Currier & Ives: master American printmakers

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), May, 1996 by Billie Heller Monness

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IN 1834, Nathaniel Currier, a 21-year-old lithographer from Massachusetts, began his own printmaking business in New York City. He opened a shop across from City Hall and a factory around the corner, where the firm remained for the next 70 years. In 1857, Currier formed a partnership with James Merritt Ives, a self-trained artist who had been the firm's bookkeeper for five years and was related to the Currier family by marriage. The resulting firm of Currier family by marriage. The resulting firm of Currier & Ives was spectacularly prolific, producing an average of three or four new prints every week for 50 years. When Currier & Ives closed in 1907, it had sold millions of prints in unlimited editions from an inventory that numbered more than 7,000 titles.

The success of Currier & Ives was attributable to national upward mobility and the mechanization of publishing. From Andrew Jackson's 1828 presidential inauguration through the Civil War, Americans experienced an astonishing growth in material comfort, leisure time, and literacy. At the same time, technological innovations cut costs and increased output of printed words and pictures. As a result, numerous newspapers and magazines, many illustrated with wood engravings, reached thousands of Americans.

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In the firm's factory, an assembly-line atmosphere prevailed. Artists prepared sketches; lithographers transferred sketches to Bavarian lithographic stones; letterers wrote inscriptions on stone; and colorists hand-painted prints. With some exceptions, most of the Currier & Ives prints were not copies of paintings done by well-known artists. Instead, they were created by staff artists working collaboratively with specialists in a particular area of design. For this reason, many of the Currier & Ives prints are unsigned.

Currier & Ives competed successfully not only with American lithography firms, but with other media as well. Its images of news events and political cartoons appealed to readers of the inexpensive dailies of the "penny presses"; its decorative pictures underpriced engravings and chromolithographs; and its celebrity portraits and historical scenes offered color and movement beyond the means of early photography.

Although the firm continued to flourish financially in the 1880s, its output by then consisted primarily of horse trotting prints and the popular, but scurrilous, "darktown comics" depicting the coarsest stereotypes of African-Americans. The firm's decline was due, in part, to the waning energies of the aging founding partners. By the century's end, competing technologies, especially photography and chromolithography, overshadowed hand-colored lithography. As middle-class tastes stratified, the more well-to-do shied away from the unsophisticated charms of Currier & Ives. In 1907, the firm's inventory was sold for little more than the cost of materials.

By the 1920s, however, there was an upsurge of public interest in artifacts of the American past, and the modern collecting of Currier & Ives prints began in earnest. Foremost among these collectors was Harry T. Peters, who assembled a personal holding of more than 2,800 Currier & Ives prints and, in 1929, published the firm's first history and catalogue. In 1956, the Museum of the City of New York organized a major exhibition of his collection, which subsequently was donated to the museum. Peters' gift has encouraged other collectors to donate works by Currier & Ives, thus enhancing the museum's holdings of the prints.

An exhibition containing 79 of these nostalgic works, "Currier & Ives, Printmakers to the American People: Highlights from the Collections of the Museum of the City of New York," will be on view at that museum through Aug. 4. It then is scheduled to travel to The Barnum Museum, Bridgeport, Conn. (Sept. 27-Jan. 13, 1997); The Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Mass. (Feb. 15-May 26, 1997); and The Baltimore (Md.) Museum of Art (June 25-Oct. 12, 1997).