Pas de quatre

We were asked recently about the watercolor attributed to Alfred Edward Chalon (1780-1860) of the four leading ballerinas of the 1840s, Fanny Cerrito, Lucile Grahn, Carlotta Grisi, and Marie Taglioni, in the Pas de Quatre, composed by Jules Perrot and danced on July 12, 1845. This painting was the source for a popular lithograph by Thomas Herbert Maguire (1821-1895), widely circulated.

According to commentary by the Victoria and Albert Museum,

“There were no men in the ballet–the ballerina was now the public’s favourite and the male dancer’s role was reduced to lifting and supporting her. In the coming years, his position declined even further, until he was all but banished from the stage and male roles were performed by girls in men’s clothing. By this time a recognisable ‘ballet’ costume had evolved, which still forms the basis of many ballet costumes today. It was originally based on fashionable dress of the period, but gradually crystallised into a low-cut pointed bodice and a bell-shaped, knee-length skirt formed of tiers of tarlatan with a diaphanous top layer.”


Our watercolor was a gift of Allison Delarue, of whom Mary Ann Jensen, former Curator of the William Seymour Theatre Collection, wrote,

“Allison Delarue, Class of 1928, is a graduate of the Peddie School who received both his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees from Princeton University. While continuing graduate studies at Oxford University he became fascinated with the renaissance of ballet in England; he studied dance with the Hon. Martin-Haney and bought his first ballet print at Cyril Beaumont’s famous London bookshop in Charing Cross Road.

Returning to the United States, he pursued his interest in the ballet while on the staff of the Cooper Union Museum in New York City. A talented photographer as well as a collector and writer, for many years Mr. Delarue was on the staff of the McCarter Theatre in Princeton. His professional memberships have included the Theatre Library Association and the American Society for Theatre Research.”

 

http://libweb5.princeton.edu/visual_materials/delarue/Htmls/index.html

What are “Mems”?

This post was directed to our friends in Great Britain who were asked to answer the question: “What are mems?” Happily, the answer came in minutes from Simon Beattie, citing the OED:
mem, v.
Pronunciation:
Brit. /mɛm/
U.S. /mɛm/
Frequency (in current use):
Origin: Formed within English, by conversion. Etymon: mem. n.1
Etymology: < mem. n.1
nonce-word.
transitive. To note or write down as a memorandum.
1915 W. J. Locke Jaffery v. 61 Once having ‘mem-ed’ an unpleasant thing in my diary, the matter is over.

The term appears in such book titles as:
A Paper, of Tobacco: Treating of The Rise, Progress, Pleasures, and Advantages of Smoking: With Anecdotes of Distinguished Smokers, Mems on Pipes and Tobacco-Boxes, and a Tritical Essay on Snuff (London 1839)

Pickwick In America! . . . : and the Sayings, Doings, and Mems of the Facetious Sam Weller (London 1839)

Mems of America, and Reminiscences At Home and Abroad (London 1839)

This advertisement [above] in Willings Press Guide includes Theatrical mems, as does the print at the top from The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, April 6, 1878.

Harry Furniss (1854-1925) was an artist, whose first job as an illustrator was for the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, and later for The Illustrated London News and The Graphic. His most famous humorous drawings were published in Punch, for which he started working in 1880.

Furniss moved to New Jersey where he worked for Thomas Edison making animated cartoons.

 

Interesting but no mention of mems:
Harry Furniss (1854-1925), My Bohemian Days, with illustrations by the author (New York: Stokes, [1919]). ReCAP 30104.372

Harry Furniss (1854-1925), Harry Furniss At Home (London: T. F. Unwin, 1904). Forrestal Annex NC1320 .F98

Harry Furniss (1854-1925), The Confessions of a Caricaturist (New York: Harper and brothers, 1902). Graphic Arts Off-Site Storage RCPXG-6703038

A Nincompoop and Other Prints

 

Princeton University class “Caricature and Modernity: 1776-1914” (ART 453/ECS 453) visited the Graphic Arts Collection this week to view prints and watercolors by James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, and other British caricaturists.

With frequent bursts of laughter, the class looked primarily at the collection of Dickson Q. Brown, Class of 1895, who donated several thousand prints, drawings, and illustrated books to the Princeton University Library.

“Caricature, based on the distortion of the human face for comic effect, challenged the ideally beautiful,” reads the class description, “and the academic art training that developed in Western Europe after the Renaissance. This course will examine the explosion of caricatural prints and comic illustrated books in France, Great Britain, and the United States from the revolutions of 1776 and 1789 to World War I. Topics will include the political role of satire in the newly defined public sphere; the influence of physiognomy and racial theories on caricatural depictions; the invention of the comic strip; and the origins of Dada and Cubism in comic illustration.”

The invention of laughing gas is celebrated below:

Reports were prepared on Gillray’s Tom Paine’s Nightly Pest (1792); King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver (1803); Matrimonial Harmonics (1805); and Advantages of Wearing Muslin Dresses! (1818). In addition, they studied Rowlandson’s Drawing from Life at the Royal Academy, Somerset House (1808); A Nincompoop or Henpecked Husband (1807); The Anatomist (1811); and Breaking up the Bluestocking Club (1815), among many others.

Next week they move on to Paris and Charles Philipon’s La Caricature with Daumier, Grandville, and other French caricaturists.

Attributed to Henry William Bunbury (1750–1811), The Long Minuet as Danced at Bath (after 1787).

 

 

 

Peter Coffin’s Spiral Rainbow


The spiral as a conceptual archetype is a recurring theme in the work of the American artist Peter Coffin, such as in his 2006 commission for Peter Norton’s annual Christmas gifts. Taking the format of a common photograph album, Coffin organized a series of postcards depicting rainbows into a three-dimensional spiral forming one enormous rainbow. As you open this volume, the constellation of cards expands in an upward swirl of color and form.

The artist commented, “There is a tendency to clutter things up, to try and make sure people know something is art, when all that’s necessary is to present it, to leave it alone. I think the hardest thing to do is to present an idea in the most straightforward way. I think it was Jasper Johns who said that, “[It’s] sometimes necessary to state the obvious.” Still, how to proceed is always the mystery. I remember at one point thinking that someday I would figure out how to do this, how you do art — like “What’s the procedure here, folks?” — and then it wouldn’t be such a struggle anymore. Later I realized I would never have a specific process; I would have to re-invent it, over and over again.”

The Coffin project is the gift of James Welling, Lecturer with the rank of Professor in the Visual Arts program in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. In turn, it was the gift of the Peter Norton Family, who each year commission a work of art to celebrate the holiday season.

Peter Coffin (born 1972), Norton Family Christmas Project ([Santa Monica, Calif.]: [Peter Norton Family], [2006]). 1 photograph album. Gift of James Welling. Graphic Arts Collection in process.

Ulises Carrión’s Early Books


Guest post by Sarah Hamerman, Poetry Cataloging Specialist

Mexican-born, Amsterdam-based artist, writer and cultural organizer Ulises Carrión (1941-1989) was a key figure in the broadly intercultural development of artists’ books and concrete poetry in the 1970s. Though Carrión achieved early success as a short fiction writer in Mexico, he soon moved away from narrative writing; upon his move to Amsterdam, he adopted a structuralist-inflected interest in linguistic systems and the materiality of the page. The artists’ book would prove an ideal medium for these ideas: in his influential 1975 essay The New Art of Making Books, Carrión champions the book as a “space-time sequence,” rather than a mere container of literary text.

    

Carrión’s earliest artists’ books, or “bookworks,” explore these ideas by playfully questioning the underlying structures of poetry. His first published artists’ book, Sonnets, consists of 44 variations of an appropriated sonnet by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Carrión’s often-subtle rewritings of the poem—indicated by titles such as Capital Sonnet, Parenthetic Sonnet, and Echoed Sonnet, highlight the rigorous rhyme scheme and structure dictated by the sonnet form. Self-published on his own mimeograph machine, Sonnets also demonstrates that Carrión’s interest in “making books” was a practical as well as an aesthetic matter.

The approach of Sonnets is further developed in Poesías, an unpublished 1972 typescript which was made available for the first time in a fine 2007 edition by Mexico-based Taller Ditoria. In one poem, Ritmos, Carrión explores rhythm and meter through the repetition of a single syllable, “ta,” and the use of space. This tactic reveals the influence of concrete and sound poetry’s concept of “verbi-voco-visual” expression on Carrión’s work. In another section, Graficas, the stanzas of a poem are conveyed by a graphic representation of their outlines. The author prints five variations of this technique on translucent paper stock, allowing the shapes to overlay and the reader to consider the entire sequence together. While these works adopt a kind of reduced and minimal language, they offer a rich and fascinating approach to the forms through which literature conveys meaning.

Ulises Carrión (1941-1989), Poesías (Ciudad de México: Taller Ditoria, 2007). Graphic Arts RCPXG-5902412

Ulises Carrión (1941-1989), Sonnet(s) (Amsterdam: In-Out Productions, 1972). Carrión’s first artist’s book, dedicated to Raúl Marroquín. Printed in black and white and stapled between clear plastic wraps. Marquand Library PQ7298.13.A73 S65 1972q Oversize

Ellsworth Kelly’s Un Coup de dés



When publisher Sidney Shiff commissioned Ellsworth Kelly to select a text and create prints for a Limited Editions Club book, Kelly chose to match his black and white lithographs with Un coup de dés by Stéphane Mallarmé, one of the most famous poems of the 19th century. In its 63rd year, the Club was publishing only three or four titles each year in editions of 300, unlike the earlier runs of 2,000 under George Macy. This allowed Shiff to work with outstanding artists and create some of the most beautiful books of the late 20th and early 21st century.

Published in the original French and the original page design, Kelly integrated his eleven lithographs with the text, accentuating the open white space of both text and images. A separate booklet with Daisy Aldan’s English language translation is included: mallarme

“A throw of the dice never even when cast in eternal circumstances at the heart of a shipwreck let it be that the Abyss whitened slack raging under an incline desperately soars by its own wing…”

 

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) and Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015), Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard ([New York]: Limited Editions Club, 1992). Text printed at Wild Carrot Letterpress and lithographs printed at Trestle Editions. Copy 71 of 300. Original black goatskin, in black solander box. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2018- in process.

The Dark Plates of Phiz

Preparing for a visit from ART 561/ENG 549/FRE 561 “Painting and Literature in Nineteenth-Century France and England,” the prints of Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz) for Charles Dickens’ Bleak House have been pulled. Phiz completed forty plates, etched on steel, for Dickens’ ninth novel published in monthly parts from March 1852 to September 1853.

 

Both for the added mystery and to thwart the lithographers who made copies of Browne’s superb etchings, the artist developed a technique for what we refer to as the ‘dark plates.’

In ten of the forty illustrations, Browne merged the meticulous engraved lines made by an engraving- or ruling-machine with the hand drawn lines of his etching needle to create the look of a mezzotint with the detail and freedom of a drypoint.
Engraving on steel had only recently been perfected. In 1895, C. W. Dickinson wrote an easy to understand description of “Copper, steel and bank-note engraving,” quoted here:

“Previous to the year 1830 only copper plate was used by engravers, because up to that time it was not thought possible to make steel soft enough to cut easily and smoothly. The first plate produced—that could be used—was called “silver steel.” Later there was manufactured the “Prussian steel” plate, which was a slight improvement in fineness of grain. Other and greater improvements followed, until now steel has almost entirely superseded copper.

Decarbonated cast steel is used for general engraving purposes and must be of very fine grain, and very soft as compared with natural cast steel. The plates are rolled out from bars of steel in its natural state, then decarbonated and cut to about the size desired, leaving enough margin to square the edges, which are finished with a wide bevel. After the plate has been cut to size, it is flattened by laying it upon a copper anvil and hammering with a wooden mallet until it is as flat as is possible to get it by that process. A uniform thickness and perfectly flat surface are then given to the plate by grinding—sometimes by hand, usually by machine—the latter process being the better, as it is the more perfect in its results.”
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_46/March_1895/Copper,_Steel,_and_Bank-Note_Engraving

Also in the early 19th-century ruling machines for engravers were being up-graded, in particular to accommodate  enormous publishing project such as Napoleon’s Description de l’Égypte. As improved and enhanced by Nicolas Conté, the French engraving machine was invaluable for the thousands of lines incorporated into the skies and landscapes within his designs. Here’s an image: https://napoleon.lindahall.org/engraving.shtml

A diamond was often used as the stylist on the engraving machines, hard enough to cut but thin enough to draw the slender marks that left the impression of a tint or tone rather than line. Here are a few close ups that make it easier to see the hundreds of tiny straight lines behind Browne’s linear picture.

 

 

Japanese Painting Manuals

芥子園畫傳 : Jieziyuan Huazhuan : The Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual. Part one 1679. Woodblock prints. Graphic Arts Collection [far left] https://graphicarts.princeton.edu/2013/12/16/the-mustard-seed-garden-painting-manual/

Thanks to Caitlin Karyadi, doctoral candidate at Princeton University, several volumes from the Princeton University Library are on view in a rotation within the Japanese galleries on the lower level of the Princeton University Art Museum. Mounted in conjunction with Picturing Place in Japan, Karyadi has done a beautiful job integrating our painting manuals with the Museum’s “funpon,” the preparatory sketches painters relied on to compete their work.

Here is one of her labels in full:


In the Making: The Practice of Painting in Early-Modern Kyoto, on view through December 16, 2018.

Many are ruined by buying bargains

According to OCLC, there are less than a dozen copies of this Benjamin Franklin broadside in the United States and three of them are at Princeton. Folded into a stamped binding (see below), the undated broadside was published after 1790 (Franklin’s death) at the shop of Carington Bowles (1724-1793). Its twenty-five engraved oval vignettes (including a central Franklin portrait) were designed by Robert Dighton (1752-1814) to illustrate Franklin’s maxims.

 

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), Bowles’s Moral Pictures, or, Poor Richard illustrated: Being Lessons for the Young and the Old on Industry, Temperance, Frugality &c. By the Late Dr. Benj. Franklin (Manchester (Exchange St. and St. Anns Square): Bancks & Co., [between 1819 and 1839]). Graphic Arts Collection 2007-0083N

 

 

The biography for Robert Dighton (1752-1814) posted by the British Museum lists his shop at 12 Charing Cross; 6 Charing Cross; and 4 Spring Gardens Charing Cross, London. “A singer and draughtsman, especially known for designs for satirical prints, which he initially supplied to Carington Bowles and Haines. Later plates he etched, published and sold himself. Stole prints from the British Museum (see A. Griffiths, ‘Landmarks in Print Collecting’, BM 1996, pp. 10, 49-50, 60, 276-83). Son of the art dealer, John Dighton (q.v.). Father of three artists, Robert junior, Denis and Richard (q.v.), who seem to have worked together as a family business, with a common stock of plates.”–Britishmuseum.org

This broadside evolved through a long series of publications. Here at Princeton, we hold:
1747
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), Poor Richard improved: being an almanack and ephemeris … for the bissextile year, 1748. : … Fitted to the latitude of forty degrees, and a meridian of near five hours from London; but may, without sensible error, serve all the northern colonies by Richard Saunders, philom (Philadelphia: printed and sold by B. Franklin, [1747]). “Richard Saunders” is a pseudonym. Probably calculated by Theophilus Grew. An advertisement for his school of mathematics appears on p. [30]. William H. Scheide Library 102.48

1748
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), Poor Richard improved: being an almanack and ephemeris … for the year of our Lord 1749: … Fitted to the latitude of forty degrees, and a meridian of near five hours west from London : but may, without sensible error, serve all the northern colonies by Richard Saunders, philom. (Philadelphia: Printed and sold by B. Franklin, and D. Hall, [1748]). “This is the first Poor Richard almanac to contain the woodcuts showing the occupations of the months,” Cf. Hamilton. Sinclair Hamilton Collection Hamilton 27

1757
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), Poor Richard improved; being an almanack and ephemeris … for the year of our Lord 1758 … by Richard Saunders, philom. (Philadelphia: Franklin and Hall, 1757). This number contains collection of proverbs which were reprinted in England as the Way to wealth. “This is most rare and valuable of the series.” Sabin. According to Ford and Evans this is the last number edited by Franklin. Rare Books (RB) RHT American-81

1779
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), The Way to Wealth: as clearly shewn in the preface of an old Pensylvanian [sic] almanack, intitled, Poor Richard, improved. Written by Dr. Benjamin Franklin. Extracted from the Doctor’s political works ([London: printed for J. Johnson, 1779]). Broadside. 31 x 39.5 cm. Rare Books Oversize 3744.91.395f

1795
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), The Way to Wealth, or, Poor Richard improved, by Benj. Franklin (Paris: Printed for Ant. Aug. Renouard, 1795). The Way to Wealth was first published in Poor Richard’s almanac for 1758 and separately issued in 1760 under title: Father Abraham’s speech. The present edition includes the French translation of Quétant and L’Écuy, with special t.-p.: La science du Bonhomme Richard, ou Moyen facile de payer les impôts. Par Benj. Franklin. Paris, Ant. Aug. Renourd, 1795. ExKa copy has bookplate of Grenville Kane. Rare Books 3744.91.395.11

Ford, Franklin Bibliography, p. 69, no. 137.

Hard Werken

Two years ago, an exhibition was mounted to celebrate the brief run of the visual art, music, and literature magazine Hard Werken, which made an impact on the typographic artists in The Netherlands and throughout Europe and the United States. The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired a rare complete run of the title. Here is a statement from Rotterdam curators Reyn van der Lugt and Marjolein van de Ven:

Between 1979 and 1982, only ten editions of this cultural magazine were published, yet it had a significant influence on a whole generation of graphic designers in the Netherlands and beyond. … The striking A3 format, its anarchic design contrary to typographic currents, the focus on photography, and its changing group of contributors for each edition–-mainly from the visual arts and literature–-immediately characterised this new initiative as a brash, elusive, and distinctly Rotterdam phenomenon.–https://www.tentrotterdam.nl/en/show/rotterdam-cultural-histories-8-hard-werken/

Hard Werken was founded by the Rotterdam designers Willem Kars, Gerard Hadders, Rick Vermeulen, Henk Elenga and Ton van der Haspel in 1979, who had all been students at the Rotterdam Academy of Arts. They met through the Graphic Workshop, an initiative of the Rotterdam art foundation and joined with the poet Jules Deelder, photographer Henk Tas, the music club Arena, and Uitgeverij 101 to publish a magazine that represented the new cultural scene of their time and place.

The magazine was characterized by experiments with typography, photography, and illustration inspired from contemporary films, music, theater and painting. Although each designer worked individually, by 1980 the artists decided to focus on design as a group, known as Hard Werken Design.

For the next dozen years, Vermeulen, Hadders, Van den Haspel and Kars accepted all types of graphic design jobs including advertising, packaging, and interior design as well as posters, magazines, and music covers. According to interviews, “everyone was free to accept assignments. In case Hard Werken was approached for an assignment, it was discussed who would do the assignment.”

Although it is hard to see here, one of the interesting graphic features of Hard Werken was the integration of off-set printing with actual tipped in photographs and other hand-written elements. It was the extra-time and expense of this hand work that made the magazine unable to continue after ten issues.