like a private kunsthalle, which invited four artists each month to do an installation in any of its four spaces. At INK, Blum first came into contact with some of the signal artists of the time, meeting John Baldessari, Jonathan Borofksy, Martin Disler, Brice Marden, Robert Ryman and others. Blum began a significant friendship at this time, with the critic and curator Jean-Christophe Ammann. He also began writing for a Swiss newspaper [name] and for a Swiss art magazine, Du. He met and wrote about Iannis Kounellis and Gerhard Richter, in addition to the artists mentioned above. Blum points out that some of the artists suggested that he open a gallery in Zürich, where they would exhibit with him, but it he was not willing to settle down just then.
_____Rather, Blum wished to preserve his mobility for the moment, and in retrospect one may surmise that this had to do partially with the desire to straddle the Atlantic as it were, to keep apprised of the activities of artists in both Europe and the United States. He had no experience publishing either prints or books, but the idea occurred to him that he could do those things without the need for a fixed location that opening a gallery would require. He tells of being influenced by a Borofsky image of a man in a suit and hat carrying a suitcase. Blum developed the idea of carrying an artist’s work, almost an exhibition, from place to place in a small box. There is something film-noirish to this image of a featureless, mobile figure, dressed in the garb of another period, and there is also a Romantic restlessness to the idea. It was not simply fluidity of movement that would characterize the Blum project, however; this would be combined with another quality, rooted perhaps in Blum’s Swiss background and his experience at Beyeler: the need to produce things of the highest quality. This would be no mean feat, to be a publisher of exquisite books and portfolios without a home base, working with one’s feet off the ground, so to speak. It was this unusual combination of qualities that gave Blum’s productions their characteristic tenor. Their originality comes from yet another place, that resonated with his encounters first with emerging artists of his generation.
In the Spring of 1980, Blum had an experience, which would set him on the course he follows to this day.

While walking through Rome, I went into a gallery. Even though the door was open, there was nothing hanging on the walls, and as I turned to walk out, a woman came up a staircase from a basement and greeted me and asked if I would be interested in seeing the work of some younger Italian artists. She went down to the basement again and came back with four large folders, full of drawings by Enzo Cucchi, Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia, and Mimmo Paladino. Perhaps Ernesto Tatafiore, as well. I went through those drawings, and I had an extraordinary experience through the work, a sense of looking at something I had been searching for. I spent about two hours looking at the drawings. I knew something was there that I had to pursue, but I didn't want to buy works at that moment. I realized what I wanted was to find something with which I could work — with which I could make something. So I took that with me, inside of me, and I couldn't stop thinking about it.

_____Blum returned to Switzerland and, on one of his frequents trips to Basel to visit Jean-Christophe Ammann, who was director of the Kunsthalle there, he recounted his recent experience in Rome. Ammann was someone who had his finger on the pulse of the latest developments in European art, yet Blum was surprised when Ammann told him he not only knew the work of the Italians but was already planning an exhibition of their work in Basel. He encouraged Blum to contact them and to pursue his goal of publishing.
Blum returned to Italy, where, at the time, Cucchi was living in Ancona, Clemente and Chia in Rome, Paladino in Milan, and Tatafiore in Naples. Clemente had been approached by Crown Point Press to do a series of etchings but had not done them yet. Printmaking in general and Blum’s particular idea of creating portfolios were not things those artists had yet explored. While they were interested in the idea, the one who responded with the urgency that they should begin right away was Enzo Cucchi. This put Blum, who had never before published anything, on the spot. “I was unprepared,” he says, “because I didn't know where to do something like that. Remembering some printers from the Beyeler days, I thought of Valter Rossi, who had a print studio in Rome, who was already quite well-known, who had worked with Henry Moore and Alberto Burri.”
_____Blum ambitiously hoped to embark on portfolios with several artists simultaneously but soon found out that was not to be. Not only were schedules difficult, if not impossible, to coordinate, but Blum suspects the others may have been waiting to see how the first project would come out. In the Fall of 1980, Ammann’s exhibition at Basel opened, and in December it traveled to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Blum went to that opening and vowed he would not return to New York without a completed portfolio. By the time he got back to Rome, he found that Cucchi and Rossi had finished a series of five lithographs. “I knew at that moment they were extraordinary,” says Blum. “I had seen drawings — Cucchi had made quite precise drawings beforehand of what he wanted to translate.” Blum brought the portfolio to New York and began showing it to people. Jacqueline Brody gave it a positive review in The Print Collector’s Newsletter, and Edy de Wilde, director of the Stedelijk, bought one for the museum. “That was my first sale,” remembers Blum, “and I thought, ‘Yes, this is going to work. This is what I want to do. And if I can make it financially successful, as well, I can continue.’”
An air or expansiveness or inclusiveness came to characterize Peter Blum Edition, as he decided to call it, using the German word. Not only would his efforts emphasize the collaboration between artist, printer and publisher; they would also endeavor to combine unique elements with superior production values in all aspects of the portfolio.

I am someone who wants to be, and is, very much hands-on, involved. I work out the project together with the artist — naturally, their ideas, but they are interested in a dialogue. I am present during the actual making of the prints — coming every day, discussing with the printer: What are the technical limitations, possibilities, innovations? I am closely involved in the choice of papers and especially in making a group which has coherence to it, and I encourage the inclusion of elements. Some of the portfolios have texts in them, poems in them, music tapes in them, objects in them. On the one hand, I leave the artists totally open to come up with the idea, but I also encourage him or her to go beyond a traditional print portfolio.

_____The story of Enzo Cucchi’s early years has been shrouded in a certain mystery. I knew he was involved with poetry, and that he did some collaborations that lead to his becoming a full-time visual artist, but I wanted more detail than I had found and so asked the literary critic and scholar Brunella Antomarini, who provided the following account, which I quote in full:

Enzo was born in a country village near Ancona in 1949 and had his first school years there. He did high school in Brescia, in the north of Italy, where his parents had gone to work. When he came back to Ancona, at 16, he threw a vocabulary book at a teacher's head and was expelled from all Italian schools. Then he started at the Accademia dell'Arte, where he learned the basics — he was there just long enough to absorb what he needed. He traveled with film-makers, poets, painters (he used to bring me to an old painter in Ancona, who paid him to help restore classical paintings). The common idea that he started as a poet is probably due to the fact that he was asked to write a piece for an art book, and he wrote a beautiful, long, poem-like text, which was printed in a prestigious avant-garde edition — the book was black with black pages. At the time, he was 25 and already involved in experimental art — he made compositions or collages on paper or canvas with his self-portrait surrounded by various objects or vegetables. He made performances, which he would show to various art critics throughout Italy. Then, at around 26 or 27, he started drawing, and by chance other artists were doing the same. Then he started painting canvases, bigger and bigger. There was an immediate response. Enzo also likes to remember that the priest of his village asked him to paint a Madonna for the church when he was a child, because he was good at drawing. Another memory he has is that at school, when he drew on his notebook, he pressed the paper with the pencil so hard that the paper was torn, and the drawing was done on the sheet below.