The Last Trumpet

In Boris Artzybasheff's dramatic wood engraving The Last Trumpet, a black-winged angel, standing on broken architectural fragments and holding a long trumpet, presides triumphantly over a doomed modern metropolis. In the background, fiery meteors fuel the colossal inferno destroying the city's towers, modern skyscrapers that symbolize human vanity and worldly ambition. By choosing this terrifying subject from the New Testament Book of Revelation, Artzybasheff alludes to the Apocalypse series of German artist Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), a masterwork of Renaissance printmaking that powerfully envisions the end of the world. As an interpretation of Dürer's extraordinary woodcut series, Artzybasheff's print reflects the pervasive pessimism caused by America's collapsing economy during the Great Depression. Yet other Americans believed in a future progress and prosperity promised by modern technology, new skyscrapers, and urban growth.

Artzybasheff's singular angel is depicted in a sleek, muscular, and elongated manner typical of the so-called Art Deco style of the late 1920s and early 1930s, characterized by streamlined forms and clear lines. His dramatic graphic style in wood engraving also resembles that of his contemporaries Fritz Eichenberg, as demonstrated in his Heathcliff Under a Tree (TF 1996.60), and Rockwell Kent, as for example in Flame (TF1996.28). A prolific book and magazine illustrator, notably as the artist of over 200 Time magazine covers done between 1941 and 1965, Artzybasheff created only a few fine art prints. The Last Trumpet, which was published by the Woodcut Society of Kansas City in an edition of two hundred, is his best known wood engraving.

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