Untitled 1961

Emerson Woelffer made this print, no title, sometime in the middle of the last century. It’s earthy but also kind of graphic, like a cave painting with a modern twist. The material quality here is what grabs me. The ochre background is scrubby and uneven, while the black shapes are blocky and solid, but somehow crumbly at the edges. Look at that central form: it’s like a dark figure, totemic, but also unsteady, as if it could fall apart at any moment. It feels totemic, a bit like some of Adolph Gottlieb’s pictographs. Woelffer went through a lot of styles in his career. He started out doing more representational work, but then moved into abstraction, influenced by the European modernists. This print feels like a distillation of all those interests, somewhere between representation and pure form, a space where the image is always on the verge of dissolving.