Washington, DC—Mauricio Lasansky (1914–2012) was an exceptional artist and printmaker who played a key role in the American printmaking renaissance following World War II. Among his best-known works are The Nazi Drawings, an extraordinary series of 30 monumental individual drawings produced between 1961 and 1966 plus a drawing triptych made between 1963 and 1971. The entire suite has been given to the National Gallery of Art by The Levitt Foundation of Des Moines, Iowa, to steward as part of the nation’s art collection. This gift represents a transformative addition to the Gallery’s holdings of Lasansky’s work and is the first acquisition of drawings by the artist.

Lasansky was born in Argentina; his parents were Jewish émigrés from Lithuania. His work focused primarily on the human figure, which he often explored through themes of war and suffering. Lasansky’s early work shares affinities with stylized forms of Latin American murals. From the 1940s onwardꟷhaving moved to the United States in 1943 to further his artistic study and experimentationꟷhis art encompassed elements of cubism (with boldly fragmented forms) and surrealism (in haunting and often brutal imagery).

Lasansky began The Nazi Drawings in 1961, the year of the first televised trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal and a major organizer of Holocaust atrocities. Justice, human rights, and humanity were longstanding concerns for Lasansky, and he began to address the horrors of the Nazi regime in some work prior to creating The Nazi Drawings.

"The Nazi Drawings are an extraordinarily powerful suite of works that depict the trauma and violence of the Holocaust. The series also emphasizes the repercussions of this unfathomable tragedy of the 20th century,” said Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art. “Lasansky represents an important generation of artists—many of whom are not as well-known as they should be—who emigrated to the United States during the global political turmoil of the 1940s and became citizens who played an important role in shaping American art and culture. We are grateful to Richard and Jeanne Levitt and the Levitt family for their generosity in sharing this landmark series with the nation.”

The Nazi Drawings

To do justice to the urgency and emotional tenor of the subjects in the project, Lasansky purposely chose the direct, elemental medium of drawing. “I tried to keep not only the vision of The Nazi Drawings simple and direct, but also the material I used in making them. I wanted them to be done with a tool used by everyone everywhere, from the cradle to the grave, meaning the pencil.”

The universality implied by this decision underscores the artist’s motivation for creating these powerfully raw, disturbing images: to monumentalize human suffering and loss as a warning against the evils of unrestricted power, prejudice, and cruelty. The frenetic energy with which he wielded his pencil produced a wide range of tones, from deep black to pale gray. In some works, Lasansky also incorporated scraps of newspaper, Bible pages, and other collaged elements, as well as selective painterly additions of red wash, spatters and drips, and pale brown wash of turpentine mixed with asphaltum—all contributing a sense of dynamism and urgency, inviting a visceral reaction to the horrors portrayed.

Numbered rather than individually titled, The Nazi Drawings can be roughly separated into four categories. Nos. 1–5 focus on images of Nazi soldiers, characterized by monstrous features and an evolving “death” helmet in the shape of a skull. Nos. 7–13 address the Nazis’ physical abuse of women, which included forced prostitution in concentration camps. Nos. 15–17, 19–20, and 25–28 document the plight of women and children, the experiences of anguish and death, calling to mind a modern-day Massacre of the Innocents. Nos. 18, 21–23, and 29 criticize elements of the Catholic Church for their response to the Holocaust. The stenciled number “5,602,715” appears—either in whole or in part, sometimes repeatedly—in several of the drawings, referencing what was at one point believed to be the total number of Jews murdered by the Nazis. (That number was later revised to over six million.) The number also recalls the dehumanizing, permanent tattoos imprinted on concentration camp inmates for tracking purposes.

The final drawing, no. 30, is an astonishing self-portrait. A skeleton figure sits on the artist’s shoulders, pressing its bony fingers into his eyes. Dripping blood seems to blind the artist, shown nude, whose own bloodied left hand grasps at the skeleton’s leg. His other hand holds a stick of chalk or pencil with which he has written both “The Nazi Drawings” and his signature in a bloody patch of ground below. With this concluding work of the initial 30 drawings, Lasansky seems to allude to the harm wrought when we turn a blind eye to injustice.

The drawings were first presented in a landmark exhibition (1967–1970) that opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and traveled to eight additional cities: New York, as one of several opening shows for the then new Whitney Museum of American Art; Des Moines, Iowa; Tacoma, Washington; Indianapolis, Indiana; Huntington, West Virginia; Chicago, Illinois; and Mexico City, Mexico. The show closed in Iowa City, Iowa, where Lasansky worked, taught, and lived.

After the touring exhibition closed, Lasansky added a drawn and collaged triptych to the set, which he had created while the other drawings were traveling. Measuring 80 by 120 inches overall, this enormous work merges Nazi references (a swastika in the far right panel) with allusions to contemporary traumas of racism and human rights violations (a figure in a white hood conjures associations with the Ku Klux Klan). The fallen figure on his back, at far left, evokes photographs of the many civil rights and anti–Vietnam War protesters knocked down by police during the marches and protests of the late 1960s.

While on tour, The Nazi Drawings attracted enormous attention in the press. Richard and Jeanne Levitt, a prominent couple living in Des Moines who collected art and were known for their philanthropy in art, community, education, and civic and Jewish organizations, acquired the suite for their family foundation in 1972 with the promise to Lasansky that they would ensure that the drawings be kept together, in their original frames, in perpetuity. The Levitt Foundation has taken great care to preserve the drawings while making them accessible through loans and exhibitions. They have been on extended loan at the art museum of the University of Iowa for many years. In 2016–2017, The Levitt Foundation funded a major preservation treatment of the drawings, conserving all 33 sheets with improved glazing and archival mounts while retaining the original molded metal frames. They were last shown in the exhibition Envisioning Evil: “The Nazi Drawings” by Mauricio Lasansky, at the Minneapolis Institute of Art from October 16, 2021, to June 26, 2022 and the Baker Museum in Naples, Florida from September 17, 2022 to March 5, 2023. Richard Levitt died in 2017 at the age of 87 and Jeanne Levitt recently turned 93. Their children, Randall and Mark Levitt, and grandchildren, Elliot Levitt and Rachel Federowicz, recently made the decision, with Jeanne and in consultation with members of the Lasansky family, for The Levitt Foundation to donate the drawings to the National Gallery.

Mauricio Lasansky (1914–2012)

Lasansky’s parents, Abrahm and Ana, were Eastern European Jews who fled persecution in Lithuania to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where Mauricio was born in 1914. The artist’s interest in printmaking was likely influenced by his father, who was trained as a banknote engraver. After initially studying art and serving as director of the Free Fine Arts School in Villa María, Argentina, in 1943 Lasansky traveled to New York on a Guggenheim fellowship to study the print collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This experience allowed him to meet and work with several European artists who had fled to the United States during World War II. He remained in the US and worked with Stanley William Hayter at Hayter’s renowned printmaking workshop, Atelier 17—temporarily transferred from Paris to New York during the war—which focused on experimental approaches to engraving, etching, and other intaglio techniques.

In 1945, Lasansky joined the faculty of the University of Iowa, where he established what became a prestigious printmaking workshop and teaching program on par with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the graduate creative writing program for which the university is well known. By 1952, seven years after joining the art department at the University of Iowa, Lasansky had become an American citizen. With his students, Lasansky founded the Iowa Print Group which organized exhibitions of their work, hosted exhibitions from elsewhere and sought to expand interest in printmaking through lectures and other programs. Additionally, he was instrumental in the establishment of the first University of Iowa Museum of Art building and the development of the art collection. As a champion of the possibilities of intaglio printmaking, Lasansky attracted numerous students to the university whom he trained over several generations and who went on to become successful artists and professors, some establishing print workshops at other universities across the country. He retired from the University in 1985 and continued to work in his studio in Iowa City until his death in 2012.

Over the course of his career, Lasansky received five Guggenheim Fellowships, six honorary Doctorate of Arts degrees and numerous prizes and special honors. His work is represented in more than one hundred public collections including virtually every major museum in the United States. Internationally recognized, his work has been exhibited throughout North and South America, Europe and Russia.