 From
the outside, June Wayne’s studio doesn’t look
like much. Tucked between an Auto Zone repair mall, a
cemetery, and a school on a modest side street in Hollywood,
it seems an unlikely, and unglamorous, site for a landmark
in 20th century art history. But once inside the gated
entrance, her space is vast and elegant, graced with plants,
books, files and photographs, not to mention lithographs,
paintings, tapestries and mixed media works spanning nearly
half a century. Along the northwest wall, three arching
windows rise like columns toward the ceiling, which, even
on a rainy March afternoon, flood the airy living space
with cool gray light. The effect is somewhat between a
temple and a factory. In fact, one could say this place
has been a bit of both. From 1960 to 70, Wayne’s
studio was the home of Tamarind Lithography Workshop,
the dynamic nucleus of a signal, and significant, moment
in American art.
“For me, Tamarind itself was a work of art,”
Wayne explains over a tray of coffee and sweet Philippine
brownies. “It’s just that we were using
people, time and money, as well as paper and stones”.
(For those who don’t know, lithography is a planographic
printing process based on the mutual antipathy of oil
and water, using stones as printing blocks).
It was a hard road. Not only did Wayne will Tamarind
into existence, she single-handedly dragged the art
of lithography (which at the time was reduced to commercial
illustration in the U.S.) into the artistic mainstream.
To do so, she had to create more than just a workshop.
She had to create an entire infrastructure, an “ecology”
as she calls it, to support the medium; from determining
the proper chemistry of the paper and inks to be used
in the printing to educating collectors and critics
in the work’s worth. “It was a revolutionary
idea,” she admits. “It was such an act of
will. None of it would work unless all of it worked.”
Making it even harder, Wayne was bucking multiple trends.
She was a woman in a very macho art world. She was a
Californian at a time when even the tiny print world
was centered on the East Coast. And she was championing
an obscure collaborative medium in an era when everyone
was obsessed with grandiose individualism. “It
was a triple whammy,” she admits with a rueful
nod. “It’s still a triple whammy.”
Born in 1918, Wayne had her first solo show in 1935
and arrived in L.A. shortly after Pearl Harbor. During
the ensuing years she discovered a fascination with
optics, which remains a central theme of her art. In
1948 she met a printer named Lynton Kistler, who produced
primitive commercial lithographs out of his house at
Third Street and Rampart. “I gave him five dollars
for a stone and took it home,” she recalls. “It
was an instant attraction between me and that stone.
It was very sensual.”
For the next 10 years, Wayne continued to explore lithography,
traveling to Paris to work with master printer Marcel
Durassier. By 1958 her passion for the craft attracted
the attention of W. McNeil Lowery, director of the Ford
Foundation in New York, who invited her to write a grant
proposal, which she spent most of the next year refining.
The goal was “To Restore the Art of the Lithograph
in the United States” by teaming master printers
with a diverse array of modern artists and training
a new generation of artisans skilled in the all-but
forgotten craft. The proposal was accepted with zeal.
In 1960, the Tamarind Lithography Workshop was officially
born.
Over the next decade Tamarind hosted 12 artists a year,
for two-month grants, among them such noted talents
as Josef Albers, David Hockney, Louise Nevelson and
Rufino Tamayo. Even Georgia O’Keefe visited in
1963—but the next day Kennedy was shot, and she
was too upset to stay. “The will to do something
well was very powerful,” Wayne recalls. “Everybody
was so motivated. There was a glamour about Tamarind,
they felt privileged to get in. The artists owned whatever
prints they made, that was part of the grant.”
What Tamarind owned was the right to print nine copies
of each work, of which seven would go to major art museums,
including LACMA, MOMA and the Chicago Art Institute,
and the other two to documenting the Tamarind experiment.
Typical of the workshop’s sweeping ideals (and
reminiscent of the Works Progress Administration, which
inspired her in her youth), Wayne’s aim was not
just to create a unique dialogue between printers and
artists, but “to make the works available for
the aesthetic pleasure and education of the country,”
in essence, to forge a national audience.
By 1970 Tamarind had become self-sufficient, so Wayne
and her workshop amicably parted ways. Tamarind settled
in Albuquerque, New Mexico, while Wayne went back to
pursuing her own art. Over the past 35 years she has
created a wide range of paintings, mixed-media works,
lithographs and tapestries, exploring her interest in
natural and physical phenomena, a style which she labels
“Quantum Aesthetics.” “I’ve
always been idiosyncratic,” she concedes. “The
concepts are consistent, although the ways they are
expressed are different.”
Today, at 88, she remains a force of nature. Since
2001 she has been a Visiting Professor at Rutgers University.
She still travels regularly to New York and Paris. This
fall she will have a show of her prints at a Birmingham,
England, museum, and will have a Catalogue Raisonne
published of her work from the past seven decades. And
she still makes art. “I’m down here by 8:30
every morning,” she says. “I’m planning
four paintings that will be done in the style of that
piece from the 1940s. I want to find out what is real
and what is an illusion. It’s very hard to see
what you’re really looking at,” she muses.
Yet she clearly takes pride in her accomplishments.
“I did a series on stellar winds. They’re
extraordinary lithographs,” she adds with an impish
smile. “I look at them and say, ‘you know,
kiddo, you did that well.’”
photo: george melrod
Apr 2006 by george melrod |
