Established in 1796 by Jean-Charles Pellerin (1756-1846), the Imagerie d’Épinal (or Imagerie Pellerin) published tens of thousands of popular prints, illustrated books, comics, and other colorful stenciled material.
After years as an antiquarian novelty, entrepreneurs Pacôme Vexlard and Christine Lorimy purchased the company in 2014, changed the name to Images d’Épinal, and began printing new images.
Young artists are being commissioned to design prints, clothing, and home furnishings, while many of the original lithographic stones are being reinked and editioned. Shops through Europe and nearby in New York City now carry their colorful products.
In conjunction with the local university École supérieure d’art de Lorraine (ESAL) students are being trained to use the traditional machinery, including the only two surviving stenciling presses, known as L’Aquatype. There is even hope for a masters program in printmaking.
New editions are in the works, thanks to 7,000 lithographic stones, hundreds of tin stencils, and studios filled with classic tools.
Adolf Müller (1884-1945), Von der Pike Auf, Zum 60. Geburtstag unseres Chefs herrn Adolf Müller zusammengestellt [Munich: H. Schwaiger, 1944]. Frontispiece portrait and approximately 300 black & white photographs on 104 glossy photo paper. 160 unnumbered leaves of text, all printed on coated glossy paper. Graphic Arts Collection 2018- in process.
The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired this richly illustrated festschrift for Adolf Müller (1884-1945), the publisher of Mein Kampf and close confidante of Hitler from the earliest days of the Nazi party. Issued to celebrate the publisher’s 60th birthday on May 4, 1944, only two copies were privately printed. Approximately one year later, on May 23, 1945, Müller hanged himself in prison following his capture by American troops.
Müller’s personal copy was bound and presented to him from the firm. This is the copy now at Princeton University Library. The volume contains a first-hand history of the Nazi party’s control of media in the pre-World War II period, as well as documentation of Müller’s publishing empire and his relationship with Hitler. The photographs show printing equipment, offices and factories, intimate shots of Müller’s offices, and reproductions of significant publications.
Quotes below are from the dealer’s well-researched description:
Müller was an intimate friend of Hitler — it was Müller who picked him up from Landsberg prison (documented within) in 1924 and Hitler lived in the publisher’s house in Tegernsee. Müller published Mein Kampf in 1925 and all its subsequent editions. The chief publisher of the Nazi party, he directed the printing of the newspaper “Völkischer Beobachter,” a vital arm of the Nazi propaganda effort.
Müller parlayed his firm’s importance to the Nazi cause from its earliest days into powerful administrative positions and a close friendship with Hitler. Intimate scenes of Müller show him hunting and fishing, participating in Nazi rallies, working at his desk, conferring with prominent Nazi officials, etc. Among the many images of Müller’s personal life, Hitler appears in twelve images, including one where he has just been released from Landsberg prison following the Beer Hall Putsch and stands next to Müller’s car.
After his discharge from the German army in 1915, Müller founded the printing company Münchner Buchgewerbhaus M. Müller & Sohn, to publish newspapers and magazines. By the early 1920s he had formed friendships with members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and, starting in 1925, Müller’s firm was the party’s central publishing house.
Subsequently, the Nazi party entrusted to Müller the publication of Mein Kampf because of his friendship with Hitler. Once the Nazi party had taken over the German government, Müller’s business, benefitting from a near monopoly, grew exponentially. He officially joined the party at Hitler’s request in 1934. His firm printed more than two million copies weekly of various Nazi magazines and newspapers at the beginning of World War II. Müller’s leadership was an irreplaceable component of the Nazi party’s propaganda apparatus in the 1920s and through to the end of the war.
The text of this book provides a thorough account of Müller’s career, which, at times, is surprisingly candid. Certain portions touch upon the company’s claims that it was an impartial entity, even though it underwent a rapid change from a neutral publishing house into a company wholly involved in National Socialist propaganda.
Additionally, it becomes clear that this document was not intended for widespread publication since it openly discusses the company’s internal operations and political decisions in a very forthright and revealing manner.
Another section describes the firm’s entanglement in a controversy regarding the reporting of Germany’s annexation of Austria. Finally, there are extensive histories of the publication of Mein Kampf and the “Völkischer Beobachter.”
According to the preface composed by Heinrich Schwaiger, chief manager of the Munich headquarters, two copies of the work were printed, however the present copy was the only one bound and the second, which remained in sheets, can no longer be located. Despite Nazi Germany’s growing number of defeats by 1944 and the destruction of the company’s headquarters in a bombing raid, no expense was spared in this book’s production. An original Gothic font was cast especially for this book, and the company’s plant prioritized the high-quality illustrations on fine coated photo paper.
All of the photographs are fully described and the individuals identified. Here is one example of the many indexes through the volume.
After Seneca Ray Stoddard (1844-1917), Statue of Liberty at Night, 1889. Photogravure. Published in Sun and Shade, vol. 3, no. 25 (September 1890).
“Mr. Stoddard employed five cameras on this occasion, stationing them on the Steamboat Pier. A wire was stretched from the torch of the Statue to the mast of a vessel a considerable distance away. Placed on this wire, controlled by a pulley, was a cup containing one and one-half pounds of flash powder; an electric wire was connected with it, and at a given signal the current turned on, by the electrician in charge of the torch, the flash exploded and the exposure made.”
While living in Kilburn Square, Ernest Edwards (1836-1903) recorded his occupation as Heliotyper, having patented his own version of the heliotype or collotype. The Edwards Heliotype Plant employed 72 workers in 1872, making ink prints for such noteworthy projects as Oscar G. Rejlander’s photographs in Darwin’s The Expressions of Emotions in Man and Animals, [Graphic Arts Collection 2003-0902N].
At the age of 36, Edwards left his business to make heliotypes for Osgood and Company in Boston from 1872-1886 but when that firm went bankrupt, Edwards joined Edward L. Wilson (1838-1903) in New York City, where The Philadelphia Photographer was now published as Wilson’s Photographic Magazine. The two men each rented offices at 853 Broadway, off Union Square, and Wilson began highlighting Edwards’s photomechanical prints each month in his magazine.
Thanks to wide-spread acclaim and growing demand in his work, Edwards moved again, taking over the entire building at 137 West 23rd Street for his New York Photo-Gravure Company. To further promote his artistic printing, the company launched a luxury magazine, entitled Sun and Shade, a large format monthly comprised of photogravure and photogelatine (collotype) plates “without letterpress.” Each issue featured several important photographers of the day as well as reproductions of fine art.
“A year ago we commenced the publication of our novel venture in journalism Sun and Shade,” wrote Edwards, “a Picture Periodical without letterpress, almost as an experiment, with a modest list of less than fifty subscribers. To-day we are printing an edition of 4,000 copies monthly. A sufficiently convincing proof of the wisdom of our hope that there was room for us.”
“In our rapid growth, the wish has been indicated unmistakably for the higher grade of pictures, and of the higher class—always for quality rather than quantity. Following rather than leading such a wish, we feel that we make no mistake in marking the future career of the magazine to be rather that of an artistic periodical than a photographic record of events.” —Photographic Times and American Photographer, Vol. 19 (1889): 394.
Reviews of the lavish magazine noted in particular that it offered “pictures without text,” and today, we recognize Sun and Shade as the important forerunner of Camera Notes, Camera Work, and later, Life and Look magazines.
“Sun and Shade is evidently meeting with the popularity it so richly deserves, in as much as it is impossible to secure back numbers, and we are told that the publishers in several cases have been obliged to re-issue in order to meet the great demand for certain numbers. —American Journal of Photography, vol. 10 (1889): 189.
Princeton University Library is fortunately to have an almost complete run of Edwards’s journal, with all the plates intact. Here are a few more examples.
Sun & Shade: an Artistic Periodical (New York: New York Photo-gravure Co., 1888/89-1896). 8 v. SA Oversize N1 .S957q.
Portfolio of eight pochoir prints from Revillon Frères (Revillon Brothers), 1929-1930. Graphic Arts Collection GAX Oversize 2003-0052F
Portfolio of four pochoir prints from Revillon Frères (Revillon Brothers), 1927-1928. Graphic Arts Collection GAX Oversize 2003-0051F
Portfolio of six photogravure prints from Revillon Frères (Revillon Brothers), ca. 1923-1924. Graphic Arts Collection GAX Oversize 2007-0027E.
The French fur company, Revillon Frères, promoted their firm with annual portfolios of fine art prints. Many featured pochoir fashion plates but in the early 1920s, the company prepared a series of six photogravures from photographs by Robert J. Flaherty (1884-1951). Revillon Frères owned the copyright to all Flaherty’s work, having sponsored the Canadian expedition that resulted in the film Nanook of the North (1922). A total of eighteen photogravures were printed, from which six were chosen for the annual portfolio (ca. 1923-1924). The remaining twelve photogravures could be purchased from G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York.
In 1925, the Revillon company wrote to V. Lansing Collins, reference librarian, preceptor, and Secretary of Princeton University, about the possible sale of their merchandise in Princeton. The following month, the company began advertising in the Daily Princetonian and as a thank you for Collins’s assistance, sent the Princeton University Library their untitled portfolio of six Flaherty prints.
In 1945, a second, also untitled portfolio with all 18 photogravures was donated to the Library in memory of Martin V. Bergen, Jr., Princeton Class of 1892 [Ex Oversize 2007-0026E].
[below] Advertisement. Daily Princetonian, 46, Number 109 (24 October 1925)
“In New York Flaherty had become friendly with a Thierry Mallet, a senior officer of Revillon Frères, a French fur trading company that was the main competitor in Canada of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Mallet was in the audience at a private screening of Flaherty’s surviving Baffin Island print sometime in early 1920 and it gave him an idea.
. . . Mallet persuaded the directors of Revillon Frères to sponsor Flaherty’s return to the north to make another film featuring the company for showing in their anniversary year.
. . . For twelve months, from August 1920 to August 1921, he based himself at the Revillon Frères post at Port Harrison, now Inukjuak, on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay, a little south of Cape Dufferin.” — Jeremy Murray-Brown, “Robert Flaherty: the Old Longing” (Boston University)
Robert Joseph Flaherty (1884-1951), [Robert Flaherty photogravures] (New York: Revillon Frères, [ca. 1925]. Gift of the publisher. Graphic Arts Collection Oversize 2007-0027E.
Includes printed text: “The six copper-plate engravings contained herein are reproductions of photographs of the inhabitants of the sub-arctic part of Eastern Canada. These six photographs, chosen from a collection of eighteen, were made during a series of five expeditions covering a period of eleven years. They were taken on behalf of our company by Robert J. Flaherty, F.R.G.S., around Cape Dufferin and Belcher Islands on the Northeast coast of Hudson Bay, in the Peninsula of Ungava, in the Hudson Strait, and on the coast of Baffin Land.”
The complete set of 18 photogravures: Allegoo (Shining Water) Sikoslingmuit Eskimo Woman, Southern Baffin Land — Nascaupie Indian Chief, Northern Labrador — Cunayou (The Sculpin) Sikoslingmuit Eskimo Girl, Southern Baffin Land — Tooktoo (The Deer) Chief of Sikoslingmuit Eskimos, Southern Baffin Land — SAPA, Sikoslingmuit Eskimo of Southern Baffin Land — A Labrador Cree (Indian), Northern Labrador — The Harpooner — Youthful Hunter — The Hunter, Eskimo in the rough ice-fields at sea — Summer (August), Eskimo Kayak in Northeastern Hudson Bay — Nyla and child, Eteeveemuit Eskimo of Cape Dufferin, Northwest Ungava — The Huskie (The Wolf Dog of the Eskimos) — Eskimo Omiak in the Spring — The Barren Lands, Northern Ungava — The Gramophone — Abandoned Eskimo Village, Ungava Coast of Hudson Bay — The Walrus Hunter — Eskimo Fisherman in his Kayak.
See also: Revillon Frères, Igloo life; a brief account of a primitive Arctic tribe living near one of the most northern trading posts of Revillon Frères (New York: Privately printed, 1923). ReCAP 998 R326
Congratulations to all the members of the College Book Art Association (CBAA) who made it to the national conference this weekend: “Collective Relevance: The Reciprocity of Art and Artifact” https://www.collegebookart.org/Philadelphia. Several panels have been rescheduled and tomorrow will be another full day if you can still make the trip.
The entire 67 page program can be downloaded here, including information on our 2018 Board of Directors and Officers. This weekend’s meeting will include both a silent and live auction, with books donated by CBAA members. The Emerging Educator Award and the Distinguished Career Award will be announced tomorrow evening.
A vendors’ fair has already begun, featuring a variety of book art-related tools and materials available for sale. Above is Paris by Barbara Mauriello, part of the exhibition of work by the faculty of the University of the Arts, on view during the conference. Other workshops and events are being posted on Twitter and Facebook as the days go on.
Friday morning began with a lecture from Sarah Suzuki, Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, Museum of Modern Art. Suzuki presenting highlights from the Museum’s 90 years of collections prints and printed books.
Many had been featured in her exhibitions over the last ten years, including Soldier, Spectre, Shaman: The Figure and the Second World War (2015-16); Scenes for a New Heritage: Contemporary Art from the Collection (2015-16); Jean Dubuffet: Soul of the Underground (2014-15); The Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec: Prints and Posters (2014-15); Wait, Later This Will All Be Nothing: Editions by Dieter Roth (2013); Printin’ (2011) with the artist Ellen Gallagher; ‘Ideas Not Theories’: Artists and The Club, 1942-1962 (2010) and Rock Paper Scissors (2010) with Jodi Hauptman; Mind & Matter: Alternative Abstractions, 1940 to Now (2010); and Wunderkammer: A Century of Curiosities (2008).
The CBAA Journal: Openings: Studies in Book Art, is now open access. Our most recent issue, Volume 3, Number 1 (2017) can be accessed by clicking here.
The Rembrandt Intaglio Printing Company staff pictured above, director Karl Klíč seated in the front row with his arm over Samuel Fawcett’s shoulder.
“When the whole history of rapid photogravure comes to be written (as I doubt greatly if it ever will be) it will be one of the oddest stories in the whole annals of our craft, and even today the oddities continue. Besides revelations exciting a smile, there might perhaps be revelations of some things of which complaint could at the time have fairly been made.” J. Albert Hepps, Printing Art 20 (1913).
Around 1879, Karl Klíč (1841-1926) perfected the engraving of copper plated cylinders instead of flat plates, in an attempt to speed up the slow process of photogravure. Although it was very expensive to engrave a single cylinder, once it was finished thousands of images could be printed making it financially viable for books, magazines and newspapers.
In 1895, Klíč joined Samuel Fawcett and the Storey Brothers printing firm in Lancaster to form the Rembrandt Intaglio Printing Company. Klíč convinced them to stop printing textiles and specialized instead in the reproduction of old master paintings and other art publications.
Thanks to the Sun Printers’ archive, here is a look at one of the first rotary gravure machines, a 15 in. calico printing press by John Wood of Ramsbottom, Lancaster, in 1910. (Photograph thanks to Digby Wakeman)
The Rembrandt Intaglio Printing Co., of Lancaster and London . . . were the first to introduce this class of work in 1896, and . . . they still stand unrivalled, the reputation of their work is firmly established, and they are to-day the premier company, and we admire them and their ability to keep their secret, for we believe that to this day the knowledge of “how it is done” is still theirs alone.
From the beginning the Rembrandt Intaglio process secured the highest appreciation of connoisseurs and collectors. Dr. Bode, Director of the Royal Museum, Berlin, describes their photogravures as the outcome of a perfected, and the only process which gives the richness and velvety effect of the old mezzotints.”.–Process: The Photomechanics of Printed Illustration 20, Issue 232 (1913).
One of the best examples of these rapid photogravures can be found in the two volumes of The Venture: an Annual of Art and Literature (London: J. Baillie, [1903-1905]. Rare Books 3584.932). Images are printed in black and brown inks until 1905 when Klíč succeeded in producing three-color rotogravure and the following year, his company begins marketing color gravure prints.
Rembrandt Intaglio never patented rapid photogravure but kept the process secret for many years. In 1904, when Eduard Mertens filed his own patent no. 17,198 for rotary photogravure, it was rejected. Not only had pictures and type been printed intaglio from the same copper plate for hundreds of years but the Rembrandt company had clearly been printing on copper cylinders long before Mertens’ application.
The fact that Mertens photographed both the text and the pictures onto a cylinder while the Rembrandt firm engraved the words by hand made no difference.
This decision cleared the way for European and American press manufacturers to sell rotary photogravure presses and for publishers to use them. By 1910, both letterpress text and gravure images were being printed together by Freiburger Zeitung [Freiburg, Germany] and in 1912, the New York Times followed.
Dozens of printing firms were established in major cities across the globe, leaving the Rembrandt Intaglio Printing Company bankrupt. The firm was acquired by the Sun Engraving Company in 1932, renamed Rembrandt Photogravure Ltd, and maintained until it closed in 1961.
Here are a few images of the 20th-century rapid photogravure or gravure printing at Sun Engraving, thanks to their online picture archive. Note the number of men needed to move the cylinders.
In James Kirkup’s 1993 obituary for the French/Cuban artist and writer Severo Sarduy (1937-1993), he writes:
“When Castro came to power, Sarduy wangled a grant to study art in Paris. His talent as a painter and designer was to accompany his writing throughout his life, and at the time of his death he was planning a vast retrospective of his paintings and drawings in Madrid. He never returned to Cuba, though he always felt anguished nostalgic longings to do so. At 23, he at once felt at home in the city that has welcomed so many Spanish and Latin American refugees from Fascist and Communist butchery. He never considered himself an exile or an immigrant: ‘I am a Cuban through and through, who just happens to live in Paris.’ Nevertheless, he became a French citizen in the Seventies.”
Thanks to Sarduy’s partner François Wahl (1925-2014), a small group of Sarduy’s canvases and works on paper are held in the Graphic Arts Collection. Created with unusual mediums including coffee and fingernail polish, many were in need to conservation and repair. Thanks to the Gratz Gallery & Conservation Studio, ten works have been conserved, re-framed, and are now once again, available for researchers here in Firestone Library.
When first in Paris, Sarduy attended Roland Barthes’ seminars on language at the College de France, and his collection included works on paper by Barthes, now also at Princeton University.
His last book, Christ on the Rue Jacob; translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Carol Maier (Firestone Library PQ7390.S28 C713 1995) was reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly:
This truly beautiful book is the last by the Cuban-born, Paris-nurtured writer who died in 1993 of AIDS. In a collection of brief, even minute, essays, he offers maps to the passage of time. The first such map is his body, on which ‘epiphanies’ are marked by scars-beginning with the navel, the first wound. The second map is Sarduy’s mind, filled with sharp impressions of places (Cafe de Flore, Benares) and people (Roland Barthes, Italo Calvino). It can make for lonely reading, in part because many friends (Barthes and Calvino among them) are dead.
In ‘The Tibetan Book of the Dead,’ Sarduy recounts the changes in his address book as death threatens to turn it into a ‘novel, or biographical fiction.’ But, facing his own death, Sarduy refuses to remove the name of a dead friend because ‘it would be like eradicating him all over again, as if I were an accomplice of the void, subjecting him to another death within death’.
A new interactive map has been posted by the Association of European Printing Museums (AEPM). It is searchable and provides the names and contact details for museums of printing and academic institution with printing programs as well as cultural heritage organizations of interest to the graphic arts community. Text is in English and French. http://www.aepm.eu/museum-finder/
I’ve tried it on my phone and my desktop computer, seems to work fine on either. Not only are museums of printing included but according to their website “the map can also lead you to newspapers, advertising, packaging, papermaking, graphic design, etc.; textile printing museums; bibliographical presses, libraries and archives with permanent or regular temporary exhibitions related to printing and printed products; workshops actively involved in preserving and transmitting printing heritage.”
The AEPM was founded in Grevenmacher (Luxembourg) in February 2003 with the aim of encouraging co-operation among European printing museums and promoting printing heritage as an important part of European cultural heritage. AEPM member organizations are marked in purple (note: Princeton University’s Firestone Library is a member and so, in purple). Click on the flag to obtain the name, address, and link to the website. Other museums, libraries and heritage workshops are marked in pink with the name and link to the website.
They are willing to add more sites, if you see something they has missed or for new organizations. Contact them with details at webmaster@aepm.eu.
Joseph Parkin Mayall (1839-1906), William Ewart Gladstone, 1883. Photogravure. Published in Artists at Home, edited by Frederick George Stephens (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1884). Graphic Arts Collection GAX Oversize 2007-0028F
Joe Mayall was forty-three when he left work in the family business established by his father, daguerreotypist John Jabez Edwin Mayall (1813–1901), and opened his own photography studio at 548 Oxford Street, near the Marble Arch in 1882.
The following year, the firm Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington proposed a series of luxury prints depicting prominent artists of the day in their homes, surrounded by their work. Equal weight was to be given to the men and the interiors, featuring “pictures, sculptures, and other objects of art which characterise those places,” according to the prospectus. Since Sampson Low had already retired from the firm, credit for the project might go to Edward Marston (1825-1914), who continued to publish luxury volumes.
Art critic George Stephens (1828-1907) was hired to write the biographies and Mayall secured the commission to make the portraits. Forty-eight men were photographed but only twenty-five appear in the final publication, issued monthly from March to August 1884. Each part cost five shillings, with the final bound volume priced at 42 shillings (£2.40). Mayall’s assistant Frank Dudman (1855-1918) filed his own name to the copyright on many of the negatives.
From the beginning, the portraits were planned as photogravures, advertised in the prospectus as the “entirely new and unquestionably permanent process of photoengraving.” When the book was later reviewed, it was called a “marvels of skill and workmanship.” Thanks to the exhibition at Emery College, we learn that “the first set of photogravures was printed in Paris, but something went awry with one of the plates, and although the March 1st publication date had been confidently announced for weeks, that initial installment was embarrassingly delayed.” Chiswick Press printed the rest of the volume but there is no information on the engraver who made and printed of the plates.
The book is dedicated to Frederic Leighton (1830-1896) [below] but he was pushed aside at the last minute to feature Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898) as the frontispiece. Although not a painter, he was an Honorary Professor of Ancient History at the Royal Academy. Photographed in his library at Hawarden Castle, Gladstone later became the subject of an article Mayall published describing the two days spent photographing; “Mr. Gladstone at Home. The Whole-Hearted Homage of a Hero-Worshipper,” Pall Mall Gazette no. 7600 (July 27, 1889).
“I packed up my apparatus and started off with my assistant on January 15, 1883, by the 5:15 A.M. train, from Euston. We arrived at Broughton Hall in due course, distant about two miles from Hawarden Castle, which was visible from the railway station. We drove over in a trap. The day was dull and unpromising for photography.”
“Now came the technical and other difficulties to be surmounted in taking a photograph of Mr. Gladstone in his sitting-room [known as the] ‘Temple of Peace.’ . . . Mrs. Gladstone suggested to me that if I found the books in the way they could be removed. I said, ‘No! madam, don’t touch them. I am somewhat of a bookworm myself, and am jealous of any one disturbing my books. I will bring that much-treasured bookcase in view when I photograph Mr. Gladstone,’ which I afterwards did.”
“…All the preparations being made and ready, the camera in site, double slides charged, and a good solid head-rest placed behind the chair, Mr. Gladstone was seated and I exposed the plate 120 seconds. Mrs. Gladstone and her son, who were in the library at the time, thought that I had exposed the plate five minutes, the time seemed so long. I said no, I had counted 120 long seconds, so Mr. Gladstone very good naturedly said, “Photographic seconds,” which I explained must be lengthened out if possible, as every photographer dreads under- exposure.”
Joseph Parkin Mayall (1839-1906), Frederic Leighton, Baron Leighton, ca. 1883. Photogravure. Published in Artists at Home, edited by Frederick George Stephens (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1884). Graphic Arts Collection GAX Oversize 2007-0028F
John Grabach (1886-1981), Building the Garden State Parkway, 1952.
There are only a few weeks left to see Newark and the Culture of Art: 1900-1960 at Morven Museum & Garden. The exhibit celebrates the early cultural history of Newark and the seminal accomplishments of John Cotton Dana (1856-1929).
Dana studied law and passed the bar in New York before switching careers and becoming director of libraries in Colorado, Massachusetts, and finally Newark, New Jersey, from 1902 until 1929. During his early years at the Newark Public Library, Dana drew exhibits from their large collection of graphic arts and by 1909, converted the library’s fourth floor into a museum. It is thanks to his leadership, Morven’s exhibit shows us, that many–now famous–artists got their start.
Like Princeton University Library (which loaned one small volume) and many other library collections in the early twentieth century, prints and photographs were collected, housed, and made accessible to the general public from the local library, long before local museums were established. Under Dana, the Newark Library also started a loaned program to distribute fine art prints to the public, just as Princeton once did for its students.
Morven’s exhibition hosts many of the great early American modernists, including John Marin, Max Weber, and Stuart Davis. Near the Davis canvas, the curator has given us information about the mural he painted in the 1920s behind the soda fountain at Sparks Nut Shop for his friend Gar Sparks (preserved only by a photograph Mrs. Davis kept).
There are many works by local New Jersey artists, such as Building the Garden State Parkway (1952) by John Grabach (1886-1981) [seen at the top and below left], who was born in Newark and moved north as far as Livingston. Grabach was one of the dedicated and beloved teachers at the Newark School of Industrial Design, which evolved from classes Dana initiated.
As he came and went each day, only two miles from the Garden State construction site, Grabach may have painted this scene on site rather than from memory.
There are also many female artists highlighted, such as Marjorie Lovelock (born 1907) seen here, along with multi-media work, textiles, sculpture, and furniture.
Playing on the second floor is the 1926 film Sightseeing in Newark, which is also available on YouTube and elsewhere online.
