Inventing an Image: Sam Glankoff
"The human figure, long his point of departure, became the site of that experiment. He compressed it, fractured it, pared it down until anatomy dissolved, and only a residue remained. 'I distorted it so that you could hardly trace the fact that it was originally a human,' he later recalled. This was an act of distillation."
Johnson Lowe Gallery is pleased to present Inventing an Image, an exhibition of works by Sam Glankoff (1894-1982), the late New York–based American artist whose innovative fusion of printmaking and painting earned him a distinct place in the history of modern abstraction.
One of the earliest artists to adapt the style of German Expressionism, Glankoff spent the better part of his early career, from the 1920s through the 1940s, using the form of woodcut to illustrate stories and characters for published magazines and novels. His hand drawn comic strips were syndicated in newspapers and in the mid 1940s-50s he became head artist for True Comics, historical-based comic books for boys. In the late 1950s, at the request of Impulse Items, he designed and fabricated the first stuffed toys of Babar the Elephant and Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat, as well as 200 other toys. Some of which are being copied to this day.
As peripheral to the discourse of serious fine art as these commercial beginnings were often regarded, the artist nevertheless maintained a rigorous and very private studio practice throughout these same periods. In 1970, for the first time, he was able to devote himself fully to works of his own conception and imagination, ultimately arriving at a hybrid method that was so singular that it prompted the invention of a new term: print-painting.
After decades spent rendering legible figures for magazines, books, and commercial commissions, Glankoff began to interrogate the very premise of depiction itself. In the isolation of his studio, the clarity and narrative function that had defined his professional output gave way to a more exacting inquiry: how might an image carry emotional and psychic force without relying on description? Glankoff, rather than abandoning the figure, tested how much of it could be removed while still retaining its essential charge. In that charged remainder, somewhere between body and sign, the artist began to invent an image no longer bound to narrative clarity but constructed from sheer necessity.
The works gathered in Inventing an Image make visible the vocabulary Glankoff forged through a sustained engagement with ancient writing systems and East Asian brush traditions, where drawing and writing share a common origin. Thick, matte blacks advance across fields of muted blue, earthen red, and chalked white, forming shapes that read at once as bodies and as characters. Limbs hinge at abrupt angles; torsos compress into block-like masses; heads flatten into discs or dissolve into ovoid silhouettes. The figure is translated and distorted until it functions less as anatomy than as sign and signal. In several compositions, circles hover within rectangles or are split and doubled; their symmetry held in suspension. For Glankoff, the circle was consummate, primitive, a form dense with psychic and symbolic implication. Pressed, dragged, and layered, the ink retains the immediacy of the hand, as if each image were being written into existence. What emerges is a language constructed from the remnants of the human form, a calligraphic abstraction in which body becomes glyph and painting becomes script.
In the early 1970s, after encountering a venerated Japanese woodcut artist’s Shikō Munakata’s polyptych at the Japan Society, Glankoff began to join separately printed sheets into large compound works, allowing the image to extend across visible seams and into real space. From this modular construction emerged the mature print-painting: carving into separate wood panels and then later painting on them, only as a guide -- neither reproduction nor conventional canvas – they are but objects built from increments of both and held together by intention.
