[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]

HENDRICKS, Andrew [contemporary]

“The March of Progress” 

2013

marquetry / scraped & engraved tabletop fragment, color pencil / 7″ x 10 1/2″

Andrew Hendricks describes his own process using found materials:

My work focuses on the exploitative relationship people have with the natural world and how this relationship shapes the manufactured landscapes around us….

[The] two-dimensional work is executed on stained and finished wood panels reclaimed from cast-off or broken furniture. Employing reductive intaglio techniques from my printmaking background, I use tools like scrapers and engraving burins to remove the layers of old finishes, stains, and veneers with the objective of adding as little as possible back onto the piece. Just as nature is reduced to create these objects, I further reduce the objects to reveal their true nature.

As with Michael Paul’s haunted painting “People talking without listening“, Hendricks’ marquetry draws on the ubiquitous telephone pole, in this case its rhythms along country roads or the lengths of urban alleys, representing a communication mode on the list of endangered technologies—if not those already extinct. Viewers under the age of, say, twenty-five, are likely to find little meaning in their repetitive cruciform shapes. For others “of a certain age” these will conjure memories of Burma Shave signs.

[From the catalogue-in-progress for “Landscapes & Livestock”, a loan exhibition for Agincourt Homecoming in the Fall of 2015]

WASSERMAN, Karl Franz Joseph Maria [1900-1972]

The Apothecary

1944

opaque watercolor on illustration board / 19 inches by 14.2 inches

The line between art and illustration is thin, if it exists. In the 19th century, however, fine art (painting especially) distinguished itself from the crass commercialism of mere illustration. Paintings like “The Apothecary,” for example, were intended to accompany magazine articles or act as “stills” from a novel or to appear on dust jackets of pulp novels; they advertised products, plays and films. They never appeared in museums or galleries. Not until Howard Pyle and N. C. Wyeth established the Brandywine School, that is.

Karl Wasserman’s gouache painting advertised “The Apothecary,” a play co-written by Agincourt activist Abel Kane and Miloš Švec, World War II refugee from occupied Czechoslovakia. In 1943, Švec evaded Soviet forces and made his way through Italy to Casablanca; then secured passage to the United States and an adjunct teaching position at Northwest Iowa Normal. During the fall semester of 1944, Abel Kane assisted with the adaptation of Lékárník, Švec’s symbolist novel of political corruption. Ticket sales for “The Apothecary” and free-will donations supported shipments of food, blankets and winter clothing to Europe.

The Normal College archive transferred this painting to the Community Collection in 1973, memorializing long-time faculty member Karl Wasserman.

[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]

HECKEL, Erich [1883–1970]

“Der Richter” / The Judge

ca1963

woodcut / 6 3/8 inches by 5 1/8 inches / edition unknown

Considered one of Germany’s finest Expressionist artists, Heckel was a founding member of Die Brücke (The Bridge). This print titled “The Judge” may be a posthumous printing. Despite that possibility, however, it is an important addition to the collection, acquired during a trip to Europe in the late 1970s.

[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]

MESS, George Joseph / Jo [1898–1962]

“Glorious Day”

ca1950

etching and aquatint / 7 inches by 9 inches / edition unknown

Brown County in south-central Indiana became the center of an important regional gathering of artists and developed that reputation during most of the 20th century. George Jo Mess [1898-1962] is not as well known as others who were part of the colony from time to time—names like Gustave Baumann and Alexis Jean Fournier—but is respectable nonetheless. His landscapes have a homey, even homelyness about them; the delicate shadings that can be achieved in aquatint applied to the rounded forms of trees and landscape, such as exemplified here in “Glorious Day” of about 1950.

[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]

KLOTZ-DÜRRENBACH, Theodor [1890-1959]

Poster for an Exhibition

1919

woodcut / 9.5 inches by  6.5 inches / #5 from an unspecified edition

Viennese artist Theodor Klotz-Dürrenbach is poorly represented in auction sale catalogues, though he seems to have created both woodcuts and paintings. This poster for a Viennese exhibit of fairytale-based woodcuts (märchen holzschnitte) was printed in 1919. The print is accompanied in the collection by a book illustrated by the same artist—Russische Volksmärchen by Eugen Weller, published in 1925—which includes four full-page woodcut illustrations by Klotz-Dürrenbach.

Both print and illustrated book came from the personal library of Dr Reinhold Kölb, founder of the Walden Clinic. Though untitled, the print tells us about itself—”Fairytale Woodcuts by Klotz-Dürrenbach”—and indirectly about the circumstances of its presence in the Kölb library: the good doctor famously used the fabrication of fairy tales in his innovative drama-therapy and public shows of puppetry.

[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]

WOMRATH, Andrew Kay [1874-1953]

European Couple by Day*

ca1930

woodcut / 8 inches by  6.25 inches / #6 from an edition of 25

Philadelphia artist Andrew Kay Womrath was born on St Crispin’s Day in 1874. He studied and collaborated with Japanese woodcut master Yoshijiro Urushibara but is little known in the United States today. Indeed there is a good deal of conflicting biographical material, including erroneous birth and death dates.

Womrath lived most of his productive life in France, but travelled frequently between there and the United States, England and Italy. Small landscapes are more typical of his output, as are Art Nouveau posters in the style of Theophile Steinlen. During 1914, he offered a class in “Decorative Design and Decorative Composition” at his studio in New York City — which indicates that considerable research needs to be done on this artist.

* There is also a nighttime version of this print.

[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]

KUMAGAI, Goro [born 1932]

Abstract City

1957

woodcut / 13 inches by 9 inches / edition unknown

The most recent additions to the Community Collection represent two very different observations of the city as historical document. One is European; the other Oriental. Yet both are in a style popularly called Mid-century Modern. Compare Kumagai’s “Abstract City” with Mario Micussi’s glimpse of the Roman Forum. But Kumagai’s woodcut is also interesting in light of the influence that the Japanese aesthetic has had on the West—and the reciprocal influence shown here.

This print was acquired from the estate of Maureen and Bill Bendix, developers of Riverside Addition in the 1950s. Their home on Sixth Street NW was among Agincourt’s earliest examples of Mid-Mod as an architectural phenomenon and its interior must have been an equally potent representation of that aesthetic.

[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]

MICOSSI, Mario [born 1922]

“Fori e San Sisto in Roma”

1960s

aquatint etching / 12 3/4 inches by 15 1/4 inches

An internationally recognized artist and etcher, Micossi studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. He then moved to New York City where he worked as an illustrator for such periodicals as The New Yorker and Saturday Review. Since the early 1960s, however, Micossi has dedicated himself to printmaking and the refinement of the deep etching technique (which this print employs). Micossi’s work is in major museums such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Fogg Museum, Harvard University; the Albertina, Venice; the Stockholm National Museum; the Library of Congress; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Micossi’s blinkered glimpse of the Forum at the heart of ancient Rome as it is seen by a mid-century Modernist. The deep rich velvet tones of an aquatint invite close inspection.

[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]

BURR, George Elbert [1859–1939]

“Fairy Glen–Wales”

before 1915

drypoint etching / 7 3/4 inches by 4 7/8 inches

Considered one of the finest early 20th century engravers, Burr was born in Ohio and attended the Art Institute of Chicago for one year. A four-year project illustrating a catalogue for the Metropolitan Museum in New York City enabled Burr and his wife to undertake a five-year tour of Europe and Great Britain, the likely source of this etching, “Fairy Glen–Wales”. This was exhibited at the Panama-Pacific Exhibition at San Francisco in 1915, which dates the print somewhat earlier. A gift to the Community Collection from the grandchildren of Edith and Ellis McGowan, this was probably purchased during their honeymoon to the Bay Area.

[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]

SCHWABEROW, Micah [1948-2022]

“Mount Rainier, Head in the Clouds”

2000

woodcut / 6 inches by 15 inches / #47 of 110

A significant number of prints in the Collection are woodcuts, a theme that begs the question of Asian influence in Western art. Two artists exemplify the woodcut as bridge between those cultures: Yushijiro Urushibara, for example, was a woodcut master who brought Japanese technique to Europe; Urushibara influenced British printmaker John Edgar Platt and he worked directly with Anglo-Belgian artist Frank Brangwyn. Reciprocally, a relationship developed when American Micah Schwaberow spent a year learning Japanese woodblock traditions in Tokyo as an apprentice to Toshi Yoshida.¹

“Mount Rainier, Head in the Clouds” is Schwaberow’s homage to 19th century printmaker Hiroshige and his multiple views of Mount Fuji.

¹ All of these artists are represented: Urushibara, Platt, Yoshida, Brangwyn, and Schwaberow by at least one work each.