John McLaughlin: The Tamarind Prints

Palm Springs Art Museum

John McLaughlin (1898-1976) is acknowledged as one of the most important artists of the post-war period. Working in southern California, by 1948 he had pioneered a distinctive style of “geometric Western abstraction” which a decade later was identified as “minimal art” or Minimalism. Inspired by his lifelong study of Asian art, he instilled in his art a sense of stillness and the Japanese notion of the void.

Between 1962 and 1963, McLaughlin was invited to make prints at Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. He produced a series of seventeen separate edition prints comprised of flat adjacent and layered rectangular bars of muted color similar to his paintings. This installation includes the entire group of seventeen prints McLaughlin produced at Tamarind.

Recognizing a need for a master printmaking studio in the United States, Tamarind was founded in Los Angeles in1960 by artist June Wayne. In 1970 it moved to University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and became the Tamarind Institute and is still active today.

Organized from the Palm Springs Art Museum’s permanent collection, this series of McLaughlin lithographs are part of a generous gift from Dorothy J. and Benjamin B. Smith.