Carol Summers

Carol Summers (December 26, 1925 — October 27, 2016) was an American printmaker whose career was defined almost entirely by colour woodcut. Born in Kingston, New York, and raised in nearby Woodstock among an artists' community — both of his parents were artists who had met in art school in St. Louis — Summers grew up surrounded by visual art before serving as a navigator-bombardier during the Second World War. After his discharge he used the G.I. Bill to attend Bard College, where he studied with the modernist painter Stefan Hirsch and learned printmaking from Louis Schanker; he supplemented his training with a summer at the Art Students League under Arnold Blanch, completing his BA in 1951.

Though Summers was trained primarily as a painter, around 1950 he turned to colour woodcut and remained committed to the medium for the rest of his sixty-five-year working life. The decisive technical breakthrough came when he developed a method that consciously departed from the Japanese ukiyo-e tradition of carved blocks inked from behind and printed onto dampened paper with a baren. In Summers's reverse procedure, the artist places dry paper directly on top of the carved block and then rolls ink with a brayer onto the front of the sheet, allowing the print to register through the pressure of the roller alone. He frequently augmented this with solvent sprays that thinned the inks into pigment dyes that bled into the paper fibres, yielding the characteristic soft-edged colour fields and luminous transitions that distinguish his prints from both traditional Japanese woodblock and the harder-edged graphic work of his peers.

The departure from Japanese practice was self-conscious and carefully argued. Summers spoke of wanting less predictability than the carved-and-stamped Japanese system delivered: softer edges, watercolour-like bleeds, and the kind of accidents that allow a print to take on its own life beyond the artist's planning. The procedure he settled on is now commonly called the 'Carol Summers technique,' and it was an explicit response to — and dialogue with — the Japanese tradition rather than a rejection of it. His subjects, drawn from sustained travel through Europe, Asia, the Himalayan region, Latin America, and the American West, retained the Japanese landscape print's sense of stylised topography and tonal massing while pursuing a chromatic intensity closer to mid-century American painting.

Alongside the American sculptor and printmaker Leonard Baskin, Summers helped pioneer what became known in the early 1960s as the 'monumental' woodcut — relief prints scaled far beyond the dimensions Western woodcut had traditionally accepted. The format suited his bold, saturated fields of colour and his preference for landscapes treated as semi-abstract patterns of mass and light. Recurring subjects across his catalogue include sacred Himalayan lakes ('Tilicho Lake,' 'Kali Gandaki'), Sangre de Cristo and Rocky Mountain ranges, Native American memorials ('Little Wolf's Last Camp,' 'Chief's Blanket'), Tuscan towns ('Colle, Val de Elsa,' 'Diocletian's Retreat'), and recurrent jungle and tropical motifs ('Jungle Bouquet,' 'Vecinos Lejos').

Summers taught at Hunter College, the Brooklyn Museum School, the Pratt Graphics Center, and Columbia University across his career, and his prints entered the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Tate. A fifty-year retrospective of his work was mounted at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History in 1999, and his catalogue spans more than half a century, reaching from the early 1950s into the 2000s.

Within the postwar American printmaking landscape Summers occupies a distinctive transitional position: a colour-woodcut artist of substantial reputation whose practice was deeply informed by Japanese precedent and yet defined itself in formal opposition to it. The luminescent surfaces and watercolour-like dye washes he achieved through his method gave his prints a hybrid character — neither Western intaglio nor Japanese mokuhanga, but a third path that influenced a younger generation of American woodcut artists who came after him.