by Donna Stein

Note: Donna Stein prepared this text for a thirty-year retrospective - 1960-1990 - of Secunda's work, which was held in 1992.

During the past forty years Arthur Secunda has created more than 300 graphic editions. From the beginning, this artist has been technically adventuresome.

Although his earliest prints - woodcuts executed in Mexico and Italy - date from 1952, this retrospective exhibition begins in 1965 with his famous Watts Series.

In Negative Landscape (1965), he employed the split fountain offset technique, spraying a rainbow of color onto a roller. Here, guesswork and luck combined with sound instinct achieve a unified edition. Influenced by filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's ideas about fragmentation of form and dislocation of reality, Secunda transformed his photographs through offset, lithographic transfer, and silkscreen techniques to express political themes. In addition, personal icons including his teacher Ossip Zadkine's sculpture "Homage to a Destroyed City" and paintings by Hieronymous Bosch are interwoven into these collaged compositions.

As a student Secunda studied with printers in Paris and New York, but the success of his first professional experience with master printer Ken Tyler at Gemini Ltd. (who showed the artist how to produce newspaper and photographic transfers and other nuances of the lithographic process for The Looters, Peace Brother and Negro Owned, 1965) affected Secunda's enthusiastic involvement with graphic workshops in Stockholm, Paris, Geneva, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Albuquerque, Avignon, Hamburg, and Barcelona.

Secunda's prints, stimulated by the light, color, atmosphere, and history of every city in which he ever lived or worked, as well as the personalities and proficiency of individual printers, evolved from these subsequent collaborations.

At Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, Secunda acquired knowledge about the variety and quality of papers and techniques for adhering them. With Confrontation (1970) he learned how a color field could fill space with one pass of a giant lithographic roller, completing a composition without employing excessive detail. For the first time, Secunda executed a graduated blend of tones and colors, a unifying technique he would perfect and continue to employ with enormous subtlety and variation in all media. This lesson transformed his later editions.

Lithographs and etchings produced at the Centre Genevois de la Gravure Contemporaine in Geneva, Switzerland have an old world charm. Secunda's appreciation of the spectacular Alpine landscape and love of texture and detail is recorded in Matterhorn, 1971.

In Babel, executed at Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque in 1972, stencil transfers onto a lithographic stone illustrate the artist's artful use of language. Secunda's fascination with the modulation of lithographic line and washes, which, like watercolors, achieve their ultimate expression through density and transparency, can also be seen in Tree-Man, a lithograph from 1973 printed at Landfall Press in Chicago.

In 1974, with Bird in Flight Secunda painstakingly transferred the look of his torn paper collages into the serigraph medium. Somewhat later, in works like Protrusion Illusion (1975), influenced by Victor Vasarely, Nassos Daphnis and Agam, chromatic geometry separated by white lines depicting torn edges, created an optic vibrancy.

Subsequent serigraphs, like Massif Central (1981), incorporate white lines, and butted surfaces of color, to suggest illusions of space and layered natural forms. Colored paper often adds another hue to a printed composition. In Metamorphose des Fleurs (1989), Secunda translates the furrows or engraving gouges from painted wood tableaux into silkscreen.

With awe and expressionist abandon Secunda explores the beauty and sensuality of nature, decoding its epic grandeur into a more intimate scale. He unconsciously cross-references back and forth between media. While most of his prints derive from other sources, the various graphic techniques have significantly influenced his paintings and sculpture. For Secunda, the translation of a composition through changes in scale, coloration, and visual orientation into a printing process is a primary creative challenge.

Los Angeles
March, 1992