Holiday Makers 1957 - 1961

Anatoli Kaplan made this print, Holiday Makers, using lithography. I imagine him drawing with grease crayon on a big, heavy stone, coaxing out these two figures from a dark, granular surface. Look at how he’s rendered the texture of their garments—the woman on the left in a striped shawl, the other in a polka-dotted dress. You can almost feel the weight of the ink, the way it pools and scatters across the paper. It reminds me a bit of Käthe Kollwitz, or even some of the earlier German Expressionists, who were also wrestling with how to depict the human form with such raw, emotional intensity. What might Kaplan have been thinking as he made this? Maybe he was thinking about folk traditions, about the stories these clothes tell, about the quiet dignity of ordinary people. Making prints is a collaborative effort, a community of ideas that keeps being re-imagined. It’s an ongoing conversation between artists who have never even met.