The Disappeared
In Memoriam
Antonio Frasconi has always believed that art should come from a place deep within one’s self. Born in 1919 in Buenos Aires to parents who had emigrated from Italy during World War I, Frasconi grew up in Montevideo, Uruguay. He moved to New York in 1945 to study at the Art Students' League. By the 1950s he had become widely recognized as a leading graphic artist, especially in woodblock printing. Over the course of the next fifty years he would illustrate and design over 100 books, books of both joy and terror: the poems of Langston Hughes’s Let America be America Again and Pablo Neruda’s Bestiary/Bestiario, the images of America’s Vietnam and A Whitman Portrait.
The dictatorship in Uruguay was long and hard, finally coming to an end in 1985, four years after the artist began work on his magnum opus, Los Desaparecidos or The Disappeared. Completed over the course of a decade, this extended series of woodblocks and monotypes push the viewers into knowing, into recognizing their own collective culpability, and into remembering. Dark, graphically strong, and echoing the book format, Frasconi’s art successfully portrays the horrors of torture, incarceration, and killing while specifically preserving the memory of real people. In addition to the exhibition prints, he published these prints and paintings in a limited-edition book. The companion text was written by Mario Benedetti, a well-known Uruguayan journalist, literary critic, poet, playwright, and writer of fiction who spent ten years in exile. |
