American Prints between the Wars

February 26 to November 9, 2008

The years between the World Wars in the United States were a period of dramatic transformation that saw the growth of major metropolitan centres, but also the waning of farm populations and the shift from a primarily agricultural to an industrial society. It was during this same period that the United States saw a virtual explosion of activity in printmaking, which was centred primarily in New York. The works reflect the experiences of the times, ranging from postwar recollections and the exuberance of the 1920s to the despair of the Great Depression. The exhibition features works from the Museum’s collection, including many recent donations by Dr. Sean B. Murphy, as well as loans from private collectors.

American printmakers drew upon two streams of tradition in that country’s artistic heritage: a direct, realist presentation of life and the evocation of visionary experience, which transformed itself from the quasi-religious sentiment of nineteenth-century American painters to a social reform agenda. George Bellows’s The Murder of Edith Cavell, exhibited in New York just one month after the armistice, presents a propagandistic theme: the atrocities committed by the German forces during the Belgian occupation. The wood engravings of John Murphy, executed just after the War, in his “Cubo-Futurist” style, modelled on the English Vorticist movement, reflect his pre-War training in England. His works of the early 1920s, expressed in powerfully simplified figures, are resonant with themes of human spiritual yearning, from the suffering of soldiers in the trenches to the nobility of the work of harvesters. John Taylor Arms, America’s foremost etcher of the period, built on the tradition of the etching revival in nineteenth-century Europe to become a leading promoter of the technique, executing, with technical virtuosity and commercial success, hundreds of etchings between the 1920s and 1930s. His work is represented in the exhibition by a superb print of Manhattan as seen from the window of Knoedler’s (a prominent dealer), a recent gift to the Museum’s collection.

The unique New York skyline, evoking all the promise and inspirational yearnings of a new machine age, inspired many artists of the period. Prints in diverse techniques by Mark Freeman and Armin Landeck exult in the new urban profile. At the same time, Bellows, Martin Lewis, Benton Spruance and Reginald Marsh explore the life of common man in the city, from factory work (Lewis) to grim city realities and urban play (Bellows and Lewis) to the seedy world of the burlesque (Marsh). The isolation and private yearnings of the individual in society are also explored in the exhibition, most notably in Edward Hopper’s haunting Evening Wind, from the Freda and Irwin Browns Collection. Complementing these prints will be four exceptional photographs of the period by Ansel Adams from the Museum’s collection.