J. L. Steg

Jim Steg (1922–2001) was an artist, printmaker, and professor based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Considered the most influential printmaker to be based in New Orleans in the twentieth century, Steg made a substantial impact on printmaking in New Orleans through his own work and over his 43-year tenure as a professor of printmaking at Newcomb College. Over the course of a long artistic career that saw him engage with several 20th century art movements, Steg used nearly every known printmaking technique and invented some of his own. The Ghost Army was made up of 1000 soldiers with artistic backgrounds, including such future titans as Abstract Expressionist Ellsworth Kelly and fashion designer Bill Blass, who were tasked with using their skills to deceive the enemy. Steg and the other members of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops created and deployed fake inflatable tanks to fool the Germans into thinking Allied troops were nearby, impersonated radio operators to send false intel over the airwaves, and committed several other forms of creative espionage. Steg and a number of other artists in the unit showed their work at an attic gallery in their barracks in Briey, France, in the last months of the war (in between trips to the front). Jim appears to have been responsible for designing the notices for the exhibitions. Jim Steg's experience as a member of the Ghost Army would make an enormous impact on both his life and his art. During this time, Steg created his first mature body of work, a series of graphite and watercolor portraits of civilians, soldiers, and refugees that he called "spontaneous impressions." These works are given a haunting quality with context, as many of the Russian refugee subjects portrayed (who often signed their own names next to Steg's) would not survive their return to Russia. In a contemporary interview about the exhibition, Steg described his subjects as "the people of Europe ... The little men of the streets ... The people who suffered the most during the war." At Weyhe Gallery, which was and still is focused on American fine art prints, Steg's interest in printmaking was piqued. Soon after his exhibition, he enrolled in the University of Iowa's newly established MFA program in printmaking. There, under the tutelage of noted Argentine-American printmaker Mauricio Lasansky, Steg began to incorporate more abstract and cubist influences into his work, which had previously been exclusively figurative. He then began to experiment with woodblock printing and etching in the early 1950s. In 1951, Steg accepted a position as professor of printmaking at Newcomb College at Tulane University, a position he would hold until his retirement in 1992. He continued to push the boundaries of his art during his tenure at Newcomb College, experimenting with the serigraph process, collagraphy, lithography, and toner drawings, among others. Steg's printmaking reached its apex in the mid-1960s, "when he introduced photographic images into his intaglio plates."

In the early 1970s, Steg began to explore the human figure in a new way by "[using] his own body as an implement, often rolling his face across a prepared plate to create a flattened, stretched representation whose ultimate appearance was dictated somewhat by chance." Residing in New Orleans rather than New York City, the center of the contemporary art world, prevented Steg from doing the necessary self-promotion required to reach a large audience; Steg remarked cynically on this fact in a 1967 interview with the Tulane newspaper: "an artist can become rich through high pressure promotion. This doesn't make for good art, but for successful artists." In a 1974 interview, Steg decried both the conservative New Orleans art market and Newcomb College's long history of decorative art, rather than fine art, as reasons his national and international reputation flourished while his local renown lagged behind.

Death and posthumous exhibitions Jim Steg died in 2001 at the age of 79. His obituary was written by Daniel Piersol, then Curator of Prints and Drawings at the New Orleans Museum of Art, who remembered him as "one of America's most distinguished printmakers." In the years since his death, Steg's archive has been meticulously maintained by his widow, Frances Swigart Steg.

In 2017, the New Orleans Museum of Art debuted Jim Steg: New Work, the first solo museum retrospective of Steg's work since his previous NOMA show in 1978. Staged in the museum's Templeman Galleries and numbering over 40 works spanning the length of the artist's career, Jim Steg: New Work highlighted Steg's contribution to twentieth century printmaking both in New Orleans and beyond.