Category Archives: Medium

mediums

Monument to German Poetry

Daily Princetonian advertisement
Thomas Nast (1840-1902), Apollo Amusing the Gods [on the far right-center, Senator Carl Schurz as Mars, god of war] published in Harper’s Weekly November 16, 1872. Wood engraving. Graphic Arts Collection.

This weekend, I was asked “what did the German American politician Carl Schurz (seen here caricatured by Thomas Nast) and George Ehret, the owner of Hell-Gate Brewery, have in common?” The answer is love of the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), author of Die Lore-Ley.

These two men joined forces in the 1890s to form the Heine Monument Association to bring the Lorelei Fountain, designed by Ernst Herter (1846-1917) in honor of Heinrich Heine, to New York City. Commissioned for but rejected by the city of Dusseldorf, Heine’s birthplace, Schurz and Ehret were confident they could raise the funds to move the 19-foot monument, sculpted in Tyrolean marble, to Grand Army Plaza in front of the Plaza Hotel, which was still under construction.

Funds were raised but the fountain was again rejected for this prominent site, next rejected by the city of Baltimore, and also rejected for a site on the north shore of Long Island. After several years in a warehouse, Heine’s monument was finally installed at 161st Street and the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, a largely German Jewish community, and dedicated on July 8, 1899.

Unfortunately over the next few years vandals cut off the heads and arms of all three mermaids that sit in the fountain bowl symbolizing poetry, satire, and melancholy. In 1940 the marble was painted black and the fountain moved to the farthest end of the Joyce Kilmer Park, where it was further destroyed with graffiti, trash, and erosion. The city offered to renovate the park if the monument was removed but local activists refused to give it up.

After years of being almost unrecognizable, funds were raised to repair and restore the fountain. The base was hollowed out and that marble used to re-sculpt heads and other body parts for the mermaids. On its centenary in 1999, Heine’s monument was rededicated in its original location, where it is enjoyed today.

Loreley
translated by Tr. Frank 1998

I cannot determine the meaning
Of sorrow that fills my breast:
A fable of old, through it streaming,
Allows my mind no rest.
The air is cool in the gloaming
And gently flows the Rhine.
The crest of the mountain is gleaming
In fading rays of sunshine.

The loveliest maiden is sitting
Up there, so wondrously fair;
Her golden jewelry is glist’ning;
She combs her golden hair.
She combs with a golden comb, preening,
And sings a song, passing time.
It has a most wondrous, appealing
And pow’rful melodic rhyme.

The boatman aboard his small skiff, –
Enraptured with a wild ache,
Has no eye for the jagged cliff, –
His thoughts on the heights fear forsake.
I think that the waves will devour
Both boat and man, by and by,
And that, with her dulcet-voiced power

See also: http://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/paul-terrys-the-lorelei-1931/

Exhibition Stare Case


Exhibition Stare Case is one of the most famous of all the prints by Thomas Rowlandson (1757-1827), undated but thought to have been published around 1811. The scene features the notoriously steep and narrow stair in Somerset House leading to the Great Hall and imagines what might happen if someone tripped on a dog, causing a cascade of bodies (at a time when women didn’t wear underpants). The exhibition upstairs becomes less interesting than the scene on the stair.

Off to the right, one lady makes a marginal attempt to grab the spotlight back from the other women by lifting her long skirt to expose her ankle. None of the men around her, including the artist himself, seem to even notice.

Rowlandson lived close by in the Adelphi and was a regular visitor to Somerset House. According to The Cyclopædia: Or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature of 1819, between 900-1,200 works were included in the annual spring exhibition, held from late April to early June and attended by over 67,000 visitors.

We assume the crowd is there to see the Spring exhibit, the highlight of the social season, although they might also be attending one of the popular lectures held in 1811, including talks by Henry Fuseli on painting; John Soane on architecture; Anthony Carlisle on anatomy; J. M. W. Turner on perspective; and John Flaxman on sculpture. Or they might also be attending the exhibit of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours, held annually beginning in 1804, where Rowlandson exhibited.

Thomas Rowlandson (1757-1827), Exhibition Stare Case, ca. 1811. Hand colored etching. Graphic Arts Collection GA 2014.00789.

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

Seven Princeton Etchings by Louis Orr


Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Louis Orr (1876-1966) moved to Paris in his twenties to study at the Academie Julian. He served in the French Army, married a French artist, became an officer of the French Legion of Honor, and was buried in Nimes, France. Orr’s etchings were the first by an American artist purchased for the permanent collection in the Louvre’s chalcography department.


In the 1930s, during one of his periodic stays in the United States, Orr accepted a commission from the Princeton University Press to etch seven campus views. First advertised in the Princeton Alumni Weekly 35, no. 17 (February 15, 1935), the Princeton portfolio contained “seven new Princeton etchings by Louis Orr, one of the world’s foremost etchers.” Featured buildings included Blair Tower; Class of 1904 Howard Henry Memorial Dormitory; Cleveland Memorial Hall; Cuyler Hall; Nassau Hall; University Chapel; Hodder Hall; and one small cover design showing a detail of Holder archway.

332 sets were printed on Rives paper and sold “at the exceedingly low price of $100,” which could be paid in monthly installments. “In view of the reputation of the artist, the limitation of the edition to 332 sets, and the fact that each etching is signed by Mr. Orr, these beautiful etchings are collectors’ items and should later sell at a premium. It is expected that the edition will be quickly exhausted.”

Louis Orr was born into a family of engravers, the grandson of John William Orr (1815-1887) and great-nephew of Nathaniel Orr (1822-1908). Princeton’s was one of many institutional commissions he completed including portfolios for Dartmouth, Duke, Pittsburgh, University of Virginia, Wellesley, and Yale.

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

 

 

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.

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