Chicago's Own Printmaker, Eldzier Cortor

The joy of this blog is when I find some new, or elder, printmaker’s work that I haven’t seen before. We have some mighty fine colleagues out there, and Eldzier Cortor is one of the good ones. I hope you enjoy his work as much as I do. Recently, a major gift of Cortor’s work was given to the Art Institute of Chicago, and anyone can make an appointment go see Cortor’s prints in their fabulous Print & Drawing Room.

Notable for his prints and paintings, African-American artist and printmaker Eldzier Cortor was born in 1916, in Tidewater, VA, to John and Ophelia Cortor. His family was a part of the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural south to the industrial north at the beginning of the 1900s. His family moved to the south side of Chicago when Cortor was about a year old. He later attended Englewood High School with other notable African-American artists, such as Margaret Burroughs and Charles Wilbert White.

He attended the Art Institute of Chicago, gaining a degree in 1936. While there, he came under the influence of instructor Kathleen Blackshear, who led students to explore the regional arts of Africa and other non-Western cultures at University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, and the Field Museum. Studying the African sculptures at the Field Museum transformed his work. "That was the most important influence in all my work, for to this day you will find in my handling of the human figure that cylindrical and lyrical quality I was taught...to appreciate in African art."

He also studied at the Institute of Design. Cortor, like his peers in the Harlem Renaissance, sought to reclaim his ancestral heritage as a means of informing and empowering his art. He searched for positive Black imagery, which he found in Chicago’s South Side working-class, in the former slave cultures of the U.S. South and Caribbean, and, finally, in the iconic Black female figure.

In 1940 he worked with the Works Progress Administration (WPA), where he drew scenes of Depression-era Bronzeville, a near south side Chicago neighborhood. Cortor received two Rosenwald Foundation grants, in 1944 and 1945, to live with the Gullah people in the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina. In 1949, Cortor received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in Jamaica, Cuba, and Haiti, and he taught at the Centre d'Art in Port-au-Prince from 1949–1951.

During his career, Cortor produced several prints in the mid-1950s with Japanese printmaker Jun’ichiro Sekino, who was a leading member of the Sosaku Hanga, or Creative Prints, movement. Between 1955 and 1998, he made experimental prints at New York’s famous Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop.

Cortor was one of the first African-American artists to make African-American women his primary theme, saying, "the Black woman represents the Black race, continuance of life." These women have been a central focus of Eldzier Cortor’s work for much of his career; their elongated sculptural features appearing timeless and modern. It was when Cortor lived with the Gullah people that he became fascinated with their deep cultural African ties to their ancestry, and this prompted him to depict Woman as an archetypal image.

Cortor’s work is also influenced by surrealism, "who often uses the female figure in a surreal interior and exterior environment." While much of his work displays a strength and hopefulness, other series, such as his Haitian-influenced slaughterhouse series speak of suffering, oppression and racism. The lasting impression of Cortor’s work shows his pride of his ancestry, and love of the female form. These compositions show off, unabashedly, Cortor’s free expressive color, form and loose compositions; and the female nude as tall, lean powerful and sensual figures. His gift to the Art Institute of Chicago cannot be diminished in importance because he is one of the major figures of Chicago’s African American art scene. We can only hope to see more of his work as he continues to make art, and especially prints.

Exhibitions:
1938 - "An Exhibition in Defense of Peace and Democracy", the Chicago Artists' Group
1940 - "The Exhibition of the Art of the American Negro", in Chicago.
1967 - City College of New York, "The Evolution of Afro-American Artists: 1800 - 1950"
1976 - Los Angeles County Museum of Art, "Two Centuries of Black American Art", (which toured the U.S. in 1977.)
1988 - "Three Masters", Kenkeleba Gallery, NY, (with Hughie Lee-Smith and Archibald Motley)
2002 - "Eldzier Cortor: Master Printmaker", Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, MA
2010 - Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
2010 - Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington, IN
2013 - San Antonio Museum of Art, TX

Collections:
Howard University
The Smithsonian American Art Museum
The Art Institute of Chicago

Awards:
Art Institute of Chicago, Advisory Committee’s Legends and Legacy Award

Publications:
Matthew Backer and Jennifer Heusel, “Black Spirit”: Works on Paper by Eldzier Cortor (Indiana University Art Museum, 2006).

The Original Lonely Boy: Edward Hopper

American painter and printmaker, Edward Hopper (1882-1967), was born in Nyack, New York. He was one of two children raised in an upper middle-class family of Dutch descent. He was well-educated and well-read in the classics. By the age of 17 he had already decided to become an artist, but his parents wanted him to him to have a stabile income so they encouraged him to study commercial illustration. While still in school, Hopper worked part-time with an advertising agency, where he did cover designs for trade magazines. He attended the New York School of Illustrating and then the New York School of Art. At the NYSA he studied with both William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri. Hopper once said of Henri that he was 'the most influential teacher I had'.

Hopper later went to study in Paris, but claimed no European influence except French engraver Charles Méryon. He also went to visit England, The Netherlands, France, Germany and Spain on his travels. He spent several years searching for what he became known for as his ’American Scene’ imagery. In 1913, Hopper sold his first painting  at the Armory Show.  Although his paintings were showing and selling, he still had to earn a living as a commercial illustrator; something he despised.  

 In 1915 Hopper chose to make etchings, which was a new market. He produced about 70 works, many of urban scenes in Paris and New York. Around 1920 Hopper’s etchings began to get the public’s attention and they began to sell more than his paintings. His prints reflected a similar sense of isolationism as his other work, but the stark black and white of his beautifully etched plates have drama, movement, jossling, bustling and an amazing quiet that can be found under a city streetlamp. His lines barely ‘describe’ his figures, but they are representative of every city’s figures. There are old and young and wealthy and working-class all wrapped up together, struggling to find their way through his sea of humanity with the sparest means possible. His prints are rich and textured and immensely satisfy our desires to be a part of his images.

Hopper moved to Washington Square in the Greenwich Village section of New York City where he would live for the rest of his life. In 1923 he renewed his friendship with fellow artist ,Jo Nivison and they married soon after.  She was his lifelong companion, and became the female model for all his work for the rest of their lives.

The Depression of the 1930s had little effect upon him or his popularity. He lived well and sold much work during this period. It wasn’t until the 1950s when the new Abstract Expressionist movement’s style made Hopper lose the public’s attention, but he didn’t care because the new style didn’t appeal to his realist, puritan sensibilities. He and his wife kept to themselves, and in the last two decades before his death, Hopper’s health suffered from several ailments. He died in his New York studio, and his wife died several months later; bequeathing their joint collection (over 3000 combined works) to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Some of his major works are also found in the New York Museum of Modern Art, The Des Moines Art Center, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

As for his influences, Hopper's visibility in art and popular culture is far-reaching. Artists such as Willem de Kooning, Jim Dine, and Mark Rothko have named him as an influence upon their work. Hopper's dramatic use of light and shadow has made him a favorite among filmmakers, namely Alfred Hitchcock, Terrence Malick, Sam Mendes  and Ridley Scott. Stores sell countless posters of “Homages to Nighthawks” featuring famous icons James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. He even influenced Japanese animation.

His birthplace and boyhood home was made into a non-profit community cultural center in 1971. It features exhibitions, workshops, lectures, performances and special events. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000, and is known as the Edward Hopper House Art Center. www.edwardhopperhouse.org/

Much is made of Hopper’s lonely figures in the big city, and his solitary figures languishing by a window watching the world go by.  There is something truly arresting about his figures, where the person is enjoying finding a quiet corner of a park to sit a read a newspaper. His nighttime scenes harbor the most lonely, bleak outlook. People riding trains looking out at a skyline are like every newcomer to a big city; eyes full of wonder and dreams yet to be fulfilled. And a couple huddled together on a train in an intimate exchange, stops us and makes is wish we were one of those two people oblivious to their surroundings.

Hoppers’ two primary subject sources

were average American places and people (gas stations, motels, restaurants, and street scenes) and rural landscapes. He would give the viewer a pulse of the city as being dangerous, but also a place where someone could find quiet and peace. His figures were usually placed in small, solitary confinements in his high-contrasted compositions, and his more intimate interactions between a couple make viewers become voyeurs. The emotional impact of his work is a sort of loneliness, quietude, and resignation, but something of knowing oneself also come through Hopper’s figures. They know what they want, even if it isn’t where they are at the present. There is an awareness of their environment, and a vision of where they want to go. Hopper’s work, like great cinema, infinitely fascinates us for what is he does not portray, what is not said, but then his images don’t have to. He gives us everything we need to know in what is not seen, what is not heard….