_____Cucchi has been prolific as a writer of short texts, and his publications are liberally sprinkled with these writings. These texts are somewhere between philosophy and poetry. Blum published a book of Cucchi’s writings, with illustrations, La cerimonia della cose (The Ceremony of Things) in 1985. In 1987, Blum published Sparire (Disappearing), a Cucchi text, which Bice Curiger refers to as a “manifesto.” One of the lines in Sparire states, “One must show things never seen: yet feasible.” Books play a significant role in Cucchi’s output, and his treatment of the book form is singular; as in his art, where he does unpredictable things in media such as mosaic and ceramic, as well as large scale sculpture, in addition to his painting and drawing, so in his publications Cucchi is never content to rely on a given format, even one that he himself has previously created. La cerimonia delle cose uses reproductions that are bound with the text pages, but are smaller in size and of differing rectangular formats. [quote from cerimonia].
_____The Enzo Cucchi portfolio with Blum, a set of five lithographs published in 1981, has the title Immagine Feroce. The title (“Fierce Image” or “Ferocious Image”) is a singular idea, as though the whole portfolio presents one image, or attitude, or else the title, instead of being descriptive, provides an analogy to what one finds inside: “This portfolio is about the experience of a fierce image.” The prints in Immagine feroce do not present fierce images per se. There was, however, a fierceness to Cucchi’s devotion to traditional artistic skills, particularly drawing, at a time when the art world was still dominated by idea-driven work.
_____There are usually four or five principal figures in each lithograph. The surprising relationships of scale and subject are harmonized by balanced use of drawn tones. Halos — or rather oval lines surround by dots that seem to function as halos — occur in two of the prints, and dark black “hairy” waves make a few appearances. An edifice is frequently included: a smokestack perhaps signaling malevolent Blakean industry — as against nature’s purity or the mystery of a cat — or an archetypal Cucchi image: a long, low building, which in its dark uniformity can conjure memories of Auschwitz’ regimented barracks. In one print, a figure who looks like a woman fondles the tip of the elongated apartment block, while she holds a man’s top hat in her other hand, displaying its oval opening at the approximate height of her genitalia. The point may be not so much a particular interpretation or sensation as how the artist is capable of orchestrating various possibilities, which can be read into his image.
_____Discussing some of Cucchi’s drawings from the early 1980s, Ursula Perucchi-Petri writes, ““In these drawings Cucchi gives plastic form to dreamlike situations, in that, in order to shape his compositions, he uses dream structures such as flowing transitions from one place to another, from one time to another, or combinations of plastic elements of different provenances and different levels. Since the description obeys neither linea[r] nor logical laws, an atmosphere is created which the observer can capture more through association than through reason, which provides him with new modes of knowledge.” In the sky of one print, a huge dark ovoid figure hovers. This egg will recur in later work, and it plays an important role in Cucchi’s latest collaboration with Blum. Since it is large and floats in the sky, it is cloud-like; since it is dark, and its surface is closed, it is stone-like. It is at once light and heavy; this contradiction, its huge size relative to other objects, and its position in the sky, from where celestial phenomena — whether natural or super-natural — are thought to come, give the object a menacing, potential aura. Perucchi-Petri also sees something life-giving in it in those images in which it is held: “This ‘something sacred between the hands’ can become a halo or ‘sacred bread,’ which reveals its force as nourishment for the soul.”
Cucchi’s early work seems rooted in European culture, both in terms of its attitude towards technique and what I interpret as an appropriate bleakness. It is not overstated or melodramatic, and it is connected also to life-generating imagery, but a meditation on desolation is frequently a legitimate reading of the work. Because Cucchi takes care to set all his images in a metaphysical or non-literal realm, there is one level on which this desolation is simply part of the human lot — what humanity has received and what it consistently metes out. Specific images, however, can bring to mind specific modern maladies.
_____Speaking of his use of different tones of grey and black in the lithographs, Cucchi says, “They are the colors of Old Europe. Colors for the resistance, for resisting. It was so that the work could be anchored, centered in Europe. It was a work for Europe, for the people of Europe. It is the first vocabulary, the first language, the first alphabet for a people. If I speak of a material as fresh, cold, hard — grey and black can seem like mountainous, hard materials. It’s something you see in the effects of minor Italian artists, in particular, and in primitive art. So, that is resistance for me — to work in a language that everyone can get right away. But without resorting to an international language, because that is very disturbing. Advertising, fashion are much faster and stronger than artists. Resistance in this sense — to resist this force and retain the character of a symbol.”
_____Cucchi’s orchestration of possibilities and techniques is fierce, because it is meant to serve as a resistance to mediocrity, to received ideas about art, and also resistance to abuse of human rights, which is what the word “resistance” most readily would signify to Europeans living in the post World War II epoch. Resistance can have another connotation as well, that of material resistance — canvas’ resistance to a brush loaded with paint being dragged across it, or the resistance of a print matrix, stone or metal, being drawn on or attacked by a variety of drawing implements. It is in this strictly technical sense that Cucchi’s early lithographs attain their most ferocious sense of resistance, in his seductive mastery of drawing techniques and exquisite balance of tones.
_____Blum published three other editions with Cucchi. In 1982, they did a large color etching, Un’immagine oscura (An Obscure Image), printed by Valter Rossi; in 1984-85, they did a series of three large vertical aquatints, printed by Valter and Eleonora Rossi; and in 1986, they collaborated one more time, producing L’Elefante di Giotto (Giotto’s Elephant), a huge aquatint, printed once again by Valter Rossi. The elongated building and the hovering black oblong in the sky, which had already appeared in Immagine Feroce, return in Un’immagine oscura. This oblong will appear as well in L’Elefante di Giotto, and elsewhere in Cucchi’s work. The head lying on top of the building in Un’immagine oscura may represent the intellect cut off from the body’s ability to bring about the mind and heart’s desires. In a text Cucchi published with Un’immagine oscura, he described the print as: “An obscure image, a kind of irradiation of life lived, also making itself felt to me as a sort of smell, a spicy odour. An immense sea of black stones, swallowed in order to be transformed mysteriously into a black presence in the sky above, a stunned, stretched-out house; across an unreal sea lies a face full of festive pain and dolorous joy…”
_____La lupa di Roma (The Wolf of Rome) presents quite a different aspect from the prints of Cucchi’s published up until that point by Blum. Not only the use of color, but also the scale, perspective and spatial dynamics are on another plane. The images that recur from Cucchi’s earlier work show that iconography, for all its power, is only as significant as the technique allows it to be. Here, we see a development in Cucchi’s print making skills: three large-scale works, each a visual world in itself, that can combine with the other two to form a triptych.
_____The last print Blum and Cucchi did together is also by far the largest; at 54 x 100 inches, it is very large for a graphic work by any artist. The scale of the print, with its expanses of darkness, compared to the size of the elephant depicted in it, is vast, since our mind translates via the elephant: if that elephant is the size of an actual elephant, then the dark space surrounding it indicates the universe. The shape floating in space is ovoid, not circular, so it cannot be a planet, thought it could intimate a planetary orbital path. The shape may make one think of a chicken egg, and the word “egg” may then make one think of a human egg. The glow around it could then suggest a halo of spermatozoa competing for entry. These suggestions and associations work partially on a visual, and partially on a semantic, verbal, level. The drypoint area, used to depict the elephant inside a cave, is integrated with the space surrounding it, done in aquatint, by means of another visual/verbal trick — the moon-like shape next to the elephant is the source of a widening beam of brownish light that extends up out of the elephant’s cave into the surrounding blackness. The location of the elephant is ambiguous. Drawn bars on either side of it seem to indicate entry into a cave, but it would be unusual for an elephant to be inside a cave, and it would be impossible for the moon to be in there with it, so the lines surrounding the elephant are not to be taken as “realistic” renderings of cave walls after all, but rather as energy zones emanating from the elephant. As is often the case with Cucchi, elements are drawn in a dimensionally sophisticated way not for purposes of realism but rather as a way of proceeding, via drawing, from one reality to another. The two (or more) realities are integrated artistically, but they do not need to contribute to a coherent, unified narrative or message.

_____While Chia, Clemente, Cucchi, and the other Italians in whom Blum was interested were just gaining recognition, the German artist A.R. Penck was already quite well known when Blum became interested in doing a print project with him. Penck had had a rich cultural life in Dresden, where he was part of a community of artists. Beginning in 1970, Penck exhibited with Galerie Michael Werner in Cologne, and he showed at Galerie Heiner Friedrich in Munich in 1971 and at Galerie Stampa in Basel in 1972. His first solo museum exhibition was at the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam in 1979, and by the mid-1980s, Penck had exhibited at the Venice Biennale and the Tate Gallery in London.
_____Born Ralf Winkler in 1939, Penck grew up outside of Dresden and, as a young child, witnessed the devastating bombing of that city by Allied Forces. In the mid-1950s, he made accomplished drawings reminiscent of Picasso’s neo-classical period. By 1959, he had abandoned that for expressionistic paint handling in his pictures of grim household scenes, and by 1961, he had hit on what would be his defining visual language: a world of “stick figures” starkly painted in black on white grounds, or vice versa. During the 1960s, these figures evolved into complex compositions with various “floors” (that is some elements took one edge as the bottom, others another edge, etc.) although usually in one plane, with additions of letters, numbers, and designs. The painted quality is often evident; simple lines do the work, but patterning becomes sophisticated. In the early 1970s, Penck embarked on his “Standart” series, in which painted words of analytical, theoretical language become part of a field with smaller and smaller visual units. The work remained quite simple in terms of plane and plan. A period of freer work occurred in the mid-1970s, including use of Expressionistic color.
_____The moment at which Blum sought out Penck and ultimately published a portfolio of woodcuts was the moment he was leaving the East to make his home in the West. Blum had seen an exhibition of Penck’s work at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1975. he wanted to write an article about Penck and endeavored to contact him. “He was considered an agitator to the East German government,” says Blum, “and he was being watched. There was no way for him to travel in the West.” Shortly afterwards, Penck left everything behind and fled to the West. Blum went to interview him and wrote for Du magazine the first article on Penck after his arrival. Two years later, in 1981, Blum contacted Penck about doing a portfolio. He was living in Cologne, at the house of Michael Werner, where he also worked. Penck agreed to do a print portfolio with the printer François Lafranca, who had his atelier at La Collinasca in the Ticino, in southern Switzerland. Penck wanted to do woodcuts, which were Lafranca’s specialty.
_____Penck began working on the blocks in Cologne, and, instead of making sketches, launched into a week of nights of cutting into the wood. David Nolan drove Penck and the eight blocks from Cologne to Basel, where they met Blum, who took over from there, driving Penck to La Collinasca. It must have been a journey filled with expectation — for Penck, who not long before had not had freedom of movement, and for Blum, who not long before had been wondering what to do with his life.