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Color woodcut, 1934; pencil signed, lower right; editioned as I 42-125 (first campaign, 42/125); printed by the artist on cream Zanders laid with the Hand-In-Heart watermark. Chamberlain 145, Baumann 110.
Grand Cañon was Gustave Baumann’s final color woodcut of Arizona’s famous geological feature. Baumann wrote about the vastness of the Canyon: “When one’s working radius, which was four miles in my Nashville days, expands to twelve hundred it gives one a kind of all-over-the-lot feeling in the southwest where intimacy of landscape is hard to find if at all. The mountains are too high and the Grand Canyon too deep to behave properly within the limits of a frame, and yet as a discipline to put man in his place there is nothing like the Grand Canyon. You see it and then you don’t as clouds suddenly tear into it from nowhere. It is a bewildering place, distance means nothing. The nearest habitation on the North Rim is fourteen miles, but you travel two hundred to get there unless you are willing to take a chance on a shaky bridge that crosses the river. Some day ‘Old Cautious’—that’s me—is going to take the long way around. Probably what I’ll find is that I could have staid [sic] where I was just as well, sitting in my favorite hiding place just under the South Rim.” – p. 388, Chamberlain, Gala. In a Modern Rendering, the Color Woodcuts of Gustave Baumann – a Catalogue Raisonné. Rizzoli Electa, 2019.
