The Velvet Print Road of Howard Norton Cook

Howard Norton Cook (American,1901–1980) was a well-known printmaker and WPA period muralist. He was born and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts.

He ventured to New York City in 1919 to attend the Art Students League where he also painted outdoor billboards and worked in printmaking shops between his art classes. In 1922 he began to work as an illustrator creating prints and drawings for several popular magazines like Harper's, Scribner's, Atlantic Monthly, Forum and Survey.

It was while he was working as an illustrator for Forum and Century magazines that he spent two months in Santa Fe before moving to Taos. The experience was transformative and had a lasting impression upon his artwork. While in Taos he met and married fellow artist Barbara Latham.

Cook’s Taos-period artwork reflected his fascination with Native American ceremonial dances from the pueblos, adobe structures, and landscapes which differed so greatly from his earlier urban work. Also he produced a series of prints based upon the Grand Canyon.

Cook and his wife traveled to Paris in 1929, and when they returned to New York, his subject matter shifted toward the city’s numerous construction projects.

He worked under the WPA program, producing murals for courthouses in Pittsburgh and Springfield, MA, plus a large fresco for a San Antonio post office in 1937.
In 1938, the couple re-settled near Taos, on the Talpa ridge.

During World War II he served in the South Pacific as an artist-war correspondent for the US Navy. In 1943 he was appointed Leader of a War Art Unit and served in the Solomon Islands.

In the 1940s, Cook's work focused mostly on American Southwest scenes. By the end of the decade, his style had become much more abstract. He moved toward making collages by the 1950s.

During his career Cook taught as a guest professor at several art schools and universities. His work continued to gain attention long after he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which confined him to a wheelchair and stopped his art career.

The look of Cook’s work reminds us of the work of notable WPA era artists, Margaret Bourke-White and her industrial machinery, simplicity of fellow Taos artist Gustave Baumann’s compositions, the watercolors of Charles Sheeler, and the watercolors of the legendary John Marin.

Cook’s blacks are the most luscious, velvety of blacks ever seen, and his lines define contours and form in a way that wraps itself around his subjects – whether human or industrial I-beams. Both are carefully and equally handled to reveal his interest in the subject, making us envious of his skill and his experiences to see these wonderful places. He makes us jealous of his compositions; full of angularly unique lines and shapes.

The man’s work is a treasure, and it needs to be seen more often. Give these images a good look, and take a step back into time when NYC was a bustling joint and the American Southwest was his peaceful counterpart to the urban scene. It’s no wonder many east coast artists flocked out to New Mexico, and still do. It is an uplifting, artistic mecca where one can find time to reflect and renew our creative spirit.Cook takes us on his velvet print road of adventure and we are all better informed artistically for it.

Awards:
Two Guggenheim Fellowships
Membership in the National Academy as a graphic artist
Gold Medal for mural painting by the Architectural League of New York
First Artist in Residence at the Roswell Museum - 1967
SFB Morse Gold Medal from the National Academy of Design

Public Collections:
Albuquerque Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Baltimore Museum of Art
Bibliotheque Nationale
British Museum
Fogg Art Museum
Harvard University
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Minneapolis Art Institute
Museum of Modern Art
Newark Museum
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Princeton Museum of Art
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Victoria & Albert Museum
Whitney Museum of American Art

New York City's Immigrant Printmaker Martin Lewis

Australian-born printmaker, Martin Lewis (1881–1962) came from Castlemaine, Victoria. As a migrant to the United States, Lewis was deeply involved in the artistic scene of New York City during the 1920s and ‘30s and he lived in the city for most of his career.

Lewis portrayed all aspects of city life including workers, buildings, and the city’s inhabitants. He liked depicting the ladies walking to and from work in their wraps and high heels. He produced prints that captured the pulse of New York City; reading as a cross-section of urban life and the sprawl of suburbia.

Lewis came from a large family of eight children and at the age of 15 he set out to start his career as an artist; traveling to New South Wales and New Zealand. He mainly did heavy manual labor jobs before he returned to Sydney and settled into a Bohemian community.

During this brief period, some of Lewis’ art was published in Sydney’s newspaper, The Bulletin, and he studied at the Art Society's School with noted Australian artist/printmaker, Julian Ashton.

In 1900, Lewis left Australia for the United States. He went to California and got a job painting stage decorations for presidential campaigner William McKinley. Then he later moved to New York, where he worked as a commercial illustrator.

1915 is the first known date of a printed image by Lewis that we find, although it seems he was already familiar with the process. During this period, he helped Edward Hopper learn printmaking and when we see their images, we can see the similarities in composition, line and movement.

In 1920, Lewis traveled to Japan where he studied Japanese art. The influence of Japanese prints was very strong in Lewis's prints, when starting in 1925, he produced a group of eighty-one etching up until 1935. (This was out of his one hundred and forty-eight known images.)

Lewis's first solo exhibition in 1929 was successful enough for him to concentrate entirely on printmaking. Lewis is most famous for his black and white prints, mostly of night scenes of New York City. During the Depression, however, he left NYC between 1932 and 1936 and moved to Newtown, Connecticut. When Lewis returned to New York City, he discovered the interest in his work had passed. He also taught at the Art Students League from 1944 to 1951. He died in 1962 in New York City in relative obscurity.

In 2011, the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, presented a highly acclaimed exhibition of Lewis’ work.

I have to say that Martin lewis' work grabbed me at first sight. It has a swing to it, and then there are images where we feel like the character he puts into the composition, where we look up at the skyscrapers of the city in awe, or look down upon the brightly lit street scenes at night.

Lewis' influence of Japanese art is strongly felt through his long diagonal lines and interesting angles of the street scenes. Whether the people of the city are heavily clad in their coats sloshing through a bitter winter scene, or barely clad in summer attire looking for a cool place to get in from the hot evening air, we feel the pulse of the city and the people that maneuver through it.

I especially enjoy how Lewis recreates the bluster of a winter snowstorm, and the steady gentle rain of spring.He understands the weather and its effects upon people in the street.

Likewise, i like how he handles groups of women going out at night together, or coming home after their work shifts. Also, the boys playing in the back of the yards neighborhood, burning their own evening fire, or the dockworkers against the New York skyline are a sight to behold for their individuality, and the stirring beauty of the city's architectural achievements at that time.

Lewis adopted New York City as his own, and his love of the city and its inhabitants is palpable. It goes to show that immigrants can entirely embrace the best and the worst of a different culture, sometimes more than the people who were born in their own country. Lewis loved the hustle and the rush of the city, and breadth of it's grandeur. We are fortunate to have rediscovered this printmaking treasure, for he has captured the essence of New York City as it was climbing in prominence, and became the mecca of the world.

The Enigmatic Grandeur of Rockwell Kent

Rockwell Kent (1882–1971), who grew up in New York City, was a writer, architect, adventurer, sailor, family man and a social activist. He studied art with several influential painters like  Arthur Wesley Dow at the Art Students League, William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri at the New York School of Art, and he apprenticed with Abbott Handerson Thayer. He also did undergraduate studies in architecture at Columbia University .

After his studies, Kent helped organize the Exhibition of Independent Artists in 1910. He did illustrations from 1912-1916 for a radical journal called The Masses. He also admired the writings of Thoreau and Emerson, and he found inspiration in the beauty of wilderness so much that he lived in Newfoundland , Alaska ,Tierra del Fuego, Ireland , Greenland and Asgaard Farm, in Au Sable Forks, New York. While he lived in Alaska, he spent a winter at Fox Island where he published a series of illustrations called Wilderness. From the 1920s through the 1950s, Kent established a reputation as an engraver, lithographer and illustrator of books. His bold and enigmatic images were seen in Vanity Fair, New York Tribune, Harper's Weekly, and the original Life magazine,  and he is most famously known for having illustrated Moby Dick.

Kent shifted his priorities to progressive politics and in 1939 he became increasingly active with a Communist organization called the Harlem Lodge of the International Workers Order (IWO), he served as the organizations’ President from 1944-53.  He was the first American artist to have work exhibited in the Soviet Union, and he donated several hundred of his paintings and drawings to the Soviet peoples. He became an honorary member of the Soviet Academy of Fine Arts, and later received the Lenin Peace Prize in 1967. A portion of the Lenin Prize monies was awarded to women and children in North and South Vietnam. 

Kent's increasing support for a Soviet-American fiendship affected his stature as an artist, and his popularity declined in the postwar years. He fell out of favor with the American public and his sympathies about the Cold War era made him a target of the US government. As with many people subject to Senator Joseph McCarthy's scrutiny, Kent was blacklisted and his US passport was revoked. 

When Kent died, The New York Times described him as "... a thoughtful, troublesome, profoundly independent, odd and kind man who made an imperishable contribution to the art of bookmaking in the United States."

Kent often portrays an enigmatic solitary, iconic figure in some form of repose or contemplation of the grandeur of Nature; caught in some spiritual/physical conflict, even pathos. Based upon the twists of his own life, it would be easy to assimilate how these figures were manifestations of himself. The interesting thing is how he does it with economy of means. His lines are crisp, clean and while his images are for the most part a small scale, the figures emanate out of their confinement and project a grand, imposing posture. One relates easily with his compositions, which call the viewer and his figures in these images to be a part of ‘the infinite’. Nothing could be more beautiful than his white, Modernist Deco-influenced figures against the dense, black vastness in which he makes them dwell and fight to maneuver.

Kent's images were seen as increasingly radical and his creative style was overshadowed by the new modernist art movement.  When Abstract Expressionism became popular, it pushed his  work further into obscurity.

The Archives of American Art holds Kent’s correspondence repository, while the Philadelphia Museum of Art has one of the more comprehensive collections of Rockwell Kent prints, drawings, and illustrated books, (collected by Kent’s longtime friend, Carl Zigrosser).

For further reading, Kent’s autobiography, called It's Me O Lord, was published in 1955.

The Holiday Season Isn't Complete Without Currier & Ives

The holiday season is upon is and it can't be properly celebrated without noting the accomplishments of one of the most lucrative and popular printing establishments in US history.This lovely scene, showing a winter-time horse and carriage race, is a fine example of the types of prints produced by Currier & Ives.

The partnership of Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives was formed in 1852 and lasted until 1902. Its popularity stemmed largely from commercial projects, including sheet music, architectural plans,  and pictorial images for the New York Sun newspaper. Their timeliness to produce images based upon topics from the daily news gained them national exposure, and allowed them to pursue other projects like landscapes, and images of Americana  - and the implied enjoyments found therein.

Currier was a trainer printer and worked in several establishments before starting his own business in 1835, on Wall Street in New York City, called simply 'N.Currier, lithographer'. He did all types of subjects, just to keep the business flowing, but when he latched onto the idea of doing prints about newsworthy and natural disasters, the business took off.  Currier was introduced to Jim Ives through his brother Charles. Ives' background as a bookkeeper and an artist served Currier's interests well. They worked together for five years, and then formed the partnership of 'Currier & Ives' in 1857.  The two complimented each others' professional ideas and personal temperaments and became lifelong friends as well as business partners.

The production of Currier & Ives images was traditional lithography, but because of demand and production capabilities of the day, they employed young immigrant women to 'color' their images in an assembly line, loosely resembling the traditions of medieval monasteries to color Biblical illustrations. They moved to 33 Spruce Street in New York City and operated a highly efficient business on  three floors - one for the printing of images, one for the workmen and grinding of stones, and one for the 'coloring' department. It was said that during the Civil War, the production of images was so high, they had to go to a stencil method of coloring images rather than use actual artists. Currier & Ives also outsourced some of the color work, and they had dealers selling their images. It was also popular back then for schools to order black and white prints to teach painting to their classes.

On a side note, Currier's relatives helped in the business. His younger brother, Charles, was trained as a lithographer, and patented a lithographic pencil called Crayola,  while his artistic brother, Lorenzo, traveled the US sketching ideas for the numerous Americana images that are so popular today. His cousin, who supplied Currier with all his presses, operated a printing press business called Cyrus Currier & Son, in Newark, New Jersey.

Nat and Jim called their business "publishers of cheap and popular pictures". In all, they produced over 7500 titles, and printed over one million images between 1835-1907. Both men passed their business partnership onto their sons who operated until 1907. The popularity of these images transcends to today, and they are seen as a vitally important part of American history and its interests from the period. Happy Holidays to one and all!