Gene Kloss Etchings

Book excerpt: Today the name Gene Kloss, NA, is synonymous with copperplate etchings and when this book was first published by Sunstone Press in the early 1980s, it quickly became a collector's item. No wonder because her limited edition prints are now becoming priceless on the art market. This 20th anniversary edition, the sole complete source of information on this outstanding artist, contains 81 black and white reproductions on 192 pages and includes a text by noted author Phillips Kloss. When Gene and her poet-husband Phillips Kloss first arrived in Taos, New Mexico, her first etching press, a sixty-pound machine, was installed at their camp in Taos Canyon by cementing it to a large rock. That press was eventually replaced by a 1,084 pound Sturges etching press purchased from a defunct greeting card company. With the years and the continual dedication came honors, national and international. The Smithsonian, the National Gallery, The Corcoran Gallery of Fine Art, the Library of Congress, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as many others, house the work of Gene Kloss in their permanent collections. From her spare life on the eastern edge of Taos with neither water nor electricity, but plenty of firewood, kerosene and inspiration, Gene Kloss informed the art world of the special beauty inherent in southwestern US images: the churches, the Indian faces, the mountains and valleys, the dances and intricate rhythms of life in a part of the United States that remains essentially unchanged to this day. ART NEWS called Gene Kloss ..".one of our most sensitive and sympathetic interpreters of the Southwest."