An Abraham Lincoln Tribute: Featuring Woodcuts by Charles Turzak

By Charles Turzak and David A. Beronä

From a humble backwoods cabin to the highest office in the land, this graphic art biography chronicles Abraham Lincoln's path from obscurity to immortality. Its thirty-six striking woodcuts, each accompanied by a brief caption, depict scenes from the life of the sixteenth president. Original and imaginative in their stark beauty, these images offer fresh perspectives on the familiar tale of Lincoln's progress from rail-splitter and self-taught prairie lawyer to his role as the Great Emancipator and preserver of the Union.
This new edition of Charles Turzak's remarkable book is presented in commemoration of the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth. In addition to a new preface and introduction, it features an appendix with several of Lincoln's famous speeches, letters, and quotations. A keepsake treasure for Civil War buffs and historians, this unique expression of American culture will inspire readers of all ages.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Release date: Sep 12, 2011
• ISBN: 9780486139081

Book preview

AUTHORS

PREFACE

Ifirst became acquainted with Charles Turzak’s work in Wood Engravings of the 1930s, by the celebrated printmaker Clare Leighton, especially in the fascinating print called Man with Drill, which created a remarkable display of a drill’s pounding vibration in a highly symbolic fashion. Leighton included Turzak with a group of artists who were not content to put down upon their wood blocks life as it would be in the lens of a camera. I later discovered that, in addition to his prints and paintings, Turzak published a wordless biography in woodcuts about Abraham Lincoln that had an interesting story behind its creation.

Charles Turzak was born in Streator, Illinois in 1899. His parents emigrated from Mrlinek, Czechoslovakia to live in Nokomis, Illinois where Turzak grew up. His friendship with a neighbor, an English cabinetmaker, contributed to his early interest in wood. Turzak was remembered, even at an early age, as a boy who enjoyed whittling monkeys out of peach pits. Through the mentoring of his neighbor he also constructed and sold five violins, though his interest quickly extended from carving and design to illustration and drawing. His interest in wood carving, design, and illustration would naturally develop later into his preferred method of artistic expression—the woodcut print.

While in high school, Turzak entered a national cartoon contest sponsored by Purina Mills, located in St. Louis, Missouri, to advertise one of their feed products. Turzak drew a Rube Goldberg type of cartoon that displayed a donkey fetching a bag of feed and won the $100 prize. Turzak took the advice of the art director at Purina Mills, who suggested that Turzak register as a student at the Art Institute of Chicago. He attended classes from 1920 to 1923. During his second year he was introduced to relief printing—specifically woodblock printing—which he mastered quickly, largely from his early interest in carving and working with wood.

During his time as a student, Turzak was also employed as a freelance advertising artist. He saved enough money to travel briefly to Europe in 1929 where he visited Czechoslovakia, England, Holland, Germany, France and Austria. He returned home during the beginning of the Depression and in 1931 married Florence Cockerham, a journalism student at Northwestern. She worked closely with Turzak and later wrote the text for Benjamin Franklin: A Biography in Wood Cuts (1935).

Like many artists during the Depression Era, Turzak illustrated books like The History of Illinois (1934) for the Work Project Association (WPA)/Federal Arts Project (FAP). He was commissioned by the Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP) to paint a set of murals between 1936 and 1940 for the post office in Lemont, Illinois and the Chicago Main Post Office. The murals in Chicago were in the government offices of General McCoy, head of the Sixth Army Corps and were, until recently, assumed to be missing. In 1999, through the efforts of the preservationist Bob Sideman, the murals were rediscovered in offices that were being converted into condominiums, as documented by Mary Lackritz Gray in A Guide to Chicago’s Murals.

In 1938, Turzak hired his friend and architect Bruce Goff to design a house and studio, which Turzak and his family lived in until his retirement, and which is now a Chicago Landmark. After the Depression, Turzak’s work improved as a freelance artist and he worked steadily for companies like General Mills, Westinghouse, and General Electric. He also served for sixteen years as the Art Director for Today’s Health, published by the American Medical Association. He and his wife raised one daughter and moved in 1958 to Orlando, Florida, where he continued his artwork until his death in 1986.

Turzak’s one wordless book was Abraham Lincoln: Biography in Woodcuts, published in 1933. The story surrounding this book began with an invitation he received to exhibit his woodcutting skills to the public in the reconstructed Lincoln Village at A Century of Progress International Exposition. (This was the name of the 1933 World’s Fair held in Chicago, Illinois to celebrate the city’s centennial.) The irony of this display was that Turzak was demonstrating the oldest graphic medium of reproducing images at a fair that had technological innovation as its theme. He demonstrated the use of the woodcut, considered to be the first medium for the dissemination of visual information to the masses. His subject was Abraham Lincoln, the recognized champion for unalienable rights of all men and women.

Turzak used public knowledge of the events and the lore of Lincoln’s life to depict familiar scenes in his biography. He included early events like Lincoln being raised in a log cabin, walking with a book in his hand, his famous wresting match with Jack Armstrong, and his love affair and grief over the death of Ann Rutledge. Turzak presented these subsequent events in fairly naturalistic terms, though always with a hint of the dynamic: waving flames in a fireplace or light from the flames that cast shadows in Lincoln’s log cabin. This sense of motion animates the event and brings us closer to the action. In addition, the noted gouges in these prints emphasize depth and provide details in objects like roof shingles and tree bark, and tall weeds that grow along the country roads.

This would have been a satisfying and straightforward depiction of Lincoln’s life even if Turzak had not decided to develop a deeper and perplexing psychological side to Lincoln’s character. In unusual and skillful design, Turzak removed the obvious in the later prints and incorporated more complex and meaningful depictions.

A good example of this inventive style appears in the print The Debate, which refers to the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates when Lincoln addressed the issue of slavery. Turzak opened up the space in this print, unlike his earlier pieces that are filled with objects. For example, instead of filling a space with faces in a crowd, he presents only a few faces that extend from the front to the background. Limiting the number of faces in the crowd opens up the space in this area and allows the contrast of black space with a specific white space, that draws attention to a lynching and the theme of slavery. Lincoln is expertly portrayed with his two hands—one white and the other black—against contrasting backgrounds to emphasize his commitment to equality. Lincoln’s figure is also highlighted with white stripes, a device for which the pioneer of the woodcut novel, Frans Masereel (1889–1972), was noted in order to focus attention on a specific character. It is uncertain if Turzak was familiar with Masereel’s woodcut novels, but Masereel was extremely popular in Europe during Turzak’s travels so it is likely that he was aware of his work, especially the popular Passionate Journey (1919).

In another print, Four Dark and Difficult Years, Turzak portrayed the death and destruction of the Civil War. In this print he designed an inventive use of bands that displayed cannons and soldiers in battle. These bands of soldiers march diagonally from the top left-hand corner through an outline of Lincoln’s bowed head. He uses this same technique in another print, The Gettysburg Address. In this print, Lincoln stands in front of what seems like neverending rows of men, women, and skulls displayed under a blazing diamond of crosses.

Finally, in addition to Turzak’s creative design in these prints, that illicit a sense of visual awe, was his metaphorical use of Lincoln’s hands. His hands were the means Turzak used to hide his subject’s melancholy from others. They also represented the need for solace, and effectively displayed the debilitating responsibility of America’s future that Lincoln shouldered alone.

After Turzak cut the wood blocks for his prints, he was able to publish an edition of 1,500 copies. To pay for the printing he used a wedding present of fifty dollars that his wife Florence had saved. George C. Domke printed this edition directly from the woodblocks. With the publication of this book, Turzak joined a small group of American artists like Lynd Ward, James Reid, William Gropper, and Milt Gross who were responsible for the advent of the wordless book in the United States in the early 1930s.

In addition to his commercial work, Turzak continued designing and printing colonial prints and woodcuts of the Founding Fathers, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Marshall, Patrick Henry, and John Paul Jones.

His daughter, Joan Turzak Van Hess, who has maintained Turzak’s archive in Orlando, Florida, remembered her father in terms of his art in a 1993 interview with the Orlando Sentinel. "He worked like a man possessed, sometimes. He loved