A Salute to Wisconsin Printmakers

       

“…A gifted group of artist-professors who, through their creative and innovative approach to the teaching of printmaking, helped to initiate a renaissance in printmaking that has become a singular addition to twentieth century American artistic expression.” — Clare Romano, artist.

Ms. Romano was referring to a creative outburst that occurred in Wisconsin, centered at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the 1950s and 1960s.  Having lived in Madison briefly and then in Milwaukee during that period and having with a strong interest in art, I was keenly aware of the phenomenon.

Upon leaving the state to work for a Wisconsin congressman in Washington D.C., I decided to buy prints by several of the university’s notable printmakers and hang them in the legislator’s office to bring them some notice on Capitol Hill.  When the congressman proved amenable, I contacted Warrington Colescott, the leader of the artist-professors, about the project and he was interested.

My first move was to purchase a Colescott print called “Park Sunday,” shown here.  Although the artist is best known for his witty and satirical rendering of historical and contemporary events, my choice was a print that showed bicycles and riders racing against a wooded background.  Colescott’s ability to represent speed fascinated me.  He was gracious enough to arrange for framing and later came to the Washington office to see the print and the small display.  

Colescott in turn recommended a print by his close Madison colleague, Dean Meeker.  Meeker was one of the first printmakers to overprint silk-screens with polymer intaglio and, and to that end, he co-invented a motorized etching press. The combination of those techniques allowed him to build images that were so seemingly three-dimensional that, as one critic said, they “almost dance and sing.”  Although my print gave the illusion of three dimensions, the figure stayed firmly on the paper.  Titled in French “Le Vitrier,” and shown here, it is of a glazier fitting a window in front of what appears to be a jumble of street signs.

The third artwork from my “Hill project” was an etching by Harold Altman, a prolific draftsman who produced more than 1,200 editions of lithographs and etchings during his 65 years as an artist.  Critics lauded his “mastery of endless variation on a simple theme,” and praised his ability to reveal the extraordinary within the ordinary.  The print is one of those subjects to which Altman returned frequently — a poignant scene of two women talking in a park as figures emerge from the background.  Although Altman is not closely identified with the Wisconsin “school,”  my recollectoion is that he spent some time in Madison.

Another Wisconsin printmaker of note was Eugene Mecikalski, an artist-professor  at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  He was a well-regarded local artist who provided a range of prints depicting scenes in and around Milwaukee.  I was drawn to his color lithograph “Bird Signs” because it captured so well autumn in city as the light dims earlier and earlier and the birds begin their migration south.

A more traditional printmaker was Glenn Villwock, a respected Wisconsin artist active for many years in the Milwaukee area.  He was an art instructor to my mother-in-law to whom he presented this woodcut entitled “Coming Berkshire Storm,” a gift which we have now inherited.  It is our second Villwock, added to a humorous print of a goat purchased at a local art fair.

The final Wisconsin printmaker was a friend, Neil Fischer, who was the staff artist of the Marquette University Journal, the literary publication of which I was editor in 1956-1957.  He lithographed a series of four superb covers for the magazine.  He later gave me a picture related to one.  It shows students walking on busy Wisconsin Avenue in the vicinity of the Marquette Library.

In time, the display in the congressional office had to be moved.  The prints migrated to our home where they hung for many years. As we gathered more art  some original prints were relegated to storage.  Two years ago I contacted the Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA) in West Bend, shown below, about donating several to its collection.  When the curator was interested, the Colescott, Meeker and Altman went off to MOWA.  The curator subsequently was in touch, enthusiastic about the uniqueness of Colescott’s “Park Sunday” and held out the possibility of putting it on display.

The Mecikalski, Villwock and Fischer prints remain on the walls of our home, a continuing reminder of the period when printmaking in Wisconsin was, as Ms. Romero said, “a singular addition to twentieth century American artistic expression.”  Both Mecikalski and Villwock are in the MOWA collection.

Note:  For those interested in knowing more about this artistic “blooming,”I recommend the book, “Progressive Printmakers: Wisconsin Artists and the Print Renaissance,” co-authored by Warrington Colescott.  Available from Amazon, it is liberally illustrated, including prints by Colescott and Meeker.

Celebrating 300 Posts - A Retrospective

When this website  was begun in April 2009, I promised it would be about “more things than you can shake a stick at.”  That may have been an overstatement, but, as will be seen in this retrospective, this blog has covered a lot of territory in eleven-plus years.  Beginning largely about various aspects of  liquor artifacts and ads, over time it has evolved into more personal reminisces.  To reflect that change I recently altered the name from “BottlesBoozeandBackstories” to “MemoriesandMiscellany”

Recently having exceeded a half-million “hits” on the blog, this 300th post marks a milestone.  To celebrate it, I have decided to reprise briefly those posts that have drawn the most attention through the years.  Only one post has exceeded 6,000 look-ins and that is somewhat of a surprise.  On June 31, 2011, I posted a piece entitled:  “The Vernacular Art of Cast Iron Bottle Openers.”  Now approaching 7,000 hits the post has proved to be by far the most popular. 

I was fascinated by the variety and creativity embodied in cast iron bottle openers. Far from being antiques, most were manufactured in the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. Although the openers were cast from standardized molds, they were hand-painted by workers who often gave them individualized “personalities.”  Among the examples I chose was a top-hatted man with a sour look generally known as “Mr. Dry.” Mr. Dry was a Prohibition advocate and his frown greets anyone uncapping a beer bottle on his face. While the origins of many of cast iron bottle openers are unknown, this one was created by Wilton Products, Inc., of Wrightsville, Pennsylvania. 

The post in second place with some 5,740 look-ins was called “The Kiss of Prohibition: ‘Lips That Touch Liquor…”.   The allusion was to a poem that concludes:  

O women, the sorrow and pain is with you,

And so be the joy and the victory, too;

With this for your motto, and succor divine,

The lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine.

The last line became iconic and was used in various formats by anti-drink advocates frequently in the run-up to National Prohibition.  The image also lent  itself to countless parodies. One photograph that seems timeless in its appeal has a group of ten chastely dressed matrons beneath a sign.  They clearly are making themselves look as “un-kissable” as possible.  My attention was drawn to the woman in the center with a strange hat and what appears to be serape around her shoulders.  Her eyes seem to indicate that her lips might have been on a bottle not long before.  Later someone wrote me claiming that her long-diseased great aunt was that woman. My correspondent provided no other details.

In third place with 5,310 hits was my attempt to unravel the riddle of what was contained in the ceramic bottles imported from China for many years by workers brought to the U.S. to work on the railroads and other infrastructure projects. They carried with them or imported distinctive pottery containers, such as the one shown here. For years these bottles were considered to have held Chinese wine.  Under the title “What Were the Chinese Drinking?” and out of personal experience in China, I posited that the bottles contained a strong whiskey-like drink called “Maotai.”  Subsequently I found out that while generally connect, I had named the leading brand of the liquor. Generically it is known as “beijou.”

Only three posts have broken the 4,000 mark.  “Discovering the Swasey Solution” on May 12, 2012, marked the end of my years-long search for pottery companies that created “fancy” advertising whiskey jugs. For the first time in print I had identified several of them but one that left no mark continued to be confounding.  That ended when I came across a catalogue from E. Swasey & Company of Portland, Maine.   It advertised “Light and Dark...Glazed Bristol Ware, Decorated Ware and Fine Glazed Stoneware.”  As I turned the pages surprise after surprise greeted me.  There were many of the mystery jugs.  It turned out to be the Swasey solution.

Another “best seller” has nothing to do with either bottles or alcohol. It was  Entitled “Charles Darwin and ‘The Monkey’s Uncle,’” posted January 30, 1915.   Although Darwin was a thoughtful, serious scientist who made a monumental breakthrough in human thinking, his theories on evolution were often ridiculed by skeptics and, in his time, made the subject of satirical cartoons and other illustrations.  In many cases, a monkey was at the center of such lampoons.  Darwin himself frequently was depicted as a simian by cartoonists and illustrators.  The popularity of the piece indicates interest from both Darwinian adherents and skeptics.

Irwin S. Cobb once was among America’s top celebrities:  Author of 60 books, he was America’s highest paid journalist, a star of radio, motion pictures and the lecture circuit. More celebrated in his time than Johnny Carson or David Letterman in ours, he hosted the Academy Awards in 1935, received the French Legion of Honor, and two honorary doctorates.  A bridge over the Ohio River, several parks, a major hotel, and a brand of cigars were named after him. Yet today, little more than 60 years after his death almost no one knows who Cobb was or what he did.  My post of October 5, 2012 set out a short biography of this “forgotten man.”  As of now some 4,175 individuals have been interested in finding out who Cobb was.

An unexplained large number of hits — often 3,000 or more on every post — occurred over a ten month period from the latter half of 2015 into the early months of 2016.  Then things returned to lower and more traditional numbers. This phenomenon has been explained to me as the effect of another blog or blogs picking up my material and replicating it.  I hope to learn more about how that happens.  

Meanwhile I expect to keep this website active by adding a new post every two weeks.  Given the evolution of the blog, going forward it may have a more personal touch, while still dealing with the wide range of subjects that have been dealt with in the past.  On to #400!