Category Archives: Acquisitions

new acquisitions

The Murder of Ted Smith in 1908

The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired a set of photographic postcards documenting the “Burning of the Negro Smith.” Two are captioned in white ink. None of them were ever addressed or mailed. The postcards came in a plain envelope marked with the caption in pencil: “Greenville, TX, 28 July 1908”.


The dealer’s note is quoted here in full:

“Ted Smith, aged 18 years old, was accused of raping a young white woman in Clinton, Texas. He was arrested and brought to jail in nearby Greenville. A mob took him from his cell at eight the next morning. Rather than the usual hanging, they covered him under a pile of wood, doused him with kerosene, and burned him alive in the center of town, in front of a large crowd. The postcards depict the horrible scene, with the crowd gathered around the fire. One shows the wood pile, apparently just before the fire started. The last two in the series show Smith’s charred remains after the wood had burned away.

Texas History site notes: From the early 1920s through the late 1960s, Greenville was known for displaying a large sign emblazoned ‘The Blackest Land, the Whitest People,’ across its main street, and the town has a history of racial tension and violence. One of the most notorious events in Greenville’s history occurred on July 28, 1908. Acting on allegations of rape from a white girl, a crowd of over 2,000 people seized a young African-American man named Ted Smith and burned him in the town square.

Despite national outrage, city and county officials refused to prosecute the case and even issued statements in support of the action. Although no issues of the Morning Herald pertaining to Smith’s lynching seem to have survived, the paper reveals a widespread acceptance of such violence in a 1908 article on another case. The article, which deals with the murder of a sheriff in a neighboring county, concludes with the suggestion, ‘The negro escaped but posses of citizens are searching for him. Feeling runs high and a lynching may follow the negro’s capture.’

The lynching of Ted Smith was covered extensively in the Greenville Messenger and the Herald’s rival, the Greenville Evening Banner. These papers provide important sources documenting the culture and history of Greenville and Hunt County. https://texashistory.unt.edu/explore/collections/GVMHD/ An extended account can be found in the Waxahachie Daily Light, Wednesday, July 29, 1908″

This portrait and short life-path of Wilhelm Weber


Dieses Bildniß, und kurtzen Lebens-Lauff, Wilhelm Webers. Dieses Bildniss und kurtzen Lebens Lauff, Wilhelm Webers, gewesenen gekrönten Poeten und Spruchspechers in Nürnberg, verehret die hinterlassende Witwe … Nuremberg, bey mir Anna Maria Weberin, hinterbliebenen Wittiwen, zu finden, bey St. Jacob, [1661]. Graphic Arts Collection 2018- in process

Although Dante never received a laurel wreath during his lifetime, Wilhelm Weber (1602-1661) was honored as Poet Laureate in 1647 at the age of forty-five. Thanks to a recent acquisition, the Graphic Arts Collection now holds two variant broadsides celebrating Weber, both published in 1661, the year of the poet’s death in Nuremberg. The central focus of both are similar engraved portraits of Weber wearing his twelve honorary medals.

Eigentliche Bildnuß, Deß Ersamen Wilhelm Webers... was published by Hans Weber, presumed to be the poet’s son, with a publication line: “Dieses Exemplar ist zufinden bey mir Hannß Weber, bey S. Jacob auffm Hohenpflaster.” The second: Dieses Bildniß, und kurtzen Lebens-Lauff, Wilhelm Webers... was published by his widow Anna Maria Weber, has the publication line: “Dieser Spruch, ist bey mir Anna Maria Weberin hinterbliebenen Wittiwen, zu finden, bey St. Jacob.”

According to Werner Wilhelm Schnabel, “A form of poetry situated outside the world of the cultural elite flourished in the 17th century. One of the best-documented representatives of this genre was the “Spruchsprecher” Wilhelm Weber . . . [who] worked as a journalist and publisher, and also as a contract poet and popular elocutionist.” A spruchsprecher was a spokesperson who recited rhymes, told stories, and spoke at public events, weddings, and New Year’s Day celebrations. More details on Weber and his broadsides can be found in Poets Laureate in the Holy Roman Empire by John Flood (2011).

One of Weber’s own New Year’s broadsides and other publications about the poet can be found in the digital collection of the State Library in Berlin. Too bad there is no broadside to celebrate the 22nd U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry of the United States, Tracy K. Smith, Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of the Humanities, Director and Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University.

 

Eigentliche Bildnuss : Dess Ersamen Wilhelm Webers, gekrönten Teutschen Poeten, und Spruchsprechers in Nürnberg, seines Alters 60. Jahr ([Nuremberg] : Dieses Exemplair ist zufinden bey mir Hannss Weber, bey S. Jacob auffm Hohenpflaster, [1661]). Text ends: So hat gesprochen/ Wilhelm Weber. Graphic Arts Collection Q-000551.

 

Comparing them in size below:

Japanese matchbook labels

The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired a collection of 425 or more matchbook labels, mainly Japanese although there are a handful of Scandinavian and German examples. The color is wonderfully bright and fresh. Here’s a small sample.

A great list of international links, if you want to see more: http://www.phillumeny.dk/, then click on links.

UJ3RK5 and other gifts


The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired several projects by the Vancouver artist Rodney Graham. The term ‘projects’ is chosen deliberately because Graham is a writer and a photographer, a musician and a filmmaker, a conceptual humorist who continues to experiment with the written, spoken, and sung word. Most of these projects are out-of-print and so, even nicer to receive as donations.

In the late 1970s, when many art school students were torn between punk rock and the visual arts, Graham formed a band with Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace called UJ3RK5 (pronounced “you jerk,” – the five is silent). They had one, surprising hit song, “Eisenhower and the Hippies,” before breaking up. Since then, Graham has continued to mix art on vinyl with art on paper, subverting distinctions of format and genre.

“Graham was captivated by the idea of this interpolation,” wrote Shepherd Steiner. “Stealthy and ingenious, Graham’s interventions into the art of the past revealed an almost cunning impulse to hack into the works of his forebears and wreak mischief therein.”

In The System of Landor’s Cottage, Graham created a fake addendum to a story by Edgar Allan Poe, so popular it has been reprinted several times. Freud Supplement (170 a-170 d) does much the same for Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams.

The artist spent 2000-2001 in a year-long residency at DAAD in Berlin. The year ended with a physical exhibition, accompanied by a conceptual artists’ book rather than traditional catalogue, called Some Works with Sound Waves, Some Works with Light Waves and Some Other Experimental Works. The book and vinyl disc contain lyrics, performance stills, and meditations on Kurt Cobain and Michelangelo Antonioni, along with essays by Martin Pesch, Susanne Gaensheimer and Dirk Snauwert. The cover is designed as a facsimile of the classical LP’s put out by the Deutsche Grammaphone label.

UJ3RK5 (Musical group), UJ3RK5 (Vancouver: Quintessence Records, 1980). Members: Rodney Graham; Jeff Wall; Ian Wallace; Colin Griffiths; Danice MacLeod; Frank Ramirez. Recorded at Little Mountain Sound, December 1979. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2018- in process

Rodney Graham, The System of Landor’s Cottage: a Pendant to Poe’s Last Story ([Toronto]: Y. Gevaert & the Art Gallery of Ontario, 1987). One of 250 numbered copies. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2018- in process

Rodney Graham, Freud Supplement (170 a-170 d) ([S.L.]: Rodney Graham, 1989). Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2018- in process

Rodney Graham, Getting It Together in the Country [Multimedia]: some works with sound waves, some works with light waves and some other experimental works (Köln, et al.: Oktagon, 2001). Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2018- in process

Grotesk Film

In 1910 publisher J. B. (Jsrael Ber) Neumann (1887-1961) opened the Graphisches Kabinett J.B. Neumann on the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, where he sold books, prints, and paintings. The shop expanded to Bremen, Düsseldorf and Münich, until Neumann finally emigrated to New York City in 1924. While still in Berlin, Neumann published one of the rarest of the graphic novels by Frans Masereel (1889-1972) entitled Grotesk Film (1921).

Masereel and Neumann would have both seen the popular 1920 black and white silent film, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) directed by Robert Wiene. The first of many German Expressionist films, it had an enormous influence on the arts of that time including Masereel’s silent novels, Grotesk Film in particular.


The small volume opens with a self-portrait of Masereel waving to an audience of expressionist faces, oblivious to a crocodile biting his foot. This might be a reference to Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, which opened in New York City a year earlier and was performed, in part, behind a cyclorama so the actors can only be seen in black and white silhouettes. The plot features a crocodile god who almost devours Jones.

By 1921, Masereel’s fame had spread to the United States where Frank Crowninshield published a full-page section of his 1920 book Idée (The Idea) in Vanity Fair. However, he was never able to obtain a passport to join his friends in New York and spent most of his adult life in Switzerland. Masereel’s final project was the organization of Xylon, the International Society of Wood Engravers. See: Xylon VI: Exposition internationale de gravure = Internationale Holzschnittausstellung Xylon (Zürich: Sektion Schweiz der Xylon, 1961- ). Graphic Arts Off-Site Storage Oversize NE1000 .xX8e

Frans Masereel (1889-1972), Groteskfilm (Berlin: J. B. Neumann, 1921). First and only edition. One of 200 copies on Verge paper. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2018- in process

Henrietta Maria Moriarty, artist and novelist

Henrietta Maria Moriarty (1781-1842), Viridarium: Coloured Plates of Greenhouse Plants, with Linnean Names, and with Concise Rules for Their Culture (London: Printed by Dewick & Clarke, Aldergate-Street, for the Author; and sold by William Earl, No. 47, Albemarle-Street, Piccadilly. 1806). First edition. 50 handcolored aquatint plates, each accompanied with a corresponding leaf of descriptive text. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2018- in process.

In his post Avoiding sex with Mrs Moriarty, garden historian Dr. David Marsh writes that facts concerning Moriarty’s life have been elusive. She traveled in high class circles: the book’s subscription list is headed by Prince Augustus, the Duke of Sussex and the younger brother of George IV and William IV.  The work is dedicated to Lady de Clifford, who also bought five copies.

The plates are mainly copied from Curtis’s Botanical Magazine so it leaves open the question of why this work came to press. Thanks to research by our friends at Marlborough Books, we now have answers about who Moriarty really was. They found a novel by Moriarty, published in 1811 under the title Brighton in an Uproar, and writes:

“This is very clearly an autobiographical work in which she uses the nom de plume of ‘Mrs Mortimer.’ Unfortunately this ‘novel’ also seems to have caused her downfall and imprisonment for slander. This connection has apparently eluded research so in case anyone wants to delve further into the mystery of Mrs Moriarty we thought to give at least an outline of her life.”

In Brighton in an Uproar, Moriarty relates why Viridarium came to be written.

Mrs. Mortimer advertised for two or three ladies to board with her: she succeeded in procuring one; and the aunt of one of the officers belonging to the corps in which her husband had served also came to reside with her. Mrs. Forth was a lady of great accomplishments, aid most pleasing manners: her behaviour to Hubertine and her children was such as rendered her an invaluable friend, and meeting with such an inmate was a great blessing to Mrs. Mortimer in her present distressed situation.

. . . Drawing had always been a favourite occupation with her; and she was advised to publish a botanical work by subscription. She was averse to this as she knew her abilities were not equal to such a task; but as it was expected of her, she immediately set about it . . . Another strong inducement to publish by subscription was the ardent desire which she had to liquidate her late husband’s debts; and in this she succeeded as from her exertion’s she paid them all within two year’s amounting to the sum of four hundred and eighty pounds.

Marlborough’s research continues,

“Henrietta Maria was christened on the 22 February 1781 at Romsey in Hampshire. She was the daughter of Major Benjamin Godfrey of the Inniskilling Dragoons and his wife Henrietta. On the 9th July 1796 she married Matthew Moriarty, Esq., of Chatham in Kent and then a Major in the Marines, she would have been barely 15 at the time of her marriage and presumably this was through the consent of her now widowed mother. Unfortunately he was not a good husband, he left a trail of debt and died somewhat dissolute, and worse leaving his widow and children unprovided for.

In order to clear the debts she wrote Viridarium and later also two novels. . . As a widow Henrietta was not reconciled to her Irish relatives and despite trying to make ends meet by writing she was clearly in financial trouble, worse she seems to have slandered someone and was committed to the King’s Bench prison in December 1813. Her occupation as a boarding house keeper, seems slightly desperate and maybe it is not surprising that she is not acknowledged in print from this time forth except the sad record contained in the 1841 census that she was a ward of the Kensington Union Workhouse followed by her death a year later.”

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.

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

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.