Emiliano Zapata and Diego Bolivar, Our Grandchildren

Born in 1914 to Eastern European Jewish immigrants in Argentina, Lasansky studied art in Buenos Aires and in the United States, eventually becoming one of the most influential printmakers of the twentieth century. Not only are his works innovative in technique, but they also portray a wide array of themes related to historical memory and emotion. Following his seminal 1967 series, “The Nazi Drawings,” in which he expressed anguish over the atrocities of World War II, Lasansky turned to a gentler subject: his family. This theme pervaded much of his work beginning in the late 1960s; indeed, the subjects of a number of his prints are his own children. Emiliano Zapata and Diego Bolívar, Our Grandchild portrays the artist’s grandsons sitting on a donkey, their detailed forms juxtaposed against the flat planes of color that make up the background. This work was printed from twenty-one plates; the master plate, with the donkey’s image, is borrowed from a previous print, Boy with Burro (1970-71). The titular alignment of the artist’s grandchildren with two revolutionary heroes acknowledges the hard-fought struggle for Latin American independence and its legacy, and futurity, within his own family.

Text credit: Produced in collaboration with the University of Maryland Department of Art History & Archaeology and by Lauren Kershenbaum