Revelation Through Concealment:
the Elusive Nature of John Himmelfarb’s Prints
January 2000

John Brunetti

John Himmelfarb’s extended commitment to printmaking spans over thirty years. Throughout this time, Himmelfarb’s prints serve as a rich journal recording and providing links between the seemingly diverse pictorial investigations of shape and line, image and abstraction, that have preoccupied the artist in both his paintings and drawings.

Himmelfarb’s prints from different periods of his career, the early ’70s, late ’80s, and mid-’90s, when juxtaposed display a wide formal and emotional range, from the intricate and meditative, to the bold and galvanic. Yet on closer inspection, they nonetheless disclose a consistent and complex approach to image-making that locates meaning in a series of elusive and playful formal variations of concealment and revelation. What becomes evident is that for this very private artist the complexities of his formal language—labyrinths of original pictographs, typography, or totemic images— are a means of both evoking the richness of life experiences while inserting a measured degree of distance between the viewer and Himmelfarb himself. The artist seeks to immerse the viewer in the diverse dialects of his exotic fabricated languages until the artist’s identity becomes lost in the resulting cacophony of reverberating echoes that make it impossible to separate constructed myths from personal reality.

Himmelfarb’s creative process resembles that of an archeologist working in reverse. Where the archeologist sorts through and separates overlapping layers of civilization in search for scientific clarity, Himmelfarb acts as the evolving civilization itself—amassing its mysteries in the seemingly endless, pieced-together scaffolding of language, architecture, and icons erected on the foundations of previous decay to rebuild the present. The resulting formal characteristics of this conceptual philosophy are images whose compositions flatten space and direct movement from top-to-bottom or side-to-side in the picture plane, rather than front-to-back. As a result, Himmelfarb’s images resemble excavation sites where each layer of culture supports the other, physically and symbolically.

A seminal example of this formal approach is March, a black and white lithograph from 1974. In this elegant print, Himmelfarb uses the same weight of contour line throughout the composition to create a dense weave of interlocking geometric and organic shapes that results in a rhythmic, all-over pattern. Himmelfarb’s tumbling landscape of shapes is an enigmatic hybrid of objects, figures, buildings, and natural terrain. The shapes’ individual identities remain anonymous, but communally they imply the multiple relationships and hierarchies of a complex society. Giving the appearance that it has been created with a continuous line, March blends both the intimate detail associated with cartography with the improvisational spontaneity of Surrealist automatic writing. In this print, Himmelfarb suggests that the carrier of meaning lies in the network of relationships between different parts, parts whose identity is often deliberately obscured.

An expressionistic print such as Lava Flow, an etching & aquatint from 1986, surprisingly further investigates the network of “arteries” and “scaffolding” of early works. Lava Flow appears to take a small detail from a composition such as March and enlarge it, in the process immersing the viewer inside the hidden image of two grimacing, totemic faces. Dramatically heightening the intensity of his bold, interlaced brushstrokes by printing them in searing red-orange against a black background, Himmelfarb transforms the image through the emotional impact of color. What distinguishes Lava Flow is the fugitive nature of the two faces whose features emerge and disappear in the writhing, glowing channels of vibrant color. Resembling ancient reliefs who have been absorbed into the earth’s strata over time, Himmelfarb’s faces appear to come alive when their crevices are filled with molten magma—nature gives rebirth to that which it has previously swallowed up.

The process of concealment is extended to written language by Himmelfarb with meticulous obsession in his “alphabet” prints from the early ’90s. The layered formal vocabulary of pre-historic pictographs and hieroglyphs, where image and idea are fused with multiple, elemental variations of line and shape, have been a source of fascination for the artist since his earliest drawings. Providing a structured, yet open-ended format for his stream of consciousness approach to drawing, the non-verbal language of these invented signs are a successful means for Himmelfarb to build a complex syntax of communication that nonetheless retains its mysteries. Reminiscent of the work of Jasper Johns, Himmelfarb’s “alphabet” works understand the poetic and abstract implications of language to provide not just a linear approach to meaning, but a circular one as well.

In the eight color screen print, Note of Appeal, ’93, Himmelfarb critiques the differences between the acts of reading and comprehension. Designed to resemble an official letter of correspondence, the print’s vertical composition is organized into an asymmetrical grid, complete with heading, salutation, paragraphs, signature, and official seal. The language of the letter, however, is rendered in an elegant, indecipherable calligraphy of the artist’s own creation. One “reads” the letter following its familiar structure, but comprehension does not follow. The seductiveness of Note of Appeal is the hypnotic authority it wields in suggesting that any lack of comprehension lies with the reader. The impenetrability of the letter’s meaning is emphasized by ghostly impressions of several additional layers of text printed in blue-grays on a pink background, creating the paper’s subliminal, transparent texture. Himmelfarb implies that real meaning always exists beneath the surface of accepted propriety.

Maintaining the elusive quality imbued in his prints has been the challenge that has preoccupied Himmelfarb throughout his career. This has been made all the more difficult because of the artist’s commitment to a lean vocabulary of shapes and lines that would seem to leave little opportunity to disguise one’s personal meanings. That he has created a resonating language of impenetrable depth from such basic elements reveals his accomplishment as an artist. That he has found the medium of printmaking his most flexible tool in assembling this vocabulary speaks to the continuing importance of prints to the creative development of a distinctive contemporary voice.