Images from a Locked Ward.

Boston: Impressions Graphic Workshop Inc., 1965. First edition. One of 75 copies (this being #54). Folio (20 1/4 x 26 1/4 inches). Title page and fourteen loose plates by Mazur, all pencil signed and numbered by him. Compete. In the publisher's clamshell case with gilt morocco lettering labels to spine and front. An excellent copy.Artist Michael Mazur first came to public notice in the early 1960s with his series of etchings and lithographs depicting inmates in a mental asylum in Howard, Rhode Island where Mazur volunteered as a hospital aide. “Images from a Locked Ward,” a portfolio of 14 lithographs created with master printer George Lockwood, has been called Mazur’s “first artistic descent into Hell.” This was a theme he later explored while illustrating poet Robert Pinsky’s translation of Dante’s Inferno. ”These lost souls,” John Canaday wrote in The New York Times, “have the terrible anonymity of individuals who cannot be reached, whose ugly physical presence is only the symptom of a tragic spiritual isolation.” Born in New York city in 1935, Michael Mazur was an inventive printmaker and painter whose work encompassed social documentation, narrative and landscape while moving back and forth between figuration and abstraction. Educated at Horace Mann, Mazur received his BA from Amherst College, where he arranged to study with Leonard Baskin who taught at Smith College. He later received both his BFA and MFA at Yale’s School of Art and Architecture, and was in residence at the American Academy in Rome. Internationally recognized, Mazur exhibited widely and his work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Metropolitan Museum, NYC; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Whitney Museum of Art, NYC. "Mazur remembers growing up as the only child in a well-to-do Jewish family in Manhattan; his demanding education at the Horace Mann School where he worked on a literary magazine with Edward Koren, the cartoonist; studying with an artist in Greenwich Village; and his early determination to be an artist. Academic challenges and social conservatism at Amherst College (B.A. 1958), where he studied printmaking and drawing with Leonard Baskin, an arrogant and limited artist, and working to his advantage with the gifted young printer, George Lockwood, in Baskin's studio. The year of self-directed study in Florence, Italy, and the lasting effect on him of the great European art tradition; his marriage to the poet, Gail Mazur; being a student at the Yale School of Art (BFA 1959, MFA 1961) and the contrast of the teaching methods of the autocratic Josef Albers and the congenial Gabor Peterdi; and his valuable experience as a volunteer assistant to Naum Gabo, who introduced him to monoprints. Teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design (1961-64) and the faculty there; and the development of his first well-known work, the "Locked Ward" series of prints, based on observation at mental hospitals" (Archives of American Art).In 2000, a large exhibition of the artist’s prints in different mediums (from etching and woodblock to lithography and monotype) toured the United States. The exhibition was accompanied by the catalogue, The Prints of Michael Mazur: with a Catalogue Raisonné 1956-1999 (New York: Hudson Hills, in Association with Jane Voorhees Zimmerlî Museum, 2000), with an introduction by the show’s organizer, Trudy V. Hansen, and essays by Ackley, Barry Walker and Lloyd Schwartz.