Pennsylvania fraktur

Magazine Antiques, July, 2001 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

Two exhibitions of fraktur taking place in southeastern Pennsylvania, where this art form flourished, present many examples that have not previously been on view, making this part of the state a rewarding destination for folk art enthusiasts this summer. The first, entitled Fraktur Treasures from the Schwenkfelder Library and Heritage Center and on view at the Schwenkfelder Library and Heritage Center Pennsburg, Montgomery County, until September 30, celebrates the completion of a new fifteen-thousand square-foot addition to this institution, which is dedicated to showing the history of the religious group known as the Schwenkfelders. Under the leadership of Caspar Schwenkfeld von Ossig (1489-1561), this small group had broken away from Martin Luther's followers by about 1526, and by the seventeenth century they were forced to worship clandestinely Some two hundred decided to seek asylum elsewhere and emigrated from Germany, via Dutch seaports, to Philadelphia in a series of six waves between 1731 and 1737. Once in America, they moved to rural areas in southeastern Pennsylvania, where they were able to worship openly.

The more than eighty-three frakturs in the exhibition are drawn from the permanent collection of about one thousand works, including Vorschriften (religious messages or writing exercises undertaken by students), Taufscheine (birth records), marriage blessings, bookplates, and drawings. In the 1770s these works on paper were quite formal and looked much like their counterparts in Europe; however by the 1780s Pennsylvania frakturs had become more colorful and the drawing more expressive. Between the 1790s and 1830s, known to aficianoados as the golden age of the fraktur, artists created imaginative compositions using a broad color palette. Among the more frequently encountered decorative motifs are stars, hearts, flowers, and birds, often enclosed in fanciful borders.

The second exhibition, entitled Faith and Family: Pennsylvania German Heritage in York County Area Fraktur, is on view at the York County Heritage Trust in York until October 31. The exhibition includes eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works and focuses particularly on Taufscheine produced in commemoration of the baptisms of members of the Lutheran and German Reformed churches in what is today York and Adams Counties. Created primarily between about 1770 and 1870, the production of these documents reached an apex in both numbers and level of artistic accomplishment in the 1820s. The sheets were often printed with a text before being embellished, and the printing on many can be traced to Hanover, a town on the Maryland border that links the two Pennsylvania counties.

The curator of the exhibition and author of its accompanying catalogue, June Burk Lloyd, examined about one thousand baptismal certificates and has categorized the motifs most commonly used in them: hearts, which appear in abundance; tulips and other flowers, which held various symbolic meanings; pomegranates and other fruits. Animals rarely appear, but there is a profusion of birds, stars, mermaids, and angels. As Lloyd notes, York County frakturs have been largely overlooked by scholars for a number of reasons, including the erroneous assumption that the Susquehanna River blocked the westward migration of Pennsylvania Germans to York County. Happily, Lloyd has done an excellent job of redressing this imbalance.

The catalogue, with the same tide as the exhibition, may be ordered from the York County Heritage Trust by telephoning 717-848-1587 or through their Web site (www.yorkheritage.org).