HAfftka

In 1981 I bought my first etching press. It was the smallest Charles Brand. I bought it from the artist Hannelore Baron for $300. Hannelore was unhappy with the gallery she was in. I liked her work very much and I suggested her art to another art dealer, Steve Schlesinger, who started representing her and was successful in placing her works in several museums and good collections. I met Hannelore through her son Mark who used to hang out with the kids in my neighborhood. We were the same age. Hannelore was a survivor and a refugee of WW2, as were my parents. We were both interested in art and music. One day Hannelore mentioned she wanted to sell her etching press. After her mastectomy she no longer had the strength to turn the press. I bought it right there and then. From then on I have had a life long love affair with the intaglio medium.

I learned the techniques of making etching fairly quickly. It came naturally to me. At some point Mark, Hannelore’s son, offered to publish my first major project. Mark was studying bass with David Izenzon. Izenzon was the bass player for Ornette Coleman and other Jazz luminaries. For a living Mark sold Persian rugs but he wanted to become and art dealer.

My first project with Mark was “Incisions”. I had a great time printing it. With this set I developed my preference for monotypes rather than strictly repeating a bon a tier print for the whole edition. Mark assisted me by placing the paper on the plate when my hands were dirty with ink. Although Mark had already given up playing the bass he was keen on introducing me to Jazz, he was an avid Jazz fan. Until then I only listened to Classical and Rock and Roll so Jazz was very foreign to me. Mark brought over a milk crate full of records and we listened to a wide array of avant-guard improvised Jazz along with classics like Lester Young and Duke Ellington. After all the plates were printed I designed a box to hold each set.

Mark took a few sets to Steve Schlesinger’s gallery on Madison Avenue, NY. Schlesinger was a dealer of Picasso, Chagall, Max Beckman and other fine artists and the gallery was well known in the New York Art World. The very next day Dr. Issac Shenkin, a world famous collector of Egon Schiele and Max Beckman, came into the gallery and saw my prints. He bought several editions. I met Dr. Shenkin a week later and he told me that he went straight to MOMA and showed it to the curator Riva Castelman. She immediately suggested that it would be the next acquisition of the Museum and proposed to show them all. It is quite hilarious looking back on it now and realizing that I didn’t know it was a big deal. When the show went up I didn’t attend the opening. That’s how naive I was about the art scene.