Art Hansen

Art Hansen (1929 — 2017) was an American printmaker, painter, and Vashon Island, Washington native whose intimate prints of Pacific-Northwest landscape and domestic life drew openly on Japanese, European, and American sources. He was born on Vashon, the rural island in central Puget Sound that supplied much of the imagery — flowers, ponds, stumps, hillside farms, and small wooden structures — that would recur across his fifty-year graphic catalogue. He completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Washington in 1952 and went on to a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Minnesota, finishing in 1957. Recognition came early: around the time of his University of Washington studies he received a Pulitzer Prize for his art at the age of twenty-two.

The pivotal step in his early development was a Fulbright Scholarship awarded in 1953, which sent him to Munich, Germany, to study etching at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, the Munich academy of fine arts. The European training in intaglio gave him the foundation in line-etching and aquatint that defined his later practice, and it was in Germany that he met Gerda, who became his wife. After completing his Munich training and his Minnesota MFA, he returned to the Pacific Northwest, settled on Vashon Island in the early 1960s, and built the studio practice he would maintain for the rest of his life.

Though Hansen worked across etching, hand-coloured etching, color lithograph, watercolor, oils, and pen-and-ink drawing, the dominant share of his graphic output is small-format intaglio: black-and-white etchings, occasional hand-coloured etchings, and a smaller body of color lithographs from the early 1980s. Recurrent subjects include forests and clearings ('Forest, Woodcutter, and Fire'; the dated 'Forest 1974'/'Forest 1975'/'Forest July 1977' sequence; 'Forest and Man on Stump'), garden flowers and still lifes ('Daffodil,' 'Daisy #3,' 'Five Roses 1992,' 'Magnolias'), narrative interior scenes ('Hotel Lounge,' 'Cafe 1977,' 'Four Men in Conversation'), and a long-running suite of meditative pictures of his wife and model Gerda ('Gerda and the Rose,' 'Gerda and the Roses,' 'Gerda and the Tomato Sacks').

The Japanese strand of his graphic vocabulary is well-documented in critical reception. His meditative compositions of natural subjects — ponds, fields, isolated trees and stumps — are often described as recalling Japanese woodblocks in their flatness, their economy of mark-making, and their preference for asymmetric placement and large fields of unmarked paper. His work is widely characterised as fusing influences from America, Europe, and Japan, and his prints have been described by gallerists and critics as observing the Northwest with a 'gentle, observant eye' grounded in Japanese-style framing.

Hansen lived and worked on Vashon Island for essentially the entirety of his mature career, producing a continuous stream of small intaglio editions through the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, and remained active into the years preceding his death in 2017. His prints are held in the permanent collections of the Seattle Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, the Palmer Museum of Art at Pennsylvania State University, the New York Public Library, and the Library of Congress, as well as the Bayerische Graphische Sammlung in Munich and corporate collections including Boeing and Microsoft. He was represented in Seattle for decades by Davidson Galleries — whose legacy is continued today by Gallery No.85 at the same Pioneer Square address — and on Vashon and in Seattle by Khan Gallery and Gallery Mack. He was a generous and prolific senior figure in the Vashon Island arts community at the time of his death.

Within the Pacific Northwest printmaking landscape Hansen occupies a distinctive position as a Japanese-influenced intaglio specialist working in a region better known for woodblock print: he is the etcher in a community that more commonly worked in relief, and his combination of European intaglio training, Vashon Island subject matter, and Japanese compositional aesthetics gives his prints a hybrid character that is recognisably both Pacific Northwest and globally connected.