American prints in the arts and crafts tradition

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 1996 by Lindsay Leard

In 1920 House & Garden, a journal emulating the ideals of the arts and crafts movement, praised the "up-to-dateness" of the Provincetown Printers' work, finding their prints especially appropriate for those seeking "beautiful and positive effects at a modest cost," and preferring them to etchings, lithographs, and reproductions of prints. The article commended the handcraftsmanship involved in making the prints, citing it as

part of the new movement in America to get away from the inspirationless machine-made art that confronts the citizen on every hand and beguiles him when he seeks to furnish his home.(21)

The arts and crafts movement also flourished on the West Coast, where in 1922 California Southland attributed the interest in wood-block prints to their decorative quality and said they provided the then fashionable craftsman bungalows with "ideal spots of color." Moreover, they were original works of art suited to enthusiasts with a limited budget?

The Panama-Pacific International Exposition held in San Francisco in 1915 included more than two thousand prints representing the history of American print making.(23) There was one gallery each for prints by James McNeill Whistler and his follower Joseph Pennell, and four galleries for modern prints, one of which was devoted to color prints. A jury that included Frank Duveneck and Pennell, both of whom had contributed to the revival of etching in America, awarded ten medals, eight of them to wood-block artists. Gustave Baumann won the gold medal; Edna Boles Hopkins, Bertha Lure, and B. J. O. Nordfeldt each received a silver medal; Elizabeth Colwell, Dow, and Helen Hyde won bronze medals; and honorable mention went to Pedro Joseph de Lemos and Margaret Jordan Patterson.

Of the medalists, Lum, Hyde, and de Lemos lived in California. Lum and Hyde each studied wood-block print making in Japan and their work was strongly influenced by it.(24) Lum joined the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts in 1907 and was designated a Master the following year.(25) De Lemos studied with Dow at Teachers College in 1904 and after returning to Oakland, California, pursued painting and design as well as print making (see Pl. VI). He was instrumental in organizing the California Society of Etchers, promoting a medium that, like the woodcut, was new to the West Coast. However, woodcut took a stronger hold, and in 1920 the newly organized Print Makers Society of California chose a woodcut by Frances Hammel Gearhart for its first annual gift print (Pl. VIII). Like many western artists, Gearhart found her subject matter in the landscape. In 1923 the secretary of the society wrote that interest in woodcuts was "growing by leaps and bounds" and that a strong market existed for them.(26)

The full flowering of arts and crafts print making was celebrated in an exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts in Michigan in 1919. Entitled Wood Block Prints in Color by American Artists, it comprised 169 entries by 22 artists.(27) Print makers from Provincetown and California were invited to participate, as were a few woodcut artists who worked independently, such as Walter Joseph Phillips (1884-1963) of Canada. Baumann had the largest entry, perhaps because of his earlier gold medal. The accompanying catalogue described the wood-block print in characteristically arts and crafts language: