The long-awaited definitive work on master wood engraver Paul Landacre (1893-1963), a key figure of California modernism.
With his virtuosic prints of rolling California hills, classically inspired nudes, and natural and manmade forms - from a seashell to his own printing press - Paul Landacre elevated wood engraving to a high art form in twentieth-century America. Landacre-s ceaseless stylistic innovation placed his work in dialogue with California contemporaries like Edward Weston and Henrietta Shore; he was, in fact, central to an artistic milieu that has been described as a -small Renaissance, Southern California style.- It is fitting, too, that the velvety blacks and dazzling whites of Landacre-s prints can recall the images of the silver screen - for the artist-s rustic bungalow on a Los Angeles hill was but a stone-s throw from Hollywood, and his early patrons and supporters included such luminaries as the director Delmer Daves and the actress Kay Franc
