The Prints of Sean Scully, on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is a thoughtful mini-retrospective chosen from a master set of prints that the artist gave to the permanent collection. Of the artist’s defiant set of prints, these are an answer to the ubiquitously decided notion that abstraction is super passé. His use of multiple printmaking methods on each print gives the works their tension. You name it, he’s done it: aquatint, monoprint, lithography, spitbite, sugarlift, etc. He departs from the typical refined surfaces produced by droves of other printmakers, and expands the complexity of his surfaces by mixing difficult printing techniques into strong technical cocktails.

Every piece of paper shares an unapologetic boldness that propagates his color blocks with unmistakable frenzy. Even when the plate has been left bare, the leftover, imprecise scratches become a forest of Scully’s signature crazed style. His prints are physical. So much that you imagine him relentlessly chiseling away at a woodcut, rhythmically inking up his plates, and stopping only to inspect that wobbly line that he teeters on somewhere between unrefined and delicate.

Walking through the exhibition, one might get exhausted by the outwardly repetitive forms – the horizontals and verticals, the kitchen-floor checkerboards, the inky black spots and smudges. The forms can actually become very boring to see over and over again. But the very act of making prints is repetitious – in fact, Scully got his first taste of printmaking in a commercial workshop pressing race ballots – and much like his abstract paintings, his prints chant the same intriguing lyrics.

This theme of lyricism is most apparent in the prints he pairs with his favorite poems. A fan of narrative literature and humanistic poetry, Scully finds inspiration in the writings of such wordsmiths as Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Federico García Lorca. These writings have led his hand to make analogous prints to accompany the words that proceeded him. Far from being illustrations, Scully describes these meditations on literature as artistic steam baths to draw motivation for his work. Colmena, from Etchings for Federico García Lorca, one of ten etchings paired with both Spanish and English translations of ten poems from "Songs" completed in 1976 by the Spanish poet and dramatist, demonstrates the same misty romance found in the stanzas. A mess of doddering edges, printed with a rough-and-tumble quality, degreased with nothing other than the artist’s saliva, Colmena perfectly expresses dual austerity and chaos. It’s no wonder Scully is fond of García Lorca’s words, which softly uphold the harmony of a more primitive life lived.