As a relative newcomer to the ranks of the California Society of Printmakers, I frequently feel as if I am unearthing treasures -- precious gems and occasional marvels that I have the pleasure of "discovering" as they come to light at shows and in artists' studios. In the case of William Wolff, I feel like I have stumbled upon the Mother Lode. Here in our midst, and surprisingly little known to many San Francisco Bay Area printmakers and collectors, dwells a humble spirit who has poured forth richly expressive prints, drawings and paintings from block, pen, and brush for nearly half a century. Last year at the Fetterly Gallery in Vallejo, California, Wolff's artistic visions, powerfully expressive like the voices of poets and prophets, invaded my consciousness, where they have remained and multiplied, insisting that I attend to the spiritual, social, and artistic wisdom they so eloquently embody.

In preparing this tribute to Bill Wolff (pictured right) and his work, I hope to draw the attention of other artists and collectors who might benefit from listening to the voice of this great figurative master emerging from the age of abstraction.

While others of his generation went about the business of radically altering the artistic landscape with conceptual productions and abstraction, Wolff quietly engaged in the making of art that seems radical in its context -- having its inspiration rooted in Judeo-Christian mysticism, literary sources both classical and contemporary, and a deeply experienced social consciousness. Considering Wolff's artistic heroes, if one can judge from the artists whose prints adorn his living room -- William Blake, Georges Rouault, Hogarth, Jacques Callot, and Ben Shahn -- one may appreciate Wolff's highly personal images and mature iconography as works having a distinguished artistic lineage. Like the late and marvelous Leonard Baskin, who shared similar sources of inspiration, Wolff bucked the artistic trends of the mid-twentieth century, wherein many artists deliberately worked to sever links with the cultural past in order to bring something entirely new onto the artistic landscape. However, unlike Baskin, Wolff went about his business in his characteristically unassuming and humble way, speaking with a quiet but profoundly resonant artistic voice.

Biographical Data

A genuine native of San Francisco, born in 1922, Wolff recently showed me a photograph of himself at the age of ten, taken with his classmates, he says, only a few blocks from his current home in Cow Hollow. From 1939 to 1943, Wolff studied at the California School of Fine Arts, before serving with the Compass Corps in Europe during the Second World War. In 1951, he graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with an M.A. in art, having focused his studies on painting and drawing. He shared a studio on Magnolia Street with James Weeks, an important San Francisco Bay Area Figurative painter, from 1949 to 1955. As early as 1950, Wolff won the Artists' Council prize of $75 for a drawing shown in the fourth annual exhibition of prints and drawings sponsored by the San Francisco Arts Commission. A 1966 exhibition pamphlet from the Oakland Museum chronicles his growing passion and facility for the woodcut, noting, "he was introduced to the medium through a friend and was inspired to master its subtleties without seeking professional instruction." In this exhibition Wolff's color woodcut Landscape, which had been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum in 1965, was featured alongside works by several other quite famous printmakers, including Wayne Thiebaud, Nathan Oliveira, Richard Diebenkorn, Kathan Brown, Roy de Forest, and Beth Van Hoesen. The exhibition left Oakland to spend two years touring the world as part of the U.S. State Department's "Art in the Embassies" program. (One wonders whether his participation would have been allowed had Wolff's socialist leanings been general knowledge, but these were the late 60s so perhaps the memory of McCarthy had faded sufficiently by then.)

In addition to adding lithography, under the tutelage of Dick Graf, and some early experiments with serigraphy to his oeuvre, in the late 60s Wolff studied intaglio with Gordon Cook at the San Francisco Art Institute. Cook had himself been a student of Mauricio Lasansky, carrying Wolff's artistic lineage back to Hayter's Atelier 17. However, while many of the mature lithographs and etchings are wonderfully subtle and spontaneous or highly developed and charged with energy, it seems Wolff's passion eventually led him to leave painting, lithography, and intaglio behind in favor of woodcut and drawing, both of which afforded means of powerful and direct expression which he has continued to practice to this very day. He has survived two wives and now daily copes with the ravages of Parkinson's disease, but new drawings appear daily and no block of wood rests safely in his presence.

Mystical Images

Consider this remarkable 1985 statement by Thomas Albright: "[Wolff works] in an expressionistic style, often using mythological themes in a way reminiscent of William Blake."¹ While I am not prepared to claim that Bill Wolff makes his art in the style of William Blake -- his work is far too original and exudes too many additional influences for such a claim to hold up -- nevertheless, some key similarities to Blake's work, I think, are rather telling. Particularly in his early paintings, Wolff's frequent placement of figures in a single plane, as on a classical frieze, with relatively little attention to the surrounding landscape, certainly bears a likeness to many of Blake's finest works and seems linked as well to the aesthetic of the Magical Realists in the twentieth century. His use of figures as symbols in the metaphysical works also reminds one of Blake. And like Blake, Wolff has mined classical texts, and in particular the Bible, for sources of artistic inspiration. Or put another way, like Blake, Wolff has employed his art as a means of expressing his profound relationship to texts holding deep personal significance for him. Like Blake, his readings of these texts are both detailed and highly personal. In the finest instances, the art arising from these readings goes beyond illustration to the level of inspired interpretation, standing quite on its own in its ability to engage and to enlighten the viewer, but revealing deeper meanings when considered in relation to the text that inspired it.

Mainstream artists of the latter twentieth century have largely avoided serious religious, and particularly Christian, subject matter. While there are notable exceptions to this generalization -- as, for example, the late works of Andy Warhol -- Wolff is decidedly unusual and bold in his confident and sustained exploration of Christian mysticism over the course of his career. Wolff's Emmaus, one of many color woodcuts interpreting Christian texts, provides an example of his deeply spiritual, purposeful art making. The Biblical text upon which this woodcut is based (Luke 24:16) describes a journey made by two men on a desert road from Jerusalem to the town of Emmaus -- a journey made in the presence of a stranger. Along the way the unrecognized Christ discusses the Scriptures with the travelers, preparing the men to receive the revelation that the stranger is in fact the resurrected Christ, whom they had thought dead and buried.

With marvelous economy of design, Wolff manages to depict the moments just before the spiritual eyes of the travelers are opened. Against a background of deep blues conjuring the cool quietude of the desert night, stand the busts of the men, in profile, eyelids shut. Surrounding their heads, apparently in the sky -- like stars -- a network of dots and lines inexplicably creates the unmistakable sense of marvelous anticipation, depicting nothing less than the mystical power of the risen Lord about to open the eyes of his unseeing friends. Conveyed with the absolute absence of theatricality, this profound artistic expression is, I believe, characteristic of Wolff's greatest works.

According to Bill, R. E. Lewis, a friend, admirer and occasional collector of his prints, reportedly once levied as criticism Bill's use of "symbolic heads" in works such as Emmaus. Lewis apparently felt that the failure to use actual models, with their unique and realistic features, rendered the works weak. Given Wolff's consummate skill in portraiture in several media (which we shall come to later), I have no doubt that the use of stylized or generalized figures in these mystical works was deliberate, and in fact contributes to their considerable power. Like William Blake, whose work suffered similar criticism, Wolff translates spiritual and subconscious realities into visual images. Wolff, like Blake, uses symbolic figures as means to cleanse "the doors of perception" so that we may "see everything as it is: Infinite."² Details of facial features become unimportant -- and might actually distract the viewer from the vision Wolff intends -- as these images function as windows into realms of spiritual and mystical reality, seen "through a glass darkly."

Nowhere is this technique more clearly realized than in Wolff's 1972 woodcut, Christ Mocked. Surrounded by a din of contorted and horrible faces, all teeth and tongues, stands the figure of Jesus -- but in fact there is no figure at all. As if in deference to the holiness and spiritual beauty of the enduring Christ, a beauty perhaps too powerful to behold, Wolff has placed a veil, a symbol, of entwined lines inspired by the crown of thorns. (Only in the twentieth century, with Blake, Redon, and Rouault embedded in our collective artistic consciousness, could such an image be understood as the profound and poetic expression that it is.)

Wolff's careful reading of text and considerable facility at cleansing the doors of perception empowered his numerous illuminations of that most obscure of Biblical prophecies, Revelation. Among the most arresting images sharing this inspiration are the 1983 color woodcut, I Took the Book..., (woodcut, 1983, 24" x 17.5", pictured left) depicting St. John at the angel's command devouring the book that he has been given (Revelation 10:10), and the fantastic color woodcut from 1970 depicting A Great Red Dragon with Seven Heads (Revelation 12:3). Wolff's fascination with Revelation and the visual material it offered led him to produce the highly energetic series of eight woodcuts, The Witnesses of the Apocalypse, which audiences enjoyed at last year's Fetterly show.

Likewise, his enchanting etching The Woman Clothed with the Sun, a work of mysterious and powerful beauty and one of the artist's personal favorites, is inspired by Revelation 12:1 ("And there appeared a great wonder in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet..."). Here the nude figure of the woman is clothed in swirling etched lines which have the peculiar quality of becoming more luminous, the blacker and more heavily inked they are -- a phenomenon shared with the sinking and inky blacks of the lithographs of Odilon Redon.

Wolff's visions of spiritual realities extended into other graphic media, and were not strictly confined to the representation of the mystical power of Christ or the mysteries of the Revelation. His etching, My Name Is Legion (A Certain Man Which Had Devils), depicts the spiritual turmoil of a man possessed by demons using energetic lines to describe his naked body as a disjointed jumble -- arms, legs, penis, head to one side -- a pathetic vision of a man disintegrated. Wolff appears to have taken an intense interest in this particular subject. The figure appears both as an etching (one of his very best) and as a woodcut. In the medium of lithography, the story expands to include Christ's appearance to the man among the tombs, where he would be healed as the Master cast the demons into a herd of swine. The swine also appear, in dramatic color lithography, as a jumbled mass stampeding toward the viewer and into the lake where they will be drowned.