A mounted figure in the light shies from a wolfish beast snarling in the darkness. Disguised as a confrontation between day and night and transported into a fantastic, mythical world, Sol y Luna was Lasansky's anguished reaction to the all-too-real horrors of the Holocaust coming to light in the spring of 1945, the last days of World War II.

In 1945, the Argentine Lasansky was a Guggenheim Fellowship winner, working in New York with leading Surrealist painter-printmakers at Stanley William Hayter's Atelier 17. Like many of its artists, the Atelier was transplanted from German-occupied Paris. Hayter's concept of a place where established painters, invited younger artists, and enthusiastic printers would experiment collectively with modernism in printmaking, was as new to America as the adventurous images coming off its presses.

Sol y Luna exemplifies the visual and technical complexity of an Atelier 17 print. The artist did not regard the metal engraving plate as a passive surface, but as an actively resistant material to be incised, gouged, scraped, burnished, and otherwise manipulated with various tools and acids until the image was liberated. This passion for craft was irresistible to a sculptor-turned-printmaker like Lasansky. Instead of returning home to Argentina in 1945, he went to the University of Iowa, where he transformed a small graphic-arts department into a national center for intaglio printmaking, a legacy of Atelier 17.

The sensuous sculptural qualities of the [engraving] plate must excite the touch as well as the eye. But mere excitement is not enough; a complete union must take place between the artist and the plate.
-Mauricio Lasansky, 1949