Author Archives: Julie Mellby

Noa Noa

We pulled the collotype facsimile of Paul Gauguin’s Noa Noa yesterday for the students to study.

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) began writing his travel journal Noa Noa [Fragrance] after returning to Paris from Tahiti in 1893. The text manuscript was given to the poet Charles Morice (1860-1919) while Gauguin kept his original pages with prints, drawings, and other visual material pasted in.

In 1926, a facsimile of Gauguin’s manuscript, now in the Louvre, was created by the German art historian Julius Meier-Graefe and published in collaboration with R. Piper & Co in an edition of 400. It reproduces Gauguin’s handwritten text and all the pasted in prints and drawings in collotype.

Through his many German connections, former curator of Graphic Arts Elmer Adler was fortunate to acquired copy no. 34. Inside the front cover (now moved to Adler Papers CO262), he kept a letter from John Rewald with a brief explanation of the book’s publishing history. It reads in part:

“New York, April 7th ’43. Dear Mr. Adler, Many thanks for your letter. The story of Noa-Noa is at least as complicated as the one of Avant et après. It was written in France, the idea being conceived by Gauguin and his friend Charles Morice. The original edition contains poems by Morice succeeding each chapter by Gauguin, and no illustrations. It was published after the painter’s return to Tahiti and finally almost caused a complete break between Gauguin and Morice in connection with the royalties etc. The original manuscript with the drawings, watercolors, and photographs pasted in was given by Gauguin to [Georges-]Daniel de Monfreid. When Gauguin’s widow succeeded in extorting the Avant et après manuscript from [André] Fontainas, Monfried feared that he, too, would be unable to resist her tears; he hurried immediately to the Louvre and offered Noa-Noa as a gift.

Noa-Noa still belongs to the Louvre-Museum. The Avant et après manuscript was sold by the German publisher, Kurt Wolf (he is now in this country) who had it acquired legally from Gauguin’s widow and ignored that it actually belonged to Fontainas. I have just been informed by the last owners that it has been definitely lost in the way from England to America, thanks to Hitler’s submarines.”

Various facsimiles have been published over the years, several are digitized but not Gauguin’s original pages: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Gauguin%2C%20Paul%2C%201848%2D1903. Hopefully our friends at the Louvre will digitize it one day.

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), Noa Noa ([München: Marées Gesellschaft: R. Piper, 1926]). Copy 34 of 400, one of 320 copies bound in woven straw cloth. Letter from John Rewald to Elmer Adler, April 7, 1943, about Noa Noa and Avant et après, in Adler correspondence. Graphic Arts Collection Oversize 2007-0082Q


See also:
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), Noa Noa [Première éd. du texte authentique de Gauguin, établi sur le manuscrtit initial retrouvé. Préf., étude, vie de l’artiste, notes et bibliographie de Jean Loize ([Paris] A. Balland [1966]. ND553.G27 A3 1966

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), Noa Noa (Paris: Sagot-Le Garrec, 1954). Facsimiles of a manuscript in the possession of Berthe Le Garrec, and a letter from Charles Morice to Edmund Sagot (laid in). Marquand Library Oversize ND553.G2 A35 1954f

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), Avant et après, avec les vingt-sept dessins du manuscrit original (Paris, G. Crès et cie, 1923). Marquand Library ND553.G2 A33 1923

Porphyro in Akron


Many of you know Andrew Cahan as an expert in photographic literature but did you know he was also an artist? The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired Hart Crane”s Porphyro In Akron (1980) with three photogravures by Cahan. He was kind enough to tell the story behind this project:

“As a preamble to the genesis of the book, I was living in Brooklyn Heights, having moved there to work as Mary Ellen Mark’s darkroom printer. When my tenure there was over, I started taking some classes at the Center for Book Arts in lower Manhattan.

Around 1978-79, I decided it was time to go back to graduate school so I could have access to the equipment needed to teach myself the photogravure process. I made a few calls to faculty friends at OSU and scored an assistantship in the photo department (prior, I had my BA from there in photo and a year as a resident student with Minor White) so they knew me fairly well and said ‘come back.’

When I landed in Columbus, Bob Tauber had just been hired to start the Logan Elm Press. Somehow we met and I became the first student to work with him. It took me almost a year to make a viable photogravure plate. I had some books which I consulted and doggedly kept at it. The first project was [a] broadside, TO GOUDY w/ LUV. I think I printed 65 or so.

Once that was done and I proved to Bob that I could make a good plate and set the type, etc, he gave me the signal to start Porphryo In Akron. The connections to this poem are as follows…

Hart Crane lived here as a young man, for a short time. I grew up in Akron [and] moved to Brooklyn Heights, as did he in an apartment overlooking the bridge. Walker Evans used three images in The Bridge, so I would too.

The photos are from three locales. The opening image [right] is of the B.F. Goodrich plant in Akron from a nearby hill. The second image [below] was from my apartment window in Brooklyn Heights, looking towards Hart Crane’s apartment. And the final image [top] was made in a club in Columbus on the night of my 31st birthday. I used a 4×5 view camera and a Leica.”

Hart Crane (1899-1932), Porphyro In Akron (Columbus, Ohio: Logan Elm Press, 1980). Three photogravures by Andrew Cahan. One of 100 copies. Graphic Arts Collection Q-000233. Colophon: “Hart Crane wrote this poem in 1920 while he was working in Akron, Ohio. An early draft was included in a letter to his friend Gorham Munson and is now in the Special Collections of The Ohio State University Libraries. Its first appearance in print was in The Complete Poems & Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, Liveright Publishing Corporation, New York, 1966.”

I
Greeting the dawn,
A shift of rubber workers presses down
South Main.
With the stubbornness of muddy water
It dwindles at each cross-line
Until you feel the weight of many cars
North-bound, and East and West,
Absorbing and conveying weariness, —
Rumbling over the hills.
Akron, ” high place ” —
A bunch of smoke-ridden hills
Among rolling Ohio hills.
The dark-skinned Greeks grin at each other
in the streets and alleys.
The Greek grins and fights with the Swede, —
And the Fjords and the Aegean are remembered.
The plough, the sword,
The trowel, — and the monkey wrench!
O City, your axles need not the oil of song.
I will whisper words to myself
And put them in my pockets.
I will go and pitch quoits with old men
In the dust of a road.

Image Sequels


In 1857, Edward Moxon published a selection of poems by Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) with wood engravings cut after drawings by William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John Everett Millais. Although not chosen by Tennyson, these images became inseparably linked to his words.

Several drawings by Hunt and Rossetti were photographed by “a neighbor,” and while the drawings were destroying–presumably in the cutting of the woodblocks–these photographs survived. Photogravures were editioned from the photographs and published in 1901 side-by-side with the wood engravings, even though the publisher warned that the images were imperfect. It is one of the few times the photogravures look worse than other reproductions.

“The publishers wish to state that the only Photographs of the Original Drawings obtainable were those taken by an amateur—a neighbor of the Artist—and are presented with all their consequent defects. It is thought however, that, imperfect as they are, they will still have a value to the Artist and the Connoisseur, to whom principally the book is intended to appeal.”

Dissatisfied with previous attempts to re-present prints by Rossetti, Holbein, Beardsley, and others, Frederick Evans (1853-1943) made platinotype enlargements from the best prints available and privately published a series of facsimile volumes. Princeton University Library has a few:

Alfred Tennyson, Poems (London: E. Moxon, 1857). Illustrations: frontispiece (medallion portrait of Tennyson) stipple engraving by H. Robinson after T. Woolner, and 54 wood engravings in text after T. Creswick, J.C. Horsley, W.H. Hunt, D. Maclise, J.E. Millais, W. Mulready, D.G. Rossetti, and C. Stanfield, engraved by the brothers Dalziel, W.T. Green, W.J. Linton, C.T. Thompson, J. Thompson and T. Williams. Rare Books 3955.1857

Alfred Tennyson, Baron Tennyson (1809-1892), Some poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson; with illustrations by W. Holman Hunt, J.E. Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti printed from the original wood blocks cut for the 1866 ed. with photogravures from some of the original drawings now first reproduced; with a preface by Joseph Pennell … & an introduction by W. Holman Hunt (London: Freemantle, 1901). Rare Books 3955.383

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616), The History of Don Quixote of the Mancha (London, D. Nutt, 1896). Extra-illustrated with 99 platinotypes by Frederick Evans, after the 1866 Dalziel Brothers’ woodcuts from Arthur Boyd Houghton’s illustrations. Graphic Arts Collection 2011-0004N

The Dance of Death, by Hans Holbein; enlarged facsimiles in platinotype by Frederick H. Evans of fifty wood engravings from Douce (1833) Lippmann (1886) and a Basel edition (1796) ([London] Priv. Print., 1913). One of an ed. of 15 copies. Graphic Arts Collection Oversize 2006-0225Q

Grotesques, by Aubrey Beardsley: enlarged facsimiles in platinotype by Frederick H. Evans (from the original drawings in his collection) ([N.p.] Priv. print., 19130. J. Harlin O’Connell Collection Oversize NE642.B362 G91q

Woodcuts from drawings for Tennyson’s Poems by D.G. Rossetti: platinotype enlargements from the original edition of 1857 / by Frederick H. Evans ([London?]: Privately printed, 1919). Rare Books 2011-0183Q

 

 

Reminder: Friday 2:00: Tattoos in Japanese Prints

Please note the change in location from the one announced several month ago. The event will be held at 2:00 in East Pyne Hall 010 followed by the reception in the Frist Campus Center, East Asian Library. No reservations necessary.

 

Visiting Woodside Press


Davin Kuntze kindly offered our small group a tour of Woodside Press, where Steven Spielberg filmed several scenes for his movie The Post last year. Founded in Woodside, Queens, in 1993, the Press was relocated to the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1998 where it continues to operate today.

Not only do they offer letterpress printing and binding, the shop has two fully operational Linotype machines with over 200 magazines loaded with Linotype matrices including faces designed by Hermann Zapf, Frederick Goudy, and Rudolph Ruzicka, among others.

These are the machines featured at the end of movie, when Katharine Graham gives the order to print the Pentagon Papers in The Washington Post and the cameras follow the production of the newspaper from editing to distribution. They shot the composing rooms scenes at Woodside Press, just down the street from Steiner Studios.

The New York Tribune was the first newspaper to use the Linotype machine, introduced with the July 3, 1886, issue. The first book printed by Linotype, was also begun that year and finished early 1887.

Henry Hall, editor, The Tribune Book of Open-Air Sports. Prepared by the New York tribune with the aid of acknowledged experts (New York: The Tribune Association, 1887). Formerly owned by Elmer Adler. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2004-1385N

 

Verso t.p.: “This book is printed without type, being the first product in book form of the Mergenthaler Machine which wholly supersedes the use of movable type.”

One of the books with type set on the Linotype machine at Woodside Press was: Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends (New York; Evanston; San Francisco; London: Harper and Row, c1974). Cotsen Children’s Library Eng 20 16941. Above is a plate from an updated edition.

 

Shelves with dozens of EMs (empty spaces) housed by point size. Below cases of metal type.

Down By The Riverside

Richard Wright (1908-1960) and John Wilson (1922-2015), Down by the Riverside, with four etchings by John Wilson (New York: The Limited Editions Club, [2001]). “The etchings have been editioned at the Center Street Studio by James Stroud.”–Colophon. Copy 88 of 300. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2018- in process

[left] Richard Wright (1909-1960), Uncle Tom’s Children, Four Novellas (New York, London: Harper & Brothers, 1938). PS3545.R815 U535 1938

 

 

Roxbury-born artist John Wilson (1922-2015) first read Richard Wright in 1945, responding to his words with a lithograph entitled “Native Son.” When the Limited Editions Club commissioned a suite of prints inspired by Wright’s short story Down by the Riverside, Wilson not only produced the prints but wrote the afterword for the volume.

“Growing up in Boston during the late 1920’s and 30’s,” he notes, “I saw gruesome pictures of southern lynchings in the black press. I understood that simply being black was the most important reality affecting my entire life. In New England the attitude was that this was a southern thing because there was no legal discrimination ‘up north.’ Of course everyone in my community understood the difference between rhetoric and reality.”

“In the early forties, I read Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children. Those powerful, trenchant short stories put me in the middle of ‘that southern thing,’ I felt a strong sense of brotherhood, identifying with his characters struggling to survive with dignity. I understood more clearly the role of terror and uncompromising violence.”

“. . . I chose to illustrate this story because of Wright’s vivid dramatic setting. Etching techniques like aquatint and spit biting were ideal to interpret the dark brooding, murky atmosphere. Above all, the river with its powerful currents and its violent energy . . . seemed to symbolize basic forces of nature. I wanted the blue translucent shapes and flowing rhythms of the water to carry the figures from one episode to the next.”–John Wilson, 2001.

“Down by the Riverside” (previously unpublished), the second short story in the 1938 and 1940 editions of Uncle Tom’s Children, dramatizes the tragic death of a black man, Brother Mann, who uses a stolen boat during a Mississippi flood to take his pregnant wife to a hospital for the child’s delivery. On the way to the hospital, Mann is discovered by the owner of the boat, a white man, who tries to shoot him, but Mann, in self-defense, kills the owner. When Mann reaches the hospital, he finds his wife dead. Later he is drafted by the military men in charge of rescuing flood victims.

The first house to which he is sent, with a black companion, both of them on another boat, happens to be that of the owner of the stolen boat, whose family recognizes Mann. Although he considers killing them, their house suddenly tilts, the axe in his hand does not fall over their heads, and he ends up rescuing them. Once the boat safely reaches the hill, they tell the authorities that Mann is a murderer. As he flees down the riverside, he is shot to death.”–The Mississippi Quarterly, Spring 1993, by Yoshinobu Hakutani

 

Library Dreams (after Magritte’s Time Transfixed)

Lothar Osterburg, Library Dreams (after Magritte’s Time Transfixed), 2011. Photogravure with scraping and aquatint with Gampi chine colle on Somerset White. No. 6/8. Graphic Arts Collection GAX2018- in process

Lothar Osterburg’s “Library Dreams” series began during a residency at the Bogliasco Foundation in Liguria, Italy in 2011. While there, he collaborated with the composer/thereminist Elizabeth Brown on a video, entitled “A Bookmobile for Dreamers.” Ten years after launching his soap library series, Osterburg has come full circle. All his libraries are recreations of imagined places, and in this new series, the books themselves become building materials, while the books’ content spills out to inspire new worlds.

“Conjuring up monumental phenomena by minimal means,” writes Grace Glueck, “Lothar Osterburg presents picturesque events like a zeppelin over Timbuktu, a glider over the Gowanus Canal, a beached cargo ship at Montauk on Long Island, and an approach to a celestial body by a landing craft. But they are all contrived in his studio, using mundane materials like twigs, toothpicks, peanut butter and wee electrical parts, and photographed through a magnifying glass or a macro lens.”–New York Times, September 19, 2003.

The Graphic Arts Collection has acquired Osterburg’s beautiful photogravure “Library Dreams (after Magritte’s Tim Transfixed)”. This is one of several works recently acquired in anticipation of a 2019 exhibition to be entitled “Turning Light Into Darkness,” focusing on the history and development of copperplate photogravure from 1850 to the present.

A member of the faculty at Bard College, Osterburg is known as one of the foremost photogravure artists in the country. The recipient of an Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he has also been awarded two New York Foundation for the Arts grants for printmaking, a grant from the AEV Foundation, and residencies at MacDowell Colony and the Liguria Studies Center of the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy. An exhibition of his new work will be held next fall at the Lesley Heller Gallery in New York City.

René Magritte (1898–1967), Time Transfixed, 1938. Oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago. 1970.426

Gustave Doré’s Raven


Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), The Raven (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1884). Steel engraving after drawings by Gustave Doré (1832-1883). Graphic Arts Collection Oversize 2004-0014F and Oversize 2004-0015F

I was asked today what the original cost was for Gustave Doré’s The Raven, poem by Edgar Allen Poe. The volume is being studied by ART 564 “Seminar in 19th-Century Art–Word and Image.”

This was Doré’s last project, completed weeks before his death on January 23, 1883. His drawings were turned over to Harper & Brothers in New York City, where fourteen master engravers were hired to rush the volume to press. Few of the artists are known today except by last names: H. Claudius; R. A. Muller; W. Zimmerman; Frederick Juengling; G. F. Buechner; R. G. Tietze; F. S. King; T. Johnson; R. Standenbaur; Frank French; R. Schelling; George Kruell; Victor Bernstrom; and Robert Hoskin.

The plates had to be cut in steel rather than copper because of the size of the edition: 10,000 copies with 26 engravings each, requiring at least 260,000 full-page sheets to be printed, collated, and bound.

First mentions of a Doré Raven began appearing almost immediately, such as the “Literary Note” in the Detroit Free Press February 4, 1883, that read,

“A few months before his death, Gustave Dore completed a series of illustrations to Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven.’ The sketches–between twenty and thirty in number–are now the property of Messrs. Harper & Brothers. They will be engraved in this country and published with the text of ‘The Raven,’ as a companion volume to Messrs. Harper & Brothers’ sumptuous edition of ‘The Ancient Mariner,’ illustrated by Dore.”

By October, the title was advertised as one of Harper & Brothers Christmas gift books at a cost of $10 (equivalent to $244 today). Sales were heavy and Doré’s work received critical praise, unlike the poor reception Édouard Manet’s lithographs for The Raven (Le Corbeau) received in 1875.

The quality of the plates varies widely, according to the skill of the individual engraver. The steel plate added coldness and flatness of the images. However, when they succeed, the result is striking.

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Nameless here for evermore.


 


Robert Delaunay and Vicente Huidobro

Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948) and Robert Delaunay (1885-1941), Tour Eiffel. Poème par Vincente Huidobro; peintures par Robert Delaunay (Madrid: privately printed, 1918). Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2018- in process


In 1908, the painters Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) and Sonia Terk (1885-1979) met and fell in love but had to wait a year for her divorce to come through before they could marry. To celebrate their new life together Delaunay painted the Eiffel Tower, the first of thirty canvases depicting that  symbol of French modernity.

For the next few years the Eiffel Tower became he primary focus, just as Claude Monet painted dozens of haystacks a generation earlier. Through these paintings, he developed a personal style of Cubist fragmentation, interweaving various perspectives with the light and color from different times of the day.

When the series was finally exhibited in Paris, their friend Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) proclaimed Delaunay “an artist who has a monumental vision of the world.” Apollinaire wrote a visual poem or Calligram in honor of Delaunay’s towers and coined the term Orphism to describe the painter’s style.

In 1913, Sonia Delaunay-Terk collaborated with the Swiss-born poet Frédéric-Louis Sauser (1887-1961), better known as Blaise Cendrars, on an epic narrative, La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France, describing a Trans-Siberian railway journey concluding at the Eiffel Tower.

Deborah Wye wrote, “Comprised of brightly colored arabesques, concentric circles, triangles, and rectangles, Delaunay-Terk’s pochoir illustrations for Blaise Cendrars’s poem and its radical format have made this a landmark in the history of the modern book. . . . Calling their creation “the first simultaneous book,” Delaunay-Terk and Cendrars drew on the artistic theory of simultaneity, espoused by the artist’s husband, the painter Robert Delaunay, and modern poets.”–Artists and Prints: Masterworks from The Museum of Modern Art (2004).

 

When war was declared, the Delaunays left Paris and in 1918 moved to Madrid, where they opened Casa Sonia to sell Delaunay-Terk’s designs for interior decoration and fashion. That summer, Robert collaborated with the Chilean concrete poet Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948) on another simultaneous book, Tour Eiffel. Huidobro’s visual poem, dedicated to Delaunay, was letterpress printed on multi-colored papers bound with a silken cord.

They used one section of a poem published the year before in the journal Nord-Sud (named for the metro line that linked Montmartre to Montparnasse). As a nod this, Delaunay added these directional terms to his cover design: a brightly stenciled (pochoir) Eiffel Tower embedded in colorful rings, as if picking up where La prose du Transsibérien left off. 

The Graphic Arts Collection has finally acquired a copy of this important volume for Princeton.




 

 

After the war, they returned to Paris and Delaunay went back to the Eiffel Tower as subject matter, further exploring his colorful Orphism. Delaunay-Terk expanded her textile design business, creating fashions for individual clients and for theatrical performances.

 

Robert Delaunay, “Eiffel Tower,” 1924. Oil on Canvas, 161.6 cm x 96.8 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis.

The Army of Cloud Cuckoo Land


The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired a very rare set of twelve etchings and engravings with the manuscript title, Dienstversuche der Nationalgarde von Wolkenkukuksheim = Attempted Service by the National Guard of Cloud Cuckoo Land, printed by Johann Christian Benjamin Gottschick (1776-1844) after drawings by Christian Georg Andreas Oldendorp (1721-1787).

Each comic member of the guard is attempting to perform military drills. The soldier seen below carries a medicine cabinet with drawers marked with potions for battered nerves, bear fat, and a potion for pregnant women, among other medicines. His dog carries the enema syringe.

Both Gottschick and Oldendorp were based in Dresden and listed in this directory of Germany and Swiss artists, along with the set of etchings: Johann Georg Meusel, Teutsches Künstlerlexikon; oder, Verzeichniss der jetztlebenden Teutschen Künstler (Lemgo: Meyerschen Buchhandlung, 1808-1814). Marquand Rare Books N6887 .M57

Several individual sheets are held in European collections, including this hand colored etching [below] at the Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig.



Johann Christian Benjamin Gottschick (1776-1844) after drawings by Christian Georg Andreas Oldendorp (1721-1787), Dienstversuche der Nationalgarde von Wolkenkukuksheim [Attempted Service by the National Guard of Cloud Cuckoo Land] ([Dresden, for Rittnersche Kunsthandlung, 1806]). Set of 12 etchings and engravings. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2018- in process