Category Archives: Acquisitions

new acquisitions

The Occuprint Portfolio

Beginning on September 17, 2011, a group of activists began occupying a section of lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. The action became known as Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and lasted until November 15, 2011, when the group of forced to leave and their tents removed. The issues raised by the group were diverse and the material they published equally varied. The OWS Screen Printing Guild was organized as an official working group within the OWS General Assembly to manage visual material, with a subgroup known as Occuprint to help with publishing.

According to their literature, “Occuprint emerged when The Occupied Wall Street Journal asked us to guest curate an issue dedicated to the poster art of the global Occupy movement.” http://occuprint.org “Occuprint showcases posters from the worldwide Occupy movement, all of which are part of the creative commons, and available to be downloaded for noncommercial use, though we ask that artists be given attribution for their work. Our Print Lab is collaboration with the Occupy Wall Street Screen Printing Guild.”

In 2012, a portfolio of thirty-one posters was selected under the curatorial eye of Marshall Weber, director of Booklyn, a non-profit artist and bookmakers organization headquartered in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Occuprint organizer, Jesse Goldstein, and various Occuprint editorial committee members including Molly Fair, Josh MacPhee, and John Boy assisted in the organization and distribution of the screen-printed portfolio. Some posters are signed by the artists and the edition limited to 100 copies. The Graphic Arts Collection is fortunate to have acquired one.

Occuprint Portfolio by edited by Marshall Weber, Jesse Goldstein, Dave Loewenstein, and Alexandra Clotfelter (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Booklyn, 2012). Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2014- in process

Ashland, The Homestead of Henry Clay

John Sartain (1808-1897), after a drawing by James Hamilton (1819-1878) after daguerreotypes taken on the spot by John M. Hewitt (active 1840-1860). Ashland. The Homestead of Henry Clay. Second state. Published Philadelphia: F. Hegan, 1853. Etching, engraving, stipple engraving with hand coloring. Graphic Arts collection GAX 2014- in process

Originally created in 1852, during Clay’s lifetime, the first version of this print was published in Louisville, Kentucky. According to Eric Brooks’ book, Ashland: The Henry Clay Estate (2007), the first version or state showed Henry Clay sitting in a chair on the left side of the lawn. When Clay died, Sartain quickly reworked the plate, removing the figure from the chair, and published a second version in 1853. A third print was completed in 1863 with Clay back in his chair, which was published by Sartain in Philadelphia and R.R. Landon in Chicago. It is the second version with an empty chair that the Graphic Arts collection has acquired.

This enormous print shows Ashland, the 600 acre Lexington, Kentucky, estate of Henry Clay (1777-1852). The family lived on this plantation from 1806 to his death, although Clay was often in Washington D.C. He ran for president of the United States five times from 1824 to 1848 but never succeeded in being elected.

Below the scene are three additional images. On the left is a figure of the God Hermes holding a shield; in the center is a bust of Henry Clay; and on the right is Demeter, the Greek goddess of agriculture sitting on a shock of wheat cradling a scythe. The same note as the first state is at the very bottom: “Entered according to Act of Congress by B. Lloyd in the year 1852 in the Clerk’s Office of the Dist. Court of the U.S. for the Dist. of KY.” An advertisement for this print can be found in the Lancaster (Pa.) Examiner and Herald, Wednesday, August 3, 1853.

Picasso’s studio

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Cover design for book II of Ces peintres nos amis (The Painters Friends), (Cannes: Galerie 65, 1960). Text by Gilberte Duclaud; biographies by Serge Chauby. Lithograph. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2014- in process. Gift of the Ruth Ivor Foundation.

Picasso designed this lithograph to be included in the portfolio Dans l’Atelier De Picasso (In Picasso’s Studio), published by the Goldmark Gallery in 1957. The artist later selected the print and embellished it with additional colors, adding a dedication to Gilberte Duclaud and Serge Chauby, his dealers in Cannes at their Galerie 65.

The revised stone was then printed by master lithographer Fernand Mourlot (1895-1988) and used as the cover illustration for the second volume of his friend’s book Ces peintres nos amis (The Painter’s Friends).

The first state of this lithography was printed in six colors but this one is done in seventeen, each one requiring a separate run through the press. Unfortunately, Princeton does not yet own either the first or second books connected with this print.

It is, however, a nice complement to our portrait of the artist by Harry Sternberg (1904-2001), Picasso, 1944. Screen print. Graphic Arts Collection GA 2008.00578

Congratulations, You Have Gout, Signed Ouch

Graphic Arts recently acquired an elaborately designed 18th-century satire on gout, praising those who attain the condition through drinking enough punch or having enough sex. Virtues are extolled with clever emblems and epigrams such as “Breve gaudium, longa miseria (brief joy, long misery).

Written in Latin and German, the four page title translates (very roughly): “Dissertations on the praises and causes of gout, under the auspices of the great and most famous, the most celebrated in the world.

[Dedicated] to the difficulties, sometimes, of the most patient Lord Claudius Expertus, Lord of and in Limping-House, the Valley of Ashes and Pains, his anonymous fellow-sufferer sets forth [for public distribution] to his allies.

Not so much to beguile leisure time, as to dispel the lame troubles of the feet, he has illustrated with emblems, with questions paradoxical to sane people, enlarged humorously with stories and verses, and not without the testimony of that most pleasant person, Caesar Severus, for the pathetic sentence to cases of gout.

Against interrupters assuredly the censorship of the law has strengthened and established it. In the year [1715].”

The date is a beautiful chronogram (time writing) in which the letters are also the numbers of the date: In Mense sIbI sVIsqVe DoLorosè hetero CLIto = IMIIVIVDLCLI = MDCLLVVIIIII = 1715

The first of the satirical emblems is signed by the Austrian artist Johann Georg Guttwein (1678-1718), and the rest have been attributed to the same artist. In the plate above, “Bacchus, the god of wine, who begins the ‘foot-planting’ of those who are merrily occupied with exchanging wine glasses, and waters the plant favorably, so that it is inclined to be wed to his daughter-in-law, gout.” With this postscript: Drinking leads to repentance. Note the inscription in the print: Planta Rigatur=The plant is watered.

The emblem below is inscribed: “Inde genus durum sumus experiensque laborum / et documenta damus qua simus origine nati.” The text comes from Ovid’s Metamorphosis: “The earthy part, however, wet with moisture, turned to flesh; what was solid and inflexible mutated to bone; the veins stayed veins; and quickly, through the power of the gods, stones the man threw took on the shapes of men, and women were remade from those thrown by the woman. So the toughness of our race, our ability to endure hard labour, and the proof we give of the source from which we are sprung.”

Dissertationes de laudibus et effectibus podagrae quas sub auspiciis… ([Brün?]: no publisher, [1715]). Illustrated by Johann Georg Gutwein. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2014- in process

Members of the gout club are congratulated in a proclamation folded into the back of the volume, signed with names that sound like expressions of pain, such as Mr. Ouch:

Scenes from Byron’s Life

Princeton University Library has a number of books with fore-edge paintings. The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired two more. The books are bound in mid-19th century full navy morocco with elaborately gilt and blind stamped covers. The name “Violet” is gilt stamped on both front covers.

Each volume also has a lovely early fore-edge painting, presenting scenes with Byron associations. One is a city view of Harrow-on-the Hill where Byron went to school [below] and the second a view of Athens, Greece [above].

Inside are the Byron poems you would expect in various editions, including Lara (4th ed.); Hebrew Melodies (1st ed., without ad leaf); The Siege of Corinth (2nd ed.); Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte (12th ed.); Poems (2nd ed.); Manfred (2nd ed.); Beppo (7th ed.); and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto the Fourth (1st ed., 2nd issue).

Lord Byron (1788-1824), The Works (London: Printed for John Murray, 1814-1824). 2 of 12 volumes. Rebound with fore-edge paintings added. Graphic Arts Collection 2014- in process

[left] T. Blood, (active 19th century) after Richard Westall (1765-1836), Lord Byron, 1814. Stipple engraving. Graphic Arts Collection GA 2005.02041

David Davidson, Maryland 7th Regiment

Unidentified photographer, Sergeant David Davidson, ca. 1862. Hand painted tintype. Graphic Arts Collection 2014 in process. Gift of Russell Marks, Class of 1954.

Thanks to the generous donation of Russell Marks, Class of 1954, the Graphic Arts Collection has a new full-plate hand-painted tintype from the 1860s. The photograph shows Union Army Sergeant David Davidson, great grandfather of Mr. Marks, and a member of Maryland’s 7th Regiment during the American Civil War.

7th Regiment Infantry was organized at Baltimore, Md., August and September 1862 and moved to the Antietam September 18, 1862. According to the U.S. National Homes for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, Sergeant Davidson (born 1838) was admitted in 1907 at the age of 69. (microfilm M388 roll 3).

Marks and his wife Tricia (formerly editor of the Princeton University Library Chronicle) lived in Latin America for fifteen years. His business career included managing a sugar and paper complex in Peru as well as the presidency of Phelps Dodge International Corporation and of the Americas Society. The couple is now happily living in Princeton once again.

Roget’s other work

John Lewis Roget (1828-1908), Familiar Illustrations of the Language of Mathematics or a New
Picture-Alphabet for Well-Behaved Undergraduates; Wherein a Ray to Illuminate their Path is Transmitted through Nine Plates of a Rare Medium by Means of the Eccentrical Pencil of W.A.G. [pseud.] (London: Ackermann, 1850). Bound together with Cambridge Customs and Costumes (London: Ackermann and Company, 1851). Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2014- in process

John Roget was the only son of Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869), the lexicographer best known for publishing the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (Roget’s Thesaurus) in 1852. Although John trained for the bar and worked together with his father on editions of the Thesaurus, his aptitude for painting and drawing was the primary focus of his life.

He become the Historian of the Royal Society of Painters and Watercolours and published several volumes of humorous sketches with academic puns. Two of these have recently been acquired by the Graphic Arts Collection.

Roget was joined in these publications by the very young Arthur George Witherby, a journalist, editor and part-time caricaturist who used the pen name W.A.G. and later drew for Vanity Fair.

Beyond the sketches themselves, these volumes present some of the earliest examples of anastastic printing, a technique often used to reproduce drawings and fine art etchings. By the mid-19^th century, Rudolph Ackermann and many British publishers had their illustrative plates printed by Rudolph Appel & Company’s Anastastic Press in Ipswich.

This was a metal (usually zinc) relief process probably developed by Charles d’Aiguebelle who earned a silver medal at the Exposition of 1834 for his “transports sur pierre d’impression anciennes.”

Luis Nadeau speculates that the first book with anastatic illustrations may be Sketches Printed at the Second Hampstead Conversazione February 2nd, 1846. Princeton University Library’s earliest example is John William Hewett’s 1849 Early Wood Carving . . . printed at Appel’s Anastatic Press (Marquand NK9744.E97 H48 1849). The books drawn by John Roget follow closely in 1850 and 1851, with excellent examples of anastatic printing to reproduce pen drawings.

See also: John Lewis Roget (1828-1908), A History of the ’Old Water-Colour’ Society (London, New York: Longmans, Green and co., 1891). Graphic Arts Collection (GA) Rowlandson 887

Enveloppe-moi

Annette Messager and Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Enveloppe-moi (New York: Museum of Modern Art Library Council, 2013). Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2014- in process.

According to the Museum of Modern Art Library prospectus, “Enveloppe-moi, by Annette Messager, is the ninth in a series of artists’ books and editions published by the Library Council of The Museum of Modern Art. This edition, conceived by the artist in Paris, comes to readers as something found deep in a closet or tucked under a bed, ready to be opened and brought back to light. Within separate enclosures, a handmade box contains a postcard correspondence between the artist and the writer/artist Jean-Philippe Toussaint; a letter and a photograph by Toussaint; and 10 photographic collages by Messager.

These contents could be souvenirs of an intensely imagined or experienced liaison, or clues to a secret history. The whole represents an enigmatic visual and verbal exchange.

Over a five-month period in 2011, Messager sent 15 postcards, one by one, to Toussaint. Each card features on one side a black-and-white photograph of one of Messager’s preexisting artworks. The collection of postcard images presents a series of indefinite but suggestive images of obscured words, phrases, nets, and body parts.

Toussaint replied on the blank side of each postcard with brief comments, questions, and literary references apparently prompted by the image on the opposite side. A second set of postcards reproduces the same artworks by Messager, but these postcards are still blank on the writer’s side. At the artist’s suggestion, readers may consider sending the “virgin” postcards (as the artist describes them) to another correspondent.Messager also created 10 collages that visualize emotionally heightened (and slightly ironic) scenes from a fictional romance: a manipulated photograph of the artist as a young woman, trapped in a spider web–like net; a B-movie style image of a lover’s kiss; a playful, doodled image of a floating mermaid overlaying a dark installation of photographic memorabilia; artworks based on graphic representations of words such as “chaos,” “trouble,” and “hotel-fiction”—these and other images are as fantastical and personally expressive as the postcard exchange is restrained. They deepen the mystery of the boxed collection. Nine of these collages appear as pigment prints in the center well of the portfolio.

A tenth collage is stamped onto the cloth-covered box. (This collage also appears as an additional pigment print in the deluxe edition.) Messager’s handwritten title, Enveloppe-moi, is silkscreened on the red cloth covers of the box and two additional images are silkscreened on the inside of the box.

During the five-month correspondence, Toussaint photographed the quotidian circumstances in which he wrote on his side of Messager’s postcards. One digitally printed photograph by Toussaint, of a hand dropping a postcard into a postbox slot, can be found within a slot on an inside flap of the portfolio, along with Toussaint’s digitally printed letter.

Messager designed the portfolio and its contents in collaboration with the co-editors, the designer, and the binder. This edition was edited and produced for The Museum of Modern Art’s Library Council by May Castleberry, Editor, Contemporary Editions, MoMA Library Council, and Céline Fribourg, Founder, éditions Take5, Geneva. The text, the colophon page, and one of the title images were designed by Philippe Apeloig in Paris. The portfolio was bound and assembled by Mark Tomlinson in Easthampton, Massachusetts, using silkscreen-printed and stamped covers created by Annette Messager. “

Modern Editions Press

Texas-born Kathleen Tankersley Young (1903–1933) published a book of Ten Poems in 1930 and along with Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler, was one of the founding publishers of the literary magazine Blues: a Magazine of New Rhymes (1929-1930). When the magazine closed, she planned a new journal under her own imprint, Modern Editions Press, published by Eric Naul.

The Modern Editions Press published two series of pamphlets in 1932 and 1933. The first series consisted of six pamphlets which included short stories, poems, and a statement. The six contributors were Dudley Fitts, John Kemmerer, Kay Boyle, Kathleen Tankersley Young, Raymond Ellsworth Larsson and Albert Halper; each one illustrated with an original print by a contemporary American artist.

The second and final series of eight pamphlets was published in 1933 and consisted exclusively of work by poets, including Lincoln Kirstein, Horace Gregory, Raymond Ellsworth Larsson, Kathleen Tankersley Young, Paul Bowles, Laurence Vail, Carl Rakosi, and Bob Brown. Each was published in an edition of 100 copies.

Young traveled to Mexico in 1933 where she died unexpectedly and the Modern Press Editions came to an end. The Graphic Arts Collection is fortunate to have acquired the first series of pamphlets, bound together in this colorful unsigned binding.

Dudley Fitts (1903-1968), Two Poems ([New York]: Modern Editions Press, 1932). Frontispiece by Stuart Davis (1892-1964).

John Kemmerer, Two Stories ([New York]: Modern Editions Press, 1932). Frontispiece by Isami Doi (1983-1965).

Kay Boyle (1902-1992), A Statement ([New York]: Modern Editions Press, 1932). Frontispiece by Max Weber (1881-1961).

Kathleen Tankersley Young (1903-1933), The Pepper Trees: a cycle of three stories ([New York]: Modern Editions Press, 1932). Frontispiece by Stefan Hirsch.

Raymond Ellsworth Larsson (1901- ), Wherefore: Peace ([New York]: Modern Editions Press, 1932). Frontispiece by Jane Berlandino.

Albert Halper (1904-1984), Chicago Side-Show ([New York]: Modern Editions Press, 1932). Frontispiece by Louis Lozowick (1892-1973).

A Little Pre-Super Bowl Football

From 1912 to 1948, the Olympic Games included an international art competition, with medals in architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture. During the 1932 summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles, 511 male and 76 female artists entered the exhibition.

Louis Hechenbleikner (1893-1983) was born in Innsbruck, Austria, and emigrated to the United States in 1923, becoming a naturalized citizen six years later. Although sports was not a common theme in Hechenbleikner’s work, he created five prints for the Olympic competition in 1932 including: The Tackle, Down the Field, Forward Pass, Through the Center, and Boxing Match. The Graphic Arts Collection has three of these five, presumably thanks to Hechenbleikner’s good friend Elmer Adler.

Louis Hechenbleikner, (1893-1963), Untitled [The Tackle, 1932]. Woodcut, GA 2007.01420; Untitled [Down the Field, 1932], woodcut. GA 2007.01419; and Untitled [Forward Pass, 1932], woodcut. GA 2007.01421

Here are a few other football scenes by some other artists.

Henry Martin (born 1925), Untitled [Spectators at Princeton football game], no date. Pen-and-wash drawing on paper. Graphic Arts Collection. Gift of Henry Martin, Class of 1948.

George Hunt (active 1820-1845) after a design by Robert Cruikshank (1789-1856), Foot ball, 1830. Engraving with hand coloring. Gift of Richard W. Meirs, Class of 1888. Graphic Arts Collection.

Thomas Nast (1840-1902), Time!: Yale vs. Princeton, 1889. Relief print. Graphic Arts, Thomas Nast Collection GA 2010.01149.

Otho Cushing (1871-1942), Untitled [Football player being toasted], no date [ca. 1910]. Pen drawing. Graphic Arts Collection GA 2006.02593.

The American artist Otho Cushing taught painting at M.I.T. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, before moving to Europe as the art editor for the European edition of the Herald-Tribune. Around 1906, Cushing joined the staff of Life magazine concentrating on caricatures with classical themes, using Greek gods and goddesses in many of his designs. The drawings in the Graphic Arts Collection are presumably for Life illustrations around this period. He left in 1917 to serve in the Army Air Corps.

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