"Apparition of the other brother": 1963, intaglio print, 28-by-19 inches.

H. C. (Carroll) Cassill once told me that in his 1948 intaglio print "The Sophisticate," he intended to poke fun at a certain post-war intellectual type - the jazz-club existentialist. It's true that his image works as a caricature, but as with any of this artist's subtle, almost hallucinatory evocations, there's more to it than that. The figure is a musician, playing a clarinet-like instrument that drops down from his mouth, dividing the space almost in half. Printed in a warm, burnt-looking black ink on creamy etching paper, he seems to disappear in and out of shadow. Transferred from the etched linear incisions on the plate, the pigment rises in low relief, up from the paper skin like scarification. You can feel the micro-terrain of welts with your eye.

In "The Sophisticate," these run in long lines laterally across the surface of the print, like wood grain or scratched grooves in an old vinyl LP. In places they seem to puddle or coagulate, like layers of cigarette smoke, clogging the air even as they form the representative components of the image: dark glasses, a half moon-shaped bald head (or could it be a beret?), and the long shaft of the clarinet. In the center a small white hand almost clear of ink, like a child's hand, spreads four fingers across the front of the instrument. The overall impression is very old and also quite new. One of Picasso's "Three Musicians" (1921) comes to mind, but also the imagery of world mythology that so deeply influenced the psychological tone of modernism: Cassill depicts a pipe-playing deity, whether Arcadian or Mayan, remembering incantatory songs from the smoke-filled shrines of prehistory.

The 43 works in the memorial exhibition H. Carroll Cassill 1928-2008, currently on view through June 14 at William Busta Gallery, represent much of the range of Cassill's artistic output, covering a period of about 60 years. Several intaglio etchings from the 1950s reflect the concerns of that period, combining a symbolic type of iconic narrative with looming, sculptural abstract shapes. There are touches of Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman in the heroic posture, if not so much in the nervous, active lines, of "Icarus and Nike" (1956) and "Icarus" (1958), while the bull in the marvelously realized smaller image "Toro" (1951) is clearly a reaction to one of Pablo Picasso's major themes. For many artists who came of age in the 1940s (Cassill received his MFA in 1950 from Iowa State University, where he worked with the influential printmaker Mauricio Lasansky), the figurative vocabulary of Picasso was persuasive to an extent that's hard to appreciate now. Our era knows no comparably dominant figure, but much of the energy of Abstract Expressionism derived from a need to break out of Picasso's mold. Seminal works from the period like Willem DeKooning's "Excavation" (1950) are littered with Picasso-ish fragments and references, as if someone had dynamited "Guernica." Cassill's "Toro," on the other hand, is more an homage than a challenge; his was a very different battleground.

Neither depictions of the figure nor the conceptual concerns that minimalism and its heirs would bring to the history of painting during the following decades remained long among Cassill's preoccupations. A printmaker's printmaker from the beginning, he was first of all an artist steeped in the elementary drama of chiaroscuro. As he moved into the 1960s, light and dark, being and nothingness, flicker as incessant variants of primal energy across Cassill's surfaces. One of the most intriguing works of this period is the 1963 intaglio "Apparition of the Other Brother." The outline of a young child is seen standing in profile toward the lower left side of the 28-by-19-inch surface. His twin or "other" faces him, surrounded by a slant-ing, box-like enclosure; at the bottom of the image, several clock faces comment mysteriously on the passage of time. On the extreme right a more lively boy's face peeks into the frame, and above, as if on a tower, a third version of the child in profile intersects the body of a large, Marc Chagall-like bird, as if he were a soul being carried aloft. The uncanny, dream-like, unsolved quality of this work is very typical, though as he continued into his later maturity, Cassill tended to leave overt symbols and imagery behind, delving ever deeper into the specific character of the marks that ebbed and flowed from the artist's hand.

In the late 1960s and through much of the '70s, woodcuts and linoleum-cut prints like "Father and Son" (1967), with its strong, frontal presentation of two stacked, circular faces, or "Evan's Boat" (1977) explore a different, somewhat less nuanced kind of tactile terrain, but with Cassill's recurring theme of doubleness still in evidence. Beginning in the 1980s, the electric quality of his mark-making became even more pronounced as he gradually moved away from formal edition-oriented printmaking, back toward the spontaneity and uniqueness of drawing. This was not so much a new development for him as a return to the break with European tradition that his teacher Lasansky had advocated at Iowa State. And for that matter, in the intervening years Cassill had rarely made two prints exactly alike.

The jumpy, restless excitement of his later works, through to the extraordinary profile study "Sketch for a Self-Portrait" of 2005, is a function of their unapologetic tenuousness. Like John Marin's masterful sea and landscape watercolor studies, Cassill's part print, part drawing hybrids follow their own drummer with rare fidelity, yet they insist on imprecision - these are not canons so much as phrases caught from the wind. Response rather than definition is the point in a work like "North light - in the woods" (1991). On one level the scanty, trembling marks add up to a few trees and an arc of rainbow-like light. But really the image is secondary, its importance far superseded by the character of the work as an imprint of human presence in relation to a specific time and place. Often in these later works Cassill uses almost invisible blue and red and yellow pencil lines, running like veins up to the outer layer of the work, then petering out or diving back below the smudged whiteness. The body of the artist cannot be distinguished from the subject or the work. This after all is what it means to be an artist - that there was here, on this surface, wielding the tools and substances that we still sense and see - an eye and a hand that attended faithfully, lovingly to the world.

H. Carroll Cassill 1928-2008: William Busta Gallery, 2731 Prospect Ave., 216.298.9071.