Chinese Landscape

Produced the year Summers completed his BA at Bard, Chinese Landscape stands among the earliest woodcuts of a career that would soon focus exclusively on the medium. The title points toward the East Asian shanshui tradition of layered mountains and water, a subject familiar to a printmaker just emerging from study with Louis Schanker and Stephan Hirsch. At this date Summers was still working close to the conventions of mid-century American modernist printmaking — bold flat shapes and assertive contour — though the choice of an Asian motif anticipates the long engagement with non-Western sources that would later carry him to India, Japan, and Latin America. The signature procedure for which he became known — laying inked blocks face-down on dampened paper so pigment bled through the washi to create soft, glowing peripheries — was still some years away. As an early color woodcut it reads as a transitional work, marking the moment Summers turned away from painting toward the relief block as his primary expressive vehicle.