Etched into History

Edward Hopper, 1882-1967. Night Shadows. 1921/1924. Etching. Collection of Hannah S. Kully. © The Huntington

Even after Edward Hopper achieved some status as a painter, he continued to keep a press for etchings in his studio. Each day he’d enter his studio and toss his fedora hat onto the rarely used machine. In countless photographs and interview footage of Hopper, that machine usually lurks in the background. Hopper never could bring himself to part with that press, like an old trusted friend. When he wanted to give a special gift to someone, he’d crank up the old press and run off a copy of Night Shadows (above), demonstrating the pride he felt in the etchings he once turned to as a way to make money when his paintings weren’t selling. The exhibition Pressed in Time: American Prints 1905-1950 at The Huntington and the accompanying catalogue by Jessica Todd Smith and Kevin M. Murphy help explain Hopper’s fondness for the print genre and how the prints of that era reflected the people and history of America for nearly half a century. “We have selected prints that seem to capture the spirit of a certain cultural frisson that took place in art and culture of the United States during the first half of the twentieth century,” Smith writes in the catalogue. The prints selected from the Huntington’s massive collection of American prints demonstrate the same incisive eye and mastery of economy that the artists themselves displayed.

Samuel Margolies, 1898-1974. Man’s Canyons. 1936. Etching and aquatint. Collection of Hannah S. Kully. © The Huntington

At the dawn of the new century, the city rose like a natural wonder, flooding the imagination of artists and inspiring them to create works such as Samuel Margolies’ Man’s Canyons (above). Towering skyscrapers carried to the heavens the hopes and dreams of all society, offering the promise of endless possibility where the sky was, literally, the limit. Advances in publishing technology created a shift in the illustration world, leaving behind the need for literal journalism and moving forward to a world asking for images “deeply imbued with political and social engagement,” as Smith writes. The 1913 Armory Show brought the innovations of European modern art to America, further challenging artists to develop a new vision of their changing American environment. Margolies’ skyscrapers, rising vertically as the rays of light slash diagonally across the picture, owe as much to modern architecture as they do to Cubism.

Martin Lewis, 1881-1962. Glow in the City. 1929. Drypoint. Purchased with funds from Hannah and Russel Kully. © The Huntington

But not all hopes rose with the skyscrapers. Martin Lewis, who taught his friend Hopper etching techniques, captures the dichotomy of the modern city in Glow in the City (above), a romantic rendering of a woman wistfully gazing across the rooftops and washing lines at the tall building far in the distance. Hopper and Lewis both delved into the mood of the city lingering beneath the bustling excitement and the inexplicable sense of loneliness in the midst of teeming crowds. The artists of the Ashcan school, especially the former newspaper illustrators drawn to New York City for money and inspiration—such as John Sloan and George Bellows–also cast their eye upon the darker side of the city.

Charles Turzak 1899-1986. Man with Drill. ca. 1935. Woodcut. Collection of Hannah S. Kully. Printed with the permission of Joan Turzak Van Hees, daughter of Charles Turzak, Charles Turzak Studio/Gallery, Orlando Florida. © The Huntington

Charles Turzak’s Man with Drill (above) explicitly illustrates the dehumanization through labor of the time, when man and machine seemed troublingly one. Such images recall the German Expressionists and their fear of the machine and, by extension, the woodcut graphic novels of Franz Masereel. Where Masereel strung together long series of woodcuts into silent graphic novels of social commentary, single images such as Turzak’s ring just as powerfully as statements of social unrest. The visible vibrations rippling from the figure with the drill send shockwaves that threaten to topple the buildings in the background. In the face of the Great Depression and two world wars, such images strove to topple the powerful and help regain a sense of balance for the masses.

Childe Hassam, 1859-1935. The White Kimono. 1915. Etching. Gift of the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation. © The Huntington

In response to the ills of the dehumanizing city, many artists turned to small town America and more intimate scenes for an antidote. Regionalists such as Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton depicted farms and farming in a return to simpler, more natural living. Illustrators followed the Dust Bowl migration to California as those displaced victims searched for an American Eden. The American Impressionist Childe Hassam, in contrast, sought solace in personalized parlor scenes such as The White Kimono (above), a quietly beautiful testimony to the excellence of the American print at the same time it documented and probed the American psyche.

Smith and Murphy provide an excellent, if brief overview of the American print from the turn of the twentieth century up until the dawn of the day of television. They list all the major donations, including forthcoming gifts of works by John Sloan from Gary, Brenda, and Harrison Ruttenberg and the American print collection of Hannah S. Kully, that have made the Huntington’s collection so comprehensive today. The actor and comedian Steve Martin provided funds to make the exhibition possible. Martin collects American art and provided the narration to the video that accompanied the Hopper exhibition at the National Gallery of Art last year. (My review of that video here.) Martin’s involvement in this project exemplifies the mainstream appeal such an exhibit should have for the public at large. These prints hold up a mirror to America over the course of five decades in a way that even great photography can only approximate. Here is the American dream seen through the prism of the American artist’s imagination and rendered in clear black and white. When you look at images such as Pele deLappe’s Rumors of War, Washington, D.C., showing the anxious faces of people listening to a radio and anticipating war in 1939, you see the same anxiety on the faces of Americans today coming to terms with new rumors of war. Pressed in Time provides not just a lesson in history or art but a lesson in the history of the American soul.


[Many thanks to The Huntington for providing me with a review copy of the catalogue to Pressed in Time: American Prints 1905-1950 and for the images from the exhibition.]

In a Silent Way

Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels, selected and introduced by George A. Walker, (C) George A. Walker. Published by Firefly Books Ltd. $29.95. Reprinted with permission. http://www.fireflybooks.com/

“Since the time of my youth, I have protested against the society in which I am living,” Franz Masereel once said. In Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels, George A. Walker gathers together four of the greatest wordless woodcut novels of the twentieth century. “Only now, at the beginning of the 21st century, is Masereel being rediscovered as one of the most important graphic artists of the 20th century and the grandfather of the modern graphic novel,” Walker writes in his introduction. In addition to Masereel, Walker introduces a new generation to the art of Lynd Ward, Giacomo Patri, and Laurence Hyde. In addition to their obvious artistry in the field of woodcuts, the thread that holds these four artists together is their thirst for social justice. “The politics and social issues they address are specific to their times,” Walker says, “but the broader issues are, sadly, still relevant to our contemporary eyes.” Regardless of place or time, these artists speak in a silent way through pure imagery against the oppression of the weak by the strong, and offer some hope for a brighter future.

Walker begins with Masereel’s The Passion of a Man (1918), which set the standard for later graphic novels. A friend of George Grosz, Masereel works in a highly Expressionist style, favoring dramatic angles and lighting effects to heighten the drama and emotional impact of his images, similar to the best woodcut art of Die Brucke artists such as Emil Nolde and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Masereel follows his nameless hero from his birth in poverty to a young adulthood marked by hard labor and life in a fearsome city full of the temptations of alcohol and prostitution. Suddenly, he begins to read and a literal light from above illuminates his existence. After leading a strike against the cruel bosses, he is imprisoned and executed. The nameless hero radiates with an inner light before the firing squad much like Goya’s central figure of The Third of May, 1808. Such glorification of martyrdom in the name of resistance to authority earned Masereel the condemnation of the Nazis years later. By placing those condemning the hero to death beneath a cross, Masereel most likely didn’t endear himself to the churches, either.

Lynd Ward’s Wild Pilgrimage gives an American perspective on the deprivations of the early twentieth century. Ward studied in Germany and discovered Masereel’s work there. But, where Masereel’s technique demonstrates Expressionism, Ward creates images with finer detail that pulsates with the textures he generates. Ward introduced America to the wordless novel in 1929 with God’s Man, which sold 20,000 copies. Ward published Wild Pilgrimage in 1932, when the wounds of the 1929 Stock Crash were fresh and the Great Depression dominated the American consciousness. Wild Pilgrimage relates the odyssey of a young man who escapes the city and seeks a better life in the country. “In the American experience there is probably no more basic or recurrent impulse than to leave society,” Ward wrote of Wild Pilgrimage. “It is a madness—or a sanity—that can take hold of any citizen when the daily grind becomes suddenly more abrasive than anyone should be asked to endure.” Interspersing dream sequences with real events, Ward powerfully justifies Walker’s claim for a relationship between these early graphic novels and the early storyboard techniques for filmmaking. After witnessing a lynching in the countryside, Ward’s pilgrim encounters a farmer who educates him on standing up to the powers that be. The pilgrim returns to the city and joins a battle between union agitators and the police sent to disrupt them. In a final dream sequence, the pilgrim tears the head off of a whip-wielding boss. Looking into the disembodied head’s eyes, the pilgrim recognizes his own face, symbolizing the self-destructiveness of violent means even towards the proper ends. Such statements and his Socialist beliefs eventually gained Ward a place on the F.B.I.’s list of persons of interest.

From White Collar by Giacomo Patri, Copyright Estate of Tamara Rey Patri, courtesy of Georges Rey, excerpted from Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels, selected and introduced by George A. Walker, (C) George A. Walker. Published by Firefly Books Ltd. $29.95. Reprinted with permission. http://www.fireflybooks.com/

Another Depression era graphic novel, Giacomo Patri’s 1938 White Collar expresses that Socialist trend even more strongly, emphasizing the senseless of the division between white and blue collar workers. “White Collar was to be my contribution to, what I believed then, an indispensible understanding of the necessity of unity among all American workers and voters,” Patri later said. Surrealist images such as the huge, starch-stiffened white collar imprisoning the individual (above) convey Patri’s message more powerfully and concisely than any words possibly could. Patri’s semi-autobiographical story follows the path of a respectable, office-working family man who loses everything in the aftermath of the Stock Crash. A portrait of Christ as the Man of Sorrows looks down upon the worker and his family as their sorrows mount, until suddenly it disappears—either sold with other possessions to pay the bills or removed in a rejection of religion. Such ambiguities and gaps that beg the reader to fill in the details comprise just one of the great pleasures of these graphic novels, which paradoxically carry a greater narrative power for not using words.

Patri’s white collar worker later happens upon a union rally and slowly begins to understand the unity of all workers, eventually becoming an agitator for fairness himself. Rockwell Kent’s introduction to the 1940 edition of White Collar praised its uplifting message: “Into the darkness of depression it throws light; the tragic dissonances it resolves; and to the dead hope it brings resurrection.” The McCarthy hearings and “Red Menace” days of the 1950s forced Patri’s pro-labor California school to close, demonstrating the powerful threat that his ideas of unity posed to the establishment.

Laurence Hyde’s 1951 Southern Cross completes the quartet. Through his strong draftsmanship full of moving lines and rhythmic textures, Hyde denounces in Southern Cross the testing by the United States Government of the hydrogen bomb on the Bikini Atoll. Hyde juxtaposes the simple, harmonious life of the natives with the discordant “civilized” world of the sailors who come to take them off their homeland before the test begins. The two worlds collide violently in an exchange between a brutish seaman and a native defending his wife from sexual assault. Hyde’s sly humor comes across in the scenes in which the sailors explain the bomb to the natives. Festooning the bomb with an olive branch-bearing dove and angels and placing a rainbow over the post-detonation mushroom cloud, Hyde presents the same false, fantasy rationale that the American government gave to their own citizens to justify the arms race.

From Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels, selected and introduced by George A. Walker, (C) George A. Walker. Published by Firefly Books Ltd. $29.95. Reprinted with permission. http://www.fireflybooks.com/

Himself a woodcut artist, Walker clearly and illuminatingly explains many of the intricacies of the art. Several illustrations in his introduction (such as the one above) present an image from a woodcut, enlarge a single detail, and then show the tool used to achieve certain effects. Walker’s insider knowledge of the craft as well as his clear affinity for the spirit of these works makes him the perfect presenter of their art. My only complaint with Graphic Witness is that I wish they had included all of the introductions and other essays that accompanied the original works. Walker alludes to and frequently quotes from these pieces, but those bits only create a hunger for more. Knowing that Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse wrote introductions to Masereel’s The Passion of a Man makes me want to track down those original responses to the images. Rockwell Kent’s words on both White Collar and Southern Cross would provide not only a perceptive viewpoint on those works but also reinforce the influence of Kent’s work on the genre. Drawn and Quarterly in 2007 printed a facsimile edition of Southern Cross that included both Kent’s words and Hyde’s own that truly enhanced the experience. (My review of that facsimile is here.) As powerful as these silent works are, even that silence can be taken too far.

From White Collar by Giacomo Patri, Copyright Estate of Tamara Rey Patri, courtesy of Georges Rey, excerpted from Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels, selected and introduced by George A. Walker, (C) George A. Walker. Published by Firefly Books Ltd. $29.95. Reprinted with permission. http://www.fireflybooks.com/

“The artist is a witness of his time, but he can also be an accuser, a critic,” Masereel once wrote, “or he can celebrate in his works the uneasy greatness of his day.” Like the final scene of Patri’s White Collar (above), in which white collar and blue collar families march side by side in solidarity, these four wordless graphic novels stand together and transcend nationality and local politics to achieve a universality of the basic struggle of the haves versus the have nots. Each witnesses the ills of their time as well as the “greatness,” i.e., the indomitable spirit of the people. In an afterword, the modern graphic novelist Seth dismisses any true link between today’s graphic novels and these works. “Ultimately it’s a mistake to see these sublimely crafted wordless novels as mere precursors to today’s picture-novels,” Seth argues. “They stand on their own as fully realized artworks and don’t need to be drafted into someone else’s history.” Fortunately, the ideas these novels embody belong so inextricably to human history that no drafting is necessary.


[Many thanks to Firefly Books for providing me with a review copy of this book as well as the images above.]