_____Müller had cut into the floor of his studio (which, Blum points out, he did not own), with a chainsaw, making lines that, when inked and printed, would create images of a refined rawness. The drawing is sophisticated; clearly the chainsaw is an instrument Müller has used before, probably in making his rough-surfaced sculptures. With that tool — not built with art in mind — Müller can draw faces, figures, elicit depths and tensions in space with surprising facility. The images are large frontal faces, with pleading eyes, figures with erect penises, sometimes with an arm or head missing, and in one case perhaps a female figure holding a baby upside down. All these figures are naked, and seem to be cast in a sea of chaos they can do nothing to control.

_____Having had success with the Year of the Drowned Dog project, spending more time in New York, and becoming more a part of the New York art world, Blum felt like doing more projects with Americans. At this time, in the mid-1980s, when he asked artists such as Baldessari, Clemente, Cucchi, and Fischl who they thought was interesting, one of the artists they mentioned was Alex Katz. Katz at that time had not had a museum exhibition in Europe and only a few gallery exhibitions; his work was not well known to Europeans, and, in Blum’s opinion it was not well understood.

_____Being, culturally, a European, I always had difficulty in understanding what Alex Katz was after. It was through other artists that I went to see Alex and started to look at his work. And I started realizing that, although Alex was somewhat older than most of the artists I had published, he seemed, in many ways, to be the youngest in the whole group — in terms of innovation, audacity, and being free in what he was painting. One of the ways for me to get to know artists and their work, to understand them — beyond going to look at their work — was to work with them. So I suggested to Alex to do a print project. I did have one specific idea of what I wanted to do with Alex in that first project, and it was to ask him to do woodcuts. One of the reasons to choose the woodcut medium was to pursue something within Alex's work which fascinated me, which had a rougher, more raw, quality than some of the prints he had done, which were much closer to the paintings and other unique work.

_____They agreed upon the project, and Katz produced a series of ten woodcuts. While it is true, as Blum states, that Katz had not done many woodcuts before their first project together, he had made, since the 1960s, a substantial body of etchings, lithographs, and silkscreens. Katz is an artist notoriously difficult to pigeonhole, and, while he painted figures since the early 1950s, he could not be grouped with Pop Art nor comfortably with New Realist painters such as Philip Pearlstein or Jane Freilicher. Katz’s large-scale paintings and fast, wet-on-wet technique gave him affinities to painters from the abstract expressionist tradition, while his deadpan use of everyday subject matter and glamour showed an interest in advertising and popular culture. In printmaking, Katz has frequently attempted to use print mediums in ways that are not normally expected.
_____Printmaking functions in Katz’s oeuvre often as a final step in the evolution of an image. He works in stages to arrive at his oil paintings — through pen sketches, painted oil on board studies, finished pencil drawings, a charcoal cartoon, which is transferred to canvas, and ultimately the oil painting on canvas. Often he works in series, so a small group of paintings will carry an image through different developments in terms of scale, format, and even application. When he makes a print of an image that has gone through this process of becoming a painting or paintings, the has thoroughly considered the image’s function and also the various ways to achieve the image. So the print, in those cases, may be viewed as an ultimate synthesis, as much as it is a transferal from a painted image to a printed one.
The 10 prints Katz produced for the Blum portfolio took couples for their subjects, and the couples came from paintings he had completed over the previous decade. Katz says that images of couples are more difficult to do than single portraits or images with three people. It is a question of balance: “The relationship between the two people is really out there.” He made the decision to print each image in a single color, which he felt was working in contradiction to woodcut’s proven success in overlapping and juxtaposing colors. “To get the color right for each print took a lot of time,” remembers Katz. “The cutting was simple and very primitive.” Katz usually cuts his own wood and lineleum prints.
Blum reacted positively to the results and was soon showing the prints to his colleagues:

Jean-Christophe Amman would stay with us on 10th Street when he would come to New York, and as he came from the airport, one of his first questions would be: “Well, Peter, what's your latest project?” In this case I told him: “You know, I just did a project with Alex Katz.” And I remember Jean-Christophe looked at me and said: “Peter, you know how much I love you. But… I just cannot understand why you're working with Alex Katz.” And we looked at these ten woodcuts, and he told me later, “You know, I never understood the work — I didn't get it, but these are interesting.” And today, he's not only a convert but, like all converts, a zealous convert. So it was exciting for me to be in the role of being able to show works in Europe to people who didn't yet understand or know them, as well as bringing European artists to America.

_____Wanting to add something to the portfolio, Blum asked Katz if he would want to add some poetry. Together, they devised the idea of a book of poems with art work, and I was asked to the contribute the poems. It was decided to make a book including 11 linoleum cuts and 10 poems. I gave a group of my poems to Blum and Katz (who is my father), and Mario Diacono was asked to approve the selection, which he did. It has always been a given for me that all aspects of verbal production — including spelling, capitalization, punctuation — must be considered inviolable in poetry, even when they are inconsistent, and even if such inconsistencies would not be tolerated in expository texts. Blum was happy to approve of all such decisions regarding the poetry, showing as much respect for the poet’s decisions as he does for the artist’s. The book is printed on name paper and was bound by name. The name for the book and for the portfolio as a whole, A Tremor in the Morning, comes from the title of one of the poems in the book. Blum had published books before, but none had been on the level, technically, of the one produced for the Katz project.
_____As Blum puts it, this was the first complete book he published as part of a portfolio. One interesting aspect of the book is that, while the images of couples for the woodcuts were taken from paintings, those for the linocuts in the book were not. Katz, who has collaborated with the poets John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Ron Padgett, among others, says he never illustrates the writing. Rather, he creates a parallel text, as it were; ultimately the two elements, text and visual, are combined in a way that privileges neither art form over the other: “When I read poetry, I read it for the surface, and when I do illustrations I put a similar sensibility into their surface. You get a feeling for the poems — what the poems are like, rather than understanding what they mean — and that's what I try to make the illustrations go with. The poems in A Tremor in the Morning are lyric poems, and I made lyric images to go with them.”
_____He chose to do the book in linoleum as a technique complementary to woodcut, yet quite different: “Linoleum is much more fluid than wood — you can really fly through it. With wood, you can have problems with the grain and the sharpness of the tools. With linoleum you don't have such problems. In linoleum, you can keep the drawing tighter, because you have more control with the line, and you can open it up. Wood is more resistant; the wood and the tools can change your drawing a little bit.”
_____Blum points out that with Katz, who had a long career of print making behind him when they met, he suggested woodcut as a way of getting Katz into an area he had not recently explored. Katz had made woodcuts in the 1950s in small, self-printed and self-published editions, and had not made many since. After A Tremor in the Morning, on the other hand, woodcut and linocut became central to Katz’s printmaking production, several editions being published by Blum. In 1988, Blum published quite a different woodcut by Katz — 3 PM, printed by John C. Erickson [?], which, at 67 ¾ x 22 1/8 inches, is one of Katz’s largest prints. The image (the subjects are Blum and his wife, Rita) comes from a painting and has been transformed into something more closely approximating “traditional” woodcut technique, in the sense that the darks and lights have a complex interaction, while again using a single color. Katz wanted to do something contrary to the practice of making prints with high numbers of colors and plates.
_____In 1997, Blum published another portfolio by Katz, Edges, a series of 13 sugar lift etchings that form a collaboration with a poem by Robert Creeley. Again working against expectations, Katz, with printers Doris Simmelink and Chris Sukimoto, found a pen that allowed him to make a thick, fluid line, approximating that of the felt-tip pen with which he did his original drawings of lilies and landscapes. Not only do the lines Katz etched not look like typical etching lines; the prints used plates larger than the paper size, so that no plate marks, typical of etching, are visible on the final prints.
_____In 2000-2001, Blum published a series of eight linocut landscapes; along with four other linocuts; in 2001, a larger color linocut image, Impatiens; and in 2003, another linocut, Pines. They were printed, as were most of Katz’s recent woodcuts and linocuts, by John C. Erickson. Regarding the difference between A Tremor in the Morning and the prints he has done with Blum more recently, Katz says, “When I went into the woodcut medium with A Tremor in the Morning, I wanted to do something that was not expressionistic, but I didn't want to do anything tight.” The character of those woodcuts that is simultaneously direct and elegant, but that character could not be repeated by Katz: “Once you do something like that, you don't want to do it again. I like to keep moving, technically. Lately, I've been doing more with linoleum.”
_____Peter Blum Edition has come a long way since its first publication, and so has Peter Blum. One of the key factors has been his relationships — with artists, but also with printers and other colleagues. In 1984, Blum joined forces with Jacqueline Burckhardt, Bice Curiger, and Walter Keller to found the periodical Parkett, which continues to this day to set a standard for excellence among art publications. One of the key ideas of Parkett was to ask artists featured in the magazine to create special editions, which would be sold, providing a source of income to support the magazine. Enzo Cucchi was the first artist do a special edition — an etching printed by Kneubuehler — for the first issue of Parkett. The Parkett editions have become an important part of the magazine’s artistic legacy.
_____Blum has been an exemplary figure in the history of the publisher/artist relationship. From his side, he says part of his impetus has been the experience gained by working with artists. From the artist’s side, Katz puts succinctly what is the particular aspect of Blum’s character that makes it attractive for artists to work with him: “It's nice to have some support when you do experimental work. I stopped working with some publishers, because they didn't want to do landscapes, because they thought they wouldn't sell. Peter will go out with me wherever I go, and that's a big deal, because you can't do it by yourself. He’s a genius at making work accessible. There hasn't been another publisher that I've had that would put any energy into this kind of experimental work.”