Two Poems with Birds

This print was published late in the artist's life, but the dealer from whom it was purchased says that this is an earlier proof impression. While described by the dealer as a woodcut, it is almost certainly a relief cut in a homogeneous (rather than grained) substance, and even with this more precise identification, it presents certain mysteries. How did the artist impose the texture on the block that results in the gray background tone? Why do the cuts that form the black-printing "plateaus" not inflect the grain in the same way that the pressure along the tool stroke that formed the white strokes did? Etc. The technique is mysterious but the composition delightful, and an excellent representative of the developing mode of abstraction in American art in the 1950s.