I wrote a long post a couple of weeks ago about the artist Antonio Frasconi, with a print that I didn’t really love but featured because I love his social justice thrust. Today, I want to share another print by the same artist, which I do love both for its visual appeal and for its subject. It’s a woodcut portrait of Walt Whitman, who died years before Frasconi was born, but whom the young Uruguayan read passionately. The depth of Frasconi’s affinity for Whitman can be judged by the fact that he made at least 8 separate portrait prints of Whitman that I can locate, most of them included in a book of Whitman’s writings Frasconi assembled titled A Whitman Portrait (1960). I haven’t read a lot of Whitman, but I have been struck deeply by what I have read, in particular this passage from Leaves of Grass, his signature work.
This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem….
Here’s the print of Whitman that I like best, which is from the page opposite the title page of the book:
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