California Society of Printmakers: One Hundred Years, 1913-2013

By California Society of Printmaker

This award-winning amply illustrated volume of informative essays and vibrant prints by the current members of the California Society of Printmakers was published to commemorate its 2013 centennial year. Readers interested in knowing more about how a small group of prominent artist-etchers in Northern California formulated an aspirational society near the turn of the 20th century and transformed itself over the course of one hundred years—welcoming artists, working in all printmaking media, into its company from around the United States and abroad—will find the ideal source in this lush book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: California Society of Printmaker
• Release date: Jan 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9780989540803

Book preview

Note to Our Readers

In publishing this e-book, we chose to make the award-winning original book available to readers in a fixed format through the California Society of Printmakers website as a high resolution PDF. To facilitate reading on a wide variety of electronic devices and in a wider variety of viewing modes, the design of the original book had to be modified to accommodate the flowable e-book experience. Now, both fixed and flowable e-versions of California Society of Printmakers: One Hundred Years, 1913-2013 are available.

When verisimilitude was achieved by photography, printmakers, like painters, could and did turn from visual reporting to visual expression. Originally a Society of Etchers, the California Society of Printmakers encourages multiple skills, new approaches, techniques, methods, concepts, and ideas.

The Society has been an umbrella for artists working in many individual styles. It reaches far beyond California for its hundred years and this splendid book celebrates its jubilee.

—Peter Selz

Professor Emeritus, History of Art

University of California, Berkeley

Printmaking, by necessity, is a labor intense, time-consuming activity of premeditated creativity. The magic comes from producing an art of spontaneity and visual self-assurance from such exacting processes.

This informative volume celebrates the tenacity and talent that have come to symbolize printmaking in California over the past century.

— Robert Flynn Johnson

Curator Emeritus

Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

CALIFORNIA SOCIETY OF PRINTMAKERS

ONE HUNDRED YEARS 1913 – 2013

CALIFORNIA SOCIETY OF PRINTMAKERS

ONE HUNDRED YEARS 1913 – 2013

Essays by

Karin Breuer ~ Daniel Lienau ~ Art Hazelwood ~

Maryly Snow ~ Sylvia Solochek Walters ~

Sherry Smith Bell ~ David R. Jones

With Contributions by

Artist Members of the California Society of Printmakers

Maryly Snow, Editor

Sylvia Solochek Walters, Assistant Editor

California Society of Printmakers

San Francisco 2013

This book was published with the assistance of the International Fine Print Dealers Association and individual contributions from members of the California Society of Printmakers, friends, family, and print-related businesses.

The California Society of Printmakers is a nonprofit organization whose principal mission is to promote and encourage the printmaking arts through exhibitions, lectures, demonstrations, and educational programs for its members and the public.

© 2013 California Society of Printmakers

ISBN hard cover: 978-0-9895408-0-3

ISBN soft cover: 978-0-9895408-1-0

ebook ISBN: 9780989540827

Library of Congress PCN: 2013944170

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers and educators who may quote brief passages.

Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

Original hardcopy book designed by Joe Ramos

www.joeramosphotography.com

Published by

California Society of Printmakers

P.O. Box 194202

San Francisco, CA 94119-4202

www.caprintmakers.org

Production and editorial assistance by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services, Oakland, CA

Front cover: Composite image.

Helen L. Bellaver, Passage, 2000. Detail.

Color monoprint with drypoint and soft pastel

Courtesy of the artist.

Robert B. Harshe, Twilight, 1915. Detail.

Intaglio. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Michelle Murillo

Preface

Maryly Snow

A Tribute to the California Society of Printmakers

Karin Breuer

A Print Dealer’s Journey with Northern California Prints

Daniel Lienau

Moving Toward Multiplicity: Printmaking in Northern California—The 1940s to the Present

Art Hazelwood

Digging the Archives: The Documented History of CSP’s Origins

Maryly Snow

The 85th Anniversary Revisited

Sylvia Solochek Walters

Since the 85th: CSP 1997 to the Present

Sherry Smith Bell

Printmaking From Here to the Future

David R. Jones

Current CSP Artist Members

CSP Honorary Members

Appendices

1. Artist Members

2. Exhibitors by the Decades, 1913–1969

3. Honorary Members

4. Associate and Patron Members

5. Exhibitions

6. Awards and Prizes

7. Officers

8. Centennial Donors

Glossary

Bibliography

Shane Weare, Art Therapy, 2004. Etching with aquatint.

TO PRINTMAKERS,

HERE AND THERE, SUNG AND UNSUNG,

TO THE FOUNDERS, MEMBERS, AND OFFICERS

TO THE PATRONS, CURATORS, SUPPORTERS,

REVIEWERS, AND AFICIONADOS ALIKE,

ALL WHO HAVE KEPT THE

CALIFORNIA SOCIETY OF PRINTMAKERS

ROLLING FOR ONE HUNDRED YEARS.

FOREWORD

The Centennial Anniversary of the California Society of Printmakers is a momentous occasion, appropriately marked by this publication, a superb chronicle of the Society past and present. It is also an opportunity to honor the accomplishments of the distinguished members who have defined and carried printmaking into the 21st century. Today printmaking reflects a multifaceted identity as the confluence of traditional and innovative practices. Alongside other diverse media and methodologies, printmaking serves as a conduit for global discourse.

What will the next one hundred years reveal about visual culture? Our rich history indicates that printmaking will continue to evolve and inspire those who are committed to creative expression.

With much appreciation I would like to acknowledge and thank all those who contributed to this centennial publication.

Michelle Murillo

President

California Society of Printmakers

PREFACE

This is a book of many voices, as befits a centennial publication. Early in its development, the editors wanted to place the organizational history of the California Society of Printmakers (CSP) in the broader context of the history of prints in Northern California and beyond. We followed the lead of CSP’s founders, who admitted non-Californians to the Society in its first year, 1913, and in subsequent years supported printmakers and exhibited prints from around the world. As the renowned art critic Alfred Frankenstein wrote of the Society’s earlier nomenclature, Its name is significant: California Society of Etchers, not Society of California Etchers.¹

In putting together the essays for this book, every effort was made to highlight and explore historical, social, technical, esthetic, and other developments related to printmaking, as all of these form the history of the CSP and its members. At times, the members and the Society itself were largely overlooked in modern art history’s focus on painting, sculpture, and celebrity. Indeed, the literature about prints, printmakers, and printmaking societies is remarkably thin. What is available tends to involve techniques, processes, and equipment. In recent years, a few authors such as Kathan Brown, Marilyn Kushner, and Deborah Wye have written more widely about the subject. However, little of the literature is devoted to the art of the print and printmaking. A major goal of this book is to contribute to the literature of printmaking and to the modern history of independent printmakers. Additionally, by presenting the history of the CSP, we intend to augment the scattered story of printmaking organizations, helping both artists and their societies elbow their way into the larger history of art.

In 1998, on the occasion of its 85th anniversary, the California Society of Printmakers published its first book, a catalog of ninety-six black-and-white pages entitled California Society of Printmakers 85th Anniversary: Catalogue of Prints. The volume began with a brief foreword by Daniel C. Robeski, CSP president from 1996 to 2002, and included Sylvia Solochek Walters’s essay, 85th Anniversary of the CSP. After those texts came a catalog of artist members: one black-and-white reproduction for each artist, followed by the membership directory of 1998, complete with street addresses, telephone numbers, and email addresses, signifying that the catalog was intended as a group portrait and memento for a limited audience of mostly members.

Because the present Centennial Book Committee is composed of members who were active when the 85th anniversary catalog was published, we wanted the 100th anniversary publication to be an even richer volume. We wanted it to fully represent the organization’s one hundred years of accomplishment; we wanted it to be more informative than its predecessor; and we wanted color. This catalog, we determined, should contain artist statements and a spectrum of essays that would place CSP within a broader historical context. It would include illuminating the Society’s organizational history, its stellar members, and the multiple events and activities that contributed to its shape and reputation. Still, the heart of our book would be the catalog of artist and honorary members and their work. And that is what we managed, over three years, to proudly scrabble together.

Karin Breuer, curator in charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, opens the volume with an appreciation of the CSP. Daniel Lienau, CSP honorary member and founder of the venerable The Annex Galleries, writes of his involvement with a roster of notable early-20th-century California printmakers, the majority of whom were members of the California Society of Etchers. Art Hazelwood, printmaker, print impresario, and independent curator, shares his distinct point of view about Bay Area printmakers from the New Deal to the present. Lienau’s and Hazelwood’s essays set the broader context in which the California Society of Printmakers existed.

The next three papers focus on the CSP itself. As CSP’s historian, I have endeavored to unearth and make accessible CSP’s organizational history, hoping to facilitate further research about printmakers and printmaking societies, and to provide information about the Society’s interesting earlier practices. Following my paper is a reprise of Sylvia Solochek Walters’s essay for the 85th anniversary. The San Francisco State University professor emerita presents an abbreviated history of the Society, especially its notable printmakers, up to the 1998 anniversary. Blue Sky Press proprietor and past CSP president Sherry Smith Bell completes this study of the CSP by focusing on a variety of recent Society activities. The essays conclude with a look at printmaking from here to the future by David R. Jones, director of Anchor Graphics, a program of the art and design department of Columbia College in Chicago.

Where the fine art of printmaking will head in the digital art-making world is anyone’s guess. But we have strived to set our past in context, and to show the best of our present for future historians and print lovers to contemplate.

Many people and many organizations contributed to the making of this book. It began with Karl Kasten and Sherry Smith Bell, who established the relationship between the Bancroft Library, University of California, and the CSP archives in the mid-1980s.

Celeste Smeland, then development director of Kala Art Institute, provided useful advice regarding fundraising. Lucy Cohen, executive director of the Book Club of California, provided timely and fruitful advice about print brokers. Ken Coburn of Global Interprint, our print broker, was generous with astute and helpful advice. Elizabeth Byrne and her graphic designer husband Chuck Byrne fielded panicky phone calls, offering advice and referrals. William Rodamor, renowned editor, was a gracious proofreader. Jennifer Uhlich and Melody Lacina helped polish the book before it went to press, and Andrew Joron, our indexer, was an essential partner at the end of the process. Jennifer, Melody, Andrew, and principal Christine Taylor, all of Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services, were a dream team.

Engaging with more than 275 CSP artist and honorary members to create the artists’ section was the most fun part of this process. By reading brief biographies and seeing so many print images, I met nearly everyone—via email or telephone, or in person. It was a pleasure working with all the artists, some of whom joined the Society more than fifty years ago.

Thanks go to the Board of Directors of the California Society of Printmakers for its financial support and direction; the CSP Centennial Celebration Committee, including Herlinde Spahr for her astute grant-writing skills; Rolf Eiselin for digging through his own archives; and Michelle Murillo, our newest CSP president, for her steady support.

This book would not exist without the critical support of the International Fine Print Dealers’ Association and its executive director, Michele Senegal. Their show of support via a two-year grant enabled us to kick off our yearlong fundraising campaign. Daniel Lienau of The Annex Galleries in Santa Rosa, California was incredibly generous and responsive to our image requests. Donors large and small, mostly members of the CSP and their friends, were generous with contributions and encouragement.

Thanks especially to our authors for their hard work and generosity. Most of all, this book would never have come to fruition without the sustained support and commitment of the Centennial Book Committee: invaluable assistant editor Sylvia Solochek Walters; constant collaborator and book designer Joe Ramos; and all-around sounding board Sherry Smith Bell. Thank you for your continuous advice, insight, sympathy, and friendship.

Maryly Snow

Note

1. Alfred Frankenstein, Museum of Art’s Etching Exhibition, San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 31, 1960.

A TRIBUTE TO THE

CALIFORNIA SOCIETY OF PRINTMAKERS

By Karin Breuer

Successive curators of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts have always been proud (and have been known to boast occasionally) that, of the major museum collections in the United States, the Achenbach has one of the best and most representative collections of prints by artists living and working in our own backyard. We are notable because, outside of New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area has one of the largest communities of professional artists in the United States. Fortunately for us, many of those artists count themselves among our most active contingents of printmakers as well.

The Achenbach is also distinguished by the fact that its founding collectors, Moore and Hazel Achenbach, were avidly collecting the art of their own time in the 1930s and 1940s while simultaneously forming a collection of old master prints. They became associate members, and later patron members, of the California Society of Etchers in the early 1940s and contributed prints by numerous artist members of the CSE to their collection after it was donated to the City of San Francisco in 1948.

E. Gunter Troche, the first professional curator of the Achenbach, did a tremendous amount of work to make the Achenbach a participatory institution in contemporary printmaking exhibitions of the CSE and Bay Printmakers. He served as a juror in several competitions, facilitated the exhibition venues for annual and national competitions at the Legion of Honor, and established an Achenbach Foundation Purchase Award at juried CSE shows as early as 1964, a year after Moore Achenbach’s death. He also encouraged some of the museum’s notable patrons (such as Mrs. Philip N. Lilienthal and Mrs. Edgar Sinton) to sponsor purchase awards at members’ exhibitions that were held at the Legion of Honor. Troche was aided in his efforts by Dennis Beall, an Achenbach curator who was also an active printmaker and onetime president of the CSE. In honor of Troche’s many contributions, a memorial purchase award was established for CSP exhibitions after his untimely death in 1971.

Even before Troche, Bea Haberl, the longtime print curator at the de Young (the Legion and the de Young did not merge as the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco until 1972), engaged her museum as a CSE associate member and acquired the Associate (or Member’s) Print for the collection at regular intervals.

The long-serving Achenbach curator Robert Flynn Johnson and I (both honorary CSP members and past speakers at CSP annual meetings) have presided over the Achenbach during times of tremendous change in the printmaking world. We’ve seen the rise of the printmaking workshop and the revival of the peintre-graveur tradition in America, the embrace by fine art printmakers of new media such as screenprint and digital, and the enthusiastic response to contemporary print collecting by new generations of young collectors. And, while it has been somewhat disheartening to witness the recent decline in student interest in printmaking as an artistic discipline at local art schools, it has always been gratifying to consistently add prints by local, independent printmaker members of the CSP to our Achenbach collection. They take their place in a storied tradition of museum collecting developed over sixty years ago by curators who understood and continue to believe that prints made in our own backyard by the talented and committed artists of California are the treasures that make the Achenbach the special and unique collection that it is.

William Seltzer Rice, Bert’s Iris, ca.1920. Detail.

A PRINT DEALER’S JOURNEY WITH NORTHERN CALIFORNIA PRINTS

By Daniel Lienau

I moved to Santa Rosa, California, in 1971, opening a frame shop that specialized in conservation framing of works on paper, something I had done earlier in Berkeley, and which few other framers concentrated on at that time. I was framing for a lithographic fine print shop and publisher, Editions Press (formerly Collector’s Press), as well as a number of galleries on Sutter Street in San Francisco, including Walton Galleries and Gilbert Galleries. I would drive to San Francisco and pick up work from galleries and collectors and drive back to Santa Rosa, where I proceeded to frame them. As I finished framing, I would hang the works on the frame shop walls until I made my next trip to deliver them. Other clients began to ask about the works I was hanging and I began selling some of them, to the delight of my San Francisco clients. I decided to try to add a small auxiliary gallery, which, after many hours of consideration and a sudden burst of creativity, I simply named the Annex gallery. After I opened a second location for a brief time in Santa Rosa, it became The Annex Galleries.

Gustave Baumann, Wash Barnes Cabin, 1912–1914. Color woodcut, 19.75 × 26.625 in. image. Unnumbered, from an edition of 50.

The Annex Galleries then began exhibiting local printmakers, scattered with an occasional master. In 1971, I framed an amazing color woodcut of the Grand Canyon for Ann Baumann, the daughter of woodcut artist Gustave Baumann (1881–1971). We began a business relationship in which the gallery started representing Baumann’s estate, an agreement that continues to this day. It was this relationship that laid the foundation for my exploration of American printmaking. While researching Baumann’s life for the gallery’s first retrospective exhibition in 1975, I discovered that he had won the gold medal for printmaking at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE) in San Francisco. With the assistance of a friend who dealt in rare books, I managed to acquire a copy of the PPIE catalog, which listed all the printmakers and the prints they exhibited. I was amazed at the size of the American exhibition, which included over 2,200 prints by 221 printmakers, of which I noted only thirty were women, many of whom won awards, especially in the area of woodcut, and whose work I was to later exhibit.

Working with the Baumann estate was a tremendous learning experience. In the early 1970s, there was little general interest in printmaking done outside such major centers as New York, Chicago, and Boston, and few books addressed the subject. In 1979, the gallery put together two touring shows that were offered to museums. One was a thirty-print retrospective of Baumann’s woodcuts from Chicago, Indiana, New York, Provincetown, California, and New Mexico. The other had thirty Baumann prints from the Southwest, plus blocks and progressive proofs for one of the prints. We sent the exhibitions around the country via Greyhound bus. An institution would rent the show for a minimal fee, insure it, and pay for shipping, one way. They, in turn, could sell prints from the exhibition, if they wished, and collect a percentage of the sale, if their rules permitted it. We discovered that Baumann had done traveling exhibitions from the 1920s through the 1930s. Our exhibitions traveled to Indiana, Colorado, Nevada, and Connecticut, among other places around the country. A couple of years later, we were doing cooperative exhibitions of Baumann’s prints with the Witkin Gallery in New York and the Bethesda Gallery in Maryland.

My new interest in Baumann led me to investigate the technique and history of the color woodcut, and that led me to discover the work of Helen Hyde (1868–1919). Through a personal contact, the gallery was able to access much of Hyde’s estate, and in 1981 we did an exhibition and checklist of Hyde’s etchings, woodcuts, some sketchbooks, watercolors, and drawings. After studying in France, Hyde purchased a printing press and had it shipped to San Francisco in 1895. She began creating what appear to be the first color etchings on the West Coast and some of the first in America. Once again, I found a connection with the PPIE: Hyde had won a bronze medal.

Helen Hyde, Plum Blossom, 1897. Color etching, 5 × 2.875 in. plate mark. Numbered 70 in pencil, from an edition of 100.

Hyde was a charter member of the California Society of Etchers (CSE) and was intrigued by her correspondence with Bertha Jaques (1863–1941), one of the founders of the Chicago Society of Etchers, chartered in 1910. Jaques was an etcher, scholar, curator, and dealer, and was promoting Helen’s work in the United States. Jaques also had won a bronze medal at PPIE and was also an early member of the California Society, exhibiting with other women members including Hyde, Gertrude Partington Albright (1874–1959), Marion Holden Pope (1872–1958), and Adele Stackpole (1885–1979) in CSE’s first exhibition in 1913.

Jaques had discovered Hyde’s color etchings, printed à la poupée, in 1898 in an article in The International Studio.¹ Curious about how color could add anything to the medium of etching, which was dominated by black and white at the time, Jaques wrote to Hyde in San Francisco asking her opinion about the use of color. In response, Jaques received two of Hyde’s color etchings in the mail, and a long correspondence and friendship began. Hyde then went on to experiment with color woodcut after traveling to Japan in 1899. With encouragement from Jaques, she exhibited her work extensively throughout the United States and was widely acknowledged for it. Hyde returned to etching while living in South Carolina before her death. In 1922, three years after Hyde’s death, Jaques wrote a pamphlet, Helen Hyde and Her Work: An Appreciation, detailing their relationship. The pamphlet included a checklist of Hyde’s work, which was our main source for cataloging her work until Tim and Lynn Mason’s catalog raisonné, Helen Hyde, was published by the Smithsonian Institution Press in 1991.

Bertha Evelyn Jaques, Wooded Island, 1894. Etching, 3.375 × 8.75 in. plate mark. Proofs only.

We later did an exhibition of the color woodcuts of Bertha Lum (1869–1954), another early CSE member who had also worked in Japan and in color woodcut. Lum was another PPIE bronze medal winner. Both the Hyde and Lum exhibits garnered much attention from East Coast institutions, such as Rutgers, and collectors began to take notice of the gallery’s exhibitions.

Bertha Lum, Song of the Brook (Flute Player), 1916. Color woodcut, 11.3125 × 4.5625 in. image. Numbered 26, from an edition of about 100.

In the 1970s, The Annex Galleries began representing prints from the estate of the 19th-century American etcher James D. Smillie (1833–1909), who had been an important part of the New York Etching Club (NYEC). NYEC, founded in Smillie’s studio in 1877, hoped to bring the etching revival that had started in Europe in the latter half of the 19th century to the United States. NYEC was devoted strictly to etching and lasted through 1893, a victim of new technologies, namely photographic and lithographic innovations, along with an unwillingness to accept other printmaking mediums into the fold (a problem that later plagued other clubs and forced them to either broaden their scope or disband). NYEC held exhibitions at the National Academy of Design featuring work by American etchers, along with many from Europe, such as Whistler’s brother-in-law, Seymour Haden, Félix Buhot, and Camille Corot.

James David Smillie, Rough Sport in Yo-Semite, 1886. Etching, 10 × 15.75 in. plate mark. Proof.

Around this same time, I purchased a collection of wood engravings by the 19th century American engraver Henry Wolf (1852–1916). Once again there were ties to PPIE, as Wolf had won its Grand Prize in printmaking. The prints I purchased were the actual prints that had been exhibited, complete with labels that listed edition sizes. Wolf was the last of the great American wood engravers who reproduced famous paintings in black-and-white images using a complicated system of mirrors and special engraving tools. He was able to convey the subtlety of an artist’s color in black and white, and he had to execute in reverse. He exhibited 146 prints at PPIE, a few of which were his own compositions. Photography had made his skills obsolete, and this Grand Prize was as much homage to the 19th century as it was to him.

Henry Wolf, Day Dreams (Recreation), (after Thomas Couture), 1909. Wood engraving, 8.6875 × 6.4375 in. image. Proof.

I saw this prize as a real demarcation between the printmaking of the 19th and 20th centuries in America. I looked through the list of works exhibited at PPIE, juried by a committee that included the Stanford professor and etcher Robert B. Harshe (1879–1938), Assistant Chief of the Department of Fine Arts of PPIE and a founder of CSE.

Joseph Pennell (1857–1926), the internationally recognized American printmaker and biographer of James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), had been asked to submit architectural designs for a building at the exposition. Pennell arrived in San Francisco in March 1912, on his way back from a drawing trip to the Panama Canal. He spent some time in San Francisco, managing to complete twenty-five etchings and drawings of San Francisco, which he reproduced in a 1913 book titled San Francisco, the City of the Golden Gate. To his disappointment, the drawings were utilized only as a design that was never used, but for propaganda in Europe.² He left immediately for Yosemite, but someone—probably Harshe, in his position as assistant chief—convinced him to return in 1915 to be the chairman of the Group Jury for Etchings and Engravings. Pennell was joined in the selection jury by the already famous American printmakers Frank Duveneck (1848–1919) and Thomas Wood Stevens (1880–1942).

Pennell returned to San Francisco to jury the show in 1915, as the war was raging in Europe, but he again left in frustration with the process. He was, however, able to use his position to award fellow juror Duveneck a special commemorative medal for his artwork, but he could not persuade the painting jurors to award a gold medal to portrait painter Celia Beaux (1885–1942), who was denied by the committee because she was a woman. Pennell exhibited 115 prints at PPIE.

Though the jury was composed of etchers who worked in black and white, their selections were a preview for much of the 20th century and included artists working in both woodcut and color woodcut, color etching, color monotype, engraving, wood engraving, mezzotint, and black-and-white and color lithography.

When I became interested in the earlier California prints, The Annex Galleries was exhibiting local contemporary printmakers. Each opening was an enjoyable celebration of the completion of a body of work and a reason for much comradery. However, the shows were not financially successful. I was a shoestring operation, the framing business financing the gallery. The gallery started to receive interest from around the country for our historical work, and for the sake of making paychecks and paying the bills, we began to focus on the earlier prints.

The Annex Galleries arranged to represent the estate of William S. Rice (1873–1973), another important Northern California printmaker who had been forgotten. Rice worked in diverse print media—etching, engraving, lithography, and woodcut. He attended the 1915 PPIE and saw the color woodcuts in the Japanese and American sections. At that time there were only a couple of how-to books in English, so Rice had to experiment with color printing, exhibiting his work in 1918 at San Francisco’s Palace of the Legion of Honor. A teacher, he wrote three books on block printing (all published by Milwaukee’s Bruce Publishing Company, in 1929, 1940, and 1941). The gallery held its first exhibition of his color woodcuts in 1984, with a catalog, William S. Rice: An Exhibition of Color Woodcuts from 1910–1940. Again, the response from the East Coast was tremendous. Subsequently, we did an exhibition of his various print media (woodcuts, etchings, drypoints, lithographs, linocuts, monotypes, watercolors, and pastels from the early 1900s) and a catalog published as Lasting Impressions: Works on Paper in 2001.

William Seltzer Rice, Bert’s Iris, ca. 1920. Color woodcut, 12.125 × 9.125 in. image. Edition of fewer than 15.

Locally there was little interest in the older works: the gallery could not get shows reviewed or any publicity. I began to adjust my methods and focus. Works from the first half of the century were plentiful and inexpensive, and I began to collect them through partial trading for framing or bulk purchases when I could afford them. I went back to my PPIE catalog and marked all the California printmakers to seek out their works. Of course, many were members of CSE, and among them I began to represent Roi Partridge (1888–1984). Roi, who exhibited at PPIE under his birth name of G. [George] Roy Partridge, had forty-two etchings shown at the age of twenty-seven. I also did a show for early CSE member and etcher John Winkler (1894–1979), who began etching in either 1913 or 1915 (accounts vary) at the San Francisco Institute of Art.

John W. Winkler, Delicatessen Booth, 1918. Etching 6.4375 × 3.9375 in. Edition of about 75.

Partridge told me that the most important part of his and Winkler’s success in the 1930s and 1940s was Bertha Jaques. She represented both men in Chicago and included their work in shows she was curating. She got their work included in print-related publications, including Fine Prints of the Year, published annually between 1923 and 1938, reproducing American and English prints completed the previous year.

Roi George Partridge, Sierra Shanties, 1922–1923. Etching, 6.9375 × 8.125 in. plate mark. Edition of 101.

Through a conversation with Elizabeth Ginno (1907–1991), etcher, CSE member, and widow of John Winkler, I discovered color etcher Augusta Rathbone (1897–1990). I had purchased three of Augusta’s color aquatints in a Western art gallery in Tucson, Arizona, without knowing who she was, as she had not been included in any printmaking books. We met Augusta, who was living in the Tenderloin in San Francisco. She had sold very little of her work over the years, and the closet in her two-room apartment was full. The Annex Galleries exhibited her work and was able to place her prints in many private and public collections, much to her amazement. They bought that? Nobody’s ever liked that print before! In 1990, Augusta’s work was included by Worcester Art Museum curator David Acton in his groundbreaking exhibition and book, A Spectrum of Innovation: Color in American Printmaking, 1890–1960. Rathbone was thrilled to finally have been acknowledged.

Augusta Payne Rathbone, Brittany Village (Ploubazlanec, Côte du Nord), 1938. Etching and color aquatint, 9.625 × 12.75 in. plate mark. Numbered 1, from an edition of about 20.

We began to piece together biographies for many of these so-called unknown printmakers. In March 1983, we opened a show, Fifty Years of California Prints, 1890–1940: An Exhibition of Etchings, Woodcuts, Lithographs, Linocuts & Monotypes by Forty Printmakers Living or Working in California Between 1890 and 1940, a ponderous but necessary title to explain our concept. It featured an etching of the Court of the Ages, a Louis Mullgardt–designed building at PPIE drawn by bronze medal winner Gertrude Partington Albright, along with an illustrated catalog and a checklist. We included biographies and prints by many CSE members, including Albright, Cornelis Botke, A. Ray Burrell, Pedro de Lemos, Helen Hyde, Bertha Jaques, E. Spencer Macky, Arthur Millier, Roi Partridge, Gottardo Piazzoni, Max Pollak, Marion H. Pope, Augusta Rathbone, W. S. Rice, Ralph Stackpole, John Stoll, Edward DeWitt Taylor, and John Winkler.³

The show was a success nationally, though not in California, with collectors contacting us about the work, many of which sold. I decided this should become an annual exhibition, so we needed more work by more artists. We also continued to do shows for individual printmakers, including Bertha Lum, Hyde, de Lemos, Richard Day (1896–1972), Rathbone, Winkler, Partridge, Rice, and others. We did a series of theme shows as well, such as Hawaiian Prints, Prairie Printmakers, and American Color Prints. The Annex Galleries also took an excursion into photography in the early 1980s, showing works by Ansel Adams, Minor White, Walter Chappell, and others—to little acclaim and few sales. It was too soon for the West Coast, and we began to concentrate on prints again.

In the mid-1980s, I bought a number of remarkable color monotypes by San Francisco printmaker Clark Hobart (1868–1948) that compared to many of the Maurice Prendergast monotypes I had seen. Hobart exhibited only color monotypes at PPIE, for which he received a silver medal. Xavier Martinez (1869–1943) also exhibited color monotypes. I began to realize that there was a group of Bay Area printmakers working in monotype at the turn of the 20th century, an interest continued through the 1920s. Curator Joann Moser addresses this in her exhibition and book, Singular Impressions: The Monotype in America (1997), to which the gallery lent a number of examples.

Clark Hobart, Going to Meetin’, ca. 1910. Color monotype, 8.375 × 12.875 in. image. Unique.

We exhibited our Fifty Years series for five years. By this time we had moved into exhibits of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and California Modernism. Again we changed our emphasis to respond to a growing group of collectors and museums with whom we had begun working. By the early 1990s, a number of books and articles had been written on West Coast printmaking, and, as more serious scholars were doing research on the subject, we continued moving into uncharted territories.

The Annex Galleries started bringing prints into inventory that were published by the Los Angeles–based Printmakers Society of California (PSC). There was often confusion about the two California societies, especially since many artists were members of both. Founded in 1914, the Printmakers of Los Angeles changed its name to the Printmakers Society of California in 1921 in order to reflect a broader base. Like CSE, it strove to have an international membership, yearly exhibitions for its members and invited guests, and a newsletter. PSC commissioned a print to be sold to the membership each year, something a number of print clubs did in the 1930s.

In 1987, in association with a collector from the East Coast, the gallery mounted an exhibition we entitled The Federal Art Project. It included ninety-four prints, mostly lithographs done by WPA artists, with an additional thirteen lithographs by Ray Bertrand (1909–1986), who ran San Francisco’s WPA litho shop.

Bertrand’s lithographs had been published in 1940 by the San Francisco Chronicle, which had devised a plan to bring Western art to the Western public at a price that fits the public’s purse.⁴ Under the rubric Contemporary Graphics, the paper presented to its readers twenty original prints over four consecutive Sundays. The first series covered Herman Volz, George Gaethke, Ray Bertrand, Reuben Kadish, and Arthur Murphy. A week later, on March 17, the second series covered Glenn Wessels, Sargent Johnson, A. Ray Burrell, Beckford Young, and Theodore Polos. March 24 introduced Dong Kingman, Shirley Staschen, Clay Spohn, Edgar Dorsey Taylor, and George Harris. The fourth and final series, dated March 31, printed works by Otis Oldfield, Benjamin Cunningham, H. Mallette Dean, John Haley, and Erle Loran.⁵

Sargent Claude Johnson, Singing Saints, 1940. Lithograph, 12 × 9.125 in. image. Numbered 40, from an edition of 150; signed 40/150.

All prints were original, signed in pencil, titled, with an edition size of 150, and priced at $2.00 per print. They could be purchased at the San Francisco Chronicle, the City of Paris department store, O’Connor, Moffat & Co. (a precursor to Macy’s), Paul Elder Books, Schwabacher-Frey (a printing, stationery, and office supply), and Gump’s (a unique gifts, jewelry, and home decor store), among others. The series was a failure: $2.00 was a lot in 1940 when the country was coming out of a depression and headed into a war. The unsold prints were dispersed between the publisher, artists, and others involved. This experiment was used later to a large degree of success by actor/collector Vincent Price, who teamed up with Sears from 1962 to 1971 to offer original art to the public, selling over fifty thousand works in the nine-year period.

The Annex Galleries exhibition included works by Northern California printmakers Karl Baumann, Ray Bertrand, David Chun, H. Mallette Dean, Margaret Dorgeloh, George Gaethke, Sargent Johnson, Jennie Lewis (not to be confused with Jeanette Maxfield Lewis), Arthur Murphy, Nicholas Panesis, Theodore Polos, Clay Spohn, Charles Surendorf, Glenn Wessels, and Lloyd W. Wulf, to name a few.⁶ Again, the show was a great success with East Coast institutions and collectors.

Once I had become aware of the Northern California connection to the remarkable WPA project, the gallery began to focus on the late 1930s and 1940s. In 1988, I acquired a large collection of prints done at the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) in Mexico between the 1930s and 1950s. We did an exhibition at the gallery with an illustrated checklist of 130 works. With its populist, political, and social content, the imagery had definite connections to the WPA work done in the United States. American-born Paul Higgins, who adopted the name Pablo O’Higgins (1904–1983), was a founder of the TGP and had family in San Francisco. TGP serves as a role model not only for Latino printmakers but also for many printmaking studios and collectives currently operating in the Bay Area.

Pablo O’Higgins, Limpiando Grano (Cleaning Grain), 1949. Lithograph, 15.25 × 10.875 in. image. Edition size not stated.

When Barbara Galuszka Parsons became the exhibitions chair for the 75th anniversary of the California Society of Printmakers (CSP) in 1988 (the name had changed from CSE in 1968), she came to the gallery in hopes of borrowing a number of early CSE/CSP members’ works for an exhibition at the Art Corridor at Sacred Heart School in Menlo Park. The gallery lent thirty-seven framed prints to the exhibit. I believe it was this loan that prompted CSP president William Wolff (1922–2004) to give me, representing the gallery, an honorary membership.

In the 1990s, the gallery began to focus on Bay Area Abstract Expressionist printmaking. With the help of print and drawing curator David Kiehl, then at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we identified a portfolio of offset lithographs entitled Drawings, published in 1948. The portfolio had been a collaborative effort by six artists who exhibited together as the Sausalito Six. They worked with offset printer Eric Ledin of Mill Valley, drawing on flexible aluminum and paper plates with grease crayon. The artists glued the prints at the upper corners to heavier support paper, which they signed in pencil.⁷ They created a black construction paper cover with a glued-on title sheet that read:

Drawings: Dixon – Diebenkorn – Hultberg – Kuhlman – Lobdell – Stillman. Published by Eric T. Ledin, Mill Valley, Calif.

Originally intended to support the Seashore Gallery in Sausalito, the gallery had closed by the time the project was finished. The artists tried to sell the portfolios themselves for $1 each, but sales were few. Most of the portfolios were dismantled, prints given to friends, and the proceeds used for a tequila party. Complete portfolios of sixteen to seventeen images are now difficult to locate.

The term for the American art movement known as Abstract Expressionism was coined in 1946 by art critic Robert Coates, making the 1948 Drawings portfolio perhaps the first Abstract Expressionist portfolio published in the United States. We placed copies with the Metropolitan Museum, the British Museum, and a number of important collections, including Alliance Capital Management in New York.

Karl Kasten, The Font, 1955. Color intaglio, 9.875 × 12.0625 in. plate