Armin Landeck: Between Architecture and Abstraction

If you haven’t seen the work of Armin Landeck (1905–1984), an architect who had a distinguished career as a printmaker, you’ve missed a first-rate American artist who lived in Cornwall and Manhattan for decades and whose prints are in museums in this country and abroad.

Landeck’s prints are often engravings showing city views of modest structures, rather than monumental buildings. His work is unmistakably modern and informed by a haunting period sensibility reminiscent of Edward Hopper and Martin Lewis. While true to an urban subject matter, the work is primarily about creating an imaginary space for the viewer.

In printmaking, engraving is a form of intaglio art first practiced in the 15th century by Albrecht Dürer and others, and used in modern times by artists including Picasso. In this tradition, Landeck used a tool called a burin to cut the lines of an image into a copper plate the same size as the finished engraving. He filled the lines with ink, then covered the plate with dampened print paper and ran it through a press to transfer the image. Like most intaglio printmakers, Landeck printed his own plates, manually controlling the process to fine-tune the result.

Landeck was born in rural Wisconsin and studied at the University of Michigan, receiving his bachelor’s degree in architecture from Columbia University. He also studied life drawing and printmaking at the Art Students League in Manhattan. Later, as the Great Depression deepened, he returned to the United States from an extended honeymoon and study trip to Europe and found that young architects were not in demand. He moved to East Cornwall, Connecticut and focused on printmaking and teaching. He joined the faculty of the Brearley School in Manhattan and taught there until 1958, regularly shuttling his family back and forth between Cornwall and New York.

In New York he also worked with well-known printmakers Martin Lewis and Stanley William Hayter. With Lewis he opened a short-lived school that offered classes on lithography, etching, drypoint, mezzotint, and wood engraving.  Subsequently he studied with Stanley William Hayter at the Atelier 17 school, which attracted many artists who had fled from World War II Europe and introduced American artists to fine art printmaking; there Landeck made his first intaglio engravings.

Landeck’s prints are in collections at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum, and other prominent institutions.

Armin Landeck: Between Architecture and Abstraction, an art exhibition at the Cornwall Library from September 10th – October 23rd, will display 45 of the 140 intaglio art prints that Landeck created over his career, with approximately half of these for sale. The exhibition was collected and organized by the artist’s grandson, architect Michael Heming, who lives in Cornwall.