Prints
With/Out Pressure
Introduction
When dealer-collector Samuel Putnam Avery established The New
York Public Library’s Print Room in 1900 by a major gift, he advised the first
curator, Frank Weitenkampf, “It is desired that this print room
contain as complete a collection as possible of the results of the graphic
arts as practiced in America.” Weitenkampf and successive curators
followed Avery’s instructions, and gifts and purchases in the first
half of the 20th century represent a virtual history of American printmaking.
Etching dominated American printmaking in the first decades of the 20th
century. Until the 1930s most American artists seemed unaware of or indifferent
to the earlier innovative woodcuts of Gauguin, Munch, and the German
Expressionists, yet by the end of that decade Will Barnet, Louis Schanker,
and Werner Drewes had found in the relief print a medium that served
their expressive needs and individual “modern” styles. By
the 1940s, encouraged by their example and the legitimacy given to the
woodcut by the Graphic Arts Division of the Federal Art Project, a number
of artists had begun to exploit the artistic possibilities of the relief
block.
Woodcut and wood engraving, as practiced with exquisite craftsmanship
by Fritz Eichenberg, Lynd Ward, and Grace Albee, were still favored for
pictorial book illustration, and for prints commissioned by conservative
print clubs and societies. However, from the 1940s through the 1960s
the relief print increasingly intrigued artists whose work encompassed
a broad spectrum of artistic points of view and styles, including various
kinds of realism, surrealism, expressionism, and abstraction. Critics
noted that relief prints were growing in scale and painterly effects,
the better to rival the power of increasingly monumental contemporary
painting. Artists like Leonard Baskin and Misch Kohn, working large wood
blocks, tapped the expressive potential of black and white. Milton Avery
often limited his palette to black, but then played with the effects
possible by varying inking, pressure, and simple color combinations,
while Seong Moy, Antonio Frasconi, and Adja Yunkers printed with multiple
colors for dramatic impact. Not limited to wood or linoleum, Boris Margo
and Edmond Casarella were among those who—inspired by the contemporary
innovations in intaglio techniques fostered by Stanley William Hayter’s
Atelier 17, and the technical experimentation encouraged by the WPA workshops—utilized
new and nontraditional printmaking materials, including celluloid dissolved
in acetone, Lucite, and cardboard.
A survey of the prints added to the Library’s Print Collection
in the 1940s through the 1960s documents this renaissance in the relief
print: given the breadth and depth of these now-historic holdings, there
were only modest gaps to be addressed in recent years. Many of these
prints were given by or acquired from the artists themselves at or near
the time of creation; others came from a handful of adventuresome New
York galleries that dealt in contemporary prints, including Grace Borgenicht,
the Contemporaries, and Weyhe Gallery. Some were purchased from the International
Graphic Arts Society, an organization that commissioned prints for sale
to its membership at modest prices. Still others came to the Library
through gift and bequest from Una Johnson, Curator of Prints and Drawings
at the Brooklyn Museum, who (along with the Library’s then print
curator, Karl Kup) championed many of these artists through exhibitions,
monographs, and her highly influential Brooklyn Museum National Print
Annual Exhibition.
In 1951, in her column for Art Digest, the critic Dore Ashton praised
the Library’s “refreshing interest in America’s contemporary
printmakers.” This interest, apparent in the selection of American
relief prints on view here, is a confirmation and validation of the Print
Collection’s long-standing commitment to the graphic arts in the
United States.
Ann Aspinwall, Margaret Glover, Nicole Simpson, Roberta Waddell
Staff of the Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of
Art, Prints and Photographs
This exhibition has been made possible by the continuing generosity
of Miriam and Ira D. Wallach.
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