by Louis Girling
© 2001 The Journal of the California Printmaker
All Rights Reserved

Art Hazelwood has suggested that Wolff's interest in this subject and its interpretation may have been informed by his years of work with youth, in particular troubled youth, as an art teacher at the Youth Guidance Center in San Francisco. In Glass Door, a lithograph of 1969 (similar to the woodcut version of My Name Is Legion... in its use of red and black) Wolff memorializes the story of a young man who apparently leapt through a glass panel. Pen and wash drawings, together with a series of preparatory proofs, preserved in his studio, seem to document the artist's struggle to comprehend the young man's anguish. Here is artistic empathy at its best.

Social Concerns

Glass Door is one of many important art works informed by the compassionate and active social consciousness that characterizes the artist's private life. The early figurative paintings, strangely, combine the aesthetics of parallel artistic movements -- social realism, neoclassicism, and even abstraction -- to achieve a sort of spirit that I might term "social mysticism." For example, a series of images of "rock breakers" seems to employ the bodies of quarry workers, as well as the shapes of broken stones, as abstract formal elements in compositions which nevertheless celebrate sweat, muscle, and sinew as foundations of an imagined liberal Utopia. One of the paintings in this series, Landscape with Stone Cutters, remains in the collection of the Oakland Museum. In 1971, Associate Curator Terry St. John wrote to Wolff to thank him for a related print, referring to The Stone Cutters as one of his favorite paintings and proposing an exhibition of the entire series. (The exhibition never materialized.)

Wolff's socialist tendencies and abiding concern with social issues reflect his compassion for the suffering of others. This compassion achieved high artistic expression in his many renderings of Veronica performing her act of mercy for the suffering Christ, the best of which radiates with the energy of a great expressionist print. Perhaps the most challenging of his prints, a little etching with aquatint entitled As You Did It to One... possesses the visual and spiritual intensity of Rouault's images from Miserere. Inspired by the words of Christ (Matthew 25:40 -- "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."), this image features prisoners bound and seated in a desolate plain. Their abandonment serves both as indictment and invitation, not only to the viewer but also to the larger society in which he participates.

It would seem no surprise, then, that in recent years Wolff has lent his prints to adorn the local homeless newspaper, the Street Sheet. Here again he continues the marvelous tradition of so many artists as social observers and compassionate supporters of the disenfranchised, stretching backward from the American artists of the WPA to Daumier's satirical images of nineteenth century French society published in Charivari, and even to my personal favorite, William Blake, whose images for Little Tom the Sailor were published and sold to benefit an English orphanage.

Theatrical and Literary

In the tradition of a number of great twentieth century artists, most notably Chagall and Rouault, but under influences stretching back even further to the likes of Jacques Callot and William Hogarth, Wolff accepted literary, and particularly poetic and theatrical, subjects as major sources of inspiration. In Wolff's case, these sources are exceptionally broad ranging -- from Shakespeare and Homer to Steinbeck and Machado, from the Commedia del Arte to contemporary street theater. His remarkable renditions of the hideous Stymphalian Birds and Shakespeare's Caliban inspire a desire for intimacy with Greek mythology and The Tempest. Hogarth's Southwark Fair, leaning in its frame atop Wolff's living room bookshelf, seems a fitting presence among his theatrical etchings ranging from the fabulous Commedia stage to the intimate Puppet Theater in Mission Park. Particularly curious about this latter work, which seems to have been inspired by theater companies performing in the 70s -- in the same Dolores Park where I run my dog, Blake, and where contemporary San Francisco residents may be alternately found sunning in their underwear or getting in touch with primal energies through drumming -- I asked Bill about its sources. His confusing reply, disjointed by the neurological effects of Parkinson's disease which force the artist to "chase thoughts around in [his] head, trying to pin one down," served only to intrigue me further: mixed references to a traveling theater company from Vermont and the Vietnam War ended with the final emphatic statement, "a lot of people got arrested that day."³

I am fascinated by the way a tiny Callot etching in the artist's personal collection, featuring stock characters of the Italian Commedia del Arte street theater, provided seemingly endless inspiration for a remarkable variety of prints in various media. No fewer than six lithographs, five woodcuts, and twenty-four etchings feature, singly or in combination, the familiar yet enigmatic Il Dottore, Pantalone, Il Capitano, Pulcinella (etching, 1970, 8" x 6", pictured left), and Arleccino. In 1969 he even editioned a series of five serigraphs featuring the Commedia characters. (The artist immediately abandoned the medium after this experience, owing to its extremely smelly and messy nature, which he found unpalatable). While the humor, pathos and visual interest of the characters provide rich material indeed, as I have surveyed Wolff's work I have become convinced that it is their masks that provided the essential element which stirred his imagination in so sustained a fashion. As the "symbolic heads" in his mystical works focus the mind of the viewer upon a spiritual reality, so masks in theatrical and spiritual practice may provide a window through which other realities are illuminated: consider the mask of the fool, which provides a mirror for our own failings; the mask of the shaman which summons the particular spirit it depicts, whose qualities are required, into the midst of a community. Wolff's studio is absolutely littered with images of clowns, actors (with and without masks) -- comic actors, tragic actors, Chinese actors, actors declaiming -- mime troupes, gladiators, puppet theaters, and the like.

Wolff's rich courtship with the theater and its masks, whose artistic practice rests so close to his own heart, reaches a sort of pinnacle in a handful of masks produced over several decades and approaching abstraction in their pure exploitation of visual symbolism. Several of these works -- Atomic Mask (1971), Guerrero (Mask of War) (1985), and Enclosed Thought (1990) -- seem to be the results of highly distilled, profound meditations upon particular concepts or clusters of ideas. Particularly moving is Wolff's Atomic Mask, a sort of jumble of vectors and nodes subtlety constructed to form a metaphysical head now devoid of all empathy. Its small scale and humble presentation seem paradoxically to reinforce this woodcut's brilliance as a work of protest art.

Life Drawing

At least since 1989, and likely since the 1970s, Wolff has actively participated in an artists' group, founded by Charles Griffin Farr and focused on drawing from live models. At the age of 78, he continues this discipline weekly.

While the drawings primarily appear to represent a forum for the development of artistic skill and for the sheer joy of spontaneous expression -- many appear on paper scraps, the verso of political flyers, and so on, implying that the artist did not intend their sale or exhibition -- many of these marvelous figures, infused with humor, sensuality and at times a monumental quality, succeed as highly developed, sophisticated images. Wolff's definition of space and linearity of design in many of these works recall early Diebenkorn and place them squarely at the center of the post-war San Francisco Bay Area Figurative art movement. By turns characterized by remarkable economy and a visceral, almost electric energy, Wolff's line has the versatility to define the most delicate of feminine forms or to build structures so totemic in tone as to conjure to mind the sculpture of Leonard Baskin or mid-twentieth-century Inuit stone carvers.

While one expects that this long experience of drawing from life would inform Wolff's printmaking, and while it is no surprise to see these drawing skills put to marvelous effect in Wolff's etched plates, their translation into woodcut gives one serious pause. The profile depicted in his 1975 woodcut Adela (Barbara) could not employ greater economy of line in defining the vulnerable feminine form of this character from Federico Garcia Lorca's play, The House of Bernarda Alba. By contrast, totemic monumentality weds sensual description of the human form in his breathtaking Lovers Embrace of 1988.

Portraits, both real and imagined, but generally drawn from life have provided a vehicle well suited for Wolff's penetrating eye. Historical portraits of Giordano Bruno, John Brown, and the World War I poet Wilfred Owen stand beside the forgotten actors and actresses, a nameless but stylish Model with Pearls, and the brilliant Head of a Black Man, which populate Wolff's prolific portraiture. The artist's daughter, Maria, and his late second wife, Marguerite, are also here. Above all, beginning with the modest early lithographic portraits of himself and of James Weeks (only one impression of each known to survive), Wolff has contributed a rich visual record of fellow poets and artists. Infamous among these are the variants of the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti -- with and without ears -- the earlier version depicting the energetic, blue-eyed figure with pinnae projecting from either side of his ample head, forever listening as a poet ought -- the later version with ears amputated à la Van Gogh -- at the poet's request, mind you, to preserve his internal self-image. Artists John Connolly, Stanley Koppel, and Roy and Carol Ragle share the considerable distinction of having had their likenesses lovingly, painstakingly carved into the block.

Cross-Fertilization Among the Arts/"The Invisible City"

As one talks with Bill Wolff and surveys his work, one becomes keenly aware of the community of artists of which he has been a part. One imagines him not only studying at the feet of Max Beckmann and exchanging printmaking tools and techniques with Roy Ragle, but also sharpening wits with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, discussing the fusion of jazz techniques with classical music with Darius Milhaud, and receiving inspiration from the parade of actors who populate his woodcuts. Wolff produced posters for poetry readings and theater openings. In the early 70s, as if to honor and recognize this artistic community from which he drew his nourishment, Wolff produced a beautiful series of woodcuts entitled The Invisible City (woodcut, 1975, 17.25" x 24.25", pictured right). Busts in profile pass from right to left, and left to right, beneath skies filled with forms inspired by Leger, the busts suggesting the shadows of artists at motion in the cultural subcurrents of a city defined not by geography but by ideas.

As a citizen of the "Invisible City" -- this mystical place where artists, poets, musicians, and the like converge to create a society largely unseen by the general populace -- Wolff has continuously participated in that vital cross-fertilization among the arts which was, to some extent, lost on those radical individualists on the art scene of the 50s and beyond. Images wrought to complement the poetry of Wolff's contemporaries dwell among the most satisfying of his artistic expressions. Among the best of these I would count Wolff's lovely etching, Breakfast in the Valley. Based upon Steinbeck's Long Valley, the work features a family of migrant workers at table in an outdoor setting strongly reminiscent of the woodcut landscape that toured the embassies in the late 60s. Wolff's statement to me, as I viewed this etching, that the migrant workers held "such mystical significance for Steinbeck" underscores once again his abiding artistic intent to render images bearing depths of meaning beyond the physical plane. Similarly, his 1988 color woodcut No Hay Camino, prepared to complement a poem by Antonio Machado and published in the Five Printmakers Portfolio by Paper Crane Press, utilizes simple elements -- a hand, a tangle of thorns -- to evoke a state of mind and to enhance the experience of the poetry by evoking subconscious associations.

In 1993, Wolff conceived a series of 14 woodcuts as illuminations for James Joseph Campbell's Poems. Strange and marvelously compelling landscapes, rendered sparingly in two colors -- turquoise and black -- in the company of figures pared down to their simple essentials -- a dove, a hand -- reach an even higher plane of maturity and artistic sophistication. Of a proposed edition of 40, six copies of this collaborative work were completed. Doug Stow printed the poems in letterpress at Paper Crane Press, and Wolff completed many, if not all, of the prints. Wolff mourns the tragedy of the uncompleted project, recounting how on a Monday he agreed with "Mac," the binder Charles MacArthur Carmen, to meet on the following Thursday to finish the work. Mac had a devastating stroke on the intervening Tuesday. Both men are now frail, and the poet has died. Nevertheless Wolff and Mac are hopeful that the edition may yet come to pass, with the help of their friends.

Inspiration to a Younger Generation

Wolff's work has provided inspiration for a number of San Francisco Bay Area artists who know him well. Roy Ragle remains a close friend and associate. Ragle notes that his frequent use of Biblical text as a compositional element in his prints may be directly attributed to Bill Wolff's influence. In a younger generation, Anthony Ryan, current president of the Graphic Arts Workshop in San Francisco, has adapted some of Wolff's techniques in the printing of his lyrical color woodcuts.

>Art Hazelwood, known to many in the San Francisco Bay Area for his paintings and relief prints boiling over with social criticism and post-modern intercultural synthesis of artistic ideas, has spent a good deal of his time working for Bill Wolff in his home and studio since 1996. Such intimacy between an older and a younger artist cannot fail to yield fruit. Steeped in Wolff's imagery, in the fall of 2000, Art began a major public mural commissioned by the Fetterly Gallery in Vallejo, California. Featuring a 110-foot-long tableau of figures in settings combining architectural elements of the Renaissance with the moving perspective of David Hockney, Art's mural celebrates the arts from painting to music to architecture. Viewers may recognize California Society of Printmakers artists Dan Robeski and Charles Ware as the models for the figures of architecture and painting, respectively. But at the center of this lively array, a scene from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar plays out on the stage, inspired, like the figure of Pantalone at the far left, by none other than Bill Wolff.

The Life of the Block

Collectors and curators be forewarned: extraordinarily few of Bill Wolff's graphic images were formally editioned. The majority bear the designation "Proof" or "Artist's Proof." Actually this designation accurately describes the artist's relationship to the works, which he seems always to view as works in progress. A virtual nightmare for the future author of Wolff's catalogue raisonne, yet for the connoisseur this phenomenon raises a fascinating prospect, as nearly every impression is in fact unique.

In creating his prints, Wolff's view of the plate or the block as a vital, living entity always poised for development and his willingness to interact with his media produce delicious results. Thus an abstract tangle of blocks printed in black and red entitled Whirlwind suggested a figure to the mind of the artist, transforming it into his 1994 Shaman. Only a careful study of the residual shapes in the subsequent print reveals that it was printed from the same block of wood as the Whirlwind. Similarly a large-scale woodcut depicting the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden was subsequently divided into two separate prints, each of which took on a life of its own. The image of Adam and Eve, now isolated from the angel guarding the entrance to the garden, seems even more despairing. Separated from our first parents, the angel now becomes Abadon, the exterminating angel of Revelation. Thus not only the details of particular images, but even their content and conception remain malleable, fluid in the artist's mind.

A prime example of this organic development of a block may be found in The Ladder. Wolff feels The Ladder arose from a creative dry period. Nevertheless this living woodcut strikes me as particularly inspired. Despite the deliberate distance he maintained from popular art movements of the time, Wolff allowed a sort of oblique influence by using a cutting board -- randomly incised with lines from a kitchen knife -- as a sort of "found object" and by interacting with the medium like the best of the abstract expressionists. By this process he produced a profound collage of visual elements, poetically conjuring a meditative vision of Jacob's dream.

In working to catalogue Wolff's graphic oeuvre, Art Hazelwood decided to label each wood block, attaching the label with a staple gun. He noted this procedure made Wolff visibly uncomfortable: the artist cringed as each label was attached, as if it were a nail in the coffin signaling the end of the life of the block. This intriguing view of block, plate and stone as living entities provides an apt metaphor for Wolff's life and contribution, as an artist whose hands and mind have proved fertile ground for seeds of inspiration from diverse artistic heroes of the past, and whose labors in turn have borne fruit to nourish and inspire a younger generation.