BA Chromo-Mania Release 8.30.12

Contact: Peter Walsh, 617-894-1170; [email protected]
For Immediate Release
“CHROMO-MANIA!” EXPLORING CHROMOLITHOGRAPHY IN BOSTON
OPENS SEPTEMBER 28
(Boston, Massachusetts, August 30,
2012) “Chromo-Mania! The Art of
Chromolithography in Boston,
1840-1910,” an exhibition on view in
the Norma Jean Calderwood Gallery of
the Boston Athenæum September 28,
2012 to January 12, 2013, explores the
extraordinary diversity, technical
virtuosity, and beauty of
chromolithographs produced in
Boston. The exhibition and its
catalogue will describe how
chromolithographs were made and will
explore how Boston publishers helped
develop this revolutionary new technology
that transformed how visual images were
created, transmitted, and received.
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“Rapid Transit,” 1877.
Chromolithographic
advertisement. Printing
attributed to Charles H. Crosby
& Company. Boston Athenæum.
“Chromo-Mania!” at Boston Athenæum
Organized by Catharina Slautterback, curator of prints & photographs,
“Chromo-Mania!” will include over sixty works, ranging from vivid town
and city views; to book, periodical, and sheet music illustrations; large-scale
advertisements; art reproductions (including works by Asher B. Durand
and Winslow Homer); and historical commemorations. The work of such
innovative Boston publishers as William Sharp, J. H. Bufford, Louis Prang,
and many others will be represented.
A display of lithographic tools and stones, lent to the exhibition by master
printer Carolyn Muskat, and images of a Victorian lithographic studio will
explain how the elaborate lithographic process created stunning full-color
images long before color photography. Visitors to the show will be able to
handle a specially-made facsimile of a proof book, which shows how
chromolithographs were printed from as many as fifty separate stone plates.
Muskat has also created a chromolithographic work especially for the
exhibition, which will display her progressive proofs for the image. An
illustrated catalogue, with an historical essay by Catharina Slautterback, will
accompany the show.
The works on view will be drawn from the nationally renowned collection
of the Boston Athenæum, one of the most extensive of its kind. A small,
related exhibition in the Athenæum will display recent chromolithograph
acquisitions, dating from the 1850s up to the twenty-first century, including
such contemporary works as Beth van Hoesen’s monumental “San
Francisco Dahlias” (1995).
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An insatiable appetite for chromolithographs
“Chromo-mania” was first coined in the 1860s to ridicule America’s
insatiable appetite for chromolithographs, a new technology as ubiquitous
and popular as the iPod is today. Chromolithograph publishers soon took
up the term as a badge of pride, attesting to the public acclaim their work
received.
Lithography (from the Greek for “stone” and “to write”), discovered in the
late eighteenth century in Germany, was originally a black-and-white
medium. The printing process allows the artist to draw directly on a plate of
fine-grained limestone and exploits the chemical properties of oil and water
to create an image that appears very close to the original drawing. At first,
publishers added colors by hand. Later, lithographs were printed in multiple
colors on separate stones by the complex method called
chromolithography.
Boston as a center of the American lithograph
Lithography began to take hold in Boston in the 1820s. Pendleton’s
Lithography of Boston, one of the first and most important early firms,
trained Fitz Henry Lane (also known as Fitz Hugh Lane), Benjamin
Champney, and many other artists of their generation in lithographic
draftsmanship.
The first American chromolithographs were printed in Boston in the early
1840s. Soon Boston firms like J. H. Bufford & Co. and L. H. Bradford and
Company were enjoying enormous commercial success. Some Boston
publishers produced fine art reproductions or accurate and detailed
scientific illustrations. Others specialized in large-scale, lavish,
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“Chromo-Mania!” at Boston Athenæum
chromolithographic advertisements,
using dozens of separately colored,
inked, and printed stones. Many of
the examples in the exhibition are
virtuosic artistic performances and
are flawlessly executed.
Louis Prang’s “empire”
Another Boston printer, the ambitious
“Victoria Regia: Continued
and shrewd German emigré Louis Prang, Bloom,” 1854. Chromolithograph.
built what Slautterback calls “arguably... Sharp & Son. Boston Athenæum.
of the New England Historical
the most successful chromolithographic Gift
Art Society, 1950
empire in the country. His ‘American
Chromos’ would re-define the very
meaning of chromolithography, alter the course of art education in the
country, and, for better or for worse, dictate the aesthetic tastes of two
generations of Americans.” After an early success making mostly blackand-white images of the Civil War-- battle scenes, officer’s portraits, sheet
music, and maps-- Prang returned to Europe to broaden his knowledge of
chromolithography. Later, back in Boston, he had even greater success.
L. Prang & Company billed their “American Chromos” as “fac-similes” or
“artistic copies” of works by Winslow Homer, Thomas Moran, and other
important artists. They were framed and hung in parlors, bed chambers,
dining rooms, churches, schoolrooms, and public buildings across the
country.
Using elaborate new techniques, Prang boasted only experts could
distinguish his copies from the originals. At a time when public museums
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and art galleries were rare in the United States, Prang, a former
revolutionary in his native Germany, sought to make art accessible to the
ordinary citizen, not just the rich. His prints were not only decoration but
taught moral lessons as well. To promote his reputation among America’s
intellectual and political vanguard, Prang even sent free copies of his
Chromos to prominent Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass.
Prang created an Art Education
Department within his company to
support art education in public schools.
The Prang Education Company,
established in 1882, became a leading
source of texts and art supplies for
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“North Woods,” 1896.
Chromolithographic art
reproduction. L. Prang &
Company after a watercolor
painting by Winslow Homer
(1836-1910). Boston Athenæum.
Gift of Charles E. Mason, Jr., 1981
“Chromo-Mania!” at Boston Athenæum
schools across the country, a legacy of enormous influence that continues
to this day.
Prang’s technically advanced efforts led to such breathtaking images as the
portfolio “The Yellowstone National Park” (1876), with plates after
watercolors by Thomas Moran. “[N]o finer specimens of chromolthographic work have been produced anywhere,” proclaimed The Times
of London of this publication. Prang considered the 116 plates for Oriental
Ceramic Art; Illustrated by Examples from the Collection of W.T. Walters
(New York, 1897), which took Prang’s craftsmen more than seven years to
complete, as his “monument.”
The exhibition includes chromolithographs after Homer and Moran,
examples from the Yellowstone portfolio and the “Oriental Ceramic Art,”
along with proof sets of the latter that show the elaborate methods used to
create them.
A rich legacy of images
Not everyone was impressed by the efforts of Prang and other Boston
lithographers to raise color printing to the level of fine art. Chromos,
sneered Clarence Cook, art critic of the influential New York Tribune, were
like “false diamonds, false hair, false teeth... [with] which homely people try
to make themselves look pretty, and succeed in making themselves
hideous... We have said the chromo-lithography is not art at all... it is mere
mechanic process.”
Prang countered by publishing celebrity testimonials from Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe and others, and by claiming
that chromolithographs were a “reproductive” art not intended to be
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original. Prang’s tremendous business success allowed him to build a large
factory in Roxbury, recruit a highly skilled staff. and to use the latest
technologies, including the first steam-powered press.
The overwhelming popularity of chromolithographs, and the promotional
efforts of Prang and his rivals, including the Forbes Lithographic
Manufacturing Company and George H. Walker & Company, meant that
Boston printers remained pre-eminent until they were overtaken by such
new technologies as photo-lithography, in the twentieth century. The
exhibition celebrates their creativity, ingenuity, and legacy.
“Although the medium had been used for commercial purposes from its
earliest years...,” writes Slautterback, “many chromolithographs produced in
Boston were striking and superbly crafted prints, regardless of whether they
were sheet music covers, advertisements, or art reproductions.”
About the Norma Jean Calderwood Gallery:
Located on the first floor of the Boston Athenæum’s National Historic
Landmark building at 10½ Beacon Street in the heart of Beacon Hill,
Boston, Massachusetts, the Norman Jean Calderwood Gallery is the
Athenæum’s main public exhibition space. It is within walking distance of
the Government Center and Park Street MBTA stations. Parking is
available in a commercial lot across from the building and in the Boston
Common Parking Garage, under the Boston Common and accessible from
Charles Street.
The Norma Jean Calderwood Gallery is open to the public from 9:00 am to
5:00 pm on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday; from 9:00 am to 7:30 pm on
Monday and Wednesday; and from 9:00 am to 3:30 pm on Saturday. Closed
on major holidays. Admission to special exhibitions in the Calderwood
Gallery is free to members; $5.00 for non-members. For general
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“Chromo-Mania!” at Boston Athenæum
information about the Calderwood Gallery and the Boston Athenæum, call
617-227-0270. For reservations for special events requiring reservations,
call 617-720-7600. Or visit the Athenæum website at
www.bostonathenaeum.org.
About the Boston Athenæum: Founded in 1807, the Boston Athenæum is Boston’s first cultural
institution. It combines an art museum, with a public exhibition gallery and
collections of paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, photographs, and
decorative arts; a leading research and membership library with over
750,000 volumes, among them 100,000 rare and historic editions; and a
civic forum including lectures, readings, panel discussions, and other
events. ***
[2012.6]
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