Sachi Yanari-Rizzo, Curator of Prints & Drawings
When it comes to printmakers in Indiana, Rudy Pozzatti is one of the most beloved and respected–as both a skilled artist and an inspirational educator. Pozzatti received his B.F.A and M.F.A in 1948 and 1950 from the University of Colorado, Boulder. His undergraduate study was interrupted by WWII, in which he served in the U.S. Army and saw combat in France, Germany, and, notably, the Battle of the Bulge.
In school, Pozzatti encountered the work of Max Beckmann and Ben Shahn when they were artists-in-residence while he was enrolled. Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Georges Rouault inspired his bold use of line and an appreciation of the painterly qualities of printmaking. He studied under Wendell Black, who was in Mauricio Lasansky’s first graduate level class at the University of Iowa. Lasansky was a legendary figure in printmaking as a master and proponent of all the copper plate print techniques.
In 1952 Pozzatti received a Fulbright grant to study in Italy, which proved only the beginning of his worldwide travel. His fascination with Italy is evident in prints throughout his career as he depicted the ruins, the Colosseum, and Filippo Brunelleschi’s famous dome of Florence Cathedral.
Shortly after graduation, Pozzatti began his teaching career at the University of Nebraska. In 1956, he accepted a position at Indiana University’s (IU) School of Fine Arts where he spent the rest of his academic career before retiring in 1991. It was an exciting time when he first arrived in Bloomington, surrounded by talented colleagues including painters James McGarrell and Leon Golub, photographer Henry Holmes Smith, metalworker Alma Eikerman, and art historians Albert Elsen, Roby Sieber, and Diether Thimme.
Pozzatti is recognized for building the foundation of IU’s well-known printmaking program. In the beginning, he had one intaglio press and two lithography presses that were broken. He would eventually add etching and woodcut. In 1963 he worked with master printers at Tamarind Lithography Workshop (now Tamarind Institute) in Los Angeles for three months, funded by a Ford Foundation grant, which provided him with in-depth experience in lithography and enabled him to add a class in the process at IU. He studied the traditional Japanese woodblock print technique at Adachi Institute in Tokyo.
Besides achieving the rank of Distinguished Professor, Pozzatti received the highest honor for a faculty member with the President’s Medal for Excellence in 2018. His alma mater bestowed an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters.
In addition to teaching, Pozzatti co-founded the printmaking workshop Echo Press in 1979, affiliated with IU. He served as director along with David Keister, who was master printer, and curator Pegram Harrison. Echo Press attracted visiting artists from around the country to create innovative prints.
Pozzatti created a large body of his own prints in this fertile environment. The museum’s intaglio print Pursuit (1964), above, reveals the artist’s interest in Greek and Roman mythology and history. His images occur in three horizontal registers that take on a sculptural quality, with their heavily embossed borders, and are interspersed by a long serpent. The upper frieze features an array of portraits, including a horned deity, possibly Pan, and two soldiers with Corinthian type helmets–trademark almond-shaped eye openings, nose guard, and large cheek coverings. The other faces are reminiscent of Pozzatti’s series of portraits entitled XII Romans (1963), made at Tamarind Lithography Workshop, that focus on twelve important Roman rulers and statemen. The bottom frieze features a wild boar pursuing a siren, part woman and part bird. The fantastic creature is renowned for its irresistible songs and makes a notable appearance in Homer’s Odyssey.
Turn-about (1972), below, seems to be literally that. Pozzatti re-used some of the same imagery of the Roman portraits, wild boar-siren chase, and two horses seen in Pursuit; however, he inverts them from left to right or up and down and added two large profiles. The upper border consists of a band of portraits, likely from history, alternating with highly realistically rendered animals that contribute to the print’s enigmatic quality. This time the print is created using lithography, which yielded a flat, bold quality.
In Tower and Turtle (1973), Pozzatti stacks multiple registers again with portraits and vignettes that tower upwards. He envisions the Tower of Babel, a story from the Book of Genesis that provides a lesson in balance between mankind’s ambition and humility. The most famous depiction is by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1563) at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The Tower of Babel shows up in an earlier work by Pozzatti from 1958 that is dark and difficult to decipher but in his later version, in 1973, the construction soars upwards and even bursts through the image’s frame.
In the borders are street scenes featuring domes, columns, and arches in architecture, possibly inspired by his repeated trips to Italy. The descriptive drawings of the turtle and fly are in keeping with his reinterpretations of the Medieval Beastiary in Physicologus Theobaldi Episcopi de Naturis Duodecim Animalium (1964). This was followed by Darwin’s Ark (1984) and Darwin’s Beastiary (1985-86). Beastiaries originated from antiquity and included real and mythological creatures.
In 1979 a residency at the Roswell Museum and Art Center brought Pozzatti to the southwest. The resulting works were depictions of the land and sky that began to approach abstraction, as seen in Pecos Sky (1980). An exhibition of Pozzatti’s work, shown at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art from May 11-June 10, 1985, featured Pecos Sky and it was likely purchased from this exhibition. A combination of lithography, woodcut, and relief using mat board allowed for the range of shapes and textures.
Pozzatti’s work can be found at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, and of course the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University, among others.
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