Linda Kramer contributed an introductory essay on Himmelfarb's life. A detail of a print entitled Tabula Tabula Picta 1992-1993 is reproduced opposite the title page; this print is held by the Sackner Archive. From Himmelfarb's WEB site: This new catalogue raisonne stunningly charts the course of his prolific print career over nearly forty years. Himmelfarb's print oeuvre can be roughly separated into a half-dozen bodies of work: Landscapes and Cityscapes, Individuals and Groups, Grid Works, Letterform Works, Maps and Bridges, and Narrative Puzzle Pieces. His loose improvisational style incorporates a range of source materials from Asian language forms to Dick Tracy, all while continuing to intrigue and invite careful viewing. John Himmelfarb is a Midwesterner, who comes from a family of artists. Born in Chicago, he was raised in the country near Winfield, Illinois. Both of his parents were painters, and his father also excelled in architectural design, supervising the construction of the family's remarkable modernist home and studio. Himmelfarb drew and painted as a child and persuaded his father to permit him to work quietly in the studio. During high school he got away from the visual arts. He confronted Latin and French and applied himself to music. He studied piano and violin, and participated in the youth symphony. Early in his Harvard years, he reconciled himself that he would not make a significant addition to music, and he began to look toward other fields. He wanted to make a social contribution, so he entered a pre-architecture program that led into urban planning. During the second half of his junior year, he enrolled in an independent study program in drawing and decided that becoming an artist was his destiny. He later earned an M.A. in Education Arts. With his decision to become an artist, he reconsidered the social utility of art and upgraded its capacity to make life more livable for others. Himmelfarb has been drawing, painting and making prints for 30 years. His works are included in many private collections and more than 20 museum collections in 13 states, the District of Columbia and four foreign nations. Most observers of the art scene are sensitive to the gradual changes that take place in an artist's work over time: phases evolve and proliferate; some ideas disappear, only to return later. Himmelfarb's phases of change can be as short as two or three years or as long as nine or ten, and they sometimes overlap briefly. His earliest personal work began with densely worked pen and ink drawings, patterned web like markings drawn from daily life, depicting neighborhoods, villages, or entire cities with roads and highways, bridges, houses; various new and outmoded structures, arches and ladders; and people and animals emulsified into an aerial overview. Closely worked sheets as large as 4 by 8 feet have been created- compulsive tapestries of fine-nibbed pen strokes, artfully dispersed patterns of black and white, near- abstractions of elemental drawing. Himmelfarb accepts the descriptive word automatism to characterize his drawings. In their making, the artist moves from intuition to realization through a chain of subjective reactions. On close study, specific images emerge to be recognized and then fall back into the web as other images take precedence. In successive phases, quasi-human-animal figures made their appearance; floral black on white calligraphic works on unsized canvas presented themselves; a black and white, overloaded boatman showed up and later found a second stage of life in robust color. Ever-larger human heads, pushed forward out of a patterned field shared with an animalian figure, obsessed the artist for nearly a decade. The Non-Objective group derived from the natural patterns and interactions of trees, shrubbery, earth and rock formations, forming an important phase. The most recent period, Inland Romance, involves the superimposition of multiple lattice-screens over an organic ground, establishing shallow but active space with progressively larger-scale colored lattices interacting forward and backward in the canvas space. Himmelfarb's work is rooted in drawing and mark making. He is skillful without the wish to make it appear so. He draws simply, selecting aspects of our known world. He draws fluently, outlining, hatching- with a steady flow of ideas and transitions, and an overall senses of balance and rhythmic distribution of darks and lights- permitting his forms to spill out into a maze of observation, incident and anecdote, edge-to-edge. With another pen nib, another tool or a Japanese brush, he would find a new gesture and a proper grammar for the marker to produce distinctive things, permitting the tool and the medium to decide the form of the mark and the style of the image. "I get a little nervous when the narrative element becomes too important and the investment in medium and process becomes less so," he says. "There is always a tug-of-war between content and abstraction, narrative and form." It has been 30 years since Himmelfarb established his separate studio, first sought gallery representation, began to have works purchased, found his work included in group shows, and received occasional awards and honors. The odyssey has not been an easy or uneventful one, nor has it developed without risk, chutzpah and enterprise outside the studio. In early years the painter held private showings in his studio for prospective collectors and drove to various cities to hold weekend showings at friends' homes for selected invitees. He would remove all art, replace it with his own and set out a rack portfolio. Income from these forays helped to maintain home, family and full-time studio practice until the galleries began to show interest. For a period, he made it a practice to write to curators and museum directors in neighboring states, introducing himself and his work. When invited by them to visit, he dropped by with a portfolio and a few paintings to provide a first-hand viewing of his new work, and to remind them of its variety and growth. These ventures have resulted in purchases of prints and drawings, and a few invitations to exhibit paintings within those same museums. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.