Bruce Weber
UPCOMING EVENTS
Gallery Talk on Grant Arnold
This Saturday Nov. 4th - 2:30 p.m.
Woodstock School of Art
Next: Sat. Dec. 2nd - 2 p.m.
Grant Arnold was active as a lithographic printer and printmaker in Woodstock from 1930-1940. A selection of approximately 60 of his important efforts as a printer in the Catskill Mountain town, as well as a sampling of his accomplishments as a printer for parts of 1930-1932 at the Art Students League in New York City, are the core of an exhibition drawn from the Grant Arnold Collection of Fine Prints at the Tyler Art Gallery, State University of New York at Oswego, on view at the Woodstock School of Art through December 9th. An illustrated catalog featuring an essay on Arnold's activity and achievement in Woodstock is available from the school for $20 plus tax and shipping. To purchase a copy go to https://woodstockschoolofart.org/product/grant-arnold-and-the-golden-era-of-woodstock-lithography-1930-1940-catalog/ .
This month's post features additional writing (not included in the catalog) on all the artists that Arnold printed for in the exhibition, plus images of all the works.
In December, Learning Woodstock Art Colony will present a post featuring the prints created by Arnold in the exhibition, which also are drawn from the collection of the State University of New York at Oswego. As noted above, there is a second gallery talk on December 2nd at 2 p.m.
Arnold Blanch (1896-1968)
The Derelict, c. 1931
Arnold Blanch (1896-1968)
Landscape, c. 1934-1935
Arnold Blanch was a long-time leader in the artistic community of Woodstock and a driving force in the growth and effectiveness of the Woodstock Artists Association. He hired Arnold as the association’s printer in 1930, and when the institution momentarily floundered during the 1930s he helped reinforce the art colony with new members. He and his wife Lucille’s interest in lithography developed in 1928 in Paris, where they worked with the printer Edouard Desjobert.
Blanch was primarily active in the 1920s and early 1930s as a landscape painter. His outdoor views, such as Landscape, are often panoramic in scope, uh ok reflective of his enthusiasm for a favored compositional approach of the 19th century Hudson River School. The Derelict of 1931 was drawn completely with crayon, and features an old beat-up Ford touring car that was abandoned at the Maverick art colony in West Hurley.[1] In the early years of the Great Depression, Blanch began to include elements of decay and desolation in his landscapes. Soon he depicted homesteads going to ruin after their third mortgage, shabby villas, and farms in peril.
Lucille Blanch (1895-1981)
Maggie, 1931
Lucille Blanch was active as a painter and printmaker. She became interested in lithography in 1928 in Paris, where she worked at the Atelier Desjobert. Among her prints are a series of lithographs devoted to local life, including a scene of a comical country auction that was printed by Arnold in 1930 (Woodstock Artists Association and Museum). Maggie pictures the Maverick cat, who went around from place to place, and her litter of kittens. When Maggie had kittens, she found the most convenient place to have them was in Lucille’s closet. Arnold recalled that Maggie “belonged to no one and who got a meal where she could. . . .”[2] He related that everybody on the Maverick “knew Maggie. Every time she came around and meowed you’d feed her.”[3]
Clarence Bolton (1893-1962)
After the Storm (Getting Water), February 1938
P
Clarence Bolton (1893-1962)
Country Church (Town Church), 1939
Clarence Bolton (1893-1962)
Winter, c. 1939
Arnold and Clarence Bolton were close friends. They started working together in January of 1938. Over the next two years they collaborated on 15 lithographs, the largest body of work Arnold printed for any single artist in the colony, surpassing the seven lithographs that he is known to have printed for Kuniyoshi, the 11 for John McClellan, and the eight for Elizabeth Bush Woiceske. Some of the prints include Arnold’s dry stamp at lower right of the image area. The prints by Bolton distributed by the Works Progress Administration include the stamp of the Federal Art Project of New York State on the verso.
Bolton’s lithographs chronicle an idyllic ramble through the rural landscape of Woodstock, primarily when the area is covered by a fresh and glistening snowfall. The artist also created lithographs of familiar scenes and places around town at various times of the year, including people doing chores and activities common to country life. Bolton’s lithographs are distinguished by their elegant design, emphasis on the geometry of overlapping mounds, hills or mountains, bold silhouette of sky, and sense of wonder before the unfolding spectacle of nature.
Reeves Brace (1898-1932)
Siesta, 1931
Reeves Brace and her husband, the writer and craftsman Ernest Brace, were a vital part of the Woodstock artistic community. In 1924, Ernest collaborated with the artist and illustrator Rudolf Wetterau in editing The Woodstock Almanac, which features Reeves Brace’s woodblock The Gentleman Farmer. Around a dozen works by Reeves are known, including landscapes, still lifes, animal subjects, and a sporting scene. Two lithographs have surfaced. A crayon drawing served as the source of Siesta, one of a few known pictures by the artist of cats. Her lithograph Mearn’s View (c. 1932-1934, Historical Society of Woodstock) was likely also printed by Arnold, who recalled Reeves as a pretty young lady whom he used to meet when they worked down in the shop at the Woodstock Artists Association.[4]
Ross Braught (1898-1983)
Untitled (Kingston: Ten Miles), 1931
Ross Braught (1898-1983)
Road Scraper (Road Grader), 1931
The painter, lithographer, and draftsman Ross Braught was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and studied in the early 1920s at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art under Daniel Garber. Braught moved to Woodstock in 1928, primarily drawn by his desire to find inspiration in a place of peace and beauty. During his time in town he produced a series of lithographs derived from scenes in Kingston and near his house in Woodstock. In his prints, Braught favored intriguing focal points taken from a high perspective, which give them an otherworldly quality, and employed branching patterns and interlocking forms. In 1931 he exhibited his lithographs alongside those of Arnold, Emil Ganso, Marion Greenwood, Paul Rohland, Caroline Speare Rohland, and David McCosh in a special showing of prints in a room adjacent to the main gallery at the Woodstock Artists Association. That year Braught took a job as head of the painting department at the Kansas City Art Institute.
John Wesley Carroll (1892-1959)
Head, 1930
John Wesley Carroll (1892-1959)
Untitled (Wrestlers), 1930
John Carroll was active as a lithographer beginning in the late teens. During World War I, he made lithographs for the Navy of the United States fleet in action, operating between Brest and St. Nazarre in France. He spent the summer of 1928 in Paris, where he made a series of lithographs, among them portraits, figure studies, landscapes, and café and circus scenes, which were printed at the Atelier Desjobert. Carroll was the first artist to come to Arnold’s shop to have a lithograph done. When Arnold introduced himself and told him his name, Carroll responded, “Everybody in town knows that you are here and what you are going to do.”[5] Wrestlers was the first lithograph Arnold printed on the Woodstock Artists Association press besides one of his own.[] Head is a portrait of Carroll’s wife, the concert pianist Inez Carroll, and was done with delicate crayon work, some scraping, and a dark edge with a soft crayon around the contour.
Konrad Cramer (1888-1963)
Figure, 1933
Konrad Cramer experimented with just about every known printing technique. What was new and untried always attracted and challenged him. Upon returning to Woodstock from a trip to Europe in 1920, he took up printmaking—especially woodcut, block printing, and lithography—and began publishing prints in local art publications, including The Plowshare andThe Hue and Cry. About this time Andrew Dasburg, Henry Lee McFee, and he, studied lithography with Bolton Brown at McFee’s studio.[7] In 1921 he created a group of lithographs which were printed by Brown, whose efforts as a lithographic printer and printmaker will be touched on below. In 1927, Cramer ran a class in lithography at his house and then in the basement of the Woodstock Artist Association, the space that would later be uilized by Arnold. In addition to managing Arnold’s workshop (at least during 1930), Cramer took advantage of Arnold’s printing skills. Arnold printed a lithograph of a townscape in 1932, and Figure in 1933, which features a combination of rubbed tints and line drawing.
Adolf Dehn (1895-1968)
Native of Woodstock (Hurkey), 1933
Adolf Dehn was widely regarded in the 1920s and 1930s as among America’s greatest lithographers. He reshaped native printmaking by his production of lithographs that had the tonal and textural richness of painting. He broke away from the traditional method of applying pointed crayons, and, instead, mopped broad washes onto the stone with crayon, water and a rag, and utilized sandpaper, erasers, and razor blades to rub, pick, scratch, scrape, caress, or attack the stone, which he later explained in his book How to Draw and Print Lithographs, written with Lawrence Barrett.
In 1928 the Atelier Desjobert printed 75 of Dehn’s lithographs, which prominently feature prostitutes, nightclub performers, and patrons. The artist and important writer on American prints Clinton Adams noted that Dehn ”delighted in Desjobert’s willingness to undertake complex manipulations of the stone, including methods that [the popular New York City printer George] Miller most likely would have discouraged.”[8] In 1931, Arnold worked extensively with Dehn at the Art Students Lague, printing at least six of his lithographs. In the summer of 1933 Dehn stayed on the Maverick with Arnold and Lucille Blanch, art school chums from Minneapolis. and worked with Arnold on the printing of Native of Woodstock, a humorous portrait of the Lake Hill farmer Hercules Davis.
Emmett Edwards (1906-1982)
Abstraction, 1933
Born in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, Emmett Edwards studied at the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In 1933 he came to Woodstock to paint landscapes, drawn there by his friend the landscape painter Stanley W. Crane. He and his artist wife Eleanor settled for 40 years on the Maverick, living in a rustic house across from the writer Henry Morton Robinson. Edwards specialized in watercolor, and created a small body of oils. He worked directly from nature, and liked to fill the paper to its margins. Arnold reported that Abstraction was the only lithograph Edwards ever created, and was based on a crayon drawing.[9]] The artist favored free-flowing and almost calligraphic, curved, sweeping lines.
Karl E. Fortess (1907-1993)
Dead End, c. 1934
Painter, printmaker and teacher Karl Fortess grew up in Chicago, and attended the Art Institute of Chicago. He went to New York City in the late 1920s and found work at the New York Public Library, where he met Grant Arnold who was also employed there. In 1930, he hitched a ride to Woodstock, where he asked a man on the street where he could find Arnold Blanch. The man gave him a lift to Hervey White’s house on the Maverick, and White arranged for him to live in an attic room. Fortess studied with Yasuo Kuniyoshi at the Woodstock School of Painting, and was impacted by his teacher’s stark and desolate landscapes. Dead End was created under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, for whom Arnold was involved in Woodstock for most of the period from 1934 to 1939 as a lithographic printer and printmaker. This WPA print was created with some scraping, and features a view of a cemetery, a junked automobile with a broken window, and a beat-up old building.
Aline Fruhauf (1907-1978)
Self Portrait, 1931
Aline Fruhauf (1907-1978)
The Ohta Children, 1931
Aline Fruhauf (1907-1978)
Untitled (Portrait of Kuniyoshi), 1932
Aline Fruhauf (1907-1978)
Still Another Self Portrait, 1933
Aline Fruhauf is mostly known as a caricaturist of personalities in art, music, literature, theater and film. Over the course of her career she worked in a variety of media, including oil, encaustic, watercolor, dry brush, pen and ink, lithography, woodcut, and etching. Her interest in caricature was sparked while in high school in New York City. Fruhauf was attracted to the work of Ralph Barton published in Vanity Fair and Judge. He became her mentor, and made her aware of the historical importance of caricature as an art form. In the late 1920s, Fruhauf contributed caricatures regularly to the daily New York newspapers as well as the magazine Musical America. Fruhauf enrolled at the Art Students League in 1930 in order to make the transition from creating caricatures for commercial publications to exhibiting and selling her work in galleries.
Arnold first printed for Fruhauf in Woodstock and then at the Art Students League. She spent the summers of 1930 to 1933 in Woodstock. During the summer of 1930 she visited the dance instructor and writer Don Oscar Becque at his studio in Byrdcliffe to discuss the possibility of illustrating his forthcoming textbook on dance. She found the young dance pupils delightful to draw, and that her pencil drawing of a nine-year-old boy “had a richness I had never achieved before, and when someone suggested that I make a lithograph of it. I took it to the workshop of the artist-printer Grant Arnold.”[10] A lithograph of the dance class dating from 1931 is in the collection of the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum.
During her time in Woodstock Fruhauf created caricatures of numerous artists, including Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Konrad Cramer, Arnold Blanch, Lucille Blanch, Adolf Dehn, Doris Lee, and Harry Gottlieb. Dehn made a caricature of Fruhauf that appeared in Creative Arts in February 1933 under the caption “Adolf Dehn retaliates.”[11] Fruhauf frequently made fun of herself. In her self-portrait of 1933, which she dedicated to Arnold, Fruhauf comically exagerates her eyes, nose, and neck, and poses herself sitting at her drawing table with a small landscape painting she created in Woodstock in the background.
Fruhauf’s caricatures usually show the subject at work, or incorporate a telling personal detail, attribute or element of the subject’s profession. The artist related that her first caricature of Kuniyoshi (which appeared in Creative Arts in 1929), showed him posed in “his customary Woodstock garb: weathered khaki shirt and pants and an old hat pulled down over his eyes. Because of his well-defined jawline, small even features, and extremely noncommittal expression, he was easy to draw. In addition to [this] ink drawing, I made a lithograph in Arnold’s printing shop and Arnold pulled a few proofs.”[12]
The Ohta Children was created in Woodstock in the summer of 1931. Arnold remarked that Fruhauf was a good friend of the Ohtas, and that the “drawing is a good likenesses of the children but it still has the feeling of a slight caricature.”[13] The lithograph pictures Allen and Toshi Ohta, children of Takashi Ueda Ohta and Virginia Harper Ohta. Son of an elite Japanese family, Takashi left his native country in 1911 to travel the world, and came to America in the late teens on a British merchant ship. The couple briefly moved to Munich in 1921, where they were married and Toshi was born. Six months later they returned to America.
In 1928, Takashi was hired as the set designer in New York City for the Provincetown Players. Later that year he became the set designer and scenic director of the Maverick Theatre. In 1935, the Ohtas moved back to New York City where four years later Toshi met the singer and musician Pete Seeger at a square dance at the High School of Music and Art. They married in 1943. Toshi went onto a career as a filmmaker, producer, manager, environmental activist, and potter, and was a specialist on the subject of folk music. In the 1970s she become known for her work with the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, founded to advance the goal of cleaning up the polluted Hudson.
In 1936, Fruhauf joined the Graphics Division of the WPA Federal Art Project, where she continued to hone her skills in lithography, and created a series of caricatures of WPA artists. After moving in 1944 to Washington, D.C., she resumed her interest in lithography, and revived her friendship with Prentiss Taylor, a former classmate in Locke’s class at the Art Students League, who suggested that she work with the printer George Miller in New York.[14]
Harry Gottlieb (1895-1992)
The Roundhouse, 1930
The Romanian born painter and printmaker Harry Gottlieb visited Hervey White in the fall of 1921 on the advice of a friend after he had saved enough money to be free to paint for a whole summer. White agreed to rent him, and his artist-wife Eugenie Gershoy, one of the Maverick art colony’s cottages on a year-round basis if he brought in other couples, so he wouldn’t feel too isolated, with the promise that he would charge the couples only a $100 a year rent. Gottlieb and Gershoy, convinced their former fellow students at the Minneapolis School of Art and the Art Students League to join them, including John Flannagan, Hannah Small, Austin Mecklem, Carl Walters, and Arnold and Lucille Blanch.
During his early years on the Maverick, Gottlieb produced block prints for the local periodical The Hue and Cry. With Arnold’s arrival he furthered his efforts in printmaking. The Roundhouse was printed in the summer of 1930, and features a reversed bird’s-eye view of the former railroad repair area of the Ulster and Delaware train station and maintainance facility in the Rondout section of Kingston, about 15 miles from Woodstock. The lithograph was created with a few scraping marks to simulate the smoke coming up from the steam engine.[15]
In 1931, Gottlieb received a Gugenheim Fellowship, and Gershoy and he spent a year in Europe, where he made lithographs in Paris at the Atelier Desjobert. Four years later he joined the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration where he specialized in silkscreen printing, and became an innovator in the medium.
Grace Greenwood (1905-1979)
Chapel, 1934
Chapel features a subject drawn from Grace Greenwood’s time in Mexico in the early 1930s, where she and her sister Marion were commissioned to undertake several large public mural projects under the technical direction of Diego Rivera. Previously she had joined Marion in studying at the Art Students League in New York City, and at the Academie Colarossi and Grande Chaumiere in Paris. The lithograph was printed for the PWAP (Public Works of Art Project). Grace went on to a career as an easel painter and illustrator. She regularly divided her time between New York City and Woodstock. From 1957 to 1970 she was married to painter Rollin Crampton, lived at a house on Tinker Street, and experimented with abstraction.
Marion Greenwood (1909-1970)
Chiquita, 1934
Marion Greenwood grew up in Brooklyn, New York. At the age of 15 she began attending the Art Students League alongside her sister Grace. The two began coming to Woodstock in 1922 where their brother Irwin had married the townswoman Ruth Allen. In the mid-1920s she studied lithography in Woodstock with Emil Ganso. Greenwood enjoyed working with Ganso, who helped her discover she “could scratch with a razor blade and get marvelous effects—almost sculptural effects and wonderful graze with it and rubbing.”[16]
For most of 1932 to 1936, Marion and Grace lived in Mexico where they had been commissioned to undertake several large public mural projects under the technical direction of Diego Rivera, which explore the reality of peasant and working class life in the country. The sisters returned to the United States for about six months in 1934, where they joined the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), and did several small murals in public buildings. During the course of the year they spent time in Woodstock where they worked at the Woodstock Artists Association with Arnold. Marion probably based her lithograph Chiquita on a drawing she had done of a young girl in Mexico. That same summer she exhibited her painting Mexican Indians at the association.
In the late 1930s, Marion’s interest in lithography blossomed. She produced large editions for Associated American Artists, who had a program of paying artists a small fee to create lithographs, which sold at a low price, and provided Greenwood with a modest but steady income. The artist died in Woodstock in 1970.
Rosella Hartman (1895-1984)
Untitled (Cat), c. 1932
Rosella Hartman (1895-1984)
Grouse (Partridge), 1933
Rosella Hartman was born in Junction City, Kansas, of German-Swiss heritage. Her sister, who was a costume designer for the New York theatre, encouraged her to attend the Art Students League. Hartman first came to Woodstock in 1919 when she studied outdoor figure painting with Andrew Dasburg at the league’s summer school. Over the summer she met the sculptor Paul Fiene. They married in 1923 and settled together in Woodstock. That year she began to produce lithographs, possibly spurred by efforts in town by Dasburg, Bolton Brown, George Bellows, Konrad Cramer, Henry Lee McFee, and Neil Ives.
Arnold printed for Hartman in the early 1930s, and later in the decade, possibly for the Federal Art Project. Most of her lithographs were created solely with a lithographic pencil to maintain control and subtlety of line. A few were made in tusche or created with a brush. Hartman’s primary subject was animals, among them cats, racoons, deer, bears, and bobcats. Domestic and wild cats predominate in her work. Her goal was to make the animals look real and to convey their charm and intelligence with a sense of playfulness and whimsicality.
Arnold recalled dining at Hartman’s house on Speare Road where she announced it was time to “’feed the cats’ so they opened the door and they had half doors—and she said, ‘Here kitty, kitty kitty.’ And 15 cats came charging into the room.”[17] Hartman also occasionally pictured game birds, including one of a grouse who was also the subject of a watercolor. Grouse (Partridge) was exhibited at the Woodstock Artists Association in July 1933 in the company of Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s Train (Road and Train).[18]
In 1934, Hartman was awarded a John Simon Gugenheim Memorial Fellowship, and traveled to Europe and the Caribbean. She worked at the Atelier Desjobert in the course of her stay in Paris, and again in 1938. The artist related that Desjobert “was so conscientious about his printing. . . . He used to test the acid in his mouth to see if it was right.”[19]
Albert Heckman (1893-1971)
Seated Figure, c. 1931-1932
The painter, lithographer, etcher, and teacher Albert Heckman was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania. In 1928, he studied at the Leipzig Institute of Graphic Arts in Germany, where he made an intensive study of the technical processes of printmaking, including etching and lithography.[20] The same year he joined the faculty of Hunter College in New York where he remained until his retirement in 1958. In the early 1930s, lithography became Heckman’s principal interest. He had his own press in Woodstock and by 1934 was printing most of his own work. Heckman generally created picturesque views of country villages and industrial sites in New York State. In the early 1930s, he created several lithographs of female nudes, including Seated Nude, which was printed by Arnold at the artists association. Heckman visited Arnold regularly at his shop, and the printer got to know him “pretty well, in an offhand sort of way.”[21]
Alfred Hutty (1878-1954)
Tropical Trees, 1933
Alfred Hutty was born in the small lumber town of Grand Haven, Michigan, but spent his early years in Kansas City and St. Louis, Missouri. In St. Louis he developed an interest in the work of Birge Harrison, whom he sought out as a teacher in Woodstock in 1908. After serving in World War I as a camoufleur, Hutty paid a visit to Charleston. He immediately wired his wife, “Come quickly, have found heaven.” For the rest of their lives Hutty and his wife divided their time between Woodstock and Charleston. During winter months he taught classes at his own school there, and was involved with the Carolina Art Association, for whom he served as director. Hutty became active as a printmaker, and achieved national recognition for his etchings of Old Charleston. It was not uncommon for Hutty to execute Woodstock scenes in Charleston, and Charleston scenes in Woodstock.
In the summer of 1927, Hutty enrolled in a lithography class taught by his friend Bolton Brown. He found the lifting of the heavy stones to be laborious, and created only a small number of lithographs. That summer he made prints based on graphite sketches he created in Woodstock and the surrounding area, including one of apple trees on Brown’s property in Zena, and another on the property of the writer J.P. McEvoy and the artist Eugenie McEvoy in Bearsville. In 1933, Hutty visited Arnold at the artists association where he printed the Charleston landscape Tropical Trees.
Neil Ives (1890-1946)
Henry Mattson, 1930
Neil Ives was the son of Halsey C. Ives, who founded the Washington University School of Fine Arts and the St. Louis Art Museum (for which he served as the first director). Before coming to Woodstock Ives studied at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Art Students League of New York. Ives travelled to Woodstock in 1913 to study with John F. Carlson at the Art Students League's Woodstock School of Landscape Painting, and remained there for the rest of his life. In the early 1920s, he experimented with lithography, perhaps as a result of his friendship with Andrew Dasburg, who was working with the medium at this time.
In 1930, Ives created a lithograph of a dog lying on the floor and a portrait of Henry Mattson, a prominent marine, landscape, still life, and portrait painter in town, which Ives achieved with a bit of scaping.[22] Ives dabbled with portraiture in the early 1930s, when he also executed an oil likeness of Mattson (Woodstock Artists Association and Museum) and a portrait study of artist Orville Peets, which was shown at the Woodstock Artists Association in 1931.
Walt Killam (1907-1979)
Farm, 1936
In the mid-1930s, the painter and illustrator Walter Killam spent about a year in Woodstock, where Arnold printed Farm, which he felt was “nicely done with crayon.”[23] During the course of 1935-1936, Killam served as Supervisor of the Dutchess County New York Public Works of Art Project, and later helped supervise the painting of murals around New York City as part of the Federal Art Project.
Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889-1953)
Before the Act, 1932
Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889-1953)
Landscape (The Shower), 1932
Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889-1953)
Still Life (Grapes and Sculpture Mold), 1933
Yasuo Kuniyoshi first came to Woodstock in 1917 when he took a landscape painting course at the Art Student League’s summer school with John F. Carlson. Ten years later he and his artist wife Katherine Schmidt began coming to Woodstock regularly for the summer months. The French artist Jules Pascin visited the town that summer and Eugene Speicher threw a party in his honor. Kuniyoshi became acquainted with Pascin and, during a stay in Paris the following year, he came under the spell of the Frenchman’s art and made sketches which served as the source for a series of 24 lithographs depicting prostitutes, actresses, dancers, and acrobats, often in sensual or sexually alluring poses, which were produced in 1928 at the workshop of Edmund Desjobert. Drawing on stone there, Kuniyoshi discovered the surface to be much more to his liking than the metal plates he had worked on with the lithographic printer George Miller earlier in the decade.
In the summer of 1930, Kuniyoshi came to Arnold’s basement shop, and asked if he could “'draw down there, it’s nice and cool.’ He said, ‘it’s too dam hot in my studio.’”[24] The artist sat down at the table Arnold set up in the room and executed a drawing on stone for Train (Road and Train). When finished, Kuniyoshi hung around while Arnold etched it, then left, asking the printer to make an edition of 15 impressions.[25] Over the course of the summers of 1930 to 1934, Arnold printed six additional lithographs for Kuniyoshi, including The Storm, Landscape (The Shower), Before the Act, Circus Girl with Plumb Hat, and Still Life (Grapes and Sculpture).
Kuniyoshi’s favorite subjects were the female figure and still life, and the artist naturally turned to these subjects when working with Arnold. He personally felt the Woodstock landscape was too beautiful to depict, but this feeling did not deter him from trying his hand at picturing the region in various media, including lithography. In his interview for the State University of New York at Oswego, Arnold explained that he achieved the slight feeling of rain in Landscape (The Shower) “because of the slanted direction of some of the strokes as well as some very delicate scaping along with it.”[27] The artist usually began by outlining his drawing with red conté crayon, and then going over it with a light line with a lithographic pencil sharpened to a very fine point. Darks were gradually built up by working over the surface repeatedly to render a rich and sensuous range of tones.[28]
Henry M. McLelland (?-?)
Untitled (Black Woman Hanging Clothes), c. 1933-1935
McLelland worked with Arnold in the early 1930s in Woodstock, where one day he “just showed up.”[29] He appears to have been from Georgia, and based his lithograph on a crayon drawing of a scene down South.
John Ward McClellan (1908-1986)
Chess (Playing Chess), December 1934
John Ward McClellan (1908-1986)
Woodstock Landscape (Wrecks),
c. 1934-1935
John Ward McClellan (1908-1986)
A Toast to the Betrothed (Drunks), 1935
John Ward McClellan (1908-1986)
The French Doll, 1935
The multitalented artist John Ward McCellan was born in London in 1908 to American parents. He was the son of a family of doctors and makers of patent medicines, including the popular Doan’s Backache Kidney Pills. Following World War I, he returned to America with the intention of becoming a doctor. Before convincing his family his future was in art, McClellan studied drawing and sculpture at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for two years. He also studied sculpture under Paul Niclausse at the Academie Julian in Paris, and then spent several years living in France, Spain, and Mexico, where he met the journalist, author, and photographer Manuel Komroff, who persuaded him to join him at Byrdcliffe in Woodstock.[30]
McClellan ventured into the basement at the Woodstock Artists Association in the summer of 1934, and expressed hesitancy about his ability to make lithographs. The artist Paul R. Meltsner happened to be in the studio when McClellan began working on a stone. After McClelland departed, he told Arnold that he felt “‘this fellow’s got a great deal of talent. . . . I think that you should encourage him more and help him more with his lithographs.’ And I did, and John really developed into a very fine lithographer.”[311]
Upon working with Arnold, McClellan’s art focused almost exclusively in black and white, restricting itself to lithography, charcoal, and pen-and-ink drawing. He explained that he felt “most at home in the black-and-white medium. I search for the underlying simplicity of form and then on top of this, I can be as decorative as I wish.”[32] He felt that the careful drawing of his subject on stone was an absolute necessity, and applied his lithographic pencil with a combination of firmness and delicacy.[33]
In World War II, McClellan served with the United States Armed Forces, and was in one of the first units to reach the liberated concentration camps. That experience had a powerful effect on him personally and on his subsequent imagery. On returning to Woodstock he continued to practice lithography, working with the printer George Miller in New York City. In the course of the 1950s he broke away from working primarily in black and white.
The Grant Arnold Collection of Fine Prints at the State University of New York at Oswego includes 12 lithographs printed by Arnold over the course of 1934 to 1939, four of which are in the current exhibition. They range in expression from the charming and whimsical to the poignant and haunting. In Woodstock Landscape (Wrecks) McClellan pictured an old car sitting in front of a barn whose roof has fallen off, and employed scraping to indicate the little flowers in the middleground. His lithograph A Toast to the Betrothed (Drunks) pictures a scene at a party where the people appear haunted like ghosts. Arnold explained that the “stone was covered completely with black tusche and all the figures were scraped out with an engraving tool or an etching needle.”[34] For Chess (Playing Chess) Arnold related that he thought McClellan “may have seen a couple of people playing chess and used them as models.”[35] McClellan was a devoted chess player himself, and often played with local plumber and electrician Adolph Heckeroth.
McClelland’s wife Doris served as the model for The French Doll. In 1959, the couple opened the shop Byways, International in the Village of Woodstock near Tannery Brook Road and Tinker Street. The shop had a prize collection of foreign dolls on view, and sold modern, antique, and exotic imports from around the world. The exterior and interior of the store was decorated by McClellan with the help of local artists.[36]
Eugenie McEvoy (1879-1975)
Industrial Scene, c. 1932
Eugenie McEvoy was a famous teenage sharpshooter, and in the early 1920s she toured the world as the “Little French Annie Oakley,” winning medals and setting records against male marksmen. In February 1923, she married the successful humorist J. P. Mcvoy. That same year the McEvoys moved to Woodstock where they presided over a 20-acre estate with enormous grounds that included a manor house, a guest house, two studios, and an Olympic-sized swimming pool. The couple separated in 1931, and divorced the following year. Eugenie received the property in Woodstock as part of her settlement. She eventually sold the estate, but retained a few acres for herself on which she built a painting studio with living quarters. which Grant Arnold and his wife Jenny rented from her in the winter of 1935-1936.
In Woodstock, Eugenie seriously turned to art. Initially she probably received formal training from her first husband, the illustrator, decorative artist, and landscape painter George A. Aldrich. In Woodstock, Henry Lee McFee and Henry Mattson critiqued her work.[37] McEvoy created landscapes, still lifes, and figure compositions. Arnold printed her lithograph St. Tropez, a scene in Southern France, and Industrial Scene featuring a factory located in the Catskill area.
Austin Merrill Mecklem (1894-1951)
Farm in Woodstock (Landscape), 1931
Austin Mecklem was born in Collax, Washington, in 1894. At the end of World War I he moved to New York and enrolled in the Art Students League, studying with Kenneth Hayes Miller and Boardman Robinson. There he met the sculptor Hannah Small, whom he married in April 1923. The couple soon settled on the Maverick, where they lived close to the Arnolds. In the summer of 1930, Arnold printed Mecklem’s Farm in Woodstock (Landscape). The artist veered between creating intimate views of the village and surrounding area of Woodstock, where landscape elements are often miniaturist in scale, and pastoral landscapes which are marked by great clarity, dramatic skies, and sense of expansiveness.
Paul R. Meltsner (1905-1967)
Industrial Landscape, c. 1935
Paul R Meltsner (1905-1967)
Death of a Striker, 1935
Paul R. Meltsner spent summers in Woodstock in the mid-1930s when he worked with Arnold on a group of lithographs, including Industrial Landscape and Death of a Striker for the Federal Art Project. Arnold remembered Meltsner as a “capable artist very interested in creating industrial scenes which he drew in the course of traveling by car around the country.”[38] The prints often include factories with smoke stacks or steam engines erupting smoke, which led to his being given the nickname “Smoke Stack Meltsner.”[39] Death of a Striker is a rare instance where Arnold was involved with a print dealing with social protest. The lithograph pictures the death of a striking worker who was trying to establish a union in a steel plant in Pennsylvania, and encountered anti-union violence. Melsner’s prints often feature sharp dark blacks silhouetted against areas of bright illumination. In the 1950s Meltsner moved to Woodstock, where he operated a gallery on Mill Hill Road next to the popular local restaurant Deanies. Meltsner died in Woodstock in 1966.
Roland Mousseau (1899-1980)
The Roundhouse, 1934
Roland Mousseau was one of a group of Minnesota-born artists who made the Maverick art colony their home. Upon Mousseau’s arrival in the Woodstock area in 1930, Hervey White equipped him with material to construct a studio where he could live and work.[40] The Roundhouse was undertaken with crayon and some scraping.[41] Like Harry Gottlieb’s lithograph of the same title, the print pictures the former repair shop on the Rondout in Kingston that serviced locomotives for the Ulster and Delaware Railroad. In July of 1934, Mousseau joined Grant Arnold, Mary Dufresne Smith, and John W. Taylor in exhibiting graphics at the Woodstock Artists Association.
Hidio Noda (1908-1939)
Nellie, 1932
Hideo Noda was born in Santa Clara, California, in 1908. At the age of 11 he was sent to live with family in Japan where he graduated from middle school. On returning to California, he attended the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), where he studied with Arnold Blanch who suggested he move to the East Coast and attend the Art Students League (where Yasuo Kuniyoshi became his mentor) and later arranged for him to live on the Maverick, where he resided from the summer of 1931 through the winter of 1933.
In 1932, Noda executed a painting of people milling about in the gallery of the artists association (Kuamoto Prefectural Museum of Art), and a lithographic portrait of Nellie Robinson, which Arnold remembered as having quite a bit of scraping.[42] The subject was the daughter of Maverick writer Henry Morton Robinson, with whom he became a close friend. The following spring Noda returned to New York City, where he served as one of the assistants on Diego Rivera’s mural Man at the Crossroads at Rockefeller Center, which was destroyed following the Mexican artist’s refusal to remove his portrait of Vladimir Lenin. In 1939, Noda died in Japan of a brain tumor.
Grace A. Pauli (1898-1990)
Untitled (Interior), c. 1931-1933
The artist, illustrator, and author Grace A. Pauli was born and raised in Cold Brook, New York. She studied art at the Utica Free Academy, Pratt Institute, the Art Students League, and the Grand Central School of Art. She came to Woodstock for one or two summers in the early 1930s. Arnold remembered her as a young woman who made a living creating greeting cards for a company in the city.[43] Interior probably features the upstairs bedroom of the place where she was boarding in Woodstock.
Woodford Royce (1902-1995)
Straw Flowers, c. 1933
The landscape and still-life painter Woodford Royce was a native of Hartford, Connecticut. In 1922 he studied at the Hartford Art School and the next year moved to Woodstock to study landscape painting with John F. Carlson and Cecil Chichester. He primarily supported himself in Woodstock as a handyman, especially for the artist Zulma Steele.[44] Arnold met Royce in the summer of 1931, when “someone who made a lithograph that summer brought [him] to the shop.”[45] They became lifelong friends. Royce helped the Arnolds build their house on Delisio Road. Grant served as Royce’s best man and Jenny as maid of honor at his marriage to Francis Woiceske, daughter of artists Ronau and Elizabeth Bush Wocieske. Arnold coaxed his friend into creating Straw Flowers, which Royce drew slowly and meticulously.[45] In later life, Royce moved to California, where he designed and built sailing boats.
Barbara Shermund (1910-1978)
Self Portrait, 1932
Born in San Francisco, California, Barbara Shermund attended the California School of Fine Arts, where she studied painting and printmaking. In 1924 she moved to New York City and briefly enrolled at the Art Students League. Beginning in 1925, Shermund worked as an illustrator for The New Yorker, and created over 600 cartoons for the magazine over the next 20 years. In 1934, the journalist Sam Love remarked that Shermund was “still on the sunny side of 25 and making plenty of money drawing the sort of people that annoy her.”[47]
Shermund spent the summers of 1932 and 1933 in Woodstock, where she created the lithographs Self Portrait, Bare Back Riders, Seated Figure, and Trapeze Artist. Arnold recalled Shermund as a successful illustrator in the city who worked very rapidly, and noted that in her cartoon-like self-portrait he did “some scraping to bring out the forms that she wanted.”[48] In the summer of 1933, Shermund met the artist Ludwig Sander in Arnold’s shop, where he was working on a lithograph. Eventually, the two married.[49]
Beulah Stevenson (1890-1965)
Concert, c. 1932
Beulah Stevenson hailed from Brooklyn, New York, and was active as a painter, printmaker, illustrator, and teacher. She studied art at Pratt Institute and the Art Students League, where she was mentored by John Sloan. Arnold recalled that Stevenson came up to Woodstock from New York City for a summer. Concert was created by a combination of crayon and scraping, and features people sitting and listening to music outside the Maverick Concert Hall in West Hurley.
Chuzo Tamotzu (1891-1975)
Untitled (Donkey), c. 1932
Chuzo Tamotzu was born in Kaoshima Prefecture in Japan, but always considered himself to be a Japanese American. Following travels in Asia and Europe, he moved to New York City in 1920, and attended the Art Students League. He settled in Greenwich Village, where he became friends with Hideo Noda, a fellow member of the John Reed Club. In the early 1930s he visited Noda at the Maverick art colony.[50] During his stay upstate he made paintings of the streets and back lots of Kingston, and Arnold printed his lithograph Group of Donkeys, created in a hybrid style which owes equally to Asian and Western traditions, and harkens back to Japanese sumi brush techniques, of which Tamotsu was a master. Tamotsu settled in Sante Fe, New Mexico, in 1948, where he moved into John Sloan’s former house and studio.
Arnold Wiltz (1889-1937)
Fisherman (Ashokan Reservoir), c. 1933-1934
Arnold Wiliz was born in Berlin, Germany, and displayed artistic talent at an early age. At 16, he began working as a seaman on sailing ships of various nationalities, and pursued his art aboard ship using homemade brushes and panels. After settling in the United States in 1913, Wiltz took classes at the National Academy of Design, and studied briefly with Hamilton Easter Field in Brooklyn Heights, where he met and married the artist Madeline Schiff, a member of a prominent Brooklyn family. The couple moved to Woodstock in 1923 after regularly hearing about the art colony in the city. During his first years in Woodstock he worked as a farmer and kept his art mostly to himself. In 1928, Wiltz visited family in Germany, and traveled to Paris, where his meticulous and sharply focused style was impacted by the Neue Sachichkeit and Surrealism. Two years later Wiltz had a solo exhibition at the Little Jones Gallery in Woodstock. This was followed in 1930 in New York City by a showing at the prominent Dudensing Gallery, which received lavish critical praise. In 1931, the artist’s work was included in the Venice Biennial.
Wiltz explored a wide range of subjects, including water views, industrial scenes, rural landscapes, farmsteads, nudes, figures in interiors, and portraits. Over the course of his short career he was highly active as a printmaker, creating lithographs, etchings, woodcuts and wood engravings, which was his most productive print medium. Fisherman (Ashoken Reservoir) is probably the lithograph titled Ashokan Reservoir which was included in the memorial exhibition of Wiltz’s work held at the Woodstock Artists Association in 1937. The print pictures a man fishing in the Ashokan Reservoir in West Hurley, and is marked by great clarity, a deep sense of space, and a hyper sense of reality. In the 1930s, Wiltz also produced paintings and wood engravings of the reservoir.
Elizabeth Bush Woiceske (1883-1958)
Cluttered Cove, c. 1937-1939
Elizabeth Bush Woiceske (1883-1958)
Snow, c. 1938-1939
Elizabeth Bush Woiceske was a native of Bloomington, Indiana, where she met her future husband Ronau. The couple settled in St. Louis, Missouri. They were employed in a stained-glass window factory, where they created cartoons used to make stained glass for churches and other places. In about 1910, the Woiceskes moved to Woodstock because of Ronau’s wish to study landscape painting with Birge Harrison at the Art Student League’s Woodstock School of Landscape Painting. The Woiceskes formed a tight circle of friendship with the Arnolds, and artist Clarence Bolton and his wife Louise. Their daughter Frances married the Arnold’s close friend, the artist Woodford Royce. In the early 1930s, Elizabeth ran an outdoor school of design in the summer for children, and Ronau conducted classes in etching.
Eight lithographs by Elizabeth are in the Grant Arnold Collection of Fine Prints at the State University of New York at Oswego, all of which date to the period 1937-1939, and some of which were printed for the Federal Art Project. Arnold recalled that they were all printed on his press at home, which he acquired in the Spring of 1936 from Bolton Brown’s widow Lucy.[51] The majority feature scenes in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the surrounding area. Arnold explained that the couple had come directly from the Midwest to Woodstock, and wanted to try their hand at picturing the seacoast.[52] Cluttered Cove features a section of Rockport where fishermen lived and worked. Drawn all in crayon, the print pictures the shacks where they cared for the catch, and a group of lobster crates. Snow was done with crayon and printed on thin Japanese paper, which Woiceske supplied. Arnold was surprised to learn that the print came out so well on paper that was much flimsier than the Reeves BF paper he usually used.[53]
BOLTON BROWN AND EMIL GANSO
Bolton Coit Brown (1864-1936)
North View, c. 1921
In the summer of 1935, Arnold found the courage to visit the great but frequently contentious American lithographer Bolton Brown at his house near Woodstock. Brown welcomed Arnold as a fellow lithographer and the two became friends. Arnold purchased Brown’s lithograph Summer Shower, and Brown gave him North View and other prints. Following Brown’s death in September of 1936, he purchased Brown’s Fuchs and Lang press, which Brown had used to print many of his lithographs for George Bellows. Now Arnold did not have to brave freezing days working in the winter in the basement of the Woodstock Artists Association.
Emil Ganso (1895-1941)
Untitled, 1930
The painter and printmaker Emil Ganso frequently came to Arnold’s shop to discuss lithographic printing techniques and printing papers, and the two became good friends. It it unclear when Ganso first began coming to Woodstock, but by 1926 he was regularly coming to the town, where he sometimes printed lithographs for Konrad Cramer, Albert Heckman, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. Upon departing town for the city in the autumn of 1931, Arnold swapped his leftover supplies of ink, acid, paper, and blotters with Ganso in exchange for this color lithograph.
PRINTS MADE AT THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE
OF NEW YORK AND THE RESETTLEMENT ADMINISTRATION IN WASHINGTON, D.C.
Cecil Bell (1906-1970)
Central Park, 1930
Born in Seatle, Washington, Cecil Bell began earning a living at the age of 20 at the Tacoma Engraving Company. He then studied printmaking at the Art Institute of Chicago before coming to New York in 1930, where he attended Charles W. Locke’s lithography class at the League, working with Arnold, and depicting city life with humor and joie de vivre.
Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1875)
Coming ‘Round the Mountain (She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain,
Ozark Musicians), 1931
In 1931, Thomas Hart Benton was commissioned to create a series of lithographs based on country and western songs for a book on music. At that time he was teaching painting at the Art Students League of New York. After completing his initial print Coming ’Round the Mountain (She’ll be Coming ’Round the Mountain), Benton told Arnold not to bother grinding any more stones for him “because he had a run in with the publisher who was trying to gyp him out of the money that he promised him, and he told him to go to hell.”[54]The work celebrates the folk music and social life of the Ozark Mountains. Three musicians sing, clap, dance, and play fiddle, guitar, and accordion. Benton utilized the image for his tempera painting Missouri Musicians (1931, Private Collection). Both the lithograph and painting picture Wilbur Leverett on guitar, Homer Leverett on fiddle, and Neville Oatman on accordian. The group of musicians appeared in vaudeville acts as the Galena Troubadours, and in films as the Original Ozark Hillbillies. In the late 1920s, Benton picked up the harmonica, played in various bands, and associated in Greenwich Village with such musicologists as Carl Ruggles and Charles Seeger.
Jan Bals (?-?)
The Printer, 1932
Jan Bals attended the Art Students League of New York, where in 1932 he created a lithographic portrait of Grant Arnold working on a stone, featuring part of Arnold’s face, hair, and arm, the sponge used to wet the stone, the cloth utilized for wiping, and a jar with gum arabic, plus the inscription “Arnold, imp.,” for “Arnold, printer."
Don Freeman (1908-1978)
Untitled (Broadway Promenade), 1932
Don Freeman grew up in San Diego, California, His uncle encouraged him to study art in New York, and he set off by train in the spring of 1928 to attend the Art Students League. At the league he studied printmaking with Charles W. Locke and Harry Wickey, and experimented with lithography, which he felt perfectly fit his temperament. He translated onto stone the random urban sketches he had been making of the life and environment of the theatre district encompassing Times Square and stretching up Broadway from 41st to 53rd streets. Freeman went on to a major career as a newspaper and children’s book illustrator, and was often referred as the “Daumier of New York.” Arnold remarked that most of lithographs that he printed for Freeman were crayon drawings, and that he may have hired someone to grain his stones.[55]
David John McCosh (1903-1981)
Untitled (Self Portrait), 1930
David McCosh was a native of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1923 to 1930. Among his close friends at the school was Francis Chapin, who joined him in studying with Bolton Brown in early 1930, when the Woodstock artist briefly taught a course in lithography at the Art Institute of Chicago. In the fall of 1930, McCosh studied lithography with Eugene Fitsch at the Art Students League in New York, where Arnold printed his self-portrait as well as a lithograph of a train flagman. The following summer McCosh assisted Arnold at the Woodstock Artists Association, where Arnold printed his lithograph of a seated woman attired in a hat. McCosh was an avid lithographer in the 1930s and 1940s. Following a period in 1932 as the director of the Davenport Municipal Art Gallery in Iowa, McCosh taught lithography at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1934 he found a long-term teaching position in the art department at the University of Oregon, where he taught courses in lithography and other subjects.
Bernard Steffen (1907-198)
Untitled, c. 1936
Printed at Resettlement Administration, Washington, D.C.
Arnold worked for the Resettlement Adminstration in Washington, D.C., in late 1936 and early 1937. While there, he printed for staff artist Bernard Steffen. Untitled features a dustbowl landscape in Oklahoma. At the bottom, the arms of a plow stick up from the sandy earth. A tractor and part of a seat and controls are also visible in the parched landscape. Early in his career Steffen specialized in depicting rural and agricultural subjects, and worked under the influence of his teacher and mentor Thomas Hart Benton. Steffen eventually lived and worked in Woodstock from 1955 to his death. In the course of the 1950s he achieved prominence as a silkscreen printmaker. He authored the definitive book on the subject, Silk Screen published in 1963. In 1957, Steffen operated the Graphic Workshop in the basement of the Woodstock Artists Association, providing instruction and printing of silkscreens. The workshop began its operation there in 1952, when it was run for three summers by Margaret Lowengrund, who, among other things, assisted in printing lithographs, utilizing the Fuchs and Lang press that had been used by Arnold, and one sold to the workshop by Clarence Bolton.[56]
Prentiss Taylor (1907-1991)
Christ in Alabama, April 21, 1932
Prentiss Taylor was a native of Washington, D.C., where he studied at the Corcoran School of Art, followed by painting classes under Charles Hawthone in Provincetown, Massachusetts. From there, in 1931, he went to the Art Students League of New York, studying lithography with Charles W. Locke, and working with Grant Arnold in 1932 on the printing of Christ in Alabama, which he created in response to a poem by the African American poet and writer Langston Hughes. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Taylor interacted with many writers and musicians associated with the Harlem Renaissance. At the time he was a young white member of the New York chapter of the John Reed Club, a group of socially committed, progressive artists and writers.
Taylor’s lithograph originally served as an illustration for a booklet featuring four poems by Hughes, addressing the Scottsboro case that was published by Golden Stairs Press in 1932, which helped raise awareness of the unfair and racially motivated judgements against the defendants. The case stemmed from false accusations that in March 1931 nine African American youths, ranging in age from 13 to 19, raped two white girls on a Southern Railway freight train. The court trial became known as the Scottsboro case and the black youths as the Scottsboro Boys. The case drew national and international attention and was a rallying point for leftwing artists and writers. Taylor went on to become one of the country’s great lithographers. His prints were often drawn on stone using a brush and lithographic ink diluted with water, instead of crayon, in order to obtain halftones and a wide variety of other tonal gradations.
[1] Coy Ludwig “Interview with Grant Arnold,” Tyler Art Gallery, SUNY Oswego (December 1978 to May 1979), p. 11. Hereafter the interview will be referred to as “Arnold Interview.” [2] Grant Arnold, “Woodstock, The Everlasting Hills,” Grant Family Archives, p. 113. Hereafter this will be referred to as “Everlasting Hills.” [3] Ibid., p. 64. [4] Ibid., p. 81. [5] Ibid., p. 94. [6] Ibid., p. 95. [7] “New Artist’s Club is Started,” The Woodstock Bulletin, vol. 3, no. 5 (June 1930): 1. [8] Clinton Adams, American Lithographers, 1900-1960: The Artists and Their Printers (Albuquerque, New Mexico: The University of New Mexico Press, 1983), p. 74. [9] “Arnold Interview,” p. 108. [10] Aiine Fruhauf, Making Friends: Memoirs of a Caricaturist (Cabin John, Maryland: Seen Locks Press, 1988), p. 179. Fruhauf married Arnold’s neighbor and friend from high school Erwin Vollmer. The couple met in 1932 in the basement of the artists association when Arnold was pulling an impression of one of her prints. [11] Ibid, p. 173. [12] Ibid., p. 167. [13 Ibid., p. 124. [14] Ibid, p. 86 [15] Ibid, p. 128. [16] I would like to thank Joanne Mulcahy for providing “The Art Students League and the Woodstock Colony,” an advanced chapter from her forthcoming book on Marion Greenwood. The artist’s remark about lithography appear on page 12. Greenwood’s statement about lithography was made in the course of an interview she did with artist Karl Fortess, one of a series of 108 interviews that were undertaken by him as part of a grant from Office of Education, U.S. Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare at Boston University's School of Applied Arts. A CD including this interview is in the archives of the Historical Society of Woodstock. [17] "Arnold Interview,” p. 133. [18] “Woodstock Art Gallery Exhibition,” Kingston Daily Freeman, July 11, 1933, p. 2. [19] Dennis Drogseth, “Introduction,” Rosella Hartman Lithographs 1923-1959 (Woodstock, New York: Phantom Press, 1980), n.p. [20] "Albert Heckman,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 16, 1928, p. 65. [21] “Arnold Interview,” p. 135.. [22] Ibid, p. 139. [23] Ibid., p. 273. [24] Ibid., p. 141. [25] Ibid., p 141. [26] Ibid., p. 143. [27] Adams, American Lithographers, 1900-1960, p. 74. [28] Ibid. p. 74. [29] “Arnold Interview,” p. 159. [30] Sylvia Day, “John McClelland – A Renaissance Man,” Ulster County Townsmen, August 26, 1976, p. 5. [31] “Arnold Interview,” p. 152. [32] In the Visual Art is a Weapon,” Catskill Mountain Star, February 16, 1951, p. 3. [33] “McClelland Show Seen in Preview at Ganso Galleries,” Kingston Daily Freeman, December 17, 1953, p. 24. [34] Ibid., p. 153. [35] “McClellans Open New Import Shop,” Kingston Daily Freeman, December 21, 1959, p. 22. I would like to thank Patricia Phagen for providing the original titles for the group of lithographs by McClellan included in this exhibition. I would also like to thank Patriciafor reading through the original typescript of this entry on John McClellan, and providing corrections. [36] “Arnold Interview,” p. 153. [37] “McEvoy Painting is Sold,” otherwise unidentified article from a Kingston newspaper, Eugenie McEvoy files, Woodstock Artists Association archives. [38] Ibid., p. 162. [39] Ibid, p. 162. [40] "Everlasting Hills,” p. 71. [41] “Arnold Interview,” p. 276. [42] "Arnold Interview,” p. 281. [43] "Arnold Interview,” p. 285. [44] “Everlasting Hills,” p. 533. [45] Ibid., p. 221. [46] Ibid., p. 699. [47] Sam Love, “New York Inside Out,” The Dispatch (Moline, Ohio), November 9, 1932, p. 6. [48] “Arnold Interview,” pp. 177, 183. [49] I would like to thank Caitlin McGurk, Association Curator and Associate Professor, the Billy Ireland Library and Museum, the Ohio State University, for informing me about the relationship and eventual marriage of Barbara Shermund and Ludwig Sander. [50] "Arnold Interview," p. 189.
[51] Ibid., p. 194.
[52] Ibid., p. 194
[53] Ibid., p. 197.
[54] Ibid., p. 59. ]55] Ibid, p. 120
.[56] Email from Christina Weyl to Bruce Weber, June 9, 2023. Christina Weyl is one of the essayists for the catalog of the exhibition A Model Workshop: Margaret Lowengrund and The Contemporaries on view at the Print Center New York in Manhattan from September 21-December 23, 2023. Arnold does not mention Lowengrund in his interviews with Coy Ludwig or in his unpublished manuscript “Woodstock, The Everlasting Hills.” One suspects that they crossed paths in Woodstock. The legacy of Lowengrund and local printmakers who were affiliated with The Graphic Workshop in the basement of the artists association after Arnold's departure from Woodstock in 1950 is the subject of Letitia Smith and Tom Wolf’s tentatively titled exhibition The Graphic Workshop at the Woodstock Artists Association, Featuring Carole Uehara, to be held at the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum sometime in the future. For a report of Clarence Bolton's sale to the Graphic Workshop of his Fuchs and Lang press see Margaret Ruff,“Bolton’s Lithographs on Display in New York,” Catskill Mountain Star, March 5, 1954, p. 3. Albert Heckman and Karl Fortess, who both worked with Arnold, assisted Lowengrund in the printing of lithographs in the workshop Lowengrund ran in summers from 1952 to 1954. She utilized the organization's two Fuchs and Lang presses, the one Arnold had used, and the one sold by Bolton. Lauren Rosenblum and Christina Weyl, A Model Workshop: Margaret Lowengrund and The Contemporaries (New York: Hirmer Publishers, 2023), p. 95
Comments