Mourning Women

Valdemar H. Elenbaas

1951

A 1951 lithograph in which the artist pares two mourning women down to tall, stylized silhouettes to express communal grief through simplified form and color.

A dark rectangular field holds two elongated, blocky figures—one green with hands covering her face, the other bluish-gray with an arm raised—whose muted robes of gray and rust and rough, rubbed textures create a spare, ritual hush.

Rooted in postwar modernist printmaking, the print uses abstraction and reduction to make visible shared sorrow, showing how lithography could translate emotional experience into archetypal, almost sculptural forms.

Palette

Art Terms

Lithography Print Abstraction Figurative Modern art Expressionism

Exhibitions

Committed to Print

1988

Twenty Lithographs: Graphic Art Processes

1941

Women of the Nineties: Fin-de-Siècle Prints

1979

New Acquisitions: Lachaise Torso; Prints

1934