William Weege Signed & Numbered Art Print Titled "Jeanie" From Birmingham Gallery Dated 1971

Frame measures 25" x 31"
About the artist from the Wisconsin Academy Website: "Stacks of artwork, both finished and unfinished, overflow William Weege’s printmaking studio in rural Arena. Piles of coarse paper clutter the tables on either side of an imposing printing press, while prints from the many decades of Weege’s career rest in drawers or hang on racks. Some are framed and hung, others lean against the walls. The artist worked in an accretive process, and many pieces have been printed, painted on, and further built up with wooden or cardboard shapes attached to their surfaces. The prints seem to wait for more to be done to them, or maybe for something to be taken away. Perhaps even if the artist were still here to finish them, these prints wouldn’t be perfected but simply halted at a stage where the eye hangs on them best. There’s a sense of mutability about Weege’s art, as if the form we see might still be on its way to something else.

Weege, who died in 2020, was a groundbreaking printmaker. His early work, made during the tumult of the Vietnam War, expressed overt political themes through strong layers of graphic imagery. Weege’s work after the 1970s, however, moved through several phases of abstraction. Created with bold exuberance, this later work is so far from what you might think of as traditional printmaking that it’s hard to know what it is or how to take it in.

At Weege’s studio I’m drawn to a white shadow box leaning against the wall, where silver thumbtacks lightly hold together an assemblage of small paper constructions. The collage/sculpture looks casually made, as if it’s ready to be rearranged or even torn apart. “That’s one of Sam’s,” Weege’s widow, Sue Steinmann, tells me, referring to the artist’s longtime collaborator, the painter Sam Gilliam. But when we look closer, we see that in fact both artists have signed the piece.

It seems unusual to see two names on a work of art, but it’s a marker of how deeply entwined Weege was with the artists he worked with. He collaborated with Gilliam, one of America’s premiere living abstract painters, for over fifty years. Weege had a similarly close working relationship with abstract painter Alan Shields. Gilliam, Shields, and many other artists flocked to Weege’s Jones Road Print Shop and Stable in rural Barneveld during the 1970s. In the mid-1980s, Weege moved to a hilly, secluded property in Arena, another small town outside of Madison, and a few years later he founded Tandem Press at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Tandem took up Weege’s vision of printmaking as a closely collaborative art form, and today the press brings artists from all over the world to Wisconsin to explore and expand the art of printmaking.

Weege was a world-class artist, but he didn’t feel the need to live in New York or Los Angeles. The art world happily came to him. Weege’s deep, lifelong engagement with the Wisconsin landscape also kept him here. He not only worked outdoors, inviting the elements to transform his art, but he spent over thirty years restoring the native prairie and oak barrens at his and Steinmann’s Arena property, Rattlesnake Ridge. This is no coincidental setting, but a particular landscape that infused his abstractions and, in turn, benefited from the same vision and technique Weege brought to his art.

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William Frederick Weege was born in Milwaukee in 1935 and grew up in Port Washington, where his father was a mechanical engineer. Weege, too, studied engineering, first at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and then at UW–Madison, where he later switched to city planning. While he mastered advanced photo printing through a job at a commercial printing firm, Weege became increasingly drawn towards drawing and painting. When he returned to UW–Madison to study printmaking and joined the MFA program, Weege was already in some ways more capable than those who would teach him.

In the complex mechanics of printmaking, images on the plates are reversed and each color application requires a different plate. Printmakers consider how each layer affects the others, and the combination of pressure, ink, and plate creates many variables to be mastered or exploited. During his MFA studies at UW–Madison, Weege continually pushed at the technical limits of printmaking, striving to create something completely new out of the notion of layer.

During the late 1960s, massive demonstrations against the Vietnam War shook the UW–Madison campus. Weege drew on his political passion and artistic skill to create posters for these protests. His posters became so popular that people often stole them as soon as he put them up."

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Jorge Lugo | (970) 821-5035 | Jorge@fairlightestatesales.com

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