Wizard of the Woodcut

The hands that grip the gouges are as calloused as a carpenter's; the eyes that guide them brood with the sad sensitivity of a romantic poet. A chipper, Groucho Marxist mustache contradicts both hands and eyes. They all belong to Printmaker Antonio Frasconi, 44, one of the U.S.'s foremost woodcut artists. In February, more than 80 of his whorled and scratch-lined works (see opposite page) will begin a two-year long tour of U.S. museums. Sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution, the show demonstrates Frasconi at his versatile best, running from bright, bird-wreathed seascapes to dark commentary on Franco's Spain.

Tin-Horn Bull. A Uruguayan by birth, Frasconi worked as an illustrator and political cartoonist until he could get his "magic paper"--a scholarship to the Art Students League that brought him to the U.S. in 1945. Over the years after that, his clean-lined, brightly colored prints of California lettuce pickers and Fulton Market fish packers, plus his portraits of such literary figures as Bertolt Brecht and Sean O'Casey, won him a reputation as a wizard of the woodcut.

The Spanish sequence is an ode to the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, whom Frasconi met in Montevideo in 1933, three years before Lorca was gunned down in the Spanish Civil War. In 1962, after a month in Spain, Frasconi made 16 Picasso-like lithographs titled Oda a Lorca, in which the poet is depicted as a matador, Franco as a hairy-legged bull with tin horns, and Spain as a land of graves over which praying figures whirl by on the backs of monsters, symbolizing "mysticism and dogma in a wild, hysterical sky."

What Wood Can Say. But Frasconi can be lyrical as well as grim. His studio in Norwalk, Conn., looks out on Long Island Sound and a chain of tidal flats that swarm with migratory birds in spring and fall. In a colorful 1959 se quence, Frasconi shows the crisp, yel low marshland laced with long black lines of birds that seem to pulsate on the paper. Denuded trees float above the steel-blue water, which itself ripples with the grain of the wood. His Homage to Francisco Sabater, honoring the anti-Franco bandit slain in 1960, shows the same respect for what wood can say.

"No two pieces of wood are alike," says Frasconi, who uses a dozen varie ties of pine, some of them knotty, in his work. "Sometimes the wood gives you a break and matches your conception in the way it is grained. But often you must surrender to the grain, find the movement of the scene, the mood of the work, in the way the grain runs."

As a result, Frasconi always keeps an eye peeled for unusual wood. He needs a lot of it, since his U.S. -born wife and sons, Pablo, 11, and Miguel, 7, also do woodcuts. The boys often bring home odd pieces of driftwood from their play, and such scavenging sometimes pays off in inscrutable ironies. A battered board that floated in from the Sound ended up in the Lorca series, conveying by its grain the harsh grandeur of the Spanish earth.

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