American Modernisms: Modern Stories, Types, & Aesthetics, curated by the Spring 2024 graduate seminar ARTH 9545 led by Elizabeth Hutton Turner, is on view through October 12, 2024 in the First Floor Gallery of Harrison/Small. Find our hours and directions online.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, great industrial, scientific, and technological changes fostered a revolution in print culture. Photomechanical reproduction and chromolithography disrupted conventional distinctions between fine and applied arts by introducing more direct graphic means of personal expression into image production of all kinds. By the turn of the twentieth century, printed images became ubiquitous and synonymous with modern life itself. The printed image was attuned to the fast-paced realities of mass production, marketing, and readymade products, as well as aspirations for new ways to live, work, and prosper in the modern world.
During the spring 2024 semester, four graduate students enrolled in ARTH 9545 American Modernisms located and analyzed visual evidence of modern types and modern stories in a variety of print genres in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. These included cartoons, caricatures, advertising illustrations for American periodicals, graphic novels, illustrated dust jackets, and playbills over a range of dates from 1900 to 1939.
Exhibited are the results of their multi-faceted investigations. Andi Laska surveyed a run of Gustav Stickley’s The Craftsman magazine from 1904 to 1913, selecting images and articles advocating for social reform and the promise of the single-family home and garden whose furnishing combined preindustrial craftsmanship with machine production.
Matias Hendi located photographs of experimental productions starting 1916-1920 of the Provincetown Players in the archives of playwrights Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell. The rudimentary sets, some designed by Marguerite and William Zorach, frame bold veristic characters such as Minnie Wright on trial for murder in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles or the conversation between the dying sailor Yank and his friend Driscoll in O’Neill’s East of Cardiff.
Emmy Monaghan explored modern innovation through simplification and subtraction in Lynn Ward’s wordless novels such as God’s Man (1929), which tells of a Faustian bargain engaged by a cosmopolitan artist in exchange for a magic paint brush that leads only to corruption and despair.
Surveying illustrated advertisements in runs of popular periodicals such as Life, Collier’s Weekly, and The Saturday Evening Post, Leo Palma located modern attitudes towards gender, beauty, and sexuality in alluring characters such as Charles Dana Gibson’s Gibson Girl and George Leyendecker’s Arrow Collar Man. Similarly, Emmy Monaghan followed the careers of three female illustrators/cartoonists from the 1920s—Helen Hockinson, Barbara Shermund, and Margaret Trafford—whose work explored the outlook of urban middle- and working-class women for The New Yorker, Esquire, Life, and Collier’s.