Sid Hammer
Sid Hammer (July 1st, 1926 – October 19, 1969) was an American artist, writer, and political activist who invented a printmaking technique he called “thermo-intaglio.” Hammer was politically active throughout his adult life. He participated in non-violent civil disobedience and other forms of protest throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s in New York City. Hammer died in 1969 of a brain tumor at 43, after which point there was no posthumous management or exhibition of his works. The cataloguing and archiving of Hammer’s work began in the spring of 2018 and an ongoing effort to bring attention to his work is underway.
Early Life and Education
The child of two recently emigrated Eastern European Jews in New York City, Hammer’s first languages were Yiddish and Russian. Hammer began to show an interest in art while attending Townsend Harris High School.
Hammer took night classes at the Cooper Union School of Art, while attending City College of New York (CCNY) during the day, where he graduated with a B.S. in Social Science in 1948. During that period he also took classes at The Art Students League. In 1949, Hammer and his wife, Muriel, moved to Los Angeles after working on the Henry A. Wallace campaign. Hammer’s son, Karl, was born in L.A., where they lived until 1952. The family moved back to New York shortly after their son was born, and a daughter, Karen, arrived in 1957. In New York, Hammer continued his full-time work as an artist.
Career
Hammer filled many notebooks with drawings of the daily life of people around him in NYC that have yet to be seen. Throughout the 1950s, Hammer showed many of his aquatints, woodblock prints, intaglio prints, in addition to his paintings and drawings. In the late 1950s Hammer began experimenting with thermo-intaglio printing, which he used to make his most recognized series, Apocalypse, in 1961.
Hammer exhibited his prints and paintings in group and solo exhibitions at ACA, AAA, Revel, and other NYC galleries, the Butler Art Institute in Youngstown, Ohio, as well as the Museum of Modern Art, Cooper Union School of Art, The New School, and The Jewish Museum. Hammer’s work resides in permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York Public Library, and the Lessing Rosenwald Collection at the National Gallery. Hammer was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1963 for his series of ten prints titled Apocalypse. Hammer completed the first edition of fifty complete sets in 1961. The series garnered critical acclaim and was purchased by the National Gallery, the MOMA, the Met, and The New York Public Library.
Hammer taught printmaking at Pratt Institute School of Art (1962-64) and taught at Cooper Union.
Thermo-intaglio: An Original Printing Technique
Thermo-intaglio, a modified version of intaglio printing invented by Hammer in the 1950s, involves etching on plates of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) with a range of differently shaped metal tools that he fastened to a soldering iron. Conventional intaglio printing typically uses copper or zinc plates, which are either engraved or etched.
Hammer explains the benefits of thermo-intaglio in an article entitled “A New Intaglio Technique”(February 1963, American Artist). PVC plates are much cheaper than either copper or zinc. The material is softer, which when paired with differently shaped heated metal tips of a modified soldering iron, allowed him to etch plates with a painterly, freehand approach. The resulting print plates produce extremely dark blacks, due to the depth of the lines and burrs achieved as the hot point of the soldering iron tools melt the surface of the plate. The plates are also more durable than drypoint engravings, allowing Hammer to make larger editions before the plates degraded. Unlike metal-plate etching techniques, thermo-intaglio allowed him to easily make repeated revisions to plates without the need to chemically clean the plates, further adding to the free-form nature and speed this technique afforded him while going through the proofing and revision process. Hammer enjoyed the “directness of these plates as an expression of the artist’s intention.”
In addition to the novel hot-tool etching technique that differentiates thermo-intaglio from other engraving and etching processes, Hammer also utilized conventional drypoint, graven line, mezzotint, and other techniques as he saw fit throughout the process of making and proofing his plates. Later prints included areas where he applied homemade black gunpowder to sections of the plate, which when lit melted the surface, creating interesting and varied greytones.
Political Activism
Hammer campaigned for the United States Progressive Party of 1948 to elect Henry Wallace. He and his wife Muriel were also members of the Communist Party USA in the late ‘40s into the early ‘50s. He became disillusioned with the direction of the party as details of the Hungarian Revolution emerged. [Peekskill, need to confirm if he was there or not]. Hammer organized a group of artists to protest nuclear weapons testing through The Artist’s Letter Fund project, resulting in a full page ad signed by many prominent artists calling for an immediate halt to nuclear weapons testing which was published in The New York Times on June 26, 1962.
References
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