Mistra is a woodcut from 1960 by American artist Edmond Casarella (1920-1996). It is pencil signed, dated, and titled and is a proof from an edition of about twenty impressions. Mistra was printed by the artist on a thin, ivory laid paper. The image measures 19-7/8 x 19-1/2 inches.
Edmond Casarella was of Italian heritage and his wife, Nikki, was of Greek heritage. They visited Greece many times as Nikki had family there. According to UNESCO, Mystras is an exceptional example of a well-preserved fortified late-Byzantine city with elaborate spatial planning organization, and fortifications with the citadel on top of the hill and two fortified precincts at the lower level. The urban fabric of the city includes palaces, residences and mansions, churches and monasteries, as well as constructions related to the city’s water supply and drainage and to commercial and craft-based activities. Mystras constitutes a unique example of a Byzantine city, an expression of flourishing urban society within the late Byzantine Empire. As a political and administrative provincial centre of the Byzantine state, Mystras became a unique intellectual, cultural and artistic centre.
Edmond Casarella, printmaker, painter, sculptor, and teacher, was born in Newark, New Jersey on September 3, 1920. Upon his graduation from Cooper Union in 1942, he was hired by Anthony Velonis to print serigraphs at Creative Printmakers under the National Youth Administration which was part of the New Deal. The following year he created the poster for the 1943 exhibition, Artists for Victory. Casarella joined the U.S. Army in 1944 and, after his discharge, he enrolled at the Brooklyn Museum School where he studied printmaking with Gabor Peterdi.
Casarella made his first paper relief print about 1948 and continued to experiment with the medium throughout his career. His work was shown in 1949 at the Laurel Gallery in New York and, in 1952, he was being represented by Margaret Lowengrund's Contemporaries Gallery. In 1953, Casarella's work was included in the Young American Printmakers exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and, in 1962, he was included in the widely traveled exhibition, American Prints Today. He received a Fulbright Fellowship in 1951, a Tiffany Award in 1955, and a Guggenheim Grant in 1960. These allowed him to travel throughout Italy and Greece.
Casarella taught at the Brooklyn Museum from 1955 to 1960 and at Cooper Union and Finch College from 1969 to 1975. During the 1960s he taught courses at the Arts Students' League and Hunter College in Manhattan and had temporary teaching positions at the Pratt Institute, Yale University, Rutgers University, and Columbia University.
Edmond Casarella was elected a National Academician of the National Academy of Design and his prints, paintings and sculpture have been included in a score of exhibitions in the United States and Eastern Europe. Casarella’s work is represented in the collections of the Greek National Museum in Athens; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Australian National Museum, Canberra; the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; the Speed Art Museum, University of Louisville; the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; and the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts.
Edmond Casarella died in Englewood, New Jersey on 13 February 1996.
