By The People, For The People

New print collection illustrates idea of art for everyone

Jolan Gross-Bettelheim’s “Assembly Line (Home Front),” from 1942, illustrates lithograph printing in “Art Under Pressure.”
Jolan Gross-Bettelheim’s “Assembly Line (Home Front),” from 1942, illustrates lithograph printing in “Art Under Pressure.”

Kevin Murphy is “evangelical” about prints.

“I think a lot of people think of prints as almost like posters,” says Murphy, curator of American art for Crystal Bridges Museum. “Artists conceived of these as fine art objects, not because they’d done a painting and wanted to make more of them.

“I think once people really understand, they’re fascinated.”

Murphy has been happily studying a treasure trove of 468 early 20th-century prints acquired by Crystal Bridges earlier this year. Thirty-eight of them go on show Dec. 21 in “Art Under Pressure.”

The title, of course, refers to the process of printmaking, which really isn’t much different than the carved potato prints everyone did in school, Murphy says. It just comes in much more complicated variations - and for him, that’s part of the fun.

“In a complicated print, even a scholar can end up questioning how it’s done,” he says. “It’s a rich viewing experience but one that’s accessible. It is ink on paper, after all.

We can all relate to it because we all put ink on paper.”

Accessibility was part of the impetus for many artists working in print making, Murphy explains.

“American artists really grabbed hold of the idea of prints being a democratic art,” he says. “And they really talked about that connection because they wanted to make art meaningful to everyone. The idea that prints were something that could be meaningful and understood and could be owned by the working class (blue-collar workers) started in the 1920s, but the philosophy really came to its fullest in the 1930s with the Great Depression. It was the golden age of print making.

“For me, the aims of those artists really reflect the aims of this institution,” Murphyadds. “The mission of Crystal Bridges is to make American art meaningful and accessible to people.”

Murphy hopes that viewers will take time to look at the prints in “Art Under Pressure” up close in all their intricate detail.

“The thing about prints, since a lot of them are black and white, is people wonder how interesting they can be,” he says. “But they have almost a tactile quality to them and some of them - etchings, engravings - really do have a texture, almost a threedimensional quality.”

Beyond that, he says, all of the prints in this collection have a connection to the people they were intended to reach, he says. They comment on life among the working class, working conditions, even environmental issues.

“We’re 70 or 80 years away from all of these prints, but they provide not just a window into another time but a reflection of your own time, almost a way of getting out of your way of daily thinking and, by looking back into history, removing yourself from your own daily concerns and thinking about the bigger picture,” Murphy says.

“One thing people should anticipate isreally a sort of picture of American life in all its glory and tragedy from 1920 to 1945, even in this little selection, this slice of the prints, less than 10 percent of (the collection),” Murphy adds. “There’s a real humanity about the images, the subjects and the way the artists created them.”

Besides, Murphy points out, prints - although modest in size - can be rarer than the paintings for which Crystal Bridges is already famous.

“There are fewer of some of these prints than there are Gilbert Stuart’s George Washington portraits,” he says. “This is not the same as buying a print of Monet’s ‘Water Lilies.’”

Whats Up, Pages 16 on 12/14/2012

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