Snapshot In Time: This is such a peaceful and quiet scene compared to very noisy world events going on in 1949 when it was created. Chairman Mao came to power that year and several hundred million people celebrated the new People's Republic of China; big American planes were landing one a minute as the Berlin Airlift fed 2.5 million people in the face of a Soviet Russia blockade; and noisiest of all, RCA sells the first of millions of 45 rpm records and players.

Art Smart Fact: Baumann preferred to work with basswood, which is soft and relatively easy to carve. All of the blocks in a set, usually numbering six, were made with precisely the same dimensions to achieve correct registration when printed on the artist's Reliance Midget letter press. Unlike most other printmakers, Baumann laboriously made his own inks, mixing ground pigments with a varnish base according to his own private formula. This viscous ink remained on the surface of the sized, flaxed paper he had made to his own specifications. Inks were carefully mixed to match the hues of a gouache model and were applied to the blocks with rollers.

About The Art: Independent and influential, Gustave Baumann stands at the center of American color relief printmaking in the 20th century. He is considered by many to be the "best of the best" of any color woodcut artist who has ever worked in this difficult medium. Today, original woodcuts by Gustave Baumann cost thousands of dollars if and when you can find them.

But you don't have to win the lottery to own his work. This is a fine reproduction of LILAC YEAR. Indeed, it is one of the best reproductions I have seen in over a decade of selling both original and replicated Baumann woodcuts. You will be very surprised how authentic the signature and hand-in-the-heart chop mark look and how good the colors are.....even the paper has texture. Several of the out-of-print reproductions have gone on to become valuable themselves.