Constance Forsyth: UT’s First Printmaking Professor

Written by Anna Smith, 2024-2026 Mellon Fellow, Prints & Drawings, Blanton Museum of Art

A pioneering educator, Constance Forsyth (1903-1987) founded The University of Texas at Austin’s printmaking program — a studio art program that continues to thrive today. In her own printmaking practice, Forsyth combined multiple processes and unconventional materials to trap gauze-like fields of clouds, mist, and wind on paper.

During my first semester as a PhD student in art history at The University of Texas at Austin, I visited the H-E-B Study Room at the Blanton Museum of Art to view works from the collection, including the print Spirit Cloud by Constance Forsyth. In person it was captivating. The longer I looked, the more intrigued I became by the interplay of paper and ink that created an otherworldly form of flowing black dots that seemed to hover over the page.

The following year, I was lucky to become the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Blanton’s prints and drawings department where I was tasked with conducting research in the collection. Remembering my encounter with Spirit Cloud, I embarked on a project to learn more about the highly experimental printmaker who had created this mysterious work of art.

This research took me from the Blanton’s collection of 125 works of art by Forsyth spanning her fifty-year career to her archives at the Indiana Historical Society, which includes her sketchbooks, printmaking recipes, and writings on printmaking practice.

Early life

Forsyth was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1903 to two artists, Alice Atkinson, a landscape painter, and William Forsyth, a member of the Hoosier Group of midwestern artists and instructor at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis. Forsyth and her two sisters were students of their father, who taught life drawing, pictorial composition, portraiture, and en plein air sketching.

Early mentorship from her father shaped her career, especially her eventual focus in printmaking. Although primarily a painter, William was fascinated by etching and kept a small press in the family home. His granddaughter recalls finding postcards from William to Constance with his etchings on one side, and detailed instructions about the process on the other.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Butler University in 1925, Forsyth attended the Broadmoor Art Academy in Colorado Springs in the summers of 1932 and 1934. There, she was one of the first students in the region to receive formal instruction in fine art lithography. Ward Lockwood, who would become the first chair of UT Austin’s Art Department, taught the course. Forsyth recalled the eagerness and persistence of the cohort: “The class was supposed to meet two afternoons a week, but the interest and enthusiasm of the instructor and a few students kept the garage well populated most afternoons and many mornings. Problems were many, but with persistence and ‘elbow grease’ we finally achieved some success.” Forsyth’s earliest works in the Blanton’s collection, such as Mountain Mist, most likely come from her student work in the program.

At The University of Texas at Austin

A few years after summer school at Broadmoor, Lockwood approached Forsyth about establishing a printmaking program at UT. In a letter from 1939, Lockwood writes of the burgeoning program — a class of just 109 students that he hoped would grow to over 350 by graduation. Forsyth agreed and was appointed to the UT art department in the summer of 1940. Correspondence in her archive indicates that she got to work immediately. Less than two weeks after being hired, Forsyth received a letter from artist and printmaker Charles Surendorf answering her questions about materials to source for the printmaking classes.

When Forsyth began teaching a few months later in 1940, there were shortages of paper, lithograph stones, and other essential printmaking tools due to wartime rationing. In the absence of materials, she came up with creative solutions. When she could no longer source silver and gold leaf for gilding, she recycled the aluminum foil lining of her own cigarette packs.

Forsyth also used this resourcefulness and persistence to sharpen her teaching skills. In 1945, she spent one week working in the studio of the renowned American lithographer George Miller, observing his practice and learning the use of alternative materials, possibly in response to continued shortages. In recounting the experience to historian Clinton Adams, Forsyth noted that she was not looking for tricks of the trade: “I already had too many.” Understanding the limitations of written description to relay technical knowledge, she reflected on simply watching Miller work: “[In lithography it is] not what you do but how you do it. How ‘hard’ is hard? How ‘fast’ is fast? Words mean little, one has to see the real expert in action.”

In a contribution on printmaking for the The Texas Art Teacher, Forsyth wrote of the relative inaccessibility of lithography: “It is frequently said that the process of lithography was guarded and kept secret by its commercial printers. This may or may not be true, but this belief may have been founded on the fact that the method is difficult to explain and even appears rather mysterious when demonstrated.” Seeking to demystify Miller’s process, Forsyth took copious notes during her time in his studio, which became an important teaching aid back in Austin.

Forsyth’s lithography courses at UT were an early and significant expansion of the technique’s instruction onto a university campus. The 1940s were a transition period in the instruction of stone lithography. All government-supported workshops funded by the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project had closed by 1943, and WPA-trained printmakers were in the early phases of establishing workshops and university programs that would lead to the American “print renaissance” of the 1960s. Many printmakers from Forsyth’s generation who taught or trained in WPA programs, including Bernarda Bryson Shahn, Ida Ableman, Riva Helfond, Juliette Steele, and Vera Berdich, eventually transitioned to teaching etching and lithography at community centers and art schools throughout the United States. (To learn more about WPA artists visit the exhibition Art in Every Corner: The Works Progress Administration (1935-1943) on view through September 27, 2026.)

In the studio

While Forsyth’s own history is tied to the expansion of instruction in lithography in the midcentury, some of her most experimental work occurs in her manipulation of media in intaglio printmaking. In this technique, marks are incised into polished copper plates, either by hand with a sharp tool or chemically eroded in a process called etching, which Forsyth most often used.

In a typical etching process, a printer will cover the metal plate with a prepared powder (containing mostly wax) called a ground. The ground is then melted, creating a surface that the artist incises with a sharp tool to reveal the copper below. Once the design is complete, the plate is treated with acid that eats away at the exposed metal, making reservoirs that will hold ink for printing. Variations in tone can be achieved by a method called stopping out in which portions of the design are covered with more waxy ground before once again treating the plate with acid. The sections still exposed will be further eroded, creating deeper reservoirs for ink.

In many prints, Forsyth used the greasy lithograph crayon to block areas of the printing plate from receiving ink, resulting in exposed paper that represents the white of clouds or the effect of sunlight. Typically used to work up a design on a lithography stone or plate, Forsyth used the drawing material to the exact opposite effect in prints like in A Cloud/The Cloud. The crayon is acid resistant, which when applied to the plate, protects covered portions from acid treatment. As a result, Forsyth was able to draw the whites of clouds with the negative space of exposed paper untouched by etching. 

Forsyth’s experimental combination of materials and techniques developed through decades of education, work, and instruction. The lithograph crayon had been one of Forsyth’s favorite materials since the 1920s, later becoming an essential tool used for drawing in the intaglio technique beginning in the late 1940s.

These increasingly abstract representations of the natural world inspired Forsyth’s students, who were able to witness her working process. She printed on university presses, many of which she purchased with her own money from the estate of Texas artist Mary Bonner. Students recall Forsyth staying past midnight after a full day of teaching to finish her work, often needing to call a cab or hail a ride from a student who was staying late to finish a project. While researching Forsyth’s life and work, I discovered that I could not separate her printmaking process and teaching practice. To me, both parts are necessary to help understand the spontaneity, inventiveness, and technical skill that define her fifty-year career.

To see more of Forsyth’s prints, visit the Blanton’s collection online.