Nathan OliveiraRetreat to the Printshop

Clip from Nathan Oliveira at Crown Point Press, ca. 2007. Video courtesy of Crown Point Press, San Francisco.

Printmaking was an important foundation and, at times, a retreat for painter Nathan Oliveira. He studied lithography with masters like Max Beckmann and Leon Goldin and later taught it at California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts). In 1952 Oliveira’s black and orange lithograph based on a Portuguese bullfight was reproduced in Life magazine, and his work was included in the Second International Biennial of Contemporary Color Lithography at the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1952; in 1957 his first solo exhibition featured only lithography. It was through printmaking that he found his artistic voice, producing powerfully expressive figures like the bull, the big-eyed ant in his noteworthy print Death of an Ant (1956), and the isolated human, for which the artist is best known.1 In the early 1960s, after a deluge of art-world success and demand for his work, Oliveira hit a dry spell. Depressed and unable to paint, the artist turned to printmaking, taking a fellowship at Tamarind Lithography Workshop to find his footing. When he joined the Stanford University art faculty in 1964, he established a printmaking program. During the Vietnam War, students used his printshop to make antiwar posters sold to benefit activists; Oliveira’s own antiwar poster depicted a figure hovering in dark space with the inscription: “Human and political differences are no longer enough reason for hate and its poison . . . If there is to be dignity and quality of existence for all mankind, let it begin.”2

  1. Peter Selz, Nathan Oliveira (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 26–31. ↩︎

  2. Peter Selz, Nathan Oliveira (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 67. ↩︎