Decorative Sunday

Nebraska printmaker and book artist Karen Kunc (b. 1952) is a favorite here at UWM Special Collections. Here is a new acquisition of color, reduction woodcuts and letterpress printing, On this Land, with a text by Latina Nebraskan poet Lenora Castillo (b. 1950), printed in Lincoln, Nebraska, at Kunc's Blue Heron Press for the Library Fellows of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in 1996 in an edition of 126 copies signed by the poet and artist.

The images were printed in five runs from Kunc's two basswood blocks on mouldmade Nideggen paper by artist Nancy Palmeri. On This Land reflects the austere beauty of the artist's environment - its farmland and open sky - and describes the gradual process of acceptance and attachment to a new place. Kunc's nature-inspired woodcuts echo the colors of rural harvesting, festivals and folk arts. The size of the book is intimate in scale, yet unfolds to a dramatic horizontal spread that evokes the land itself. Our copy is another donation from the estate of our late friend Dennis Bayuzick.

View other posts with works by Karen Kunc.

View other books from the collection of Dennis Bayuzick.

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Whitewashing Lascaux, 2008. Leake Street Tunnel, Waterloo Station, London. Created for the Cans Festival, a 3-day street art street festival hosted and organized by Banksy in a tunnel under Waterloo Station.

Happy Choppers, 2002. Hoxton, London. Produced during the "Operation Enduring Freedom" campaign in Afghanistan.

Kissing Coppers, 2004. Originally in Trafalgar Street, Brighton, UK. In 2011, it was cut out and shipped to New York to be sold by art dealer Stephan Keszler at a 2014 auction in Miami for $575,000. A replica has replaced the original.

Sweeping it Under the Carpet, 2006. Hoxton, London where it appeared on the side of the White Cube Gallery, but has since been buffed.

Girl Searching Soldier, 2007. Bethlehem, West Bank, Palestine. "Whilst the image is delightfully absurd, there is also a warning for Israeli occupying forces. One day, Banksy seems to be saying, our children will be investigating you for what you have done."

Police Sniper with Boy, 2007. Bristol, UK, but in 2012 was painted over with black paint and replaced by another work, the Queen as David Bowie, by a different street artist.

ATM Girl, 2007. Exmouth Market, Finsbury, London. Created a few months before the biggest financial crash since the 1930s.

Eavesdropping, 2014. Cheltenham, UK, a sleepy, conservative, quintessentially English market town in Gloucestershire, but just three miles away from the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

Park, 2010. Downtown Los Angeles on the side of designer Tarina Tarantino's showroom a few blocks from the Los Angeles Theatre, painted just days before the premiere of Exit Through the Gift Shop at the Theatre.

Photographer Rat, 2005. Islington, London. "Rats are a good role model . . . they have no respect for the hierarchy of society and the have sex 50 times a day." -- Banksy.

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Decorative Sunday: BANKSY

Decorative art, street art, fine art, political cartoon, all four? Where's B**ksy?, an unauthorized selection of works by the infamous street artist by street art specialist Xavier Tapies published by Gingko Press in Berkeley, California in 2016, is the first survey of Banksy's art career from 2002 to 2016. Arranged chronologically, every period has a double-spread world map showing where each of the stencils was painted, what happened to the work (destroyed/sold/auctioned/still there) as well as a summary of the direction Banksy’s art took in that period.

There is Always Hope, 2002. East staircase leading up to Waterloo Bridge, Southbank, London.

View more posts featuring Decorative Plates.

Staff Pick of the Week

Décoration moderne dans l'intérieur by Henry Delacroix (1907-1974) was published in Paris by S. de Bonadona, likely around 1935. Delacroix studied architecture at the National School of Decorative Arts of Paris joining his father’s architectural firm upon graduation. He made a name for himself reconstructing French cities after World War II, most notably City of 4000 in La Courneuve.  

Capturing Delacroix’s penchant for modern art deco inspired interiors, Décoration moderne dans l'intérieur is a portfolio of the genre’s luminaries. The publication contains forty-eight vibrant pochoir (stencil coloring) printed plates of designs by Francis Jourdain, Pierre Chareau, Georges Djo-Bourgeois, and the author, Henry Delacroix himself. He also included a seemingly heartfelt introduction that loosely translates to the idea of a man’s physical and spiritual needs being met through the luxury of a home that can facilitate the rest needed to nurture his imagination.  

Delacroix produced several portfolios of this kind showcasing ideas for an array of architectural settings and including painterly accessories inspired by Chagall and Matisse. A delight for anyone interested in interior design or color theory! Our copy of Décoration moderne dans l'intérieur is part of a gift from the estate of our dear friend Dennis Bayuzick.  

View other books from the collection of Dennis Bayuzick. 

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– Jenna, Special Collections Graduate Intern 

Decorative Plates

It's been awhile since we last posted something on the theme of the decorative arts, so I'm happy to have found this book—especially because it was mis-shelved in the stacks! This book is House and Garden's Book of Color Schemes, which contains "over two hundred color schemes and three hundred illustrations of halls, living rooms, dining rooms, bed chambers, sun rooms, roofs, garden rooms, kitchens and baths; the characteristic colors of each decorative period; how to select a color scheme, with unusual treatments for painted furniture and floors; a portfolio of crystal rooms and eight pages of unusual interiors in color." It was edited by long-time editor of House & Garden Richardson Wright (1887-1961) and Margaret McElroy, associate editor, and published by Condé Nast Publications, Inc. in 1929.

The book includes a large number of photographs of rooms, however, they are mostly in black and white—an unfortunate thing for a book about color! The promised eight color illustrations of rooms are not all present in our copy, but the five that are still in the book are shown here, alongside some of their black and white compatriots. I especially love the one titled "Tawny Yellow in Variety" that features a shocking amount of leopard print.

If you've read any of the posts I usually write, you know that I love a good binding—this one is a publisher's binding in a chartreuse-y yellow book cloth with art deco-style silver tooling featuring stars and leaves. Somebody took it upon themselves to write the publication date on the cover above the title—how thoughtful!

View more posts featuring Decorative Plates.

-- Alice, Special Collections Department Manager

A Wisconsin Decorative Arts Feathursday

This week we present some decorative avian motifs form the 1948 portfolio Decorative Art in Wisconsin by Anne Kendall Foote (1910-1986) and Elaine A. G. Smedal (1922-2014), published in Madison, Wisconsin by Screen Art Company. The portfolio is a follow-up to the authors' 1946 portfolio Norwegian Design in Wisconsin, and was funded by a grant from the University of Wisconsin's Committee on the Study of American Civilization. The portfolio includes 15 original silk-screened prints with photographs and descriptions of the artifacts that the designs are drawn from.

We were delighted that bird images were included, and particularly delighted that some of them were . . . CHICKENS!!

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James Trissel's Color for Letterpress

After being away from UWM Special Collections for the first part of the Summer, I was delighted to spend some time looking through some of the gorgeous work we recently acquired from the estate of Dennis Bayuzick. I was particularly taken by Color for Letterpress, published in an edition of seventy-five by The Press at Colorado College in 1978. The book was designed and printed by founder of the press, Jim Trissel. Over two decades, Trissel raised the press to a level of excellence attained by only a handful of academic letterpresses in the United States.

Jim's son Ben, who worked beside him at the press, reflected on his father's exacting standards in a memorial essay shortly after his death in 1999: "I remember once abandoning the initial layout of the Color for Letterpress book because the registration was off by a 1/32 of an inch. He stopped the press run, reconfigured the book's enture structure, and printed it right."

Color for Letterpress was printed on a Vandercook Universal Power 3 press. Trissel used mostly lithographic inks on BFK Rives paper from Arches, which he describes in the introduction as "very white," and "dimensionally stable." The book consists of an introductory text and three sections of plates housed in a white acrylic case. The plates of the first section, The Quartered Spectrum, utilize single hues with variations in density and temperature. Families of Analogous Color, the second section, "contrasts hues by temperature but prints individual hues in closely related groups or families." The last grouping is called Six Complementary Pairs and shows contrasts in both hue and temperature. "The book is accordion-bound," writes Trissel, "to permit an easy display of the plates."

Check out more from the Collection of Dennis Bayuzick here.

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-Olivia Hickner, Special Collections Graduate intern

Decorative Sunday

This week we present some dados from volume 9 of the Jeypore Portfolio of Architectural Details, published in twelve volumes by Bernard Quaritch between 1890 and 1913. A dado is the lower part of a wall, below the dado rail and above the skirting board, that is often given over to decorative treatment.

Issued under the patronage of Maharaja Sawai Madhu Singh, the Jeypore Portfolio was prepared under the supervision of Colonel Samuel Swinton Jacob, Indian Staff Corps, Engineer to the Jeypore State, and Lala Ram Bakhsh, head draftsman and teacher in the Jeypore School of Art, and was photo-lithographed by William Griggs of London, the inventor of photo-chromo-lithography. The Portfolio was intended to serve as a record of the architectural heritage of the Jeypore State and the north-west region of Rajasthan. As a record, it would “rescue (such) designs from oblivion and give them new life.”

Of the 12-volume set we only hold volumes 7 (String and band patterns), 9 (Dados), and 10 (Parapets). These have been digitized and may be found in our digital collections.

View other posts from the Jeypore Portfolio.

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Decorative Sunday

A few months ago, I posted images from the first Graphis Annual, check out that post for some background on the early days of Graphis. Since that inaugural Graphis Annual in 1952/53, the Graphis family of publications has expanded to include a number of annual reviews, starting with the Graphis Photo Annual in 1966 and the Graphis Poster Annual in 1973. The images here are from the Design Annual 2022, published by Graphis Inc. in New York, NY. Graphis also now publishes annuals in advertising as well as a New Talent Annual highlighting exceptional student work.

It is interesting to compare more current Graphis Annuals with earlier ones, not only to note changes in aesthetic sensibility, but also to note the expansion of ambitious design work into areas like corporate annuals and/or environmental reports. The image above that looks like the cover of a manga, for example, is actually the annual report for Nissin Foods Holdings Co., LTD., a Japanese company that specialized in convenience foods like Cup Noodles (which I was very surprised to learn hasn’t been called Cup O’ Noodles since 1993 ... Mandela effect?). I was also pleased to see how much book design was featured in the annual, though I do admit to over-representing book design in my choices here. I just couldn’t help myself!

Find more Decorative Sunday posts here. 

-Olivia, Special Collections Graduate Intern

Decorative Sunday with Henry P. Kirby

These charming sketches are the work of New York architect Henry P. Kirby (1853 - 1915). Architectural Compositions contains fifty loose plates printed on Whatman paper and housed in a portfolio. It was published in Boston in 1892 by Bates, Kimball & Guild, publishers of one of the United State’s leading architectural journals of that time, The Architectural Review (Boston), not to be confused with the longer running Architectural Review still in publication out of London. 

Kirby would have been working as a draftsman for George B. Post at the time of publication, for whom he later worked as lead designer before striking out on his own. Some of the subject matter also evokes Kirby’s time in France, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts after training with his father, also an architect. Per the subtitle, some of the sketches were “made in connection with actual projects,” while many were “the result of study during leisure moments.” I found Kirby’s eye for the human elements in his sketches particularly endearing, from the foreground figures to details on the buildings themselves, like open widows and overgrown foliage, or what looks like a duvet cover hanging out to dry (first image above). 

For any music buffs reading, the final sketch includes some bars of "Très-jolie" from the opéra comique smash hit La Fille de Madame Angot. 

Our copy of Architectural Compositions was gifted to UWM by Gustav A. Elgeti in 1966. 

Find more Decorative Sunday posts here.

-Olivia, Special Collections Graduate Intern

Decorative Sunday

This week’s plates are from the first volume of La Décoration Primitive, a collection of portfolios documenting the decorative art of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas (the last in two volumes, separated by pre- and post-Columbian). The four volumes were published in Paris by the photography and decorative arts publisher A. Calavas for Librarie des Arts Décoratifs, likely in 1922. The art critic and theorist Rosalind Krauss postulated that these volumes, along with Calavas’s other publishing for Librarie des Arts Décoratifs, were “published specifically for the instruction of arts and design students” in her 1985 work The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths.

While the Oceania and two American volumes contain introductory texts by Daniel Réal, a painter and curator at the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro, the text of La Décoration Primitive Afrique is by P.-C. Lepage. Lepage opens his introduction by addressing the use of the term “primitive,” insisting it is not used pejoratively. Indeed, “primitive art” was the most pervasive term used to describe non-Western art at the beginning of the 20th century. The term has declined in use as more of the art world has recognized the explicitly derogatory connotations. The rest of Lapage’s introductory text goes on to extoll the richness of the artistic tradition of the African continent, and laments the “disastrous influence” of les blanches in Africa, first by destroying “tout ce qui était à portée de leur ardeur iconoclaste (everything within reach of their iconoclastic ardor).” 

-Olivia Hickner, Special Collections Graduate Intern

The Berlin Painter

Of all the vase painters of ancient Athens, there is one who continues to captivate all those who witness their works, not only for their splendor and skill, but also for their mystery. The identity of the artist dubbed the Berlin Painter is something we may never know. Although over 200 pieces have been identified as being painted by this individual, none of them hold the name of the artist. This is highly unusual, since by the time of the early 5th century BCE, the period when the Berlin Painter’s vases are dated, both master potters and painters would commonly place their names on their favored works.

The Berlin Painter and His World: Athenian Vase-Painting in the Early Fifth Century B.C. edited by J. Michael Padgett, Curator of Ancient Art at the Princeton University Art Museum, and published by the Museum in 2017 on the occasion of exhibitions of the same name at the Princeton University Art Museum and the Toledo Museum of Art, is the definitive work on this ancient Greek artist, and includes an updated catalogue raisonné, With contributions by several leading scholars, the work seeks to rebuild the ancient city of Athens though the ceramic remains by artists such as the Berlin Painter.  

The highly decorated pottery of ancient Athens allows us to see the wide spread of influences this culture had on both the Mediterranean world and Central Europe. While beloved by those in the Hellenic world, others imported the pottery, as luxury items and elaborate symbols of wealth. The Etruscans from the Italian peninsula regularly furnished their tombs with kraters, wine mixing vessels, and the Celts of modern-day France and Germany would regularly feast using the Athenian pottery. Though lacking the fast-traveling methods available today, the broad distance where Athenian pottery can be found demonstrates that the cultures of the Mediterranean and Europe were closely connected.

View more Decorative Sunday posts.

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– LauraJean, Special Collections Classics Intern.

Decorative Sunday: Paste Paper Edition

In 1942, Harvard University Press printed 250 copies of Decorated Book Papers: Being an Account of the Designs and Fashions by the bookbinder, author, and creator and collector of decorative papers, Rosamond Bowditch Loring. Published by the Harvard College Library Department of Printing and Graphic Arts in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the 234 sale copies of the first edition sold out within months, despite the “then considerable price of ten dollars” and the economic stressors of the war. In addition to eight plates reproducing examples of 18th century decorative papers, the first edition includes twenty-five samples tipped in, many of which are from the author’s own extensive collection. 

While Loring collected a variety of a decorative papers, the examples shown here are from the chapter on paste papers, Loring’s area of creative specialization. The sample papers included in this chapter are all Loring’s own work, or that of her student, Veronica Ruzicka, who bound the first edition (it is worthy to note that Ruzicka is the daughter of illustrator, wood engraver, and type designer Rudolph Ruzicka, whose work we have highlighted several times). Ruzicka also contributed an essay when a second edition of the book was finally published by Harvard University Press in 1952, along with Dard Hunter and Walter Muir Whitehall. 

Rosamond Loring (May 2, 1889 – September 17, 1950) studied book binding under Mary Crease Sears at the Sears School of Bookbinding in Boston. Sears, about a decade older than Loring, had had to battle to learn the trade; women were barred from the Bookbinders Union but most commercial binderies were happy to hire women for particular tasks, such as sewing sheets, but maintained a strict separation of roles, preventing employees from learning the whole binding process from start to finish. Eventually, Ms. Sears secured an apprenticeship in France to complete her studies and opened her binding school in Boston shortly after, training several generations of women binders. While studying under Sears, Loring became frustrated with the lack of options for quality endpapers and became determined to make her own, which she sold to other binders at Ms. Sears’s studio. Her first major commercial commission was for the Houghton Mifflin publication of The Antigone of Sophocles, translated by John J. Chapman (Boston, 1930).

Our copy of Decorated Book Papers is a gift of Dick Schoen. 

-Olivia Hickner, Special Collections Graduate Intern

The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb

It has been called the first masterpiece of the Renaissance, the forefather of artistic realism, and the first major oil painting (though that last claim is dubious, since oil paints were in use in Asia as early as the 7th century). In the last five centuries, it has been involved in seven separate thefts and is possibly the most stolen work in art history (the bottom left panel has never been recovered, a reproduction now stands in its place). It’s Jan van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb A.K.A. The Ghent Altarpiece. Rather, it’s the comprehensive treatment of The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb printed and published in 1964 by Arti Grafiche Ricordi of Milan, under the auspices of the Belgian National Commission for UNESCO.

The text is by Valentin Denis, a Belgian professor of Archeology and Art History, and translated into English from the French by Michael Langley. Arti Grafiche Ricordi had also published the original French edition in 1963, as well as an Italian translation the same year. A Dutch-language edition was published in 1964 in Amsterdam by Bonaventura, an imprint of Elsevier (both names an homage to the lauded Dutch House of Elzevir). Despite the change in publisher, the Dutch edition maintains the same design that is consistent across all three of the Ricordi editions. The plates are printed in full-color letterpress halftone on wood veneer laminated to carboard. The first plate is a fold-out triptych, allowing readers to view the entire altarpiece, both open and closed. The following 24 plates focus on the panels, showing individual panels in their entirely and also honing in on details, such as the extreme close up of the background flora and architecture on the upper left corner of the central panel (eighth image above). 

Arti Grafiche Ricordi was the graphic design arm of Casa Ricordi, founded in 1808 by the violinist Giovanni Ricordi and predominantly known as a publisher of classical music and opera. The publishing house came to prominence by developing privileged relationships with major 19th-century Italian composers like Rossini, Verdi, and later, Puccini. The firm maintained full family control, with four generations of Ricordi’s at the helm, for over a century, and remains a major name in classical music publishing (now as a subsidiary of Universal Music Group). But Arti Grafiche Ricordi has its own influential past in Italian graphic design. Giulio, the third Ricordi to lead the firm, first bolstered the Officine Grafiche, hiring as the creative director the German Adolfo Hohenstein in 1888. Hohenstein and Officine Grafiche would go on to train the bulk of the first generation of great Italian poster designers. 

Find more Decorative Sunday posts here. 

-Olivia Hickner, Special Collections Graduate Intern

Decorative Sunday

GEE’S BEND QUILTS

Since the 19th century, the women of Gee’s Bend in southern Alabama have created stunning, vibrant quilts. In 2002, folk art collector, historian, and curator William Arnett organized an exhibition entitled "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," which debuted at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and later travelled to a dozen other locations across the country, including our own Milwaukee Art Museum (September 27, 2003 - January 4, 2004). This exhibition brought fame to the quilts, and Arnett's foundation Souls Grown Deep Foundation continues to collect and organize exhibitions for Gee’s Bend Quilts.

The images shown here are from Gee’s Bend: The Women and Their Quilts, with essays by John Beardsley, William Arnett, Paul Arnett, and Jane Livingston, an introduction by Alvia Wardlaw, and a foreword by Peter Marzio. The book was published in 2002 by Tinwood Books, Atlanta, and published in conjunction with the 2002 exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. It includes 350 color illustrations and 30 black-and-white illustrations. The dust jacket notes observe:

Our copy is a gift from our friend and benefactor Suzy Ettinger.

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Decorative Sunday

Published in Boston by Shambhala Publications in 2000, The Buddha Scroll is a twenty-first century facsimile of an eighteenth-century reproduction of a twelfth-century work. This accordion-fold book folds out to replicate the 36-foot Qing dynasty scroll, painted by Ding Guanpeng ( 丁觀鵬) in 1767. Ding Guanpeng was commissioned by Emperor Gaozong of Qing to reproduce the Pictorial of Buddhist Icons, completed in 1180 by Zhang Shengwen of the Kingdom of Dali (present day Yunnan Province) after the original work was found water damaged and mismounted.

The Kingdom of Dali and it’s predecessor Nanzhao were situated between Tibet and China and encompassed many ethnic and linguistic groups. Translator Thomas Cleary, who contributed an introduction to the scroll as well as a key to the figures found in the scroll, writes that the depictions in the scroll “reflect the syncretic cultural background of its original model, representing a whole range of Buddhism … it is an unusually eclectic work of art, illustrating the continuity of the many currents that form the great ocean of Buddhism.”

The Buddha Scroll was a gift of Dick Schoen. 

Find more Decorative Sunday posts here. 

-Olivia, Special Collections Graduate Intern

Labarte’s Histoire des Arts Industriels, part deux!

Last month we posted images from the first album of plates of Histoire des arts industriels au Moyen Âge et à l'époque de la Renaissance, published in four volumes between 1864-1866 by A. Morel et Cie. of Paris. In that post, we discussed the creator, Jules Labarte, and a bit of the publishing history. This post will focus on Imprimerie Lithographique de Lemercier, the firm responsible for image reproduction in Labarte’s Histoire. 

Founded by Rose-Joseph Lemercier in 1837, Lemercier was the largest lithography firm in Paris between 1850 and 1870 and was instrumental in industrializing the lithography business in France and integrating new photolithographic processes into his repertoire. The son and grandson of basketmakers, Lemercier was apprenticed out to follow in the family business, but he quickly became enchanted with printing, studying first under Joséphine-Clémence Formentin before apprenticing for Édouard Knecht, nephew and successor of Aloys Senefelder, the inventor of lithography. 

Lemercier attempted his own innovations, including an effort to develop his own photolithographic process in the early 1850s. Ultimately, he purchased the patent for the process developed by Alphonse Poitevin. The image below is an example of that process:

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-Olivia, Special Collections Graduate Intern

Decorative Sunday

This week we present some parapet designs from Jeypore Portfolio of Architectural Details, published in twelve volumes by Bernard Quaritch between 1890 and 1913. The plates displayed here are from volume 10 on parapets, the decorative extension of the wall at the edge of a roof, balcony, or other structure..

Issued under the patronage of Maharaja Sawai Madhu Singh, the set was prepared under the supervision of Colonel Samuel Swinton Jacob, Indian Staff Corps, Engineer to the Jeypore State, and Lala Ram Bakhsh, head draftsman and teacher in the Jeypore School of Art, and was photo-lithographed by William Griggs of London, the inventor of photo-chromo-lithography. The Portfolio was intended to serve as a record of the architectural heritage of the Jeypore State and the north-west region of Rajasthan. As a record, it would “rescue (such) designs from oblivion and give them new life.”

Of the 12-volume set we only hold volumes 7 (String and band patterns), 9 (Dados), and 10 (Parapets). These have been digitized and may be found in our digital collections.

View other posts from the Jeypore Portfolio.

View more Decorative Sunday posts.