MOVING TOWARD MULTIPLICITY: PRINTMAKING IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA—THE 1940S TO THE PRESENT

By Art Hazelwood

The story of the past seventy years of printmaking in Northern California is a dramatic one of new forms and new directions. With the end of World War II, the California Society of Etchers (CSE) found itself in much the same position as it had been for most of its history—it was the only organization focused on printmaking in Northern California. The Depression saw the rise of the Graphics Division of the WPA Federal Arts Project, but the WPA ended in 1942. Theoretically at least, the CSE was therefore uniquely positioned to be a leading force in the developing postwar art world.

The CSE may have been alone in representing the interests of prints and printmakers, but the print world was moving in new directions. The impact of the Depression and the WPA, despite their brevity, was profound. A new artistic ideal of printmaking had been born, and the 19th-century Etching Revival style was no longer the focus of printmaking. The aesthetic of finely rendered landscapes was slipping away, and the medium of etching was eclipsed by lithography, relief, and, increasingly, screenprint. A whole new generation of artists was exposed to printmaking, and they looked to different inspirations. The enthusiasm for the etchings of the 19th-century artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler as well as for the Arts and Crafts style was replaced with new and more contemporary influences. The Mexican muralist Diego Rivera made a profound impact beginning with his first visit to San Francisco in 1930. Other Mexican artists and European modernists were also influential throughout the 1930s and 1940s.

In contrast, the CSE artists can perhaps be represented best by John Winkler. Winkler was an early member of the CSE who, in the 1920s, was heralded as one of the greatest etchers in America. His works were much sought after, his newest editions closely watched. He worked in what could be referred to as the Whistler school—fine etching, landscape and cityscape, and incredible attention to craft. But in the late 1920s and 1930s he hit a wall and found he could no longer work. Though his personal artistic block had its own sources, it dramatically symbolized the wider changes going on in printmaking and its role in society. The 1930s represented a truly monumental shift of aesthetics, of media, of politics, and of the very reasons for printmaking.1

These changes began to be noticeably felt in the 1930s, but the long period of tumult in the microcosm of Northern California lasted well into the 1970s. By that time CSE had become the California Society of Printmakers (CSP), and a large number of print publishers, workshops, and college and university print departments had sprung into existence. The CSE was not to be alone for long.

The CSE was consistently administered by Nicholas Dunphy (1896–1955), who was executive secretary from 1931 until his death. Dunphy was an accomplished etcher whose work also fell within the Whistler school. After his death, Elizabeth Ginno (also known as Elizabeth de Gebele Ginno), wife of John Winkler, took the organization under her care. She was a stabilizing force for fifteen years, eventually shepherding the transition into the CSP. In 1970, after one year as the third president of the new society, she stepped down from the board.

Elizabeth Ginno was employed by the WPA during the Depression and did printmaking demonstrations at the 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair exhibition, Art in Action, on Treasure Island. In 1940, she also created lithographs printed on the telltale Warren’s Olde Style paper—a pretty clear sign that she was working at the WPA Federal Arts Project print workshop run by CSE member Ray Bertrand. Almost all San Francisco WPA prints, as well as most student work of the era, were printed on this paper. There wasn’t really much lithography going on at that time that wasn’t produced through Ray Bertrand.2

Ray Bertrand, who had worked on the New Deal mural at Coit Tower, was the lead printer and director of the WPA Graphics Division in San Francisco. The shop served two functions: it employed commercial lithography printers laid off by the economic downturn, and it employed local artists to make art. Bertrand was also teaching lithography at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). Bertrand’s skill at printing, and the exposure that the WPA Federal Arts Project gave to many artists, are credited with the new upsurge in interest in lithography.

Through their blend of commercial printers and fine art employees, the WPA workshops around the country introduced a number of innovative applications of commercial techniques to art. In the San Francisco WPA print shop, a unique coated paper was invented for use in transfer lithography. The paper was treated to simulate the surface of a litho stone. Transfer lithography allowed the artist to work on this paper, which could then be used to make an editioned print. As a result, artists over a wide geographic area could mail in their lithographic plates and the San Francisco print shop would do the printing.3

Across the country the Federal Arts Project gave impetus to the more “democratic” print forms, primarily lithography, but also relief print and, increasingly, screenprint. Etching was associated with an older style, and the more arduous printing process made it seem less relevant at a time when accessibility to art was valued more than ever before.

Aside from lithography, a new technique was moving west out of New York. Originating in the early 1930s and used in the WPA Poster Unit, it made the move to the Graphics Division of the Federal Arts Project in 1938 under the tutelage of Anthony Velonis. At first called silkscreen, the name seems to have been gussied up as it made the leap from posters to fine art prints, becoming “serigraphy.” Further artistic approaches to serigraphy (now more accurately called screenprint) grew out of the Art Students League and the workshop of Harry Sternberg.4 Dorr Bothwell, Marion O. Cunningham, Mildred Rackley, and others created screenprints in the Bay Area in the early 1940s. Bothwell went on to teach the technique at the California School of Fine Arts.

Relief prints were also transformed by the new atmosphere of the WPA as well as by two seemingly contradictory visions—the influence of Mexican art and the revival of wood engraving as a form of artistic expression. The bold political expression of Mexican art was merged with the exceptional control of wood engraving in the hands of several Northern California artists, including Adelyne Cross Eriksson (1905–1979) and Victor Arnautoff (1896–1979). Many of the artists who created relief prints were ideologically and aesthetically aligned with the Mexican print artists of the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP), founded in 1937 in Mexico City, and tended not to be connected with the CSE. There were exceptions, such as Charles Surendorf (1906–1979), who was a CSE board member, a WPA relief print artist, and also part of the California Labor School. Edward Hagedorn (1902–1982), who created large, bold antiwar linocuts in the 1930s, was also a CSE board member.

In contrast to this ferment, the prints seen at CSE exhibits all through the 1940s were generally etchings, and the titles suggest fairly traditional subjects. For example, associate prints selected in 1948 were a drypoint, Barn at Belota, by William S. Rice; etchings by Nicholas Dunphy, Reclining Cypress, and Cornelis Botke, Bodega Bay; Elizabeth Ginno’s lithograph, Windmill; an aquatint, The Pinto Colt, by J. J. McVicker (1911–2004); and the etching by Edith “Mark” Milsk (1899–1982), Modern Rhythm Dancer. The CSE was carrying the flag of an older time and style.

While printmaking was shifting away from the Whistler school under the new ideals brought on by the WPA and the Depression, the demise of the WPA in 1942 left a void. However, the spirit of the WPA and its democratic ideal of “art for the people” found a new home in what became an important center for the political and cultural left—the California Labor School and its spin-off print workshop, the Graphic Arts Workshop, which became the first challenge to the monopoly of CSE in the Northern California world of postwar print organizations.

The Graphic Arts Workshop (1952–to the present) arose out of the San Francisco–based Tom Mooney Labor School, which was founded in 1942. The school, which became the California Labor School in 1944, taught all manner of classes and had an art department that at its height was nearly as large as the California School of Fine Arts. The school attracted its teachers from all over the world. Pablo O’Higgins, the American-born co-founder of the TGP, taught there in 1945 and again in 1948. Italian-born Giacomo Patri (1898–1978), who created the iconic print series of the Depression with his wordless novel of linocuts, White Collar (1938), was head of the Art Department at the Labor School starting...