_____Penck was in this idyllic paradise, and it was very emotional to be there with him. He put everything he had into this series of woodcuts. He didn't have much to say about the East, or he didn't want to talk about it at that time. So this was something he could work with, and for, to make something again for the first time. The title he gave to the portfolio — 8 Erfahrungen, (Eight Experiences) — I think referred to experiences and feelings of what he had left behind: images of faces and dances and movement, which were expressing this leaving of the East and coming to the West.

_____In Dresden, Penck had absorbed much of what was going in the West in contemporary art. A group of significant artists had come from the East at an earlier time — Penck’s friend, Georg Baselitz, Jorg Immendorf, and Gerhard Richter among them. “But,” Blum insists, “he had his own language and systems of depicting movement in painting. Often, his work was quite political, even though that was expressed in an abstract language of signs and symbols.”
_____The format of each of the 8 Erfahrungen is identical, but within that format there is much variation. Two of the most striking images are of figures: a large, tightly cropped, head; and a female figure dancing. In the former, the fluidity with which the contours of the head are evinced balances the harshness of the Expressionist proportions of the features, while in the latter, the figure is an almost pure black against a white background, whose mottled areas contribute to a sense of movement as much as do the figure’s gestures. In general, the deep blacks on the whiteness of the handmade paper give the series a tone of blunt expression, whose simple images come across clearly.
Penck’s portfolio comes with a poem by the artist, which contains the lines, “SPAT OUT BY THE EAST/THE WEST HAS NOT YET DEVOURED ME.” And “8 LEAPS TO MAKE LOOT/8 PROSTRATIONS/TAKE WHAT YOU NEED.” In the compilation Looks et Tenebrae, Bice Curiger provides the text of an interview she conducted with Penck in 1982 in Zürich. In it, Penck reveals that he had a history with woodcut before the Blum project: “I always made woodcuts during crisis situations… they are part of a situation of clarification. The material provokes clarification… the action and the intention must be quite clear. There are few possibilities for correction or change once the thing has been cut into… There is a vast amount of tension in planning the execution, and the substance offers a certain resistance, causing the original plan to be somehow deformed or changed.” These comments, which apply equally to the approach of Josef Felix Müller and derive from the practices of the German Expressionists at the beginning of the 20th century, are predicated on the desire for an experimental, spontaneous look to the image.
_____Penck speaks of a “development” within the series of eight prints, and although that development is not linear, we can definitely see in the variety of forms and compositions an approach that was dynamic. If one looks at the use of color (the placement and divisions of the black and white) within each piece, one finds that it is quite different from piece to piece, although within the series those variations make for a harmonious set of results. The appearance and use of human figures is also varied, from schematic to sculpted, and from full-figure to head.

_____The next print project for Blum was with Sandro Chia. By the time Blum met him in Rome, Chia, who had studied art the Academy [name] in Florence, was established, at least in his manner of living and working. It was in New York that Blum next met Chia, and it was decided that Chia would work with Pat [last name] of Aeropress in New York. While Chia did not do drawings as studies for the prints, some of the subjects in the five color etchings had already appeared in his paintings. In particular, a painting, also from 1981, entitled Rabbit for Dinner, has the same subject as the first print, which is called L’Artificio (The Artifice). In the painting, as in the print, a man with a knife in one hand and a candle in the other, pursues a rabbit, who dives away from him. The candle in the painting seems to have a decorative halo around it, giving it a numinous or metaphysical significance. The color in the print is more muted, with dark earth tones dominant. The highest keyed color is in the red lines that emanate from the candle, again accentuating it, although more subtly.
_____Chia’s etching technique — the prints use aquatint, drypoint, roulette, scraping and open bite with asphaltum — is evident, as is the care with which each image is approached. As with Penck’s series, so here one can observe changes from print to print, which lend a dynamic to the regular format of the prints. Another defining aspect of the series is the choice of wide, bottom-weighted margins, causing each to float up in its expansive Arches Buff setting. Alla torre (To the Tower) is remarkable for how the color printing, combined with Chia’s etching technique, renders the human forms quite solid; in fact, they look more like sculptures than living beings. The subject — with one figure sticking a knife into the other — is dramatic, as is the use of red, again limited, here to the signifying mark of a question. The colors and techniques are varied from print to print, with the final image, E gli heroi alla finestra (And the Heroes at the Window), the most distinctive, with its group of etched figures centralized against a dark, even ground, punctuated by asphaltum [?] drips that can conjure the feeling of stars against a night sky, though they do not actually resemble them. There is a multi-media sensibility about these prints; Circa l’imprendibile (About the Unseizable) has lavender feel of painting, which derives from silver/grey aquatint over crimson etched lines.
_____As with much of Chia’s work from that era, the figures have the feeling of something old, not only because they bring to mind figures by Cocteau or De Chirico, but because those artists were already referencing types — the gallant, for instance — from an earlier time. Chia can call up an Italianism from between the two World Wars, reflected as much in the clothing as in the Neo-Cubist structures. Chia apparently saw himself a traditionalist, as he wrote, “I have no other choice but to go with art, I am only the link on a chain, I am not supposed to bring innovations but I am meant to make restless contributions.”

_____1981 had been a productive year for Peter Blum Edtion; not only had the Cucchi, Penck, and Chia portfolios been completed but also portfolios by Martin Disler and Rolf Winnewisser. In 1982, Blum was able to convince Francesco Clemente to do a woodcut project with Lafranca. Blum got the idea while going to galleries with Clemente in New York: “I was with Francesco up on Madison Avenue, and we walked into a gallery where they had an exhibition of prints of Edvard Munch. Clemente became pretty excited about them — the woodcuts, in particular. Transparency within these woodcuts, images which would overlap, seeing the grain of the wood, all somehow brought the idea of our doing something together to a head, to a point.”
These were the artist’s first woodcuts, and the only ones on which he has done the cutting himself. Clemente is famous for his mastery of surfaces and ways of working — he has made frescoes, and paintings on wood and on denim, in addition to oil paintings, watercolors, pastels, and sculptures. When he undertakes a project, the physical elements with which he will work are significant to him, and he contemplates an approach that takes the material’s nature into account. Describing the woodcut project with Blum, Clemente remembers, “I imagined what a woodcut is about, and the primary imagination was the image of the lovers who carve their initials into the trunk of a tree, and that’s how it started. That simple gesture of the lovers and the tree suggested all the images — the heart, love life, piercing, penetrating, wounding. There’s even an image of birth, which is the conclusion of the act of love!”
Another aspect of the project that appealed to Clemente was the idea of traveling to work in a particular place. At that time in his life, he had recently moved to New York City, where he had painted the cycle 14 Stations of the Cross, which he would show at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1983. He is able to work in varied settings, even without a studio, and the idea of having to travel to a distant region in Southern Switzerland fit his way of working. As he explains, “One strategy of my work is to travel and to look for the genius loci. This place is very isolated, a narrow road going up into the mountain, and then this narrow valley with a ferocious stream of water. The printer was an extraordinary character. He lived in a big house where he had decided to cut out the floors of many of the rooms, so you were always on the edge of falling off three stories. The house is washed away by the stream once a year.”
_____Clemente spent two weeks in La Collinasca, devising the images, cutting the blocks, and mixing the colors. Although the eight woodcuts are printed in black on Lafranca’s handmade paper, they are in fact different blacks. This was the first time Clemente attempted this, and, as the artist notes, Lafranca’s input was crucial: “We decided to expose the roughness of the process by having these grainy wooden blocks, and then I asked the printer to mix a number of blacks in different colors, so there’s a lot of color in the portfolio, even if nominally it is black and white. In reality, we mixed, and that’s something I’ve done later, in many groups of my works — to cut the black with red, blue. So all those blacks are just on the edge before they become a red, a blue, a green. It’s just one second before they turn into a color. The printer was instrumental in mixing the proper color.”
It was Blum who suggested the inclusion of a poem with the portfolio of woodcuts. While in Rome, Blum had met a poet named Valerio Magrelli, who was in his early 20s at the time. Blum liked his poetry and suggested the inclusion of one his poems in Clemente’s portfolio. Clemente was surprised that Blum had discovered Magrelli for himself, and, as he too liked Magrelli’s poetry, he approved the idea.
_____Magrelli, who eventually became a well-known poet in Italy, contributed an eight-line poem, whose slightness is suitable to the delicacy of the woodcut series. What makes Magrelli’s poetry interesting, however, is its hermetic quality, something it does not share with Clemente’s work. Clemente, over the years did collaborations with Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, and John Wieners, among others, all poets who share Clemente’s visceral drives. The poem expresses the wish to be “[j]just a dry stone/alive and white within/that is immovably self-contained.” Clemente’s images, on the other hand, are a compendium of uncontainedness.
_____The very title page — a heart pierced by an arrow, with the letters “A” and “F” (the initial letters of the portfolio’s title, Febbre Alta (High Fever), but also the initial letters of the names of Francesco and his wife, Alba) — contains a high-voltage mix of art historical and everyday associations. From that point, the sequence of prints moves in dynamic fashion. The prints often divide into primarily black and primarily white sections, and the gestures — both of the cuts into the wood and of the imagery — are filled with sinuous energy. The first image is turbulent, showing faces turning into hands turning into genitals; the second indicates two figures, probably female and male; the third shows a hand approaching but not quite penetrating a woman’s vagina; the fourth has a woman lying on her back, her mouth open, with two white shapes with little mouths — one between her legs, the other emerging from her head; the fifth image shows a spinal column, lungs, and a snakelike form that seems to be the uterus, with a small human figure inside; the sixth image is a mother’s-eye view of her own feet and her hands holding an ovoid shape — perhaps a new-born infant, though it could be a rock, a loaf of bread, or a head seen from above; the seventh image shows a naked female figure whose genitals are accentuated and whose face is obliterated with strong, white, parallel marks; the eighth image shows a reclining female figure, making a hand gesture (a mudra), while a sky of white marks flashes above her. Then there is the closing note: an image printed from a cross section of a tree trunk, with several lithe figures cavorting over its black-printed surface.

_____In 1983, Blum undertook a publishing project with the American artist Eric Fischl which would take his work in a different direction. Fischl grew up on Long Island and moved in 1967 to Phoenix, Arizona, where he began studies at a junior college. Transferring to Arizona State University, he began doing abstract painting. He was dissatisfied with a painting and painted a white shape in it, which he then realized was a bed. “I never understood it, but I knew it was done,” he has said. “Then years later that bed started to appear and reappear until its presence became clarified to me.” The bed image would play a crucial role in Fischl’s mature work, which took the dysfunctionality of American suburban life as its primary context.
_____Beginning in the late 1970s and continuing through 1982, Fischl did a series of paintings on sheets of glassine; the transparency of the material allowed him to overlay sheets, making combinations of figures after they had been painted separately. “I can almost say that glassine unlocked my creative process,” Fischl says. It was something about the translucency of the material… I found that I could literally project a scene… I was looking for a frozen moment, and it was something I realized painting…can do better than anything else.”
_____When Peter Blum met Fischl in 1981, he knew right away that Fischl’s work was different from the European artists with whom he had been working. Blum recalls, “It was Mario Diacono who one day told me about a young painter whose studio he had visited and who encouraged me to go. I went to see Eric, and my first response to his work was that something disturbing was there.” Blum sensed a connection to traditional, European art in Fischl’s paintings of figures, but it had a bluntness that made it typically American. “I remember immediately blurting out, ‘Let's do a print project together.’” Blum expressed to Fischl his concept of having artists do portfolios of prints that went together. “But Eric took this literally, and he came, several weeks later, with a series of watercolors which became six prints, which could fit together — partly overlapping each other — to form one image.”