Collecting Prints, Posters, and Ephemera: Perspectives in a Global World 9781501338496, 9781501338526, 9781501338519

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Figures
Introduction, Part I: Collecting Modernand Contemporary Prints
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Introduction, Part II: Collecting Posters and OtherEphemera: From Modernity to the Digital Era
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Plates
Series Editor’s Introduction
Introduction
Part 1: Collecting Prints
Introduction, Part I: Collecting Modernand Contemporary Prints
Print Collecting before 1800
Modern Print Collecting
Institutional Print Collections
The Historiography of Print Collecting
The Changing Market for Prints Today
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Chapter 1: Henrietta Louisa Koenen’s (1830–81) Amsterdam Collection of Women Printmakers
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Chapter 2: Loys Delteil (1869–1927): Community and Contemporary Print Collecting in Fin-de-Siècle Paris
Delteil’s Biography and Professional Roles
Delteil’s Scholarship: Le Peintre-graveur illustré
The Community around Prints: Public Work and Private Collecting
Delteil’s Collection
Delteil as a Défenseur of Contemporary Prints
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Chapter 3: Women Collectors of Japanese Prints: The 1909–14 Paris Expositions des estampes japonaises at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs
The 1909–14 Expositions des estampes japonaises at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs
Japoniste Social Networks
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Chapter 4: Collecting Ukiyo-e Prints in Japan during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Chapter 5: Building Hemispheric Unity to Serve Corporate Identity: IBM’s Collection of Prints from the Americas
Art, Business, Politics, and the Birth of the IBM Permanent Collection
IBM and Graphic Art of the Americas
Aftermath and Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Part 2: Collecting Posters and Ephemera
Introduction, Part II: Collecting Posters and Other Ephemera: From Modernity to the Digital Era
Collecting Posters and Ephemera in the Nineteenth Century
Print Ephemera, History, and Memory
Museums and Collecting Posters
Collecting in the Digital Era
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Chapter 6: From Commune to Commerce: Ernest Maindron’s Collecting Ephemera and Posters, Late 1850s–Early 1900s
Ernest Maindron: Collector, Archivist, Curator, and Historian
Maindron’s Collection of Commune Posters
Maindron’s Classification
The Late Nineteenth-Century Poster Market
Collecting Posters and Ephemera for Future Historians
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Chapter 7: The Maurice Rickards Collection of Ephemera
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Chapter 8: Hans Sachs: The Most Dedicated Collector of Posters in Germany
“The World’s Largest Poster Collection”
The Society of the Friends of the Poster and the Journal Das Plakat
The Plundering and Dispersal of the Collection
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Chapter 9: To Possess is to Belong: Carlos Monsiváis’s Collection of Ephemera and Popular Culture in Mexico City
The Public Monsiváis
The Private Collector
Collecting Mexican Archetypes
The Collection as an Alternative View of the Nation
The Collection at The Little Shop
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Chapter 10: The David King Collection of Russian and Soviet Ephemera at Tate: Expanding the Museum Narrative with Ephemera
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Chapter 11: Collecting Chinese Propaganda Posters
Introduction—Chinese Propaganda Posters
Art and Propaganda Posters
Collecting Posters
Collecting Chinese Posters Today: Issues and Methods
Collecting Posters: Scope of Publication Numbers
Collections and Museums in the West
Collections and Museums in China
Collecting Posters: The Market
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Chapter 12: The Cuba Poster Project: Collecting for People, not Profit
The Cuba Poster Project
The Commercialization of Political Posters
Sampling or Plagiarism?
Repositories: Personal, Commercial, and Public
Proposed Best Practices
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Archives and collections
Chapter 13: Collecting Pre- and Post-Revolution Iranian Movie Posters in the United States and in Iran
Film Poster Collecting inside Iran: Private Collections
Film Poster Collecting outside of Iran: Poster Collecting Tied to Film Exhibition and Distribution
Poster Collecting Tied to Film Scholarship
Notes
Selected Bibliography
14: The Challenge of Collecting Digital Posters and Graphics from the Web: A Roundtable Discussion
Introduction
The Participants
Roundtable
Notes
Author Biographies
Index

Citation preview

Collecting Prints, Posters, and Ephemera

Series Editor: Kathryn Brown, Loughborough University, UK Advisory Board: Véronique Chagnon-Burke, Christie’s Education, USA Christel H. Force, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA Charlotte Galloway, Australian National University, Australia Mel Jordan, Royal College of Art, UK Alain Quemin, University of Paris 8, France Mark Westgarth, University of Leeds, UK

Collecting Prints, Posters, and Ephemera Perspectives in a Global World Edited by Ruth E. Iskin and Britany Salsbury

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2020 Copyright © Ruth E. Iskin, Britany Salsbury and Contributors, 2020 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. iv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Exposition du Centenaire de la Lithographie, Galerie Rapp. Paris, France, 1895. Hugo d’Alesi, F. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Iskin, Ruth, editor. | Salsbury, Britany, editor. Title: Collecting prints, posters and ephemera : perspectives in a global world / edited by Ruth E. Iskin and Britany Salsbury. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. | Series: Contextualizing art markets | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019026324 (print) | LCCN 2019026325 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501338496 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501338502 (epub) | ISBN 9781501338519 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Prints–Collectors and collecting. | Posters–Collectors and collecting. | Printed ephemera–Collectors and collecting. | Art and society–History–19th century. | Art and society–History–20th century. Classification: LCC N5200 .C629 2019 (print) | LCC N5200 (ebook) | DDC 769/.12–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019026324 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019026325 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3-8496 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3-8519 eBook: 978-1-5013-3-8502 Series: Contextualizing Art Markets Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

The authors thank the Cleveland Museum of Art, especially Virginia N. and Randall J. Barbato Deputy Director and Chief Curator Heather Lemonedes Brown, for supporting this publication.

Contents List of Figures Series Editor’s Introduction

vii xiii

Introduction  Ruth E. Iskin and Britany Salsbury 1 Part I  Collecting Prints

7

Introduction, Part I: Collecting Modern and Contemporary Prints  Britany Salsbury

9

1

Henrietta Louisa Koenen’s (1830–81) Amsterdam Collection of Women Printmakers  Madeleine C. Viljoen 27

2

Loys Delteil (1869–1927): Community and Contemporary Print Collecting in Fin-de-Siècle Paris  Britany Salsbury 44

3

Women Collectors of Japanese Prints: The 1909–14 Paris Expositions des estampes japonaises at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs  Elizabeth Emery 61

4 Collecting Ukiyo-e Prints in Japan during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries  Shigeru Oikawa 79

5

Building Hemispheric Unity to Serve Corporate Identity: IBM’s Collection of Prints from the Americas  Rachel Kaplan 95

Part II  Collecting Posters and Ephemera

111

Introduction, Part II: Collecting Posters and Other Ephemera: From Modernity to the Digital Era  Ruth E. Iskin

113

6

From Commune to Commerce: Ernest Maindron’s Collecting Ephemera and Posters, Late 1850s–Early 1900s  Ruth E. Iskin 129

7

The Maurice Rickards Collection of Ephemera  Michael Twyman 149

8

Hans Sachs: The Most Dedicated Collector of Posters in Germany  Kathleen Chapman 164

vi Contents

 9 To Possess is to Belong: Carlos Monsiváis’s Collection of Ephemera and Popular Culture in Mexico City  Liliana Chávez Díaz 179

10 The David King Collection of Russian and Soviet Ephemera at Tate: Expanding the Museum Narrative with Ephemera  Sofia Gurevich 197

11 Collecting Chinese Propaganda Posters  Stefan Landsberger 212 12 The Cuba Poster Project: Collecting for People, not Profit  Lincoln Cushing 228 13 Collecting Pre- and Post-Revolution Iranian Movie Posters in the United States and in Iran  Hamid Naficy 245

14 The Challenge of Collecting Digital Posters and Graphics from the Web: A Roundtable Discussion  Anisa Hawes 262 Author Biographies Index

275 279

Figures Introduction, Part I: Collecting Modern and Contemporary Prints 0.1 Richard Bull’s collection of prints by amateurs, c. 1805, British Museum

11

0.2 Jan Toorop, The Print Lover (Dr. Aegidius Timmerman), 1898–1900, oil on canvas, 66.5 × 76 cm, Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

14

0.3 Percy Lancaster, The Print Collector, 1945, etching and drypoint, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

15

0.4 Print Room, Cleveland Museum of Art, 1922. Cleveland Museum of Art Archives

17

Chapter 1 1.1 Daniel Nicolaus Chodowiecki, Der Kupferstich Liebhaber (The Lover of Engraving), etching, 1781, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

31

1.2 John Kay, Connoisseurs, etching, 1785, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

32

1.3 Anonymous, published by Matthew Darly, The Female Conoiseur, hand-colored etching, 1772, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

33

1.4 Barbara van den Broeck, after Crispin van den Broeck, The Last Judgment, engraving, 1599, ii/iv, The New York Public Library, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs

37

Chapter 2 2.1 Loys Delteil, Alfred de Musset, c. 1880–1900, British Museum

46

2.2 Loys Delteil, Loys Delteil, 1898, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division

47

2.3 Francisco de Goya, Los Caprichos: No hay quien nos desate, published 1799, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

53

2.4 Édouard Manet, The Spanish Singer (Le Guitarrero), 1861–2, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

54

viii Figures

Chapter 3 3.1 Cover of the brochure for the third exhibit of Japanese prints held at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris (January 10 to February 12, 1911), Musée des Arts Décoratifs, archives UCAD box D1/55, author’s photograph

63

3.2 Masatomo Haghiwara and Mme Raymond Koechlin, photograph taken by Hugues Krafft at Midori-no-Sato on July 25, 1892, photo: Musée Hôtel le Vergeur, Reims

66

3.3 William Merritt Chase, The Japanese Woodblock Print, c. 1888, oil on canvas, 51.2 × 61.6 cm, Neue Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemaelde­ sammlungen, Munich, Germany

67

3.4 Clémentine-Hélène Dufau (French, 1869–1937), Portrait of a Woman in a Kimono, c. 1910, oil on canvas, 158.4 × 110.5 cm (62 3/8 × 43 1/2 in.), Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Gift of Herbert D. and Ruth Schimmel, 85.048.001, photo by Peter Jacobs

68

Chapter 4 4.1 Sharaku, (Ichikawa) Yaozô later Suketakaya, Art Institute of Chicago

82

4.2 Édouard Manet, Emile Zola, 1868, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

83

4.3 Hokkei, Seal of Kyosai, Kyosai shu, collection of the author

84

Chapter 5 5.1 José Clemente Orozco, Pulquería (Danzantes), 1934, lithograph, Collection of the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Gift of Robert L. B. Tobin. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SOMAAP, Mexico

101

5.2 Camilo Blas (José Alfonso Sánchez Urteaga), El Collao (The High Plains), 1934, woodcut, private collection, photograph by Daniel Giannoni, ARCHI, Archivo Digital de Arte Peruano

103

5.3 Mauricio Lasansky, Changos y Burritos (Children and Young Burros), 1937, etching with drypoint on zinc, image courtesy of the Lasansky Corporation 104 5.4 John Taylor Arms, In Memoriam, 1939, etching, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bequest of Staunton B. Peck, 1950, 1950-103-1, courtesy of Suzanne Arms Hawkins

105

Figures

ix

Introduction, Part II: Collecting Posters and Other Ephemera: From Modernity to the Digital Era 0.5 Société Belge des Affichophiles in Antwerpen, c. 1900, photograph, Library of Congress, Washington, DC

118

Chapter 6 6.1 Jules Chéret, Ernest Maindron, cover illustration for Les hommes d’aujourd’hui 6, no. 277 [1887], author’s collection

131

6.2 Fernand Fau, 14e exposition – 31 rue Bonaparte, Salon des Cent, 1895. Public domain

132

6.3 Frédéric-Auguste Cazals, 7me exposition – 31 rue Bonaparte, Salon des Cent, 1894. Public domain

133

6.4 Honoré Daumier The Connoisseur, c. 1860–65, pen and ink, wash, watercolor, lithographic crayon, and gouache over black chalk. 43.8 × 35.5 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929

134

Chapter 7 7.1 Maurice Rickards surrounded by items from his ephemera collection before it was transferred to the Centre for Ephemera Studies at the University of Reading. Photographer unknown, c. 1990 Photographer unknown, c. 1990

150

7.2 A board from the Rickards Collection showing a range of intaglioprinted British trade cards, mostly of the first half of the nineteenth century. Centre for Ephemera Studies, University of Reading

154

7.3 The Maurice Rickards Collection when in his own private apartment, showing a “model” way of organizing ephemera, mid-1980s. Solander boxes are stacked on wooden racks alongside a small reference collection of books and a viewing stand. Centre for Ephemera Studies, University of Reading

155

7.4 Announcement of an exhibition of “The only real mermaid.” Letterpress, with a skeptical manuscript observation in vernacular language revealing that the item was left at the owner’s house near Darlington, October 26, 1849. Centre for Ephemera Studies, University of Reading

157

x Figures

Chapter 8 8.1 Unknown photographer, Hans Sachs in Study, undated, Estate of Hans Sachs

165

8.2 Otto Fischer, Exhibition of Saxonian Arts and Crafts. “The Old Town” Dresden, 1896 (Ausstellung des saechsischen Handwerks und Kunstge werbes Dresden 1896 Die alte Stadt), lithograph printed in yellow, red, brown, blue, and black on wove paper mounted on muslin, Gift of the Robert Gore Rifkind Collection, Beverly Hills, CA

167

Chapter 9 9.1 Graciela Iturbide, Retrato de Monsiváis en su cuarto de juegos, c. 1996, gelatin silver print, Carlos Monsiváis / Museo del Estanquillo Collection

180

9.2 Héctor Herrera, Fachada Museo del Estanquillo Día, 2017, digital print, Museo del Estanquillo

180

9.3 Claudio Linati, Escribano público, 1830, hand-painted lithograph, Carlos Monsiváis / Museo del Estanquillo Collection

186

9.4 Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, Souvenir de México, 1905, lithograph, cover by unknown artist for Wagner and Levien, Carlos Monsiváis / Museo del Estanquillo Collection

190

Chapter 10 10.1 Installation view of the Red Star display at Tate Modern, 2008

199

10.2 Unknown photographer, The Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw, holding a copy of “USSR in Construction,” at his home in London, c. 1930–41, later print, photograph, gelatin silver print on paper, The David King Collection at Tate 204 10.3 Page from the 10 Years of Uzbekistan publication designed by Alexander Rodchenko, featuring a defaced portrait of Dzhakhan Abidova, deputy chairwoman of the Presidium of the Central Committee of Uzbekistan, c. 1930s, printed in the 1990s, photograph, gelatin silver print on paper, The David King Collection at Tate 205

Chapter 11 11.1 Designer unknown, Little guests in the Moon Palace (Yuegong xiao keren), published by Renmin meishu chubanshe (Beijing), c. 1972, IISH/Stefan R. Landsberger Collection, photo © International Institute of Social History

213

Figures

xi

11.2 Xin Liliang, Chairman Mao gives us a happy life (Mao zhuxi gei womende xingfu shenghuo), published by Sanyi yinshua gongsi (Shanghai), March 1954, IISH/Stefan R. Landsberger Collection, photo © International Institute of Social History

214

11.3 Dandong Red Headquarters of the Lu Xun Art Academy Mao Zedong Thought 65th Battalion, General Department of the Lu Xun Art Academy Mao Zedong Thought Red Guards, Listen to the words of Chairman Mao, swear to follow the model of “Support the army, love the people”! (Ting Mao zhuxi de hua, shizuo “yongjun aimin” de mofan!), publisher unknown, c. 1968, IISH/Stefan R. Landsberger Collection, photo © International Institute of Social History

218

11.4 Designer unknown, Defeat Japanese imperialism (Dadao Riben diguozhuyi), published by Junshi weiyuanhui zhengxunchu, c. 1937, IISH/Stefan R. Landsberger Collection, photo © International Institute of Social History

220

Chapter 12 12.1 Heriberto Echeverria, March 8—International Women’s Day, for Editora Politica, Cuba, 1972, photo by Lincoln Cushing from Docs Populi Archive

230

12.2 Swann Galleries and Getty Images websites showing examples of political poster and image sales, Swann Gallery auction held August 3, 2011, Getty Images captured February 9, 2016

234

12.3 The Life Cycle of a Cultural Object, by Lincoln Cushing

236

12.4 Resist Oppression: Refuse the Draft!, 1968, from a set of posters burned in a privately held collection, photo by Lincoln Cushing from Docs Populi Archive

240

Chapter 13 13.1 Farshid Mesghali, The Cow (Gav), directed by Dariush Mehrjui, offset lithograph, 1969, photo © Ali Bakhtiari Movie Poster Collection, Tehran, Iran

247

13.2 Multilingual poster in five languages, c. 1926, photo © Massoud Mehrabi Movie Poster Collection, Tehran, Iran

249

13.3 Ali Mortazavi, based on original design by Abbas Kiarostami, Qaisar, directed and screenwriting by Masud Kimiai, 1969, photo © Hamid Naficy Iranian Movie Posters Collection, Northwestern University Archives

251

xii Figures 13.4 Khorraminejad, Bandari, directed by Kamran Qadakchian, 1973, offset lithograph, photo © Hamid Naficy Iranian Movie Posters Collection, Northwestern University Archives

255

Chapter 14 14.1 Various, Beer and Bingo, screenshot by author, 2017, Google Images™ search service results preserved using Webrecorder

264

14.2 Occupy Design UK, Bombing Yeman, JPEG image, 2017, http:​//gra​phics​.occu​pydes​ign.o​rg.uk​/3171​/bomb​ing-y​emen

266

Plates Plate 1  Jan Toorop, The Print Lover (Dr. Aegidius Timmerman), 1898–1900, oil on canvas, 66.5 × 76 cm, Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands Plate 2  Clémentine-Hélène Dufau (French, 1869–1937), Portrait of a Woman in a Kimono, c. 1910, oil on canvas, 158.4 × 110.5 cm (62 3/8 × 43 1/2 in.), Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Gift of Herbert D. and Ruth Schimmel, 85.048.001, photo by Peter Jacobs Plate 3  Hokkei, Seal of Kyosai, Kyosai shu, collection of the author Plate 4  Jules Chéret, Ernest Maindron, cover illustration for Les hommes d’aujourd’hui 6, no. 277 [1887], author’s collection Plate 5  Otto Fischer, Exhibition of Saxonian Arts and Crafts. “The Old Town” Dresden, 1896 (Ausstellung des saechsischen Handwerks und Kunstgewerbes Dresden 1896 Die alte Stadt), lithograph printed in yellow, red, brown, blue, and black on wove paper mounted on muslin, Gift of the Robert Gore Rifkind Collection, Beverly Hills, CA Plate 6  Designer unknown, Little guests in the Moon Palace (Yuegong xiao keren), published by Renmin meishu chubanshe (Beijing), c. 1972, IISH/Stefan R. Landsberger Collection, photo © International Institute of Social History Plate 7 Heriberto Echeverria, March 8—International Women’s Day, for Editora Politica, Cuba, 1972, photo by Lincoln Cushing from Docs Populi Archive Plate 8 Khorraminejad, Bandari, directed by Kamran Qadakchian, 1973, offset lithograph, photo © Hamid Naficy Iranian Movie Posters Collection, Northwestern University Archives

Series Editor’s Introduction Any study of art markets and collecting necessarily confronts questions concerning the creation of value: why are some artifacts deemed worth preserving while others are discarded? What makes one object more valuable than another? Who makes decisions about the aesthetic and financial values of individual works, and do the criteria for determining such values remain stable throughout time? These questions come strikingly to the fore in the case of print culture. As forms of graphic production that are, of their nature, produced in multiples and typically designed for mass distribution and transient display in public spaces, posters, and ephemera, for example, have often been looked through rather than looked at. Their practical functions, coupled with their ability to signify wider social and cultural ideas, have often seemed at odds with the values typically ascribed to works considered worthy of collection and preservation. Even some prints that are today prized in private and public collections are embedded in complex—and often conflicting—financial, social, and knowledge networks that developed at different rates and for different purposes in various art world contexts. As editors of the present volume, Ruth E. Iskin and Britany Salsbury have united a group of experts in the field of print culture to debate these and related issues in histories of graphic production from the nineteenth century to the present. The chapters in this volume reveal the emergence of distinctive epistemic frameworks for the collecting, valuing, and preservation of different kinds of prints, posters, and ephemera in countries around the world. As Salsbury and Iskin make clear, the creation of a market for such materials depended, in many cases, on the emergence of scholarship about both the content of the relevant works and their material qualities as artifacts. In this context, Salsbury discusses the crucial role of Loys Delteil in the field of nineteenth-century printmaking, while Iskin draws attention to the importance of Ernest Maindron in the history of nineteenth-century posters. The writings of these and other collectors disseminated ideas about graphic works and gave the latter prominence in wider collecting circles. In such cases, the relationship between market forces, collecting trends, and scholarly research could hardly be closer. The fact that posters and ephemera are part of quotidian—and transient—visual culture reveals something special about the act of collecting: namely, that collections of such materials are often derived from an individual’s enthusiasm for the artifacts themselves rather than from ideas about the potential marketability of, or institutional appetite for, those artifacts. In consequence, private preferences often come to the fore in development of print collections. Yet, the chapters in this volume also show that collecting activities are shaped by the social networks in which individuals participate. The sharing of ideas within collector circles and beyond has helped to stimulate

xiv Series Editor’s Introduction interest in different branches of print culture and to establish crucial guidance for those interested in entering the market. In many cases, prints, posters, and ephemera acquire value by virtue of their inclusion in a collection: the whole acquires a cultural and financial significance that is greater than its parts. The establishment of a collection can, in turn, affect the sales prices of other artifacts (including proofs and cancelled plates) that attract the interest of individuals keen to enter related markets and to establish their own unique assemblages. The contribution to this volume by collector Stefan Landsberger offers a welcome perspective on this issue. He sets out his personal motivations for developing a collection (in this case, Chinese propaganda posters produced from 1937 to the present) and the manner in which his collection has developed over four decades. In Landsberger’s case, as in other examples treated in the volume, the act of collecting printed material becomes a prism through which to analyze the emergence of specific markets within the art world and to understand how these impact on histories of personal and institutional collecting. One of the most important features of the present volume is the breadth of its focus. While individual chapters closely analyze examples of print production and collection in Europe, the United States, South America, Asia, and the Middle East, certain themes recur throughout the discussions: the emergence of stratified markets for prints; the impact of materials on the value of individual works; the relationship between prints and decoration; the role of gender in the analysis of collector networks; and changing ideas about the cultural significance of collecting. Developing the latter point, the volume concludes with an important discussion led by Anisa Hawes about intersections between print and digital culture. Participants in a roundtable discussion debate the challenges of preserving born-digital material, including digital objects, social media postings, downloads, and multi-authored “graphic events.” The discussion makes clear that the history of print culture is continuing to evolve and generate new styles of collecting, market opportunities, and avenues for research. Indeed, technologies are requiring us to revisit our understanding of what constitutes “print culture” itself. The chapters in this book make an important contribution to wide-ranging debates about collecting and print markets, and it is with pleasure that I welcome the volume into the Contextualizing Art Markets series. Kathryn Brown Loughborough, Spring 2019

Introduction Ruth E. Iskin and Britany Salsbury

Scholarly interest in the history of collecting has grown in recent years, producing a new body of writing on print collecting. Many of these texts have focused on collectors of the past, however, and the practices and historical narratives of collecting printed material during the modern and contemporary periods have yet to be fully examined. The first to address collections of prints, posters, and ephemera together, this volume aims to broaden the parameters of the field and introduce diversity to the topic in numerous ways. With an international range of case studies dating from the nineteenth century through today, this book defines “prints” broadly, focusing on both fine art and mass-produced examples. Several of the chapters examine political and propaganda posters in different contexts, including the nineteenth-century Paris Commune, and the twentieth-century Cuban, Chinese, and Russian revolutions (Chapters 6, 10, 11, 10). Some include information or a comparative discussion of collecting posters in both non-Western and Western contexts: for example, collecting Chinese Revolution posters in the Netherlands and in China; Iranian movie posters in the United States and in Iran; and Cuban posters in the United States and in Cuba. The book also introduces diverse voices to the topic of collecting by including the writing of art historians, as well as curators and directors of collecting institutions, museum researchers, and contemporary poster collectors (some of whom are also humanities scholars themselves) (Chapters 7, 11, 12, 13). Together, these authors represent varied perspectives on the history of acquiring prints and ephemera as well as the practices, priorities, and experiences of collecting today. The essays in Collecting Prints, Posters, and Ephemera are intended collectively to fill gaps in the study of the history of collecting. The book includes, for example, two different articles on collecting Japanese woodblock prints from perspectives that have been largely missing from the literature, which has tended to focus on European male collectors. As Chapters 3 and 4 reveal, women and Japanese collectors were equally enthusiastic about acquiring these works. Addressing the lack of scholarship on women collectors and consideration of gender issues in collecting prints, the volume also includes the fascinating case of the nineteenth-century female Dutch collector, Henrietta Louisa Koenen, who assembled a unique collection of works made by female printmakers, and whose achievement (like those of women who collected Japanese prints) has not been properly credited (Chapter 1). The individual print collectors discussed throughout the book include Koenen in addition to the French collector Loys Delteil and Mexican collector Carlos

2

Collecting Prints, Posters, and Ephemera

Monsiváis (Chapters 1, 2, 9). Several chapters address private collectors of posters: Ernest Maindron who amassed substantial holdings of these works in nineteenthcentury Paris, and the early twentieth-century Jewish German collector Hans Sachs, whose extensive poster collection was pillaged by the Nazi regime (Chapters 6 and 8). The volume also features the perspectives of collectors within the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Stefan Landsberger, who is Dutch, the Havana-born American Lincoln Cushing, and Iran-born American Hamid Naficy (Chapters 11, 12, 13). Finally, it features articles focused more broadly on defined groups rather than individuals: on those in Japan who acquired Japanese woodblock prints and on Parisian women collectors of Japanese prints (Chapters 3 and 4). Collecting Prints, Posters, and Ephemera also addresses museums’ collecting and the interactions between private collections and institutions that have become repositories of their holdings. Chapter 5, for example, addresses IBM’s corporate collection of prints from the Americas, and a roundtable discussion presents contemporary issues in museums’ acquisitions of digital posters (Chapter 14). Several chapters also examine private collections now housed in institutions, such as the vast holdings of the graphic designer and arts editor of The Sunday Times magazine, David King, of some 250,000 objects, including posters and ephemera of Soviet visual culture, recently acquired by Tate Modern in London (Chapter 10). Another chapter similarly examines the 20,000item ephemera collection amassed by Maurice Rickards, a pioneering historian of the field. Rickards’s holdings are now housed at the University of Reading’s Centre for Ephemera Studies, and its current director, Michael Twyman, explores the collection’s history in Chapter 7. The collection of the Mexican critic Carlos Monsiváis similarly served as the basis of the Estanquillo Museum in Mexico City, whose holdings of Mexican prints, ephemera, and other objects of popular culture are discussed in Chapter 9. More recently, in an example from the United States, historian Hamid Naficy discusses his own holdings of Iranian movie posters, which he donated to the Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University (Chapter 13). The book’s closing roundtable discussion extends the issues raised by these case studies by looking forward to the future, examining museums’ practices of and strategies for acquiring digital posters and ephemera. This topic, which has not been discussed in existing scholarship on the history of collecting, suggests new directions for consideration in the field. Both of the book’s parts are preceded by thematic introductions relating to prints and to posters and ephemera, respectively. Part I, “Collecting Modern and Contemporary Prints,” includes five chapters, beginning with “Henrietta Louisa Koenen’s (1830–81) Amsterdam Collection of Women Printmakers,” in which art historian and print curator Madeleine C. Viljoen analyzes the ambitious collection of over 800 prints by women that Koenen assembled in the mid-nineteenth century. Focusing on the important but still understudied categories of women printmakers and collectors, the chapter brings new insights to Koenen’s practices and to the important role she played in these fields, which has been downplayed historically in favor of her husband. In Chapter 2, “Loys Delteil (1869–1927): Community and Contemporary Print Collecting in Fin-de-Siècle Paris,” print historian and curator Britany Salsbury discusses the author

Introduction  3 of Le Peintre-graveur illustré (1906–26), the thirty-one-volume catalog raisonné of nineteenth-century printmaking that has been a definitive guide for collectors in this field. The chapter focuses on Delteil’s lesser known activity as a collector and examines these practices as an activity that integrated his multiple practices as an artist, dealer, expert, and critic. Salsbury argues that Delteil’s unique combination of professional roles was intrinsically tied to his collecting, enabling him to assemble a collection noted for its remarkable rarity and quality. In Chapter 3, “Women Collectors of Japanese Prints: The 1909–14 Paris Expositions des estampes japonaises at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs,” cultural historian Elizabeth Emery analyzes the French japoniste movement by bringing a critical perspective to the memoirs, private journals, and letters left by male artists, intellectuals, and businessmen. She reveals the inaccuracies in their presentation of collecting Japanese prints as the exclusive purview of a small group of men and argues that such retrospective accounts falsely elided the active role played by women—such as Florine Langweil, Louise-Marcelle Seure, Louise Curtis, and Mary A. Ainsworth—who also acquired and exchanged these objects. Emery’s analysis of archives from the Union Centrale des arts décoratifs, which acknowledge the participation of ten women in the six exhibits of Japanese prints held yearly between 1909 and 1914, serves as the basis for a new interpretation of female engagement with print collecting. Japanese art historian Shigeru Oikawa also deals with Japanese prints in his chapter, “Collecting Ukiyo-e Prints in Japan during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” Focusing on ukiyo-e prints, among the most popular Japanese artifacts in the West today, Oikawa analyzes the process that led to their recognition in Japan, and the emergence of collectors both in Japan and the West. He argues that, while the interest of Western collectors in Japanese prints began in the middle of the nineteenth century, they were seen as significant in Japan only later, and sheds new light on why this difference in perspective occurred. The first part of the book concludes with “Building Hemispheric Unity to Serve Corporate Identity: IBM’s Collection of Prints from the Americas,” by curator of Latin American art Rachel Kaplan. Her chapter focuses on a print collection assembled by IBM and circulated in exhibitions throughout the United States and Latin America. Kaplan analyzes these holdings of prints within the history of corporate collecting as well as the political and cultural context of the 1940s, and examines IBM’s claim that their collections and exhibitions promoted hemispheric unity and universal kinship. The book’s second part, devoted to collecting posters and ephemera, begins with an introduction to this topic and includes eight chapters and a roundtable discussion. It begins with Chapter 6 by historian of art and visual culture, Ruth E. Iskin, “From Commune to Commerce: Ernest Maindron’s Collecting Ephemera and Posters, Late 1850s–Early 1900s,” which examines Maindron’s collection of more than 15,000 posters. Although Maindron is best known as the first historian of the poster and for his writing about this field during the 1880s and 1890s, the article focuses on a lesser known part of his career. At the beginning of his collecting, Maindron salvaged a very large body of Commune posters hung throughout Paris during the revolutionary days

4

Collecting Prints, Posters, and Ephemera

of 1870. Showing the indispensable relationship between Maindron’s roles as a collector, curator, archivist, and historian, the chapter analyzes his practices, motivations, and ideas. Iskin argues that, although the political Commune posters of 1870 differed from the illustrated commercial advertising posters of the 1890s that served a burgeoning consumer culture, Maindron’s collecting both kinds of works made sense in terms of his understanding of them as crucial fragments of the history of modernity. The next chapter, “The Maurice Rickards Collection of Ephemera,” is authored by the preeminent print historian Michael Twyman, and explores the activities of Maurice Rickards, a pioneer of collecting, studying, and promoting ephemera in the late twentieth century. It argues that Rickards’s collecting focused on the “evidential value” of ephemera, and that it was intrinsically connected to his other activities. The latter included founding the Ephemera Society in Britain, helping to launch a similar American society, editing the Ephemerist journal, and compiling an Encyclopedia of Ephemera. Finally, the chapter discusses decisions taken following the acquisition of this collection left by Rickards to the University of Reading’s Centre for Ephemera Studies. In Chapter 8, “Hans Sachs: The Most Dedicated Collector of Posters in Germany,” art historian Kathleen Chapman analyzes the practices and motivations of the GermanJewish dentist, Hans Sachs who, from 1896 to 1938, assembled a collection of 12,500 posters—the most significant such collection of his time. Chapman also discusses Sachs’s related activities, including founding the important periodical Das Plakat (1910–21). Analyzing Sachs’s collection and its subsequent devastation by the Nazis, the chapter presents a heartbreaking case study that sheds new light on twentiethcentury German art, culture, and politics. The book’s second part continues by examining the collection of Carlos Monsiváis. In Chapter 9, “To Possess is to Belong: Carlos Monsiváis’s Collection of Ephemera and Popular Culture in Mexico City,” Liliana Chávez Díaz, an expert in Latin American Literature, examines Monsiváis’s holdings of prints and ephemera representing Mexican history, traditions, and politics. These objects are currently housed at the Estanquillo Museum, which was founded in 2006 in Mexico City. Chávez Díaz argues that Monsiváis’s collection traces an alternative view of a nation without clear origins, in which fate and desire, repression and joy are constantly intertwined. She further proposes that, by assembling a hybrid and apparently anarchic collection, Monsiváis sought to both critique and pay homage to Mexican society, while expressing his own place within it. Chapter 10 also examines a collection housed within an institution. Authored by curator Sofia Gurevich, “The David King Collection of Russian and Soviet Ephemera at Tate: Expanding the Museum Narrative with Ephemera,” explores the collection of approximately 250,000 items of Soviet visual culture assembled by late graphic designer David King, which was recently acquired by Tate. It addresses a range of issues related to the entrance of such holdings of ephemera into Tate—especially its impact on historical narratives and potential to expand the canon within museums. The following three chapters feature the perspectives of scholars who are also collectors. Chapter 11, “Collecting Chinese Propaganda Posters,” by the prominent

Introduction  5 expert on Chinese posters, Stefan Landsberger, combines a personal narrative of collecting propaganda posters from China for over four decades with analysis of both Western and Chinese collections. The chapter addresses the motivations for these collectors from 1980 to the present, discusses initiatives to create museums dedicated to Chinese posters within China beginning in the late 1990s, and comments on the poster market today. Chapter 12, “The Cuba Poster Project: Collecting for People, not Profit” is contributed by Lincoln Cushing, who began as an artist and printer and later became a collector, archivist, author, and university librarian dedicated to documenting, cataloging, and disseminating oppositional political culture of the late twentieth century. This chapter uses a collection of Cuban posters as a starting point from which to explore motivations for collecting, the role of digital technology in gathering and sharing images and metadata, and the complex intersections of the art market and academic and research institutions. Finally, it analyzes the role of such ephemeral objects in the long arc of art history. In Chapter 13, “Collecting Pre- and Post-Revolution Iranian Movie Posters in the United States and in Iran,” poster collector and preeminent film historian Hamid Naficy explores collecting Iranian movie posters. By focusing on collectors both inside and outside of Iran, Naficy discusses larger issues of personal and national aspirations for form, taste, culture, and identity formation in an increasingly globalized world. As this chapter also shows, there are multiple avenues to Iranian movie poster collecting, from involvement in the film industry, criticism, and scholarship; curating and programming film festivals; engagement in selling posters; or connoisseurship of Iranian movies. The volume concludes with “The Challenge of Collecting Digital Posters and Graphics from the Web: A Roundtable Discussion,” authored by Anisa Hawes. This conversation is a groundbreaking exchange of ideas among a designer/activist, a digital conservator, a software developer, and a curatorial researcher. These professionals discuss how digital technology and web culture have transformed the poster, greatly complicating collecting practices. The roundtable participants reflect on this transformation and a range of new issues including the re-evaluation of established curatorial practices and the exploration of the considerable challenges of collecting digital posters and graphics from the web for museums and archives. Finally, participants share their insights on evolving design vernaculars and experiences of developing and using emerging web archiving tools. The themes developed in this discussion reveal the dramatic changes that have transformed the practices of collecting prints, posters, and ephemera during the brief but significant period covered by this volume. We have attempted to broaden and diversify the study of collecting printed material, which is traditionally situated within art-historical scholarship, by incorporating important aspects of mass visual culture, such as posters and ephemera. The book’s chapters also suggest the increasingly expansive definition of “collectors” themselves. Whereas once these individuals were mostly wealthy men, the practice of collecting printed material has changed drastically over the past century and is now undertaken by a wide variety of practitioners and institutions. The volume explores, for example, women who collected during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but have been excluded or minimized in

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Collecting Prints, Posters, and Ephemera

literature on the topic. The scope of its chapters also reveals that the traditionally Western focus of scholarship on collecting prints, posters, and ephemera must be re-envisioned to include a broader geographic and cultural range. We hope that this book’s reinterpretation of collecting printed material will inform future directions in the study of collecting and of the place of prints, posters, and ephemera within global visual culture.

Part I

Collecting Prints

8 

Introduction, Part I: Collecting Modern and Contemporary Prints Britany Salsbury

“It is profoundly consequential that the maturation of the print in Western art coincides precisely with the emergence of art collecting as we now understand it.” Peter Parshall1 The ways in which artists made prints and they were understood and collected by audiences changed dramatically during the modern and contemporary periods. With some notable exceptions, before the mid-nineteenth century, printmaking was often used in the West either for ephemera, such as caricature and broadsides, or to inexpensively copy paintings rather than to produce original works.2 As art making grew more experimental in subject and form throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so did printmaking. Art historian and curator Peter Parshall suggests that these changes in facture were directly connected to collecting.3 Collectors internationally began to see prints as an affordable way to build a sophisticated collection of contemporary art, to connect with a like-minded community of enthusiasts, and to explore the new themes and subjects of these works. This introduction examines the history and historiography of print collecting during the modern and contemporary periods, focusing on changes in these practices during this time. It focuses primarily on the West (Europe and the United States), corresponding to my own area of expertise, although individual essays throughout this book provide a broader geographic scope. Beginning with a brief overview of collecting before the nineteenth century, it explores the ways that private and institutional collectors either adhered to or challenged these traditions, and analyzes the topic’s historiography. It argues that print collectors played a pivotal role in the way that prints were understood during this period: they were the early curators of institutional collections; they wrote much of the literature on prints and collecting; and they worked (and continue to work) to bring attention to prints as a subject of collecting and study. The introduction concludes with comments on how the process of acquiring prints has evolved in an increasingly international and online market.

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Collecting Prints, Posters, and Ephemera

Print Collecting before 1800 Prints have been collected as long as artists have made them. The earliest collectors in the West were mostly educated men of the upper classes, but their acquisitions were more practical than the product of a distinct interest in prints. In Northern Europe during the fifteenth century, collectors typically acquired intaglio prints and woodcuts to enhance the holdings of their personal libraries, pasting them throughout books as decorations or illustrations.4 Beginning in the next century, artists throughout Europe also often collected prints to use in their studios. Many of these prints reproduced paintings that were inaccessible to most audiences. Prints were copied directly by artists and provided to their students for drawing exercises, or to build knowledge of other masters. Once these study collections were assembled, they were often kept intact and passed from one generation to the next.5 The prints in them were typically purchased from religious sites such as monasteries, or later, from shops that specialized in print selling and sometimes doubled as publishers.6 Throughout Europe beginning around the late fifteenth century, collectors began more deliberately to attempt to build a unified collection. The practice evolved differently in various regions from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century. As print historian Antony Griffiths has observed, “there is no single history of print collecting, only a series of varied and linked lineages.”7 At this time, serious collectors were typically members of the aristocracy, royalty, or merchant classes, with expendable income to acquire art. They sought prints for study or entertainment, and often built massive holdings into the hundreds or even thousands during their lifetimes. Many acquired prints from established sellers in the cities in which they lived. By the eighteenth century, vendors such as the Mariette family in Paris, the Rossi family in Rome, and John Boydell in London set up popular shops that published and sold prints.8 Sometimes collectors also purchased prints while traveling to cities such as Rome to commemorate their participation in the Grand Tour. Beginning in the eighteenth century a wider range of social classes could acquire prints due to their affordability. Middle-class collectors bought inexpensive prints to display in their homes; in England and Scotland, for example, William Hogarth’s prints were a popular choice for decoration, framed and hung in living spaces.9 In colonial Boston, the early print dealer William Price sold engraved American views, which he varnished and framed for purchase by merchants, sea captains, and government officials.10 Around 1800, print sellers in cities such as Paris and London began to feature available works in outdoor vitrines to appeal to potential collectors. Viewable in public space, these displays attracted the attention of a wide variety of social classes. Although it varied widely, print collecting before 1800 was informally standardized with practices that continued throughout the modern and contemporary periods. Serious print collecting constituted purchasing prints by artists to build a collection rather than as decoration. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such collectors selected a theme or approach—such as the Italian school or portrait prints— and acquired as many examples as possible. They housed their collections in albums, a practice that was common until close to the nineteenth century. Each print was



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trimmed to the margins of its image or plate mark, pasted on a regular sized sheet, and inserted into a luxuriously bound volume. This practice can be seen in an album page from the British politician Richard Bull’s (1725–1805) collection of etchings by wealthy amateurs (Figure 0.1). Each print is affixed to the page and numbered alongside the collector’s notes. In this format, collections like Bull’s could be stored in libraries alongside books and pulled to peruse at leisure. Although this systematic approach to collecting evolved beginning in the nineteenth century, the idea of acquiring prints as objects to study and as part of a greater whole continued to define serious print collecting.11

Figure 0.1  Richard Bull’s collection of prints by amateurs, c. 1805, British Museum.

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Collecting Prints, Posters, and Ephemera

Modern Print Collecting Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, collectors began to focus more on acquiring prints because of the identity of their artist rather than their subject or relationship to a theme. In doing so, they built on the practices of serious collectors in the previous generation, although some continued to collect based on iconography or inventory. The etching revival, which began around 1850 and initiated a new and international interest in creating, marketing, and collecting original prints, was a major catalyst for this shift. Beginning in France and England, artists started to experiment with etching, which had languished in popularity since the eighteenth century. Because the technique did not require the assistance of a master printer, artists could easily learn and independently work using portable presses that fit in their studio.12 The publication of an accessible guide to etching techniques, Maxime Lalanne’s Traité de la gravure (Treatise on Etching), in 1866 inspired the growth of original printmaking internationally. Published in French and translated to English soon after, the book could be acquired by artists who were unable to travel to London or Paris to study. The art critic Charles Blanc asserted in 1880 that etchings were being made in and circulated from places as far reaching as the Hague, Poland, London, and Lisbon, suggesting the new international audience for original prints.13 And in his introduction to a translation of Lalanne’s book in the same year, Sylvester Rosa Koehler noted that “private collections have been formed and are growing in richness from day to day,” specifically citing those of King Ferdinand of Portugal and King Charles XV of Sweden, both collectors of contemporary etchings.14 This shift led to a dramatically increased market for original prints throughout Europe and the United States as the etching revival spread. The artists who were part of the etching revival used technical aspects of their process to cultivate a sense of rarity for their works and attract collectors. By doing so, they changed how prints were collected and inspired printmakers in other media from this point forward. They began to print in growing numbers of states—variations on a single image that are achieved by revising the printing plate and continuing to pull impressions. Collectors deliberately sought out the same image in multiple states, or especially rare states. Artists such as James Abbott McNeill Whistler sold not only their finished prints but also working proofs, further expanding the market and the range of what could be collected.15 The use of luxury materials such as metallic inks and imported or vintage papers allowed artists to justify higher prices.16 Especially in France and England, printmakers from Francis Seymour Haden to Édouard Manet also limited their editions, sometimes designating the number of existing impressions and where an individual print fell within that process (such as, for example, 1/10) on the sheet. They routinely destroyed their plates after completing an edition, imposing an artificial limit on an inherently multiple process. These practices are still in use today by many contemporary artists. Such aspects of rarity were used to market prints to collectors. In mid-nineteenthcentury England, the Etching Club—an artists’ organization that included practitioners such as Francis Seymour Hayden and William Holman Hunt—sold



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editions by its members and publicized the fact that only a limited number were produced before the plate was destroyed. The earliest prints pulled were priced highest, as were those from smaller editions.17 The Club also issued prints at various price points to attract a wide range of collectors. A small number were more expensively printed on luxury papers while prints on standard paper were more affordable.18 This practice was common in other countries, especially France. Dealers such as Edmond Sagot and Ambroise Vollard published lithographs with slight variations or on special papers at an elevated price.19 In Germany, Max Klinger’s prints were marketed similarly, possibly influenced by the time the artist spent in Paris as a young man. His portfolio Rescue of Ovid’s Victims (1879), for example, was printed in five editions of varying quality and price, with six extra impressions on what Klinger described as “a most wonderful and no longer obtainable Japan paper . . . [which I] keep . . . locked away.”20 By varying the materials and therefore the price point of their works, printmakers could reach a broad variety of potential collectors. During the late nineteenth century, a greater range of printed material also became available. Artists internationally—including Jules Chéret in France and Edward Penfield in the United States—designed posters and printed ephemera that appealed to audiences for original prints. These works were sometimes acquired and owned alongside prints, reflecting a new and expanded definition of print collecting. In Chapter 6, Ruth E. Iskin discusses one such example of this new type of collector, Ernest Maindron, who amassed substantial holdings of posters, invitations, menu designs, and other ephemera in addition to prints. In early twentieth-century England, the playwright and actress Gabrielle Enthoven similarly collected ephemera, amassing over 80,000 original prints and theater-related posters, programs, and other materials.21 In 1924, Enthoven donated her collection to the Victoria and Albert Museum, where she worked with a team to catalogue, study, and continue to build the collection.22 Like Maindron, Enthoven saw collecting as a means to document history through the visual culture that was an integral part of it. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the practices of print collecting also diversified geographically. Most serious collectors continued to focus on prints by artists, taking advantage of the growing availability in Europe and the United States of prints from around the world, including countries outside of the West.23 In Chapter 3, Elizabeth Emery discusses the interest of a growing number of women collectors in France and the United States in prints from Japan. In Germany, the collector Toni Straus-Negbaur similarly collected Japanese prints after reading early histories on them by German scholars.24 Other collectors looked to Eastern Europe. Gwenoch David Talbot, a British businessman, acquired about 1,000 prerevolution Russian prints during his professional travels there in the mid-twentieth century, focusing especially on landscape and topographical views of St. Petersburg.25 He donated his collection to the Ashmolean Museum upon his death in 1974. The British graphic designer David King, the subject of Chapter 10, similarly collected Soviet visual culture during the 1960s and 1970s, focusing more broadly on posters, periodicals, and other ephemera. Sometimes international connections were made

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Collecting Prints, Posters, and Ephemera

indirectly, through professional agents who brought prints from one country to another—especially from France to the United States. For example, William Mead and Mary Andrews Ladd collected contemporary European prints with a scope impressive in both quality and quantity given their location in Portland, Oregon at a time when the city was still remote.26 They never traveled to Europe themselves and instead relied on dealers such as Frederick Keppel, who acquired works for resale during buying trips to Paris and London.27 Around the same time, the American collector George Perkins Marsh—whose collections formed the basis of the Smithsonian’s print holdings—ordered prints from Europe by mail or imported them through American dealers.28 As these changes took place, collectors started to see prints as objects to privately enjoy and discuss with fellow enthusiasts. Rather than pasting their holdings systematically in albums, they often began to organize prints loosely in portfolios beginning in the late nineteenth century. This allowed for easier perusal and consultation, as the Dutch artist Jan Toorop suggested in his portrait of collector Aegidius Timmerman around 1900 (Figure 0.2). The painting shows the classicist and translator intently studying Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s color lithograph Marcelle Lender (1895), holding the print with both hands, within comfortable domestic surroundings.29 The same focus can be seen in a 1945 image by the British artist Percy Lancaster (Figure 0.3), in which a group of three men bend before a print that has been removed from a portfolio and placed on a chair for close viewing. One man holds a magnifying glass and the others slide their glasses down their noses to study the image’s fine detail—all while pointedly ignoring a framed print on the wall.

Figure 0.2  Jan Toorop, The Print Lover (Dr. Aegidius Timmerman), 1898–1900, oil on canvas, 66.5 × 76 cm, Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.



Introduction, Part I

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Figure 0.3  Percy Lancaster, The Print Collector, 1945, etching and drypoint, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Print collecting continued to develop throughout the twentieth century as the number of contemporary artists who experimented with printmaking grew. Throughout Europe and the United States, a community of dealers, collectors, and publishers supported the market for prints. In Germany, the dealer and critic Paul Cassirer encouraged contemporary artists such as Max Liebermann and Max Beckmann to make prints by setting up their own printshop. Cassirer collected their work while building a market by writing criticism and exhibiting their prints in his gallery.30 Later, as New York emerged as the art world’s capital, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller actively collected the work of living American printmakers, partially as a means of philanthropy.31 Rockefeller’s collection included New York printmakers and their Mexican contemporaries, such as Diego Rivera, whom Rockefeller befriended when Rivera visited the Museum of Modern Art in 1931.32 After the Second World War, artistic print shops such as Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), Crown Point Press, and Tamarind Institute encouraged artists to make prints by providing a supportive operation with equipment, materials, and highly trained professionals. While there, artists without prior experience or a specific interest in printmaking could work with master printers, sometimes only completing a preparatory drawing.33

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Collecting Prints, Posters, and Ephemera

At Crown Point Press, artists well-established in other media, including Alex Katz and Pat Steir, made prints in a variety of techniques that corresponded visually with their paintings. These works appealed not only to collectors of prints but also of contemporary art, further expanding the market. Contemporary print collectors John L. and Roslyn Bakst Goldman cite these blurred boundaries as what originally drew them to print collecting: The American print renaissance of the 1960s was beginning and increasingly artists became interested in working in traditional print media. . . . We were fascinated by the technical interplay between the artist and the intermediary used to create the print . . . building and strengthening or enhancing the image.34

As the Goldmans describe, the expanded availability and definition of contemporary prints held broad appeal, and it created a more diverse market.

Institutional Print Collections Print collectors also played an important role in establishing institutional collections. Like today, many saw donating to museums or libraries as a way of keeping their collections intact and preserving their efforts for posterity. Initially, before the nineteenth century, prints were most commonly integrated into library collections in Europe. The British Museum, for example, founded their Department of Prints and Drawings in 1808 after the print collection was separated from the British Library.35 In France, the national print collection has been part of the Bibliothèque Nationale from its founding in 1632 through today.36 Like most others, both began with the donation of print collections—in the case of the British Museum, that of Sir Hans Sloane at the museum’s founding in 1753; the Bibliothèque Nationale was founded from the royal collection, supplemented by the holdings of Michel de Marolles in 1667.37 This practice remained common as other museums established print collections internationally. The first print department in the United States, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, was founded based on the collection of Francis Calley Gray. On long-term loan from Harvard University, it was ultimately reclaimed and served as the basis of the Fogg Museum’s print collection.38 A Harvard alumnus, Gray acquired etchings and engravings from all periods during frequent travels to Europe.39 Similarly, the Biblioteca Nacional de España formed a study room and began to more actively collect after being given the collection of Valentín Carderera, which formed the core of its holdings.40 The storage and display of these institutional collections became increasingly standardized beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. Institutions with collections formed in earlier centuries, such as France’s Bibliothèque Nationale, often stored prints in the same albums used by private collectors. This approach was revisited and rethought after 1800, leading to the system used by most institutions today, much of which was initiated by the British Museum. There, around 1860, a print room



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supervisor named W. M. Scott invented the “sunk mount,” which consisted of hinging a print to a sheet of stiff board and overlaying it with another board cut to show the image.41 This format allowed the print to be held and studied closely without touching the paper. Mats were cut to standardized sizes for ease of storage, allowing them to be neatly stacked inside Solander boxes. Invented by Daniel Solander as a means to store botanical specimens, these containers featured a clamshell format that protected the objects inside from dust and light.42 They were organized in shelved storage, often according to nationality and chronology. Although institutional print collections are housed in storage to prevent exposure to light, they are accessible to visitors in study rooms, which are typically adjacent to storage with tables and reference texts for close looking. They developed alongside the formation of institutional collections. The British Museum, for example, allocated a room in its original building for viewing its core collection in 1753, the year those prints were acquired.43 The Bibliothèque Nationale de France similarly allowed select visitors to access the collection in a designated space beginning in the eighteenth century.44 An 1895 guide to the Cabinet des Estampes specified that the study room was open six days a week to any member of the public with approval from the administration.45 Most American museums began to create these facilities in the early twentieth century, often shortly after acquiring formative gifts. The Cleveland Museum of Art opened a study room in 1922, aiming to provide a place where “those who take pleasure in prints from aesthetic, technical, or historic points of view, may enjoy them undisturbed and in quiet with the proper reference books near at hand.”46 The facility featured space to examine prints either flat on a table or propped on a rack, with natural light from the north and a library of reference books (Figure 0.4). Visitors were encouraged not only to view the museum’s collection, but also to bring in their own acquisitions for

Figure 0.4  Print Room, Cleveland Museum of Art, 1922. Cleveland Museum of Art Archives.

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Collecting Prints, Posters, and Ephemera

comparison and study.47 In addition, the space included vitrines for displaying works from the collection, allowing it to serve as an extension of the museum’s galleries. The earliest curators of these institutional holdings were often print collectors themselves. The first Director appointed to the Rijksprentenkabinet of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, in 1876 (and the spouse of Henrietta Louisa Koenen, the subject of Chapter 1), Johan Philip van der Kellen, was initially better known for his own substantial collection, which he was obliged to sell when he assumed his institutional duties.48 Some of these early curators were self-taught, especially given the relative scarcity of formal training in art history during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.49 Sylvester Rosa Koehler, appointed as the first print curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Smithsonian Institution in 1885, learned about prints while working as a color lithography firm’s technical manager before translating and authoring several important texts on etching.50 In Boston, Koehler aimed to build a didactic collection that would, in his words, “illustrate the whole history of the multiplying arts.”51 While doing so, he amassed a personal collection that included thousands of etchings and woodcuts by contemporary American and German artists, often donating prints to the museum and leaving a large portion to the institution that employed him just before his death.52 Like Koehler, William M. Ivins, the founding curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s print collection, learned about prints primarily through his own private collecting. This approach allowed him to develop a distinctive perspective on prints, valuing them for their content as well as their form, an emphasis that was unprecedented at the time.53 Ivins was not alone in linking his personal and institutional collecting interests; Katharine Kuh, the curator responsible for modern art at the Art Institute of Chicago during the 1950s, purchased prints by artists such as José Guadalupe Posada, Leopoldo Méndez, and José Clemente Orozco during her travels to Mexico, keeping some and donating others to the museum.54 By building this part of the collection, she put Chicago at the forefront of collecting Mexican prints in the United States. Beyond occasionally working as curators, print collectors also built museum collections through gifts. This support was sometimes undertaken by groups such as print clubs. These organizations financially supported print acquisitions at their institutions and also encouraged private collecting, with the assumption that they would be donated to museums.55 Individual collectors also supported institutions. The Polish art critic Fliks Manggha-Jasieński built a large and varied print collection, including contemporary French, Japanese, and Polish works, donating it to the National Museum in Krakow in 1920.56 Today, collectors often work alongside museum curators to build holdings in strategic areas. The American businessman Lessing J. Rosenwald began collecting prints in the 1920s, amassing a substantial collection of modern and old master works that he promised to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. upon its founding in 1941.57 Rosenwald saw this donation as a patriotic gesture: as his 1979 obituary stated, “It was with a view to assembling a collection for the nation that he went about his work.”58 Jordan Schnitzer, an American philanthropist and investor, began collecting prints as a teenager and has built one of the country’s largest holdings of contemporary works on paper.59 Rather than donating the collection to a specific



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museum, he formed a foundation that supports traveling print exhibitions; curators may borrow works or thematic displays, allowing them to draw greater attention to prints and collecting.60

The Historiography of Print Collecting Print collectors played an instrumental role in expanding the literature about this topic by writing manuals, guides, and reference texts. Most of these books were formatted as catalogues raisonnés, featuring complete listings of all prints by a particular artist or school with technical information allowing for identification. A well-known example is Austrian scholar and collector Adam Bartsch’s 21-volume Le Peintre-graveur (1803– 21). Catering to connoisseurs, he provided a guide for assembling an encyclopedic collection of Dutch, Flemish, German, or Italian prints from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries based on his own numbering system. In its comprehensive presentation, his volumes were directed exclusively toward experienced collectors. Although it was primarily a reference text rather than critical analysis, his selection of artists instructed the reader on issues of taste. Other texts produced by collectors around Bartsch’s time—such as Carl Heinrich von Heineken in Germany, Michael Huber in England, and Alexandre Pierre Francois Robert-Dumesnil in France— offered similar reference texts.61 Like Bartsch, each implicitly suggested taste and value through their selection of artists and thus helped to create a canon for prints. In the late nineteenth century, new texts further developed upon Bartsch’s format. The collector, critic, and historian Henri Beraldi published Les Graveurs du XIXe siècle (1885–92), a 12-volume series that presented the work of nineteenth-century artists. While most collecting literature had dealt with collecting prints of the past, Beraldi focused exclusively on contemporary printmaking. He described each print with a brief biographical note, included an inventory of the artist’s production with technical details, and sometimes a monographic essay. Beraldi’s work on contemporary French printmakers was taken up by the French collector Loys Delteil who capitalized on his various roles within the Parisian print world to document his contemporaries’ work (Chapter 2). Like Beraldi, Delteil advocated for contemporary printmaking, often drawing upon his relationships with artists and knowledge of the art market. This type of reference literature continued into the twentieth century, as collectors and dealers authored studies of printmakers’ oeuvres. In Germany, Rosa Schapire, a patron of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, wrote a study of his graphic work.62 Like Delteil, Schapire’s scholarship drew upon her personal relationship with the artist and the extensive collection she had assembled of his work. Other collectors adopted differing approaches; in 1921, the Dutch collector Frits Lugt authored a comprehensive guide to identifying the marks that historical and contemporary collectors stamped onto works that they acquired.63 This work transformed the study of the provenance of prints and drawings, and encouraged greater knowledge of the history of collecting by allowing institutions and collectors to identify prints that were dispersed from the same owner’s holdings. Although, like much collecting literature, it was primarily a

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reference text; Lugt’s study facilitated not only cataloguing prints but also knowledge of the specific individuals who collected. In 2010, his book was digitized, serving as an online database that continues to grow as new marks are identified today.64 Collectors also published guides on how to acquire prints during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their texts established standard practices for collection building and offered advice. A popular British example during this period is Joseph Maberly’s The Print Collector (1844), which offered advice to novice collectors based on the author’s own practical experiences and existing early literature on the topic.65 It offered details on subjects ranging from beginning to collect, classifications and terminology for prints, pricing and value, and caring and storage.66 This genre of writing continued to develop and shape collecting in the coming years. In early twentieth-century France, Gustave Bourcard’s influential text, La Cote d’estampes des différentes écoles anciennes et modernes (The Popularity of Prints from Different Historic and Modern Schools, 1912), encouraged collecting based on quality rather than an encyclopedic scope.67 Bourcard emphasized the importance of a collector’s knowledge and taste, and presented collecting as a subjective rather than systematic practice. His text signified a new individualized approach to collecting that can be seen in guides of the time, such as Gustav Schiefler’s Meine Graphiksammlung (My Print Collection, 1927) which described how the author’s immediate and emotional response upon viewing expressionist prints encouraged him to collect them, and Alexis Pétrovitch’s Kto chto sobirayet (Notes on Collectors of this Era in Moscow), a personalized account of his collecting in Moscow, written in 1892 and published in 1916.68 In addition, a wide variety of journals catered to print collectors, including Pan (1895–1900) in Germany, L’Estampe (1881–c. 1905) and Annuaire de la gravure française in France, The Print Collector’s Quarterly in England and the United States (1911–50), and The Print Collector’s Newsletter (1970–1996) in the United States. These periodicals likewise featured a range of articles by collectors. All of this literature considerably influenced the practices of collecting historical and contemporary prints.

The Changing Market for Prints Today Although the print market has changed steadily during the modern and contemporary periods, shifts have accelerated in recent years. While prints were almost exclusively sold by expert dealers and in public auctions a century ago, this practice has been impacted by factors such as the internet, an increasingly global art market, and the growth of art fairs. In some instances, prints by living artists have been incorporated into the broader field of contemporary art. As a result, some collecting has moved away from past practices, which were medium specific and focused on connoisseurship and a deep knowledge of printmakers’ oeuvres. A 2014 New York Times article about shifts in print collecting, for example, argued that “encouraged by the soaring prices of original art and the availability of images of . . . prints online, a new international crowd that doesn’t know the difference between etching and drypoint . . . and isn’t



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really that bothered—has entered the market.”69 In 2018, Bloomberg similarly pointed to the print market as “the fastest-growing segment of the art market,” describing a shift from focusing on old master prints in the 1970s to contemporary works today. The president of Pace Prints, Dick Solomon asserted, “In the old days, there were such things as painting collectors and print collectors. . . . Now it’s a mixed bag.”70 The market has reflected this shift away from media specificity: in 2017, for example, France’s annual print fair changed its focus to rare books and art objects rather than prints. In response, several fairs specific to contemporary prints have been established. In 2006, the International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) launched INK Miami Art Fair, a companion to Art Basel Miami Beach that highlights recent editions, and in 2015, the more generally paper-focused Art on Paper fair formed to coincide with the Armory Show in New York. Some changes in collecting and the market have taken place online. Over the past few years, several sites have developed with the specific aim of connecting collectors to artworks. These include Artsy, an online database designed to make the art market more accessible by providing didactic information and lists prices. Although not specifically focused on prints, Artsy has partnered with the IFPDA to showcase offerings from its annual Fine Art Print Fair, providing blogs on topics such as “9 Works Under $3,000 to collect at IFPDA” and “From Under $1,000 to Over $1 Million, the 16 Best Buys at IFPDA,” and guides to the fair based on topics such as “Figurative Art” and “20th Century Art,” all clearly meant to appeal to novice collectors.71 The site frequently includes prices for individual works, in contrast to many dealers’ websites. Another site, Paddle8, advertises itself as “the auction house for the 21st century collector,” and offers regular online sales of prints and multiples. Like Artsy, the site is designed for potential collectors without prior knowledge of the market or the protocols of dealers and auction houses. Such resources comprise a dramatic departure within the print market for a worldwide reach online. They also differ strongly in their relative impersonality, given the traditional emphasis on expertise and personal relationships in print collecting. Print collectors, curators, and those involved in the art market, such as dealers and auction specialists, have worked to encourage a new generation of collectors. Several organizations have supported and encouraged both private and institutional print collecting through networking and advocacy. In 1956, the Print Council of America was founded by collector Lessing J. Rosenwald and has gradually grown to a membership of over 270 individuals, mostly American or Canadian print curators.72 One of its major initiatives is the study of the collection and care of prints within institutions. In France, the Comité national de l’estampe’s membership includes curators and collectors with a mission of promoting their shared interest in prints through exhibitions and scholarship.73 Another similar group, the Print Council of Australia, brings together arts institutions and collectors to promote all types of printmaking in the country, and the Arbeitskreis Graphik connects curators from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and beyond aiming to standardize and increase the visibility of print collections online.74 Other organizations focus more specifically on promoting print collecting through the market. The International Fine Print Dealers Association was established in 1987 and

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has responded to the increasing globalization of the market by building a membership of dealers from thirteen countries.75 The organization holds its own fair annually and established a charitable foundation in 2009 with the professed aim of “fostering connoisseurship in the field of fine prints for a new generation of collectors, curators, and specialists.”76 Also international, the Association of Print Scholars was founded in 2014 and includes print collectors as members, with the objectives of encouraging collaboration and producing new and innovative scholarship on prints. These examples suggest the complexities of print collecting in an increasingly global world. The essays in this book address these cultural changes by revealing the shifting definition of this collecting. As printmaking has changed throughout the modern and contemporary period, the practice of collecting has taken on a wider variety of meanings and contexts. In contrast to the specialized collecting guides of previous generations, the internet offers a seemingly inexhaustible range of information addressed to novices and experts. Despite these dramatic changes, print collecting today is still inflected by literature and habits that began over a century ago, revealing the practice as carrying forward traditions while also changing.

Notes 1 Peter Parshall, “Art and the Theater of Knowledge: The Origins of Print Collecting in Northern Europe,” Harvard University Art Museums Bulletin 2, no. 3 (Spring 1994): 7. 2 This is, of course, a generalization of printmaking before the mid-nineteenth century for the purposes of this introduction. There are numerous exceptions, including the work of Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Francisco de Goya, to name just a few. Reproductive printmaking also continued beyond the mid-nineteenth century, although it became increasingly less common following the invention of photography. For an informative overview of the history of printmaking, see Antony Griffiths, Prints and Printmaking: An Introduction to the History and Techniques (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 3 Parshall, “Art and the Theater of Knowledge,” 7. 4 For an example of one such collector, see David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 1470-1550 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 64; Antony Griffiths, The Print before Photography: An Introduction to European Printmaking 1550–1820 (London: British Museum, 2016), 427–28. 5 Parshall, “Art and the Theater of Knowledge,” 10; Genevieve Warwick, introduction to Collecting Prints and Drawings in Europe, c. 1500–1750, eds. Christopher Baker, Caroline Elam and Genevieve Warwick (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 3. 6 Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 347; Griffiths, The Print before Photography, 339. 7 Griffiths, The Print before Photography, 445. 8 See Antony Griffiths, “Print Collecting in Rome, Paris, and London in the Early Eighteenth Cetury,” Harvard University Art Museums Bulletin 2, no. 3 (Spring 1994): 37–58. 9 Hogarth’s prints were especially widely available, often as pirated copies. See Stana Nenadic, “Print Collecting and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland,” History 82 (1997): 205.



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10 Sinclair H. Hitchings, “The First American Printseller,” Print Collector’s Newsletter 2, no. 5 (1971): 94. 11 Some collectors maintained an encyclopedic approach to collecting into the nineteenth century; for one example, see Chapter 1. 12 Britany Salsbury, “Etching: The Creative Process,” in Altered States: Etching in Late 19th-Century Paris (Providence: RISD Museum, 2017), online, https://alteredstates. risdmuseum.org/#etching-the-creative-process​. 13 Charles Blanc, “Letter by M. Blanc,” in Maxime Lalanne, A Treatise on Etching, trans. S. R. Koehler (Boston: The Page Company, 1880), xxix–xxx. 14 S. R. Koehler, introduction to Lalanne, A Treatise on Etching, 1. 15 Katharine A. Lochnan, “The Gentle Art of Marketing Whistler Prints,” Print Quarterly 14, no. 1 (March 1997): 12. 16 See Michel Melot, The Impressionist Print, trans. Caroline Beamish (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 134–8. 17 Emma Chambers, An Indolent and Blundering Art? The Etching Revival and the Redefinition of Etching in England, 1838-1892 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 74–5. 18 Chambers, An Indolent and Blundering Art? 75. 19 For one example, see Colta Ives, Helen Giambruni, and Sasha M. Newman, Pierre Bonnard: The Graphic Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), 229. 20 Max Klinger qtd. in Hans Wolfgang Singer, Max Klinger: Radierungen Stiche und Steindrucke, 1878-1903 [1909], reprint, translated by Bernd K. Estabrook (San Francisco: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 1990), 171. 21 Frits Lugt, Les marques de collections de dessins et d’estampes, online, no. 813a. http://www.marquesdecollections.fr/ 22 Kate Dorney, “Introducing Enthoven,” online, http:​//www​.vam.​ac.uk​/blog​/tale​s-arc​ hives​/intr​oduci​ng-en​thove​n. 23 For example, Pierre Juhel’s research on print sales in Third Republic Paris indicates the prevalence of sales of Japanese prints by European collectors; see Pierre Juhel, Les Ventes publiques d’estampes à Paris sous la Troisième République: Repertoire des catalogues, 1870–1914 (Paris: Éditions du Cercle de la Librairie), 533. 24 Lugt, Les marques de collections de dessins et d’estampes, no. 2459a. 25 Ibid., no. 5118. 26 Lisa Dickinson Michaux, “A Forgotten Collector Makes His Mark: William Mead Ladd and Print Collecting at the Turn of the Century,” in Twenty-First-Century Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Art: Essays in Honor of Gabriel P. Weisberg, eds. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Laurinda S. Dixon (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 85. 27 Ibid., 89. For more on Keppel’s work as an agent, see Frederick Keppel, “The Charm of Old Engravings: A Story of the Engraver’s Art in its Golden Age,” Arts and Decoration 1, no. 3 (1911): 126–7. 28 Helena E. Wright, “Print Collecting in the Gilded Age,” Imprint: Journal of the American Historical Print Collectors Society 29, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 3. 29 For further analysis of this painting see Ruth E. Iskin, The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s-1900s (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2014), 163–4. 30 Frances Carey and Antony Griffiths, introduction to The Print in Germany 1880– 1933: The Age of Expressionism (London: British Museum, 1984), 19.

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31 Deborah Wye and Audrey Isselbacher, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and Print Collecting: An Early Mission for MoMA (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 5. 32 Wye and Isselbacher, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and Print Collecting, 9. 33 See Kathan Brown, Ink, Paper, Metal, Wood: Painters and Sculptors at Crown Point Press (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996), esp. 194–6 and 210–11. 34 Roslyn Bakst Goldman and John L. Goldman, “A Socially Acceptable form of Addiction,” Art in Print 7, no. 1 (May–June 2017): 24. 35 “History of the Collection,” British Museum, http:​//www​.brit​ishmu​seum.​org/a​bout_​ us/de​partm​ents/​print​s_and​_draw​ings/​histo​ry_of​_the_​colle​ction​.aspx​. 36 “Estampes, photographies, affiches,” Bibliothèque nationale de France, http:​//www​ .bnf.​fr/fr​/coll​ectio​ns_et​_serv​ices/​estam​p/s.e​stamp​es.ht​ml. 37 Henri Bouchot, Le Cabinet des estampes de la Bibliothèque nationale: guide du lecteur et du visiteur, catalogue général et raisonné des collections qui y sont conservées (Paris: E. Dentu, 1895), ii. 38 For an account of this transfer, see Cynthia Clark, “Five American Print Curators,” The Print Collector’s Newsletter 11, no. 3 (July–August 1980): 85. 39 Louis Thies, Catalogue of the Collection of Engravings Bequeathed to Harvard College by Francis Calley Gray (Cambridge: Welch, Bigelow, and Co., 1869), v. 40 Lugt, Les marques de collections de dessins et d’estampes, no. 4105. 41 Antony Griffiths, “The Archaeology of the Print,” in Collecting Prints and Drawings in Europe, 1500–1750, 9. 42 Griffiths, “The Archaeology of the Print,” 9. 43 Anon., The Print Room of the British Museum (London: Waterlow & Sons, 1876), 24. 44 Lugt, Les marques de collections de dessins et d’estampes, no. 248. 45 Bouchot, Le Cabinet des estampes de la Bibliothèque nationale, xx. 46 T. S., “New Print Study Room,” Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 9, no. 9 (November 1922): 160. 47 Ibid., 161. 48 See Chapter 1. 49 Clark, “Five American Print Curators,” 85. 50 Helena E. Wright, The First Smithsonian Collection: The European Engravings of George Perkins Marsh and the Role of Prints in the U.S. National Museum (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2015), 120. 51 Clark, “Five American Print Curators,” 85. 52 Lugt, Les marques de collections de dessins et d’estampes, no. 1580. 53 Freyda Spira, “Introduction: Printed Matter,” in The Power of Prints: The Legacy of William M. Ivins and A. Hyatt Mayor (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016), 3. 54 Karen I. Huang, “Chicago’s Own Mexican Odyssey: A Dialogue in the Arts, 1925– 1946” (MA thesis, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2007), 58–9, 64. 55 Theresa Engelbrecht, “Inter-Collected: The Shared History of the Print Club and Museum Collection,” Art in Print 7, no. 2 (July–August 2017): 30. 56 Agnieszka Kluczewska-Wójcik, “Feliks Manggha-Jasieński (1861–1929), collectionneur d’estampes,” Nouvelles de l’estampe 205 (March–April 2006): 7. 57 Judith Goldman, “An Interview with Lessing J. Rosenwald,” The Print Collector’s Newsletter 1, no. 4 (September–October 1970): 77. 58 J.Y. Smith, “Lessing Rosenwald Dies, Donated Art, Rare Books,” Washington Post, June 26, 1979, https​://ww​w.was​hingt​onpos​t.com​/arch​ive/l​ocal/​1979/​06/26​/less​ing-



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rosenw​ald-d​ies-d​onate​d-art​-rare​-book​s/3ee​be53e​-0a3a​-4e0e​-991e​-d49f​ae1b7​217/?​ utm_t​erm=.​32a15​e2193​cc. 59 Jennifer Farrell, “Like Johnny Appleseed, but with Prints: Jennifer Farrell Speaks with Jordan Schnitzer,” Art in Print 7, no. 2 (July–August 2017): 22. 60 “The Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation: A Passion for Sharing Art,” Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, http:​//www​.jord​ansch​nitze​r.org​/foun​datio​n/. 61 Heineken’s four-volume Dictionnaire des artistes dont nous avons des estampes (1778– 90) focused on important old master prints; Huber’s Notices generals des graveurs (1787) featured lists of prints based on his own collection; and Robert-Dumesnil’s Le Peintre-graveur francais (1835–71) provided information on French prints. For more on early collecting literature, see Griffiths, The Print before Photography, 453–5. 62 Carey and Griffiths, introduction to The Print in Germany 1880–1933, 19. 63 Lugt, introduction to Les marques de collections de dessins et d’estampes. 64 Les Marques de Collections, http://www.marquesdecollections.fr. 65 Lugt, Les marques de collections de dessins et d’estampes, no. 1845. 66 Joseph Maberly, The Print Collector (London: Saunders and Otley, 1844), v–viii. 67 This was one of several books that Bourcard wrote about prints and collecting; see also A travers cinq siècles de gravures, 1350-1903 (Paris: Georges Rapilly, 1903) and Graveurs et gravures, France et étranger: Essai de bibliographie, 1540–1910 (Paris: H. Floury, 1910). On Bourcard, see Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho, Prints in Paris 1900: From Elite to the Street (Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2017), 34. 68 Lugt, Les marques de collections de dessins et d’estampes, no. 74; Ida Katherine Rigby, “The Revival of Printmaking in Germany,” in German Expressionist Prints and Drawings: The Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, vol. 1 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1989), 39. 69 Scott Reyburn, “The Esoteric World of Print Collecting,” New York Times, September 22, 2014, https​://ww​w.nyt​imes.​com/2​014/0​9/22/​arts/​inter​natio​nal/t​he-es​oteri​c-wor​ ld-of​-prin​t-col​lecti​ng.ht​ml. 70 James Tarmy, “Is the Fastest Growing Segment of the Art Market the Cheapest?” Bloomberg, January 29, 2018, https​://ww​w.blo​omber​g.com​/news​/arti​cles/​2018-​01-29​/ is-t​he-fa​stest​-grow​ing-s​egmen​t-of-​the-a​rt-ma​rket-​the-c​heape​st. 71 “Explore the Fine Art Print Fair on Artsy,” Artsy, https://www.artsy.net/ifpda-print-fair. 72 “About the Print Council of America,” Print Council of America, http://printcouncil. org/about/. 73 “Présentation: Comité national de l’estampe,” Nouvelles de l’estampe, http:​//nou​velle​ sdele​stamp​e.fr/​le-co​mite-​natio​nal-d​e-les​tampe​/pres​entat​ion/.​ 74 “Membership,” Print Council of Australia, https://www.printcouncil.org.au/. 75 “About,” International Fine Print Dealers Association, http://www.ifpda.org/about. 76 “About Us,” IFPDA Foundation, http://foundation.ifpda.org/.

Selected Bibliography Baker, Christopher, Caroline Elam, and Genevieve Warwick, eds. Collecting Prints and Drawings in Europe, c. 1500-1750. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Griffiths, Antony. The Print before Photography: An Introduction to European Printmaking 1550-1820. London: British Museum, 2016.

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Juhel, Pierre. Les Ventes publiques d’estampes à Paris sous la Troisième République: Repertoire des catalogues, 1870-1914. Paris: Éditions du Cercle de la Librairie, 2016. Lugt, Frits. Les marques de collections de dessins et d’estampes. Paris: Fondation Custodia, 2010. http://www.marquesdecollections.fr/. Reyburn, Scott. “The Esoteric World of Print Collecting.” New York Times, September 22, 2014. https​://ww​w.nyt​imes.​com/2​014/0​9/22/​arts/​inter​natio​nal/t​he-es​oteri​c-wor​ld-of​ -prin​t-col​lecti​ng.ht​ml. Wright, Helena E. “Print Collecting in the Gilded Age.” Imprint: Journal of the American Historical Print Collectors Society 29, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 2–13.

1

Henrietta Louisa Koenen’s (1830–81) Amsterdam Collection of Women Printmakers Madeleine C. Viljoen

Not the first of her sex to distinguish herself by amassing a private collection of art, Henrietta Louisa Koenen is singular, nonetheless, for being the first woman to concentrate that activity on the graphic output of early modern women artists.1 Women might divert themselves with the acquisition of pretty objets for the home, but they did not go about assembling a comprehensive grouping of prints, let alone one that focused on works executed by women.2 As recently as the early twentieth century, one veteran collector encouraged women to collect china figurines from Chelsea and Dresden, which “seem made for the delicate fingers of women to handle,” adding that “women as a rule have little taste for collecting books, prints or pictures.”3 Frits Lugt’s unrivaled study of European collectors’ stamps confirms the dearth of important early modern and nineteenth-century female print collectors. Only one person, Charlotte Elisabeth Schreiber (1812–95), daughter of the ninth Earl of Lindsay, who married Charles Schreiber, bears some comparison with Henrietta.4 In addition to acquiring English porcelain, she assembled an important group of decorative printed playing cards and fans, which she later donated to the British Museum.5 A generation later, Mademoiselle Georges Achille Fould (1865–1951), a sculptress who was the daughter of a rich financier, sought out works by French printmakers Debucourt, Baudouin, Boilly, Robert, and others.6 Henrietta’s seriousness, dedication, and ambition are unique for her time, however. So rigorous, indeed, was her approach to acquiring works by female artists that her print collection, now at The New York Public Library, forms the cornerstone for scholarship on the history of women printmakers we still rely on today.7 Often referred to as the wife of Johan Philip van der Kellen, a prominent connoisseur of prints and the first director to be appointed to the Rijksprentenkabinet in 1876— as if her unusual focus could be explained as an uncomplicated consequence of her marriage—there is much to suggest that Henrietta’s devotion to the medium, though in many respects comparable with her husband’s, was both independent and astonishingly forward-thinking.8 Far from regarding Henrietta’s study of prints as a simple extension of Johan Philip’s activities, this chapter is an effort to concentrate on her legacy by considering for the first time the qualities of her collection that both conform to and

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depart from the practice of her times—most notably that of her husband to whose name she is almost always linked—and to return to her the credit as an individual collector and scholar, which she so richly deserves. Feminist approaches to the art of the nineteenth century have paid attention to the ways in which women were subject to patterns of production and consumption, viewing, and display that were defined by men. Studies of the history of nineteenth-century women collectors by Dianne Sachko Macleod and essays assembled by Clarissa Campbell Orr have likewise demonstrated what women collected and how those interests were shaped by patriarchal notions of femininity.9 Little attention has hitherto been given, however, to the methodologies serious women collectors employed when putting their collections together. Linda Nochlin’s famously probing and provocative question: “Why have there been no great women artists?” later rephrased by Eleanor Tufts to read: “Why is so little known about women artists?” have ramifications for the history of collecting, compelling my likeminded question: “Why is so little known about women collectors?”10 The oversight of Henrietta’s name among the ranks of great print collectors of all time is all the more objectionable given that her accomplishment stands apart as a major milestone in the history of collecting, arguably no less great than the achievements of men about which we know a great deal more. By paying attention to how a moderately educated, middle-class woman like Henrietta set out to assemble a topnotch selection of women printmakers, we may appreciate the extraordinary focus, intelligence, and knowledge that went into her quest. No frivolous hobby, hers is the first truly feminist collecting project in the history of art. Born in 1830 in Nieuwer-Amstel in the Netherlands, Henrietta was the first child of Cornelis Ariën Koenen and Maria Antoinette Hoogkamer. Young and of humble means at the time of Henrietta’s birth, Cornelis Ariën was employed successively as huisknecht (footman), kantoorloper (office messenger), oppasser (caretaker), and finally kantoorbediende (office clerk).11 He died in 1835, when his wife was just twenty-two years of age, leaving behind three young daughters. Few details of Henrietta’s youth are known, except that her mother passed away in 1850 when Henrietta was nineteen years old, and her two sisters fourteen and twelve. Too young to fend for themselves, it is probable that she and her sisters moved in with Elizabeth Philippina Zurcher and Johannes Petrus Schouberg, their mother’s great aunt and uncle, who were childless.12 Johannes Petrus Schouberg was employed since 1845 as stempelsnijder or die cutter at the Mint, an occupation that involves cutting a metal matrix and therefore has long-standing connections with printmaking.13 Johannes Petrus Schouberg probably introduced Henrietta to Johann Philip Johan Philip, who, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, was likewise employed as stempelsnijder at the Mint. The couple married in 1860, when Henrietta was thirty, and Johan Philip Johan Philip was twenty-nine. Considering Johann Phillip’s reputation as a precocious juvenile art lover and his celebrated contributions to the history of Netherlandish printmaking, it is not surprising that a great deal more is known about his zeal for prints than about Henrietta’s and that her attention to the medium is casually elided with his.14 In fact, in addition to Johannes Petrus Schouberg in whose household she lived, Henrietta had contact with several printmakers while she was growing up, including Johannes



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Cornelis Zurcher (1794, Amsterdam–1882, Amstelveen), an uncle, who acted as witness to Henrietta’s christening and who was a professional engraver as well as members of the Hoogkamer family who were also active in the profession.15 It appears, in other words, that Henrietta was exposed to prints by a range of maternal relatives while she was growing up and that she may have acquired a taste for the medium quite early. Exactly when Louisa started collecting prints is unclear. The preface to the 1901 exhibition catalog of her collection held at the Grolier Club, which was written by Frank Weitenkampf, then head of The New York Public Library Art Department, states that she began in 1848.16 If this were true, Henrietta would have been just eighteen years old and still living with her mother. Even had she been thus inclined, it seems unlikely that she would at that time have had sufficient funds to pursue the venture on the scale we know it assumed. It is possible Henrietta bought some prints before her marriage, but her union with Johan Philip would have provided the sort of financial and intellectual support essential to her ambition to assemble a representative grouping of early modern women graphic artists and thus is the likelier date for the start of this larger mission. Art collecting and patronage have long been ways women have asserted their autonomy and taste, and Henrietta is no exception in this regard. Early modern women played important roles in commissioning works from paintings to devotional books of hours and were also involved in grand architectural projects.17 Unlike Henrietta, almost all early modern female collectors were members of the aristocracy or women of substantial financial means, and the works they patronized were nearly always costly, luxury goods.18 Rarely, did early modern women exhibit much interest in prints, a medium that was affordable and almost always executed in black and white, making them less glamorous as flashy commodities for acquisition. Exceptions exist, of course, as in the case of the first Duchess of Northumberland (1716–76), who assembled a grand Musaeum of artificialia and naturalia that comprised many printed art works.19 Not just a gathering of prints, her collection included some pastels, medals and coins, and wondrous objects such as the skeleton of a sea horse, shells and minerals, and thus catered to traditional fascination with the exotic and marvelous.20 Like her male counterparts who acquired Kunstkammer-like material, the duchess pursued a desire for her holdings to be encyclopedic, and her prints fulfilled the role of representing “fables, emblems and metamorphoses, sacred subjects, statues, medals, antiquities, architecture, views of landskips, natural history, habits,” as well as the works of individual printmakers, including Galle, Stradanus, Collaert, Wierix, de Passe, Hollar, Goltzius, Callot, Teniers, and Sadeler.21 To the degree that her Musaeum included a large grouping of prints, the duchess is among the first women to actively collect works in the medium.22 The case of Carola Catharina Patina’s (1660–1774) Pitture Scelte e Dichiarate—a recueil or bound gathering of reproductive prints prefaced by texts—published in 1691 likewise points to a way in which well-off, educated early modern women involved themselves in a kind of print collecting.23 Daughter of the eminent doctor and numismatist Charles Patin, Carola Catharina commissioned leading reproductive printmakers to render printed reproductions of drawings and paintings, in large part

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by Venetian Masters, whose significance she discussed in an accompanying text. A woman of impressive scholarly accomplishment in her own right, Carola Catharina approached the project of assembling a printed volume of masterworks in a way that is akin to putting together a collection of prints, which is to say she chose specific works for their artistic merit and grouped them to represent some of the most famous Italian masters of her day.24 The project was neither obvious nor easy for a woman, and she complains in the preface about the impotence she felt at picking the noblest works for reproduction, a handicap she ascribes to her age, her sex, and the customs of a foreign land, troubles that would not have fettered men in the same way.25 For much of the early modern period, indeed, print collecting and its close companion print connoisseurship was very much the province of men.26 Typically housed in albums or in special storage cabinets, printed sheets were scrutinized by learned and noble men within their studioli or Kunstkammern. An etching by Daniel Nicolaus Chodowiecki illustrates just such a lover of engravings (Figure 1.1). Alone in his study, the figure is immersed in the prints pasted into an album before him. Surrounded by additional volumes casually strewn on the floor, a traveling portfolio, and framed pictures hung on the wall, the man shown here is a person of culture and refinement, an idea the inscription supports, stating that prints do not seduce with gaudy color but lead to the contemplation of beauty afar. Increasingly, collectors like this one strove not just for quantity, but for rarity.27 When Hendrick Goltzius engraved a silver matrix, a medium that was too soft to create long print runs, he created a sort of limited edition avant la lettre, and when Rembrandt obsessively tinkered with his plates and experimented with a range of supports, he catered to collectors’ desire to own something special, a rare proof or even an undescribed state on an usual sheet of paper.28 Competition for such items could be fierce as individuals strove to set themselves and their collections apart through the quality of their holdings. Far from being the private, solitary activity Chodowiecki’s etching portrays, however, print connoisseurship provided important avenues for male sociability. A caricature by John Kay (Figure 1.2) shows a group of six men crowded into a confined space to look at prints together. The man in the left foreground has been identified as James Sibbald, a well-known Edinburgh bookseller and publisher. William Scott, a plumber and a collector, looks over Sibbald’s shoulder and uses a magnifying glass to get a better look at an impression of the Three Graces in Sibbald’s hand. George Fairholme of Greenhill, an important collector of Rembrandt etchings Greenhill, faces them, holding but not looking at an image of the grinning head of the Edinburgh auctioneer William Martin (1744–1820), an oblique witticism about the profits the gleeful salesman accrues by dint of the gentlemen’s hobby. Indeed, though Kay includes three prints in his image, the figures are intent on just one: the engraving of the Three Graces. The aim of this and other satirical prints is to poke fun at collectors and connoisseurs, the joke here turning in part on the question of what the figures are studying: the quality of the impression or of the nubile damsels it depicts? The lecherous demeanor of the motley group of middle-aged men exposes print connoisseurship to be an activity that stoked a kind of libidinous desire among those who acquired them, hinting at the unsuitability of the medium for female consumption.29



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Figure 1.1  Daniel Nicolaus Chodowiecki, Der Kupferstich Liebhaber (The Lover of Engraving), etching, 1781, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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Figure 1.2  John Kay, Connoisseurs, etching, 1785, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. A rare etching of a Female Conoiseur [sic] (Figure 1.3), meanwhile, frames women’s engagement with prints as both superficial and light-hearted.30 Possibly a portrait of Mary Darly, second wife of the satirical publisher Matthew Darly, the image shows a well-dressed lady grasping an impression of Martial Macaroni, a dandy and focus of contemporary ridicule, who is immediately recognizable by his ludicrous wig with a long straight, unmistakably phallic, rod of hair behind his head.31 Unlike her male counterparts, Darly’s female connoisseur pays little attention to the image she holds. A scene neither from history nor from classical mythology, the sheet in the lady’s hand was designed for amusement—witness the mischievous smile that hovers around her



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Figure 1.3  Anonymous, published by Matthew Darly, The Female Conoiseur, handcolored etching, 1772, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. lips—not warranting the sort of learned concentration her male peers expended on their highbrow collections. Images like these demonstrate Henrietta Louisa’s daring when less than a century later after this print was published, she set out to put together her very own collection of printed art works, replete with erudite historical subjects and nude figures. In attempting to come to terms with the extraordinariness of Louisa Henrietta’s scheme, it is worth considering how her collection compares with that of her male contemporaries. Most notable in this respect is the collection her husband assembled at much the same time she was acquiring prints for hers. An abundance of documentary evidence is available for Johan Philip, which has helped to establish a rather complete picture of the Rijksmuseum’s first director of the print collection.32 From this emerges a sense of his early passion for the Dutch poet, illustrator, and engraver Jan Luyken

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and his commitment to amassing the graphic works of Dutch and Flemish artists.33 It was his early work studying and acquiring the works of Netherlandish masters for his own collection that emboldened him to attempt an addendum to Adam von Bartsch’s Le Peintre-graveur, concentrating on the work of Dutch and Flemish printmakers. An incentive to publish the volume, he notes, were the numerous lacunae in Bartsch’s account, which: “make print lovers avidly desire to have a complement to that part of the Peintre Graveur.”34 Glowing reviews followed Johann Philip’s publication, leading to his being courted in 1874 for the directorship of the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett, a position he declined. In July 1876, he was named director of the Rijksprentenkabinet in Amsterdam.35 His acceptance of the job triggered a conflict of interest clause: no museum director could own a private collection. He was compelled to sell off his personal print holdings. It is this group, rather than the prints he cites in his Netherlandish Le Peintre-graveur, that gives us a clearer understanding of what he might have viewed as an ideal private collection. The contents of the sale are recorded in the catalog published by Frederik Muller, which lists close to 5,000 sheets of Netherlandish origin covering the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. The lots are prefaced by a grandiloquent essay, praising his indefatigable research “conducted according to a plan formulated in advance, which is to say to reunite samples of the oeuvre of all Netherlandish printmakers, in the most extreme sense of the word, from the most distant past to the present.”36 The sale’s catalog features work by well-known artists like Lucas van Leyden, Rembrandt van Rijn and Esias van de Velde, but also by lesser known lights like Jan Hendriksz. Verstraelen, and Franz Ertinger. Henrietta’s collection of women artists, which largely comprised prints but also some drawings—mainly still-life aquarelles—was put up for sale by Frederik Muller in 1884, just three years after she died, and six years after her husband’s auction.37 The circumstances surrounding Johan Philip’s decision to divest himself of Henrietta’s collection are unknown, though presumably the works, which would have descended to him upon her death, were bound by the same conditions to which his own had been subject. The wording of Johan Philip’s and Henrietta’s catalogs, issued just over five years apart by the same auction house offers an illuminating study in contrast. Whereas his catalog is titled: “Catalogue de Gravures anciennes des écoles hollandaise et flamande . . . formant le Cabinet d’estampes réuni part Mr. J. Ph. Van der Kellen, Auteur du Peintre Graveur Hollandais et Flamand, Directeur du Cabinet National d’Estampes à Amsterdam,”  making reference both to Johan Philip’s credentials as a connoisseur and scholar, Henrietta’s name appears neither in the title nor in any other part of the catalog. The staggering omission seems particularly ironic in light of the auction house’s assertion that “our century tends more and more towards the emancipation of women, such that the thing which at other times seemed more or less an exception, has become the most ordinary thing now, to know that a female talent is operating in the artistic domain, along with the stronger sex.”38 One is forced to conclude that while Johan Philip’s name boosted confidence in the sale of his collection, the same was not true for his wife. Either recognizing the importance of the integrity of the collection, or having little faith in his ability to sell Henrietta’s holdings as individual lots, Frederik Muller offered



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Henrietta’s collection en bloc until January 1885 for the rather reasonable price of 10,000 guilders (a contemporary market value of approximately $137,000). Intending to sweeten the deal perhaps, he proposed throwing in the gilded eighteenth-century armoire that had housed the prints for an additional 4,400 guilders (about $5,101 today).39 The collection did not sell, but initially was lent to the famous 1898 “Nationale tentoonstelling van vrouwenarbeid.” The national exhibition, which was held in a space specially created for it in The Hague, was organized to promote women’s labor, and showcased arts and crafts executed by women, as well as performance, including song and dance. The event attracted over 90,000 visitors.40 Two years later, in 1900, Samuel Putnam Avery, a well-known art dealer and collector of prints, bought Henrietta’s print collection. Frederik Muller’s bill of sale reads: “Collection: Les Femmes Artistes. Collected by Henrietta Louisa Koenen, wife of J. Philip van der Kellen from 1848 to her death, March 1861. Continued by Mr. van der Kellen till 1881. Mr. van der Kellen was Director of the Print room at Amsterdam from 1876 till 1896 and from 1898 till now.”41 Not only does the invoice state she died in March 1861, when she actually passed away on March 6, 1881, it also claims that Johan Philip contributed to the collection after she was deceased. Even had Johan Philip been able to purchase prints for Henrietta’s collection, a venture from which as director of the Rijksprentenkabinet he was expressly forbidden, he would have had a mere three years to make the additions. Frederik Muller’s assertion, reiterated in the 1901 Grolier Club exhibition catalog, has the injurious effect of fostering the impression that Henrietta’s holdings of women printmakers was really more the result of Johan Philip’s efforts and expertise than of hers, thereby renewing the insult of withholding recognition of Henrietta’s role in realizing the collection. Whereas the preface to Johan Philip’s sale impresses on the reader the importance of the artists in the collection, as well as the quality and range of the sheets it includes, the text that introduces Henrietta’s makes a case for its novelty and rarity. “Isn’t it strange that no catalogue has been devoted to the work of women artists,” it states, adding that the only excuse for the oversight is the paucity of sheets executed by women printmakers.42 Apart from its focus on the works of women artists, Henrietta’s holdings are not that odd, however, and conform in most respects to contemporary notions of an ideal private print collection. Ignaz Emanuel Wesseley, in his Anleitung zur Kenntniss und zum Sammeln, published in Leipzig in 1876, differentiates between public versus private holdings, concluding that “a general collection of art prints, intended to encompass the broadest range of artists of all periods and schools, usually exceeds the capacity of the individual collector.”43 He states that private collectors usually concentrate on an aspect of prints, be it national schools, favorite artists, or subjects.44 A collection of works by female printmakers is not one of the categories Wesseley mentions—or could possibly even imagine—but the idea of specialization was certainly very much in keeping with the approach he counsels. As Karl Heinrich von Heinecken’s Idée generale d’une collection d’estampes and Johan Philip’s private collection reveal, moreover, the prints of notable women artists were deemed eminently collectible. Heinecken, who sought to advise individuals on how to assemble a general collection of prints, mentions the names of Catherine Sperling, Elisabeth Sophie

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Cheron, and Diana Ghisi, while Johan Philip’s private collection included two prints by Anna Maria de Koker, two by Madeleine de Passe, one by Gertrude Roghman, and one by Anna Maria van Schurman.45 Graphite, pen and ink inscriptions in an identical hand—almost certainly that of Henrietta—on the rectos and versos of over forty prints now at The New York Public Library, as well as the thoroughly documented entries in Frederik Muller’s 1884 sales catalog of her collection, which rely on her research, offer some important clues to Henrietta’s collecting strategy and ambition. Most of the handwritten notes offer biographical material about the prints’ makers, frequently focusing on whom the artist was married or related to. Marie Jeanne Ozanne, is described as “femme Le Gouas,” referring to her husband the engraver Yves-Marie Le Gouaz (1742–1816), and Charlotte Napoleon as “daughter of Josef, brother of Napoleon, King of Naples.”46 An inscription in Henrietta’s hand pasted onto the mat of a trio of prints by Princess Sophie of SaxeCoburg Saalfeld, reads: “Sophie Fr. Caroline Louise née le 19 Aout 1778. Mariée le 23 Fevr. 1804—à Emanuel Comte de Mensdorf et Pouilly. Almanach de Goettingue 1810 pag. 59,” revealing that she pursued data about her artists in obscure local journals. It is worth noting, moreover, that while Henrietta’s biographical commentaries are compatible with those of her husband and other contemporary catalogers, they usually go just that bit further. Thus, while Johan Philip’s catalog states simply that Anne Marie Schurman was born in 1607, Henrietta’s adds that she was a famous intellectual, published in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and made drawings and etchings, and while Johan Philip’s notes include Madeleine de Passe’s birthdate, Henrietta’s enlarges the information, noting that she was married to “Frederik Chevalier de Bevervoorde.” Though it is difficult to draw firm conclusions, Henrietta’s steadfast dedication to knowing more about the women artists whose work she acquired points to a more acute personal identification with the prints’ makers than that shown by her male counterparts. Her focus on the women’s relationships, moreover, suggests her recognition of the ways in which their careers were determined by men. Though we have no evidence for what motivated Henrietta Louisa to buy the prints of women printmakers, the journal entries of Lady Charlotte Schreiber (1812–95), suggest that it was possible for nineteenth-century women to have a feminist agenda when acquiring art.47 Frederik Muller’s dawning awareness of “the quantity of daughters, sisters and wives of famous artists who followed the careers of their fathers, brothers and husbands,” an insight he ascribes to Charles Darwin, would in fact not have been possible had it not been for the breadth of Henrietta’s interest in women artists. Her focus on women of varied nationalities, training, and time period laid the groundwork for what we know about the early modern history of women printmakers today. Noteworthy, moreover, is her avoidance of making value judgments about the works in her collection. Whereas her husband and male counterparts delighted in masterful impressions and rare proofs—Johan Philip observes of a print by Jan Saenredam that it is “a magnificent proof of the first state, before any lettering and printed in chiaroscuro. The proof is completely unknown to Bartsch and Weigel”—Henrietta’s collection achieved rarity through the addition of little-known artists, especially the privately circulated and therefore hard-to-obtain prints of European noble women.48 Her



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inclusion of the rather infelicitous composition etched by Elisabeth Christine, Queen of Prussia, who, the catalog points out, was born Princess of Brunswick and was the wife of Frederick the Great, points to her acceptance of pieces that were even decidedly unskilled. Finally, whereas her husband and other collectors were legendarily fussy about the impressions they admitted to their collections—to the point of eliminating from consideration certain chef d’oeuvres—Henrietta acquired works such as sixteenthcentury Barbara van den Broeck’s Last Judgment (Figure 1.4), which though rare is not a stellar impression.49 Her aim was to be encyclopedic at the risk of admitting to her collection works of inferior quality. Collector’s marks on several of her prints may offer clues to how she acquired them. One of these belonged to Christian Gottfried Matthes, a painter and engraver in Berlin who owned a wide-ranging pan-European collection. It appears on Rose

Figure 1.4  Barbara van den Broeck, after Crispin van den Broeck, The Last Judgment, engraving, 1599, ii/iv, The New York Public Library, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs.

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Angelique Moitte’s (1722–80) Game of Bowling after David Teniers as well as on Madame Boucher’s (1716–96) Two Sleeping Peasants after her husband Francois Boucher. Matthes’s collection was sold in Berlin on January 20, 1862, by Amsler and Ruthardt.50 The collector’s stamp of Franz Gawet, meanwhile, appears on three separate compositions by Princess Flore de Ligne (1775–1851). Gawet was an engraver and collector, who assembled a large, carefully selected group of prints. He died in 1847, but 2,138 of his prints were sold in 1862 in Vienna by Miethke and Wawra.51 The collector’s mark of the Reverend James Burleigh appears on an impression of Elisabetta Sirani’s Holy Family with St. Elisabeth. Burleigh assembled a collection of important prints, with brilliant impressions by Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt. His prints were sold at Sotheby’s, London, in 1877.52 The dates of the three sales, which coincide with the presumptive dates of Henrietta’s collecting activity, strongly suggest she purchased them from auction. Additional stamps indicate that she was able to snap up a few items that were de-accessioned from museum collections: an impression of Maria Boorkens’s Beggars at the Door after Rembrandt bears the deaccession stamp of the Rijksmuseum and Marguerite Le Comte’s Obelisque, likewise after Rembrandt, bears the so-called Tilgungsstempel of the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett.53 Finally, two works in her collection bear the mark of Heinrich Buttstaedt, who owned print shops in Gotha and Berlin, and who passed away in 1876 or slightly earlier. Works with this stamp seem to have been purchased directly from the owner’s store.54 We know that Henrietta regularly accompanied her husband on his research trips abroad and assisted him with his studies, giving her ample opportunity not only to see but also to bid, perhaps with assistance from her husband, on works she hoped to get for her collection.55 By way of conclusion, it is worth focusing for a moment on Samuel Putnam Avery, the person who ultimately acquired Henrietta Louisa Koenen’s collection, and who donated it in 1900 with the balance of his print holdings to The New York Public Library. Avery’s aim was to document the art of his own day and he endeavored to obtain one or more examples of the work of every contemporary printmaker he had met or of whom he had heard. The result was a collection of 17,775 etchings and lithographs, representing 978 artists. Avery was in many ways the perfect client for Henrietta’s women printmakers. An astute dealer and collector, who recognized the value of having others assemble collections for which he could take credit, Avery relied very much on the expertise of other connoisseurs to build his own reputation. Among those who helped him create the great print collection he eventually gave to The New York Public Library are George Lucas, who worked as an agent for him in Paris from c. 1867 to 1882 and who was responsible for acquiring important prints and rare proofs in Paris by leading artists of the day; Howard Mansfield, who owned a complete set of Turner’s Liber Studiorum replete with rare proof states, and which he purchased from him on condition that the catalog of the Avery collection reflect his debt (something Avery eventually omitted leading to considerable acrimony); and finally Henrietta Louisa Koenen, whose collection stands out for its quantity of early modern prints by women artists, a departure for Avery who generally favored the prints of his contemporaries. Avery was seminal in instigating so-called Ladies Private Views, occasions that allowed female patrons to visit his gallery and to peruse his inventory without interference



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from male visitors, as seen in a work by Ignacio de León Escosura, now at The New York Public Library. The painting pictures Avery holding a small-framed work to enable a fashionably attired young woman seated before him to examine it with a magnifying glass. Sympathetic to the needs and ambitions of women collectors—an understanding one might say that extended to Henrietta herself—and possessing a comparable interest in the prints of women artists, including Rosa Bonheur and Mary Cassatt, Avery intuitively recognized the singular merits of Henrietta’s collection.56 In hindsight, it seems fitting that Henrietta’s collection ended up in America rather than in her native Holland, for it was American women traveling to Europe for fashion and culture who were at the forefront of print collecting in the late nineteenth century.57 Given the extraordinary rarity of the works she collected, the expertise she put into determining the identities of the women who made them, the breadth of schools and nationalities she embraced, and the expanse of time she represented, it is high time Henrietta emerges from her husband’s shadow to take her own rightful place in the history of great nineteenth-century European collectors. Before feminist art history was even invented, Henrietta led the charge in defining what women were capable of as collectors and as printmakers.

Notes 1 The literature on women collectors is broad and includes Cynthia Lawrence, ed. Women and Art in Early Modern Europe: Patrons, Collectors and Connoisseurs (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1997); Inge Reist and Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, eds. Power Underestimated: American Women Art Collectors (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2011); Charlotte Gere and Marina Vaizey, Great Women Collectors (New York: Harry Abrams, 1999); Dianne Sachko Macleod, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800–1940 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), and Melissa Hyde and Jennifer Milam, Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe (London: Routledge, 2003). 2 Gere and Vaizey, Great Women Collectors, 11. 3 Maurice Jonas, Notes of an Art Collector (London: Routledge, 1907), 17. 4 Frits Lugt, Les marques de collections de dessins & d’estampes, online, Lugt 534. 5 For more on Lady Charlotte Schreiber as a collector of ceramics, see Ann Eatwell, “Private Pleasure, Public Beneficence: Lady Charlotte Schreiber and Ceramic Collecting,” in Women in the Victorian Art World (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 125–45. 6 Lugt, Les marques de collections, 172b and Lugt 943a. 7 Judith Brodsky, “Some Notes on Women Printmakers,” Art Journal 35 (1976): 374, used Henrietta Louisa’s collection of women artists as the basis for her case study and the conclusions she draws are heavily based on Henrietta’s collecting choices. See also Lia Markey, “The Female Printmaker and the Culture of the Reproductive Print Workshop,” in Paper Museums: The Reproductive Print in Europe, 1500–1800, eds. Rebecca Zorach and Elizabeth Rodini (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 51–75.

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8 Catalogue of a Collection of Engravings, Etchings and Lithographs by Women, exhibited at the Grolier Club April 12–27, 1901 (New York: The Grolier Club, 1901), iii; the 1900 bill of sale from Frederik Muller and Co. 9 Dianne Sachko Macleod, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture 1800–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 21–45; Clarissa Campbell Orr, ed. Women in the Victorian Art World (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 89–148. 10 Linda Nochlin “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” In Art and Sexual Politics: Women’s Liberation, Women Artists, and Art History, eds. Thomas B. Hess and Elizabeth C. Baker (New York: Collier, 1973), 44. First published in ARTnews (January 1971), 22–39, 67–71; and Eleanor Tufts, American Women Artists, Past and Present: A Selected Bibliographic Guide. 2 vols. (New York: Garland, 1984). 11 See Els Kloeck’s thorough research in Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon van Nederland, http:​//res​ource​s.huy​gens.​knaw.​nl/vr​ouwen​lexic​on/le​mmata​/data​/Koen​en 12 See Kloeck, “Henrietta Louisa Koenen,” http:​//res​ource​s.huy​gens.​knaw.​nl/vr​ouwen​ lexic​on/le​mmata​/data​/Koen​en 13 Compare my argument in Madeleine Viljoen, “Paper Value: Marcantonio Raimondi’s Medaglie Contraffatte,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 48 (2003): 203–36. 14 Johan Philip van der Kellen is described as playing with prints when he was still in his highchair. See Everhard Korthals Altes, “Johan Philip van der Kellen (1831– 1906), de eerste directeur van het Rijksprentenkabinet,” Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 46 (1998): 208. 15 Known for his school maps and atlases, Johannes Cornelis Zurcher was trained by his father to be a professional engraver. 16 Catalogue of a Collection of Engravings, Etchings and Lithographs by Women, iii. 17 See Susan E. James, The Feminine Dynamic in English Art, 1485–1603 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009); Virginia Reinburg, “‘For the Use of Women’: Women and Books of Hours,” Early Modern Women 4 (Fall 2009): 235–40; and Rose Marie San Juan, “The Court Lady’s Dilemma: Isabella d’Este and art collecting in the Renaissance,” in The Italian Renaissance, ed. Paula Findlen (Malden: Blackwell, 2002), 317–40. 18 Lawrence, Women and Art in Early Modern Europe: Patrons, Collectors and Connoisseurs, 4–7. 19 Adriano Aymonino, “The Musaeum of the First Duchess of Northumberland (1716–1776),” in Women Patrons and Collectors, eds. Susan Bracken, Andrea M. Gáldy, and Adriana Turpin (New Castle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 101–20. 20 See among others, Loraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998); and Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds. The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). 21 See the appendix to Aymonino, “The Musaeum of the First Duchess of Northumberland (1716-1776),” 118, which includes a transcription of the Musaeum’s catalog. 22 To this name can be added the Duchess of Portland (1714–85), who collected not just china and specimens of natural science, but also etchings by Rembrandt. See Gere and Vaizey, Great Women Collectors, 77–87.



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23 For more on the development of the recueil, see Kristel Smentek, Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), 56–69. 24 Delia Gaze, ed,. Dictionary of Women Artists, vol. 1. (London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997), 70. 25 Carolina Catharina Patina, Pitture Scelte (In Colonia [i.e. Venice?]: Appresso Pietro Marteau 1691), preface. 26 Henrietta’s singularity is signaled by the Index of Print Collectors assembled for the catalog, Van Dyck, Rembrandt and the Portrait Print (New Haven and London: Art Institute of Chicago distributed by Yale University Press, 2016), 100–5, which features a single female collector of Old Master prints, Anne-Marie Logan, an American art historian, born in 1936. Karl Heinrich von Heinecken, Idée Générale d’une Collection Complette d’Estampes avec une Dissertation sur l’Origine de la Gravure (Leipzig: chez Jean Paul Kraus, 1771), 70–89 and Antony Griffiths, ed. Landmarks in Print Collecting: Connoisseurs and Donors at the British Museum since 1753 (London: British Museum Press, 1996) are likewise conspicuous for their rosters of all male print collectors. 27 For more on the history of print connoisseurship, see especially Antony Griffiths, The Print before Photography (London: The British Museum, 2016), 429–33. 28 See my argument about Hendrick Goltzius’s silver matrix in Madeleine Viljoen, “To Print or Not to Print? Hendrick Goltzius’s 1595 Sine Baccho et Cerere Friget Venus and Engraving with Precious Metals,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 74 (2011): 45–76. For Rembrandt, see Nadine Orenstein, “States of Resolution: Rembrandt and the Unfinished Print,” in Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Haven: Distributed by Yale University Press, 2016), 80–6. 29 See Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” in The Cultures of Collecting (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 9, on connoisseurship in terms of desire. 30 An impression at the British Museum was annotated by Horace Walpole to read “Mrs. Darly,” making it likely that this is a self-portrait. 31 Walpole’s inscription on the impression now at the British Museum could also reference “Mrs. Darly” as the engraver of the image. For more about the Macaroni and especially about the phallic aspects of his wig, see Amelia Rauser, “Hair, Authenticity and the Self-Made Macaroni,” Eighteenth-century Studies 38 (2004): 101–17. 32 Korthals Altes, “Johan Philip van der Kellen (1831-1906), de eerste directeur van het Rijksprentenkabinet,” 206–63. 33 Christiaan Kramm, De levens en werken der Hollandsche en Vlaamsche kunstschilders, beeldhouwers, graveurs en bouwmeesters, van den vroegsten tot op onzen tijd (Amsterdam: Gebroders Diederichs, 1857–61), 847. 34 Johann Philip van der Kellen, Le Peintre-graveur hollandais et flamand (Utrecht: Kemink et Fils, 1873), v. 35 Korthals Altes, “Johan Philip van der Kellen (1831–1906), de eerste directeur van het Rijksprentenkabinet,” 214. 36 Catalogue de Gravures Anciennes des écoles Hollandaise et Flamande suivies d’une Collection d’Eaux Fortes Modernes formant le Cabinet d’Estampes réuni par Mr. J. Ph.van der Kellen (Amsterdam, Frederick Muller & Co, 1878), preface.

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37 The drawings were not purchased by Samuel Putnam Avery, and consequently did not come to The New York Public Library in 1900. Their current whereabouts are unknown. 38 Catalogue d’une Collections Unique de Dessins, Gravures et Eaux-Fortes composés ou Exécutés par des Femmes (Amsterdam: Frederik Muller, 1884), preface. 39 See http://www.iisg.nl/hpw/calculate.php for a method to calculate equivalent present-day values for out-of-use and older currencies. 40 For more on this exhibition, see Maria Grever, Transforming the Public Sphere (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 41 The invoice is pasted into The New York Public Library’s copy of Henrietta Louisa’s sales catalog. The bill of sale is written in English and addressed to Samuel Putnam Avery. 42 Catalogue d’une Collections Unique de Dessins, Gravures et Eaux-Fortes composés ou Exécutés par des Femmes, preface. 43 Ignaz Emanuel Wessely, Anleitung zur Kenntniss und zum Sammeln der Werke des Kunstdruckes (Leipzig: T. O. Weigel, 1876), 221. 44 Wessely, Anleitung, 221–7. 45 von Heinecken, Idée Générale d’une collection d’Estampes, 127, 168, 499; Catalogue de Gravures Anciennes des Écoles Hollandaise et Flamande suivies d’une Collections d’Eaux Fortes Modernes formant le Cabinet d’Estampes réuni par Mr. J. Ph. Van der Kellen, 85, 125, 143, 154. 46 “dochter van Josef broeder van Napoleon. Koning van Napels.” 47 See Meaghan Clark, “The Art Press at the Fin de Siècle: Women, Collecting and Connoisseurship,” Visual Resources (2015): 31, 24. 48 “…magnifique épreuve du 1er état, avant toute lettre, imprimé en clair-obscur. État de la planche entièrement inconnu à Bartsch e Weigel.” 49 Korthals Altes, “Johan Philip van der Kellen (1831–1906), de eerste directeur van het Rijksprentenkabinet,” 210. 50 Lugt, Les marques de collections, 2871. 51 Ibid., 1069. 52 Ibid., 1425. 53 Ibid., 2398. 54 Ibid., 3722. 55 Korthals Altes, “Johan Philip van der Kellen (1831–1906), de eerste directeur van het Rijksprentenkabinet,” 213, 246, states that a fragment of a travel diary to Braunschweig and an account of a visit to the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin document just a few of the couple’s travels. In addition, he states, that Henrietta Louisa assisted her husband in making tracings of compositions in print collections in Vienna, Dresden and Berlin. 56 Julie Verlaine, Femmes collectionneuses d’art et mécènes de 1880 à nos jours (Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2013), 25–6. 57 Ruth E. Iskin, The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design and Collecting, 1860s–1900s (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2014), 79–123 explored women’s representation as print connoisseurs in colored posters. See also Catherine Bindman and Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho, “Small Apartments and Big Dreams: Print Collecting in the Fin de Siècle,” Art in Print 7, no. 1 (2017).



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Selected Bibliography Brodsky, Judith. “Some Notes on Women Printmakers,” Art Journal 35 (1976): 374–7. Eatwell, Ann. “Private Pleasure, Public Beneficence: Lady Charlotte Schreiber and Ceramic Collecting.” In Women in the Victorian Art World, 125–45. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Gere, Charlotte and Marina Vaizey. Great Women Collectors. New York: Harry Abrams, 1999. Hyde, Melissa and Jennifer Milam. Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in EighteenthCentury Europe. London: Routledge, 2003. Kloeck, Els. “Henrietta Louisa Koenen.” In Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon van Nederland. http:​// res​ource​s.huy​gens.​knaw.​nl/vr​ouwen​lexic​on/le​mmata​/data​/Koen​en. Iskin, Ruth E. The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design and Collecting, 1860s–1900s. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2014. Lawrence, Cynthia, ed. Women and Art in Early Modern Europe: Patrons, Collectors and Connoisseurs. University Park: The Pennsylvania University Press, 1997. Macleod, Dianne Sachko. Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800-1940. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008. Markey, Lia. “The Female Printmaker and the Culture of the Reproductive Print Workshop.” In Paper Museums: The Reproductive Print in Europe, 1500-1800, edited by Rebecca Zorach and Elizabeth Rodini, 51–75. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Nochlin, Linda. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” In Art and Sexual Politics: Women’s Liberation, Women Artists, and Art History, edited by Thomas B. Hess and Elizabeth C. Baker, 44. New York: Collier, 1973. First published in ARTnews (January 1971): 22–39, 67–71. Reist, Inge and Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, eds. Power Underestimated: American Women Art Collectors. Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2011. Tufts, Eleanor. American Women Artists, Past and Present: A Selected Bibliographic Guide. 2 vols. New York: Garland, 1984.

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Loys Delteil (1869–1927): Community and Contemporary Print Collecting in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Britany Salsbury

Loys Delteil is recognized primarily for his writing on nineteenth-century prints, especially his 31-volume series of catalogues raisonnés, Le Peintre-graveur illustré (1906–26). Throughout this long career, Delteil also carefully built a collection of about 500 prints that was characterized by its remarkable rarity and quality.1 His reputation as a scholar, however, has obscured any knowledge of his collecting practices.2 Like his scholarship, Delteil built his collection by drawing upon the unique range of roles that he played within the community surrounding print collecting in fin-de-siècle Paris: he bought and sold prints, served as an expert for numerous public auctions, founded a journal about contemporary prints, published the prints of his peers, and wrote in a variety of print-related publications. He successfully blurred the boundaries between these roles, leading his contemporaries to describe him as “the man who best understood prints, and who did the most so that others would understand them.”3 This chapter will examine Delteil’s collecting as an activity that integrated his multiple practices as an artist, collector, dealer, expert, and critic. I will argue that Delteil’s collection was possible because of his unique position within the print community and the variety of professional roles that he occupied. Although contemporary printmaking gained the attention of a growing number of collectors in fin-de-siècle Paris, Delteil remained a remarkable example for his work within virtually every area of the print market. His collection allowed him to develop his own expertise, participate in the community of amateurs who shared his interest, and be actively involved in the art market. This took place alongside a shift in fin-de-siècle Paris toward collecting contemporary prints. As quality and rarity became more important than building an encyclopedic print collection, the direct access Delteil had to the art market, his connections to contemporary artists, and his involvement in the discourse about contemporary prints allowed him not only to purchase prints but also to inform contemporary collecting practices. This context reveals the direct connections that existed between Delteil’s public work and private collecting, and the way in which he inspired a generation of collectors to seek out prints of their own time.



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Delteil’s Biography and Professional Roles Loys Delteil was born to a middle-class Parisian family in 1869, and his father, an administrator in the postal service, encouraged him to pursue training in drawing, which he saw as potentially having a practical application.4 Delteil was first exposed to printmaking as a young man by his instructor, the sculptor and active print collector Ernest-Théophile Devaulx.5 Devaulx introduced Delteil to Victor Prouté, a bookseller who expanded his business and became a leading dealer of modern prints with his son, Paul, in Paris, beginning in 1876.6 Prouté was one of the first dealers to circulate a catalogue, beginning around 1890, listing available prints for sale arranged by subject.7 Delteil benefited from the mentorship of the elder Prouté, who inspired him to begin collecting prints.8 The dealer also encouraged Delteil to take up etching as a hobby and published one of Delteil’s earliest prints—a formal portrait of the novelist Alfred de Musset (Figure 2.1). Delteil taught himself the process and worked independently using newly available technical manuals and easy-to-use tools available following the etching revival in Paris.9 A later self-portrait (Figure 2.2) demonstrates that Delteil’s printmaking practice remained an important part of his identity. In the image, he appears at a work table in the midst of producing an etching, leaning over a copper plate with a needle and magnifying glass. A mirror on the table allows him not only to work toward capturing his own visage but also to engage the viewer in a direct and assertive gaze. He sits surrounded by etching tools—a range of needles and scrapers and an aquatint bag— before a window that allows him to work from natural light. This print was one of several portrait etchings that Delteil made depicting contemporary printmakers around this time, including Félix Bracquemond, Félix Buhot, and Honoré Daumier. Its timing indicates his desire as a young man, just under the age of thirty, to identify as an artist and to create a genealogy of contemporary printmaking in which he himself participated. Notably, Delteil’s self-portrait features a framed print or drawing on an easel within his private space, suggesting his interest in both making and collecting art. These interests developed in tandem in Prouté’s shop; as the dealer wrote later in his memoirs, “[although] he [Delteil] was a novice . . . in the field of printmaking, he could soon be found, during the lunch hour, leaning over our portfolios.”10 Delteil also frequented the Cabinet des Estampes at the Bibliothèque Nationale, where he studied the institution’s holdings of prints and met others with similar interests. He applied for an entry-level position at the Cabinet, but was rejected for having failed to pass his baccalaureate exam, leading him to make his living from a variety of print-related jobs rather than a single bureaucratic post.11 Around this time, Delteil also began to acquire prints, focusing on inexpensive reproductive works. He sold this early collection in 1890, at the age of twenty-one, to focus on purchasing contemporary original prints by European artists.12 While Delteil developed these interests, he explored a variety of related professional roles within the developing community surrounding prints in fin-de-siècle Paris. During

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Figure 2.1  Loys Delteil, Alfred de Musset, c. 1880–1900, British Museum. the 1890s, he attempted to work as a print dealer, likely advised by his older brother, Léo, a successful seller in Edmond Sagot’s print and poster gallery.13 Although he had “no taste or aptitude for business” (according to his friend Eugène Bouvy, a scholar of Italian literature who also occasionally wrote on the history of prints), Delteil’s work as a dealer had significant consequences for his later collecting.14 First, it provided access to rare and unique prints; when asked during the late 1890s about where to find such works, for example, an established dealer pointed to Delteil, describing him as “an intelligent young man, knowledgeable about all questions related to printmaking. He’s only just beginning but he knows the field and he will go far.”15 Beyond this access, Delteil’s brief career as a dealer also connected him to contemporary artists. From 1895 until 1896, for example, he briefly published, marketed, and sold L’Estampe moderne, an album of prints by artists including Henri Fantin-Latour and Théophile Alexandre Steinlen.16 This project built on the popularity of similar portfolios such



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Figure 2.2  Loys Delteil, Loys Delteil, 1898, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. as André Marty’s L’Estampe originale (1893–95). Available by subscription, each issue included six original etchings and lithographs (some in color) alongside writing by Delteil and other authors about historical and contemporary printmaking. These texts promoted printmaking as an original medium and discussed the work of individual artists featured within the portfolio. Beyond his writing for L’Estampe moderne, Delteil was a prolific art critic, and discussed contemporary issues in printmaking for a variety of journals for over three decades, throughout his entire career. With few exceptions, he wrote almost exclusively for the wide array of periodicals that began to target directly a new network of print collectors beginning in the 1880s, such as L’Estampe, L’Estampe et l’affiche, and L’Amateur d’estampes. These journals encouraged readers to contribute and exchange opinions on the subjects discussed in their pages. They then published individuals’ responses on issues ranging from contemporary artists to methods of exhibiting prints.17 Delteil frequently contributed to these publications, praising printmakers such as Félix Bracquemond and Charles-François Daubigny.

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Through connections made in these roles, Delteil began serving as an expert for public sales at Paris’s official (and exclusive) auction house, the Hôtel Drouot, beginning in the late 1890s.18 He was best known for this work, and continued at Drouot until his death, about thirty years later. He began by assisting various experts in the coordination of sales, but his career took off in 1898 when his friend, the printmaker Paul Mathey, entrusted him with a lot of prints for sale at a time when the two most prominent experts in the field were about to retire.19 Delteil’s responsibilities as an auction’s sale expert included examining a collector’s portfolio, establishing values for the prints, researching and writing a sales catalogue, organizing a public exhibition of important works from the collection, promoting the sale, and managing the bidding process.20 He experimented with this format to improve upon the established procedure for these sales. In each catalogue, for example, he featured collectors’ biographies, discussed their collecting practices, and illustrated the prints for sale. Delteil was also the first expert to feature images in his publications, which helped to market the works and educate collectors. His contemporaries noted these efforts; as a biographical note in a 1904 issue of Gil Blas noted, Delteil “was able to earn, in very little time, a position that was deservingly impressive through his restraint and his knowledge.”21 In high demand as an expert, Delteil typically secured substantial honoraria for his work.22 Like Delteil’s work as a dealer, his role as a sale expert informed his later collecting practices. He developed insider knowledge of other collectors’ practices and a deep understanding of value and rarity in the contemporary print market. In fin-de-siècle Paris, public sales played an important role within the market and community for prints. Collectors could not only make purchases at Drouot, but also socialize and learn by studying famous collections before their sale and dispersal. The enthusiasts who gathered at the auction house saw themselves as a knowledgeable elite, connected by their sophisticated understanding of prints. One such figure, the renowned collector Edmond de Goncourt, went so far as to explicitly state in his will that his collection should be dispersed at Drouot to like-minded collectors so that “the pleasure that each of them has brought to me is given back to them by an inheritor of my tastes.”23 Delteil’s access to such auctions and the community of collectors that gathered for them informed his approach to collecting and provided a financial source for his purchases.

Delteil’s Scholarship: Le Peintre-graveur illustré Delteil’s professional experience also facilitated his work as a scholar of contemporary prints. He is best known for Le Peintre-graveur illustré, which today still serves as a definitive guide for collectors and researchers of nineteenth-century European prints. Each of the thirty-one volumes presents a comprehensive overview of the print oeuvre of a single artist or group of artists, listing technical information for each work—such as medium, size, edition, variation of states, and important provenance. As in his auction catalogues, Delteil featured illustrations of each listed work. This combination of information standardized details about contemporary prints and provided the



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introductory information necessary not only to collect, but also to research and critically discuss the work. Le Peintre-graveur illustré built on a model established by the Austrian scholar Adam Bartsch in his 21-volume set, Le Peintre-graveur (1803–21), which provided a guide and schematic code for comprehensively collecting and organizing prints by Dutch, Italian, Flemish, and German masters from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. This format was adapted by other authors, such as Alexandre RobertDumesnil, in his Le Peintre-graveur français (1835–71), which focused specifically on French artists from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. Later, Henri Beraldi examined the field of nineteenth-century French prints in his 12-volume Les Graveurs du XIXe siècle (1885–92). Delteil expanded upon these authors’ contributions by providing extended biographies on each artist and reproductions of their works. This significant development allowed collectors to access encyclopedic visual information without owning prints themselves. As one critic wrote in a review of the first volume, “the reader’s eyes move to the image . . . from there that the work is remembered, understood, the experience of seeing being what commits the words to memory.”24 Delteil financed and published the series himself, under the name Éditions du peintre-graveur illustré. He raised funds for the publication, in part, by selling the book at various price points—a common strategy used for deluxe books and print portfolios at the time. The volume of Le Peintre-graveur illustré devoted to Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, for example, was sold in a deluxe version of 50 copies at 70 francs (a price rivaling that of original prints) and a regular edition of 450 copies, for 20 francs.25 Although it is difficult to know definitively who purchased Le Peintre-graveur illustré, critics noted that the regular edition’s price was reasonable, and advertisements for, and reviews of, the series in publications aimed toward collectors of contemporary prints suggest that the target audience was print collectors. Delteil issued volumes over the course of twenty-four years, as he researched a particular artist and his prints sufficiently enough to undertake a thorough biography and catalogue raisonné; for example, Corot, the subject of one of his first volumes, was also one of the first artists whose work Delteil researched and collected.26

The Community around Prints: Public Work and Private Collecting It was possible for Delteil to occupy such a wide variety of roles because of an expanded interest in contemporary prints in fin-de-siècle Paris. The profile of the collector and the practice of collecting began to change during the second half of the nineteenth century, following an explosion in the market for original prints. This development made it feasible to build a sophisticated collection of contemporary art, and created a community around prints. The archives of dealer Edmond Sagot reveal that collectors from throughout Europe and the United States regularly contacted his gallery in Paris to acquire prints by living artists, suggesting the central role of this city in the international

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market.27 A new genre of upper-middle-class collectors emerged, aligning with what Pierre Bourdieu has termed “bohemians of the upper bourgeoisie,” or, as historian Willa Z. Silverman has described in her study of fin-de-siècle book collectors, “welleducated, wealthy representatives of the social elites [who favored] . . . artists of their own day.”28 Most were professional men who sought to establish themselves as part of taste-based elite and gain what Pierre Bourdieu has described as “cultural capital”: an accumulation of experiential knowledge acquired through specifically classed experiences.29 They saw collecting vanguard prints as a means of countering the tastes of the bourgeois middle class that had grown in France as wealth dispersed following the Revolution, industrialization further distanced the aristocracy and working class, and mass culture became increasingly ubiquitous throughout Paris.30 The growing community surrounding contemporary prints allowed Delteil, who occupied a variety of roles within it, to leverage his position and build the sort of remarkable collection that before might have been possible only for a member of the aristocracy. In past centuries, wealth was the usual means to build a respected print collection rather than the social and professional connections that benefited Delteil. Prior to the nineteenth century, print collecting primarily comprised an aristocratic pastime that signified affluence and erudition. Great print collectors belonged to the upper social classes, such as the aristocracy or intelligentsia.31 Although some collectors certainly developed an interest in contemporary art, they generally selected a school, genre, or subject—for example, portraits or Northern artists—and worked toward finding all known examples of prints in that field.32 This process of collecting was one that emphasized quality, but especially quantity. Delteil collected at a time when this practice was shifting, due to an increased focus on rarity and originality in printmaking and collecting. In an influential 1874 essay, the Parisian art critic and collector Philippe Burty coined the phrase belle épreuve, which described unusually precious and rare prints. Artists throughout Europe adopted Burty’s criteria for such prints, including individualized printing, artificially limited editions, and precious materials such as colored inks and vintage papers.33 Print collecting manuals published during this period also emphasized the idea of focusing on quality and rarity above quantity. In his influential guide of 1912, La Cote des estampes des différentes écoles anciennes et modernes, for example, the print historian Gustave Bourcard asserted that “collectors can be divided into three basic categories [including] the lover of the belle épreuve . . . [who] only acquires prints of absolute and exceptional quality.”34 Similarly, in his biographical guide to collecting, Mes Estampes, 1872–1884 (1884), Henri Beraldi described the search for rare and unique works as a “singular mania . . . requiring a search for the same pieces in an even rarer state, almost impossible to find!”35 In their emphasis, authors such as Bourcard and Beraldi diverged from previous generations of this genre of literature, which aimed at assisting a collector in acquiring based on quantity and scope.36 With rarity rather than encyclopedic holdings as a new goal for print collecting, Delteil’s wide range of professional roles held great potential to build a collection. His work within the art market and among contemporary artists afforded him opportunities for acquisition and access to works before they officially entered the art



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market. Through his critical writing and scholarship, he also steered the conversation on contemporary prints, promoting the artists he favored and increasing the demand for their work. And, through his involvement in the print community, he was able to actively promote his field of interest, creating greater enthusiasm for it, and thus, greater value for the prints he collected.

Delteil’s Collection The inventory of Delteil’s collection taken upon its posthumous sale at Drouot, in 1928, suggests the connoisseurial eye that informed his collecting. He owned prints almost exclusively by artists who now comprise the canon of nineteenth-century printmaking, including Honoré Daumier, Mary Cassatt, Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, and James Ensor. With the exception of Daumier and Francisco de Goya, he collected artists of his own time. Delteil focused on French artists, but also several of their panEuropean contemporaries, such as Félicien Rops, Francis Seymour Haden, and Johan Jongkind. To facilitate these purchases, he occasionally traveled internationally for his research. Although the majority of his collection was vanguard in style, Delteil also collected the prints of several comparatively conservative etchers who were popular at the time, such as Eugène Béjot and Jean Frélaut, representing the wide range of prints available in fin-de-siècle Paris. Delteil’s contemporaries saw his keen understanding of the market and what constituted an exceptional print as the direct result his unique position within the Parisian print world. In a preface for the catalogue of Delteil’s posthumous collection sale, the critic and collector, Charles Saunier, for example, asserted that Delteil had been: led by his profession to a situation so enviable, assuring him the esteem of amateurs as well as the respect of the public . . . [for having] sought out neither quantity nor series, but rather pieces of exceptional quality, the most beautiful impressions of all for their perfection in printing, the quality of their inks, the sumptuousness of the paper that serves as their support.37

In an article published about his collection at the time of its posthumous sale, an anonymous writer for the Journal des débats likewise described Delteil’s unique knowledge, describing him as “he who advised so many amateurs, served as such a precious model of instruction, showing them all the qualities that an ideal print collector should seek out in prints, and creating such interest in modern prints.”38 The preface of his sales catalogue similarly remarked on Delteil’s tireless pursuit for knowledge of prints and their acquisition: for him, “no sacrifice was too great.”39 For these reasons, the author speculated on the demand for the collection: Many of the works will be bitterly and justly fought over. For it is impossible to assemble a collection of this quality in just a few months; it requires a deep

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Collecting Prints, Posters, and Ephemera knowledge, patience, and significant sacrifice during a period that is justifiably revealing itself to be a golden age of collecting.40

These critics praised Delteil’s professional reputation and expertise as highly as his collection, indicating the direct connection they perceived between his work and acquisitions. Delteil’s peers regarded his print collecting practices as an example to emulate because of his emphasis on exceptional impressions. Throughout his collection inventory, virtually every print was described using the most superlative existing terminology: “très belle,” “superbe,” or, in some cases, “magnifique.”41 Many were produced using luxurious materials, including colored inks—such as etchings by Corot printed in sanguine or bistre—or costly papers—such as an impression of Mary Cassatt’s Big Sister and Little Brother on a vintage green sheet and Corot’s Reading Under the Trees printed on a rich vellum. Some works were entirely unique, including impressions of Jean-Fraçois Raffaelli’s Madeleine and Alphonse Legros’s portrait of Jules Dalou that were both retouched by their artists in watercolor and ink. Virtually all works in the collection featured signatures, adding value through the indexical presence of their makers, and were numbered, indicating their limited availability. In addition to extraordinary quality, Delteil sought out especially rare prints, presumably finding and affording the high prices of such works through his early and direct access to sales at Drouot. One example, a strong and early impression of Francisco de Goya’s No hay quien nos desate, from the series Los caprichos (Figure 2.3), is noted as “rare” in the catalogue of his sale. Goya was the earliest artist featured in Delteil’s collection, and the first he believed to be truly modern. Delteil built a small group of prints by the artist from Los caprichos that he thought to be early impressions from the first state, in which the subtle tones of aquatint were the strongest. Other prints from his collection were described as having even greater rarity: an etched Italian landscape by Corot was “très rare,” a soft-ground etching by Pierre-Auguste Renoir depicting his son Claude was “fort rare,” and Gabriel-Alexandre Decamps’s A Hunting Dog was noted to be “rarissme.”42 While a work’s limited edition or unusual state sometimes constituted its rarity, in some instances works were unique due to their provenance. Delteil acquired prints from the collections some of the most illustrious fin-de-siècle collectors, such as George A. Lucas and Alfred Beurdeley II, indicating that his connections to Drouot and his relationships with dealers such as Prouté and Sagot allowed him to access works before their appearance in sales. For example, when Delteil served as the expert for the sale of the critic and curator Roger Marx, he obtained several notable prints from Marx’s collection, including Manet’s portrait of Berthe Morisot and lithographs by Daumier and Toulouse-Lautrec.43 Likewise, records for the Beurdeley sale indicate that, as its expert, Delteil was able to make substantial purchases from the collection, including several exceptionally rare prints by Charles Meryon.44 Only the dealer Maurice Le Garrec acquired more from the sale than Delteil, probably to resell rather than for his personal collection.45 Delteil also collected prints with significant historical provenance, such as an impression of Manet’s The Guitarist (Figure 2.4) that had been



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Figure 2.3  Francisco de Goya, Los Caprichos: No hay quien nos desate, published 1799, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. signed and dedicated to the Abbé Hurel, a Parisian priest and close friend of Manet known for his interest in modern art.46 Delteil clearly valued historical lineages for his prints. He noted the presence of particular prints in significant collections throughout his various catalogues raisonnés so that others could similarly record provenance.47 Delteil built his collection alongside his scholarship, simultaneously creating a resource for others in the form of Le Peintre-graveur illustré. Research was important to his professional practice; throughout his entire career, he maintained dossiers on artists who inspired his interest, including articles, photographs, reproductions of their work, and his own notes.48 Records from the Parisian dealer Edmond Sagot indicate that while Delteil researched his 10-volume catalogue raisonné of Honoré Daumier’s prints (1904), he strategically purchased prints by the French lithographer from the dealer.49 Delteil described his goals in a letter to Sagot, telling him that he was “occupied with acquiring some lithographs that will be reproduced in the text,” asking for his help in

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Figure 2.4  Édouard Manet, The Spanish Singer (Le Guitarrero), 1861–2, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. locating impressions of particular images.50 This project also presented Delteil with other opportunities to collect: before Le Peintre-graveur illustré, he assisted NicolasAuguste Hazard, an avid collector of Daumier’s prints, with publishing a catalogue raisonné of these works. For his assistance, Delteil was able to acquire directly from Hazard, including an especially rare impression from Daumier’s series The Justice System.51 By the time Delteil’s collection was dispersed, he owned over thirty prints by the artist, each described as a “très belle épreuve” or “superbe épreuve.”52 Delteil also acquired prints through relationships with contemporary artists that he developed in his work as a printmaker and critic. Numerous prints in his collection featured personalized inscriptions from their artists directly to Delteil, such as James Ensor’s Demons Tormenting Me, on which the artist wrote: “To Loys Delteil, a demon who still torments me.”53 He amassed a collection of etchings by Anders Zorn— described as “a magnificent selection of the most essential works”—after staying with the artist in Sweden while researching a volume of Le Peintre-graveur illustré devoted to his work.54 Friendship also connected the works within his collection in various ways:



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for instance Henri Fantin-Latour, whose work Delteil had published in his portfolio L’Estampe moderne, was represented not only by a number of his own prints, but also by prints that had come from his personal collection, presumably gifts to Delteil.55

Delteil as a Défenseur of Contemporary Prints Delteil used his connections not only to build a collection but also the community surrounding prints in fin-de-siècle Paris. When he served as a sale expert, he routinely hosted intimate viewings of the available works in his space on the rue des BonsEnfants prior to the auction.56 He also held receptions in his cabinet d’amateur, allowing colleagues from his various professions to gather. The dealer Paul Prouté reminisced about one such event, writing that Delteil “created a pleasant atmosphere by bringing together . . . friends who were both artists and collectors, creating a break from the everyday, where one saw [contemporary prints by] Lautrec rather than [art of the past] and original rather than reproductive prints.”57 The art critic Charles Saunier similarly praised these gatherings, writing: It was Delteil’s pleasure to show [his collection] to the close friends that gathered twice monthly. . . . The amateurs admired [his prints], asked detailed questions . . . looked closely at the marks of a needle, the way in which a plate had been created, the striking way in which a work was printed.58

As Saunier noted, these gatherings also served as a means of education: [Delteil] considered his collection to be an eloquent instrument of propaganda for the art that he loved most, modern prints. How many collectors, disappointed by their first purchases of mediocre 18th-century prints while starting out received a better orientation from Delteil . . . from the clarity of his advice and the eloquence of the beautiful prints gathered in his portfolios.59

This idea recurred throughout writing on his Le Peintre-graveur illustré; for example, a review of the first volume connected the book to Delteil’s own collection: Delteil has largely contributed . . . to the growing interest of collectors in original prints of our century; he has guided . . . those who despair at the idea of not being able to gather an acceptable collection of Rembrandts or of color prints of the 18th century. Delteil, by opening to these disillusioned collectors his own collection, has proven that the pleasure they sought can be found by collecting the beautiful lithographs of Daumier . . . [and] the etchings . . . of Meryon.60

As this author noted, Delteil’s collection demonstrated the value of contemporary prints to his peers, and convinced them that the work of living artists was as worthy of collecting as that by past masters.

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Delteil’s critical writing similarly demonstrates his desire to promote the importance of the contemporary works he collected. In the pages of L’Estampe, for example, he wrote extensively on issues including building a comprehensive collection of contemporary prints at Bibliothèque Nationale de France through donations to the obligatory depôt legal; on establishing print collections in the provinces to encourage collecting outside of Paris; and on the logistics of establishing an annual salon for printmaking.61 These writings aligned Delteil with the contemporary notion of a défenseur—a collector who supported contemporary artists through a combination of art purchases and advocacy.62 In 1886, for example, Félix Bracquemond, a printmaker and friend of Delteil, had addressed the important role collectors could play in advancing modern prints, arguing in the Journal des arts that “print amateurs seem to me to be the natural defenders of printmaking.”63 Bracquemond cited communities of collectors as a means of both supporting contemporary artists and for creating a discourse around their work and argued that only amateurs shared artists’ views on taste. Delteil’s involvement in virtually every aspect of selling and collecting contemporary prints made him especially well-suited for such a role. As a défenseur, he was in the company of collectors who amassed much more sizeable holdings of prints, such as Roger Marx, who owned over 3,700 modern prints and Alfred Beurdeley II who had over 28,000 such works.64 The important role he was able to create in collecting and understanding contemporary prints was all the more remarkable for being tied to knowledge, expertise, and access rather than wealth. For Delteil, to collect was to endorse prints—both for the present and for the next generation of print collectors. His unique position within the Parisian print world as a dealer, publisher, artist, expert, scholar, and collector afforded him a place where he could actively inform and participate in the formation of value, and build a collection that engaged and reflected the new community of print collectors in fin-de-siècle Paris.

Notes I am grateful to Jay A. Clarke and Ruth E. Iskin for their comments on various drafts of this chapter. 1 Delteil’s collection was dispersed in an auction at the Hôtel Drouot in 1928, except for seven prints that his widow donated to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The contents of his library were sold at auction in 1931. 2 Delteil has been the subject of only one article in the secondary literature on prints, but that text focuses specifically on his role as publisher of the album L’Estampe moderne; see Blandine Bouret, “L’Estampe moderne de Loys Delteil,” Nouvelles de l’estampe 96 (December 1987): 4–20. The most informative primary sources on his life are an article published by Delteil’s friend, Eugène Bouvy in the journal L’Amateur d’estampes, based on the author’s relationship and experiences with Delteil; and the preface to the posthumous sale of Delteil’s collection by the art critic Charles Saunier, which briefly discusses Delteil’s collecting practices. See Eugène



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Bouvy, “Loys Delteil (1869–1927),” L’Amateur d’estampes 6 (1927): 161–71; and Charles Saunier, “Préface,” Catalogue des estampes modernes composant la collection Loys Delteil (Paris: Drouot, 1928), i–iv. 3 Bouvy, “Loys Delteil (1869–1927),” 170. 4 Ibid., 161–2. Bobet-Mezzasalma believes that Delteil’s father was a librarian; Sophie Bobet-Mezzasalma, “Loys Delteil,” Dictionnaire critique des historiens de l’art (Paris: Institut national d’histoire de l’art, 2009), online, https​://ww​w.inh​a.fr/​fr/re​ssour​ces/ p​ublic​ation​s/pub​licat​ions-​numer​iques​/dict​ionna​ire-c​ritiq​ue-de​s-his​torie​ns-de​-l-ar​t/ del​teil-​loys.​html.​ 5 On Devaulx, see Frits Lugt, Les Marques de collections de dessins et d’estampes, online, nos. 670 and 2667. http://www.marquesdecollections.fr/. 6 Paul Prouté, Un vieux marchand de gravures raconte (Paris: Prouté, 1980), 76–86. 7 For example, Victor Prouté: Estampes & livres, catalogue trimestriel 11 (November 1892). Archives Paul Prouté, S.A., Paris. The print dealers Edmond Sagot and Gustave Pellet also issued catalogues around this time. 8 Prouté, Un vieux marchand de gravures raconte, 28. 9 On the new availability of technical knowledge and materials during this period, see Britany Salsbury, “Etching: The Creative Process,” in Altered States: Etching in Late 19th-Century Paris (Providence: RISD Museum, 2017), online, https://alteredstates. risdmuseum.org/altered-states/#etching-the-creative-process. 10 Prouté, Un vieux marchand de gravures raconte, 28. 11 Bouvy, “Loys Delteil (1869–1927),” 162. 12 Bouret, “L’Estampe moderne de Loys Delteil,” 4. 13 According to a letter from Léo and Loys Delteil’s father to Edmond Sagot, Léo was employed by the well-known dealer by the early 1890s. Letter, April 25, 1893, box 57, Fonds Sagot-Le Garrec (Archives 86), Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris. 14 Bouvy, “Loys Delteil (1869–1927),” 161. 15 Ibid. 16 For a list of prints published in these albums, see Bouret, “L’Estampe moderne de Loys Delteil,” 14–20. This publication is not to be confused by the second, more widely known one with the same title, issued by the Imprimerie Champenois from 1897–99, which focused on Art Nouveau prints. 17 This format was common in literary journals at the time; Venita Datta, “The Literary Avant-Garde at the Fin de Siècle,” in Birth of a National Icon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 17–38. 18 Upon its formation in 1852, Drouot was designated as the exclusive Parisian auction house, in an attempt to avoid price fixing; see Nicholas Green, “Dealing in Temperaments: Economic Transformations of the Artistic Field in France during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Art History 10, no. 1 (March 1987): 62–7; specifically on print sales, see Pierre Juhel, Les Ventes publiques d’estampes à Paris sous la Troisième République: Repertoire des catalogues, 1870–1914 (Paris: Éditions du Cercle de la Librairie), 10–16. 19 According to Bouvy, the two primary experts were Bouillon and Dupont aîné; Bouvy, “Loys Delteil (1869–1927),” 162. 20 Prouté, Un vieux marchand de gravures raconte, 29. 21 J. Marchand, “Le Carnet du Cousin Pons, Nos experts: Loys Delteil,” Gil Blas, January 4, 1904, n.p. [3].

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22 For example he was paid 37,617.30 francs for serving as an expert for the sales of the Alfred Beurdeley collection in May 1920. Fonds Lair-Dubreuil, CommissairesPriseurs (D43 E3), Archives de la Ville de Paris. See also Juhel, Les Ventes publiques d’estampes à Paris sous la Troisième République: Repertoire des catalogues, 1870–1914, 527–30. This “index of experts” indicates that Delteil was an expert in exponentially more sales than any of his peers. 23 Edmond de Goncourt, “Testament,” qtd. in Paul Guillaumin, Drouot, hier et aujourd’hui (Paris: Éditions de l’Amateur, 1986), 9. 24 Charles Saunier, “Bibliographie: Le Peintre-graveur illustré . . . Tome I,” La Chronique des arts et de la curiosité 27 (August 11, 1906): 235. 25 According to an advertisement published in the April/June 1910 issue of Le Livre et l’image for the volume dedicated to Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, which included an original print by the artist. Other similar advertisements specify that the deluxe edition was published on costly Japanese paper. 26 Saunier, “Préface,” Catalogue des estampes modernes composant la collection Loys Delteil, ii. 27 For example, Sagot corresponded with Atherton Curtis and Frederick Keppel in the United States; Dr. John D. Blum, in Geneva; Ernst Arnold, H. H. Meier, and J. A. Stargardt in Germany; and even Malmoud Khalil Bey in Ghiza. See Fonds Sagot-Le Garrec (Archives 86), Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris. 28 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Market of Symbolic Goods” [1983], in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 125, and Willa Z. Silverman, The New Bibliopolis: French Book Collectors and the Culture of Print, 1880–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 12. 29 See Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J. G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 243–8. 30 On these historical shifts, see Sara C. Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), and Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 110. On the representation of women collectors in fin-de-siècle Paris, see Ruth E. Iskin, “Connoisseurship, Gender and the Material Culture of Viewing Prints in the 1890s,” in Making Waves: Crosscurrents in the Study of Nineteenth-Century Art, eds. Laurinda S. Dixon and Gabriel P. Weinberg (Turnhout: Brepols Press, 2019); and Carvalho, Prints in Paris 1900, 32. 31 For example, Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694-1774) in France and Everhard Jabach (1618–95) in Germany; see Genevieve Warwick, “Introduction,” Collecting Prints and Drawings in Europe, c. 1500–1750, ed. Christopher Baker, et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 3–5. 32 This practice is promoted in collecting manuals of the time, such as Carl Heinrich von Heinecken, Idée générale d’une collection complette [sic] d’estampes (Leipzig: J. P. Kraus, 1771). 33 Some artists, such as Charles Daubigny, were known to purchase vintage books specifically to tear out pages for printing; see Burty, “La belle épreuve,” L’Eau-forte en 1875 (Paris: A. Cadart, 1875), 9–11. For more on the belle épreuve, see Michel Melot,



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The Impressionist Print, trans. Caroline Beamish (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 134–8. 34 Gustave Bourcard, La Cote des estampes, des différentes écoles anciennes et modernes (Paris: Morgand, 1912), iv. 35 Henri Beraldi, Mes Estampes, 1872-1884 (Lille: Daniel, 1887), 7. 36 Antony Griffiths, “The Knowledge and Literature of Prints,” The Print before Photography: An Introduction to European Printmaking 1550-1820 (London: British Museum, 2016), 446–56. For specific examples of this type of collecting, see Barthélémy Jobert, “Collections et collectionneurs d’estampes en France de 1780 à 1880, d’après les catalogues de vente,” in Collections et marché de l’art en France, 1789–1848, eds. Monica Preti-Hamard and Philippe Sénéchel (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2005), 243–55. 37 Saunier, “Préface,” Catalogue des estampes modernes composant la collection Loys Delteil, i. 38 Anonymous, “Collection Loys Delteil,” Journal des débats, June 12, 1928, 4. 39 Saunier, “Préface,” Catalogue des estampes modernes composant la collection Loys Delteil, ii. 40 Ibid., iv. 41 On the vocabulary for rarity in fin-de-siècle Paris, which was wide-ranging but standardized, see Britany Salsbury, “Albert Besnard, In the Ashes,” in Altered States: Etching in Late 19th-Century Paris, online, https​://pu​blica​tions​.risd​museu​m.org​/alte​ red-s​tates​/#alb​ert-b​esnar​d-in-​the-a​shes-​1887.​ 42 For a full inventory with notations of rarity, see Catalogue des estampes modernes composant la collection Loys Delteil, 11–48. 43 Catalogue des estampes modernes composant la collection Loys Delteil, nos. 305, 89, 369. For an inventory of Marx’s print collection, see Catalogue des estampes modernes composant la collection Roger Marx (Paris: Hotel Drouot, 1914). 44 Fonds Lair-Dubreuil, Commissaires-Priseurs (D43 E3), Archives de la Ville de Paris. 45 Ibid. 46 On the relationship between Manet and Hurel, see Edgar Wind, Art and Anarchy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1985), 103. 47 Herman J. Wechsler, introduction to Le Peintre-graveur illustré, vol. 1 (1906–26; repr., San Francisco: Alan Wofsy, 1969), 2. 48 Delteil’s archives at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art include approximately 460 dossiers on individual artists. Although the files are undated, the range of artists, from academic painters to vanguard printmakers, suggests that this practice was one he undertook throughout his career. Fonds Loys Delteil (Archives 59), Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris. 49 Receipts from Edmond Sagot to Loys Delteil, c. 1900–1903, box 57, Fonds Sagot-Le Garrec (Archives 86), Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris. 50 Letter from Loys Delteil to Edmond Sagot, July 7, 1903, box 57, Fonds Sagot-Le Garrec (Archives 86), Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris. 51 Lugt, Les Marques de collections de dessins et d’estampes, no. 1975. 52 Catalogue des estampes modernes composant la collection Loys Delteil, 16–19. 53 Ibid., 21. 54 Ibid., iii. 55 For example, see Catalogue des estampes modernes composant la collection Loys Delteil, no. 35.

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56 Invitations to such viewings reoccur throughout contemporary periodicals, in both articles and advertisements. For examples, see La Chronique des arts et de la curiosité 19 (May 13, 1905): iv; and Journal of the Ex Libris Society 14 (1904): 145. My thanks to Ruth E. Iskin for bringing this practice to my attention. 57 Prouté, Un vieux marchand de gravures raconte, 28. 58 Saunier, “Préface,” Catalogue des estampes modernes composant la collection Loys Delteil, 10. 59 Ibid. 60 Charles Saunier, “Bibliographie: Le Peintre-graveur illustré . . . Tome I,” La Chronique des arts et de la curiosité 27 (August 11, 1906): 235. Delteil’s promotion of the work of Meryon, in particular, extended to the point that he launched a campaign proposing to name a Parisian street after the etcher; see Eugène Bouvy, “Les Livres: Maitres de l’art moderne: Meryon,” L’Amateur d’estampes (1927): 170. 61 See for example, Loys Delteil, “Du dépôt des estampes a la Bibliothèque nationale,” L’Estampe 11, no. 66 (November 26, 1893): n.p. 62 Anne-Martin Fugier, La Vie d’artiste au XIXe siècle (Paris: L. Audibert, 2007), 336–62. 63 Félix Bracquemond, “La Gravure et les procèdes de photo-gravure” [1886], in Écrits sur l’art, ed. Pierre Sanchez (Dijon: L’Echelle de Jacob, 2002), 182. 64 Lugt, Les Marques de collections de dessins et d’estampes, nos. 2229 and 421.

Selected Bibliography Bourcard, Gustave. La Cote des estampes, des différentes écoles anciennes et modernes. Paris: Morgand, 1912. Bouvy, Eugène. “Loys Delteil (1869–1927).” L’Amateur d’estampes 6 (1927): 161–71. Burty, Philippe. “La belle épreuve.” In L’Eau-forte en 1875, 7–13. Paris: A. Cadart, 1875. Catalogue des estampes modernes composant la collection Loys Delteil. Paris: Drouot, 1928. Delteil, Loys. Le Peintre-graveur illustré. 1906–26. Reprinted with an introduction by Herman J. Wechsler. San Francisco: Alan Wofsy, 1969. Juhel, Pierre. Les Ventes publiques d’estampes à Paris sous la Troisième République: Repertoire des catalogues, 1870–1914. Paris: Éditions du Cercle de la Librairie, 2016. Prouté, Paul. Un vieux marchand de gravures raconte. Paris: Prouté, 1980. Silverman, Willa Z. The New Bibliopolis: French Book Collectors and the Culture of Print, 1880–1914. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Williams, Rosalind H. Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

3

Women Collectors of Japanese Prints: The 1909–14 Paris Expositions des estampes japonaises at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs Elizabeth Emery

If you could imagine the world of collectors of Japanese prints during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, you would see wealthy gentlemen caught in the wave of enthusiasm for “japonisme.” Men of great aesthetic discrimination bought prints for their technical and stylistic beauty or their attribution to artists then held in great esteem. . . . Among these early collectors the American Mary A. Ainsworth was unique. Neither male, married nor particularly wealthy, it is not surprising that her collecting habits were also unconventional for the day. Nancy S. Allen, 19851 The Japanese print collection of Mary A. Ainsworth (1867–1950) housed at Oberlin College is thought to have been the first historically representative collection of ukiyo-e prints in the United States and was considered, at its bequest in 1950, as one of the best in the country, comparable to those formed by more celebrated male collectors Ernest Fenollosa and Edward Morse.2 Ainsworth’s collection of 1,300 prints is littleknown today perhaps in large part, as Allen notes in the citation above, because her “collecting habits” have been interpreted as “unconventional” with regard to the commonly accepted notion that japonisme3 was largely for “gentlemen.” This chapter seeks to revisit the myth of the “gentleman-only” world of Japanese print collectors by drawing attention to archives related to six exhibits of Japanese prints held at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs from 1909–14; they reveal the active international participation of women like Ainsworth in the collection and display of Japanese prints.4 Nostalgic twentieth-century memoirs were largely responsible for forging the elite reputation (“men of great aesthetic discrimination”) of japonistes such as Louvre curator Gaston Migeon (1861–1930) and art historian and collector Raymond Koechlin (1860–1931).5 Migeon and Koechlin fondly recalled dinners at Siegfried Bing’s home in the 1890s where a small group of men lingered late into the night, bonding over large boxes of brilliantly colored Japanese prints.6 Because of Koechlin’s prominence

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in the art world, his privately printed and distributed 1930 memoirs have now become one of the foundational texts for understanding the japoniste movement, a somewhat unfortunate development given that this text largely elides the contributions of women. This chapter thus returns to an earlier set of documents in which Koechlin explicitly recognized women’s participation in Japanese print collecting at an international level: the checklists, catalogues, subscription lists, and correspondence conserved from the six exhibits of Japanese prints he organized for the Musée des Arts Décoratifs from 1909 to 1914.7 These archives reveal a female participation (ten women out of sixty-seven named individuals) heretofore neglected in the literature on the French collection of Japanese prints. They provide indisputable proof that women owned Japanese prints, loaned them to exhibits, and subscribed to exhibition catalogues, thus helping to solve a long-standing puzzle about why women and girls examine Japanese prints in so many works of art, as in paintings and portraits by James McNeill Whistler, William Merritt Chase, and Clémentine-Hélène Dufau (see Figures 3.3 and 3.4), but have left so few conventional traces as print collectors.8 I will begin by providing an overview of the ukiyo-e exhibits organized by Koechlin for the Musée des Arts Décoratifs before examining the social status and contributions of the ten women whose participation he acknowledged in the table of contents: “Mme E. Chausson”; “Mme Curtis”; “Mme Ch. du Bos”; “Miss Genova”; “Mme Gillot”; “Mme P. Girod”; “Mme Langweil”; “Mme Léry”; “Mme Raoul-Duval”; and “Mme Seure.” The brief biographical sketches that follow flesh out the identities behind these elliptical names and provide clues to the social expectations and evolving connoisseurship practices that made it increasingly uncommon for “men of great artistic discrimination,” as Allen puts it, to acknowledge women as print collectors.

The 1909–14 Expositions des estampes japonaises at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs Shanti Devi Luraghi’s master’s thesis constitutes the only sustained analysis of this series of six exhibits of Japanese prints. The present article complements her work— focused largely on Koechlin and the catalogues—by examining those who loaned prints.9 Koechlin sought to establish the excellence of extant French collections while providing a chronological overview—“the entire visual history of Japanese prints”— in order to convince the public of the artistic value of a medium not yet appreciated as “art.”10 The exhibits thus covered a remarkable variety of subjects, techniques, and artists from Moronubo and Harunobu to Utamaro and Hokusai, not neglecting lesser-known artists and subjects such as war and religion, and popular scenes of courtesans, eroticism, landscapes, theater, and fantasy. Over these six years, the exhibits showcased the works of 130 Japanese artists and featured some 2,354 works amassed by sixty-seven collectors and two museums (the Louvre and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs).11 They resulted in six luxurious catalogues edited by Charles Vignier and Hogitaro Inada (Jean Lebel participated in 1913 and 1914), all with prefaces



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by Koechlin.12 The volumes from 1909–10 were printed in black and white, while subsequent ones featured a selection of collectible color reproductions. Because Japanese prints were only just gaining recognition as “art” in 1909, French museum holdings of Japanese prints were poor.13 As a result, Koechlin relied almost entirely on loans from private collections: “No amateur refused to loan the best pieces from his collection and we have here a showcase of what taste could accumulate in Paris over the last twenty-five years.”14 These contemporary catalogues, like the programs accompanying the exhibits (Figure 3.1), thus bear witness, in a much more empirical (and thus accurate) way than do memoirs, to the major Parisian holdings of Japanese prints from 1909–14. Given the silence regarding women collectors of Japanese prints in retrospective memoirs such as those of Koechlin and Migeon or in studies of these

Figure 3.1  Cover of the brochure for the third exhibit of Japanese prints held at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris (January 10 to February 12, 1911), Musée des Arts Décoratifs, archives UCAD box D1/55, author’s photograph.

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exhibits by scholars such as Luraghi, it is striking to note that 15 percent of those who loaned works were specifically identified as women and that the artists and types of prints they collected do not differ markedly from those acquired by men.15 This percentage is particularly striking when compared with the fact that women comprise only 9 percent of the 3,176 international collectors of all types of items listed in RisPaquot’s Répertoire des collectionneurs de la France et de l’étranger.16 In the section that follows I will provide an overview of the ten women named in the catalogues, including information about their identity, collecting practices, and milieu. I have grouped these women collectors by marital status and social class, both determining factors in their ability to leave the kinds of bequests that have come to be seen as the mark of great collectors. From 1804 until roughly 1907, the French legal system considered married women minors; their access to work, acquisition and disposition of property, authority over children, and even legal access was determined by their husbands.17 Unless they had drawn up marriage contracts, nineteenth-century women’s relationship to property was tenuous, particularly since inheritance laws strictly regulated the percentage of the estate to be shared among offspring. Indeed, it was only in 1891 that surviving spouses were guaranteed the use (if not ownership) of 25 percent of their deceased spouse’s property.18 It is thus particularly helpful for modern scholars that Koechlin saw fit to acknowledge the married French women who loaned works to the 1909–14 exhibits rather than mentioning only the names of their husbands.19

Japoniste Social Networks Marie Gillot (née Blanche, 1861–1941) bore a surname legendary in japoniste circles. Her husband, collector and printer Charles Gillot (1853–1903), served as director of Le Japon artistique from 1888–91, and his extensive collections of Asian art were sold at two major auctions after his untimely death (3,453 lots in 1904). Though one might imagine Marie Gillot had simply loaned Koechlin prints she had inherited from her husband, the situation was more complex given the inheritance laws mentioned above. Entitled surviving spouses with children were permitted to the use of one-quarter of the estate, but possessions often had to be liquidated to disperse funds and then reacquired at auction.20 This was problematic in the case of collections, as we can gauge by a poignant story related by Koechlin: Mme Gillot, who wanted to keep a Japanese screen in the family, had to bid for it at auction, enlisting Bing to obtain it. Bing was unsuccessful because a dealer bidding on behalf of a rich American drove the price to the unimaginable height of 50,000 francs (the equivalent of $185,000).21 The fact that Marie Gillot worked actively to reacquire objects of value and loaned them to all but the 1910 Exposition des estampes japonaises proves that she was not simply a passive recipient of her husband’s collection, but herself an active participant in the japoniste milieu.22 The Gillots’ daughter Louise-Marcelle (1873–1944), identified on the list of lenders as “Mme Seure,” also participated in Koechlin’s exhibitions from 1911–14. She was a



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decorative artist who trained with Art Nouveau designer Eugène Grasset, and married archaeologist Georges Seure (himself a collector) in 1905, shortly after her father’s death. She clearly shared her parents’ taste since she commissioned a dining room from Grasset similar to the one he had constructed for her family when she was a child.23 The 2008 auction marketed by Christie’s as the “Ancienne Collection Charles Gillot” (“untouched since the nineteenth century”) was, in fact, hers; it totaled (including the buyer’s premium) 17,925,032 euros.24 The contributions of Marie and Louise-Marcelle Gillot to the Expositions des estampes japonaises raise questions about the collecting and curatorial activities performed within family settings. While the male japonistes Gillot, Tadamasa Hayashi, Louis Gonse, and Raymond Koechlin made themselves known as “men of great aesthetic discrimination,”25 they were often supported by women, who were mentioned only fleetingly, if at all, in male-penned memoirs.26 Tadamasa Hayashi’s wife, Satoko, has all but disappeared from the history of collecting Japanese prints even though it was she who worked in Japan to place commands and manage Hayashi’s business when he was in France. It was apparently her idea to create a collector’s stamp to mark the objects that passed through Hayashi’s business.27 In Gonse’s home, “mother-inlaw, wife, and husband spend their lives giving three simultaneous lectures in front of the house’s three vitrines,” complained Edmond de Goncourt in 1883.28 Such notes, jotted down contemporaneously, recorded women’s presence and acknowledged their expert knowledge, thus contradicting later memoirs that selectively presented the community as largely male. Japoniste Henri Cernuschi, for example, entertained both men and women, thus facilitating courtships such as those of Anna Ellissen (1856– 1929) and her future husband Louis Gonse. Family photographs reveal husband and wife participating together in Japanese-themed events at the home of Hugues Krafft or dressing in Japanese costumes.29 Anna Gonse contributed much more to her husband’s japonisant activities than currently acknowledged, a participation likely representative of other husband-wife collaborations of the time.30 Koechlin also shared japoniste interests with his wife Hélène Bouwens van der Boijen (1862–93) whom he married in 1888 (Figure 3.2); she was a gifted painter and daughter of the architect who designed the Musée Cernuschi.31 After attending Bing’s 1890 exhibit of Japanese prints at the École des Beaux-Arts, Koechlin fell in love with the colors of these prints and their scenes of courtesans, actors, and mothers; Hélène’s enthusiasm rivaled his own. Her family connections granted them access to the Gonses’ collection which they examined for an entire day. Gonse was so impressed by their devotion that he offered the young couple two prints.32 From this point forward, Hélène (never mentioned other than as “my wife”) disappears from Koechlin’s discussion of Japanese prints. What is sublimated into his “conversion” to japonisme, however, was his “distress” at her sudden death in 1893, which led to his adoption by the japoniste brotherhood.33 Indeed, Koechlin seems to have continued to associate Hélène with collecting; much to the surprise of colleagues, he stipulated that the objects he bequeathed to museums after his death should reference both of their names.34 This was not the case for “Mme Haviland” (née Madeleine Burty, 1860–1900), only child of collector Philippe Burty. Her husband Charles, director of the Haviland

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Figure 3.2  Masatomo Haghiwara and Mme Raymond Koechlin, photograph taken by Hugues Krafft at Midori-no-Sato on July 25, 1892, photo: Musée Hôtel le Vergeur, Reims. porcelain factory and himself an avid japoniste, did loan works to the 1909–14 exhibits, but without acknowledging the influence of his wife who had died in 1900. Family records testify to her love of collecting, a passion she is said to have passed on to her son Paul.35 In fact, only a few couples publicly recognized their collaboration, including “M et Mme Curtis,” who loaned Japanese prints to the Estampes japonaises exhibit. In his repertory of collectors’ marks, Frits Lugt insisted on the collective work of



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Atherton (1864–1943) and Louise Burleigh (1869–1910), American expatriates. They began collecting prints shortly after their marriage in 1894 and both had to agree on all acquisitions, a partnership recognized in a joint collector’s mark.36 Like Hélène Koechlin, Louise Curtis was an artist (artiste-dessinateur): she studied with Luc-Olivier Merson and Raphaël Collin (a fellow contributor to the Estampes japonaises exhibits). Eight hundred items from the Curtises’ “colossal” collection of some 10,000 original prints were willed to the Bibliothèque Nationale, which acknowledges only Atherton’s role in the collection.37 Koechlin, too, mentions only Atherton in his memoirs, though Goncourt mentions both in his Journal, as he does for many other spouses who hosted or participated in the social gatherings connected to the japoniste movement.38 The phenomenon of wives who share an interest in Japanese prints (or other art), but who defer to their husbands continues today in, for example, the case of Gerhard Pulverer, whose extensive collection of Japanese books and prints was acquired by the Smithsonian Museum in 2007. When asked in an interview whether his wife, Suzanne, minds the expense, he twice mentions their shared love of ukiyo-e prints and credits her for initiating him to them in 1969.39 Social conventions that encourage women to participate quietly behind the scenes or to have others purchase works for them provide at least one explanation for why there are so many paintings of women studying Japanese prints, such as in William Merritt Chase’s The Japanese Woodblock Print (Figure 3.3), which features the artist’s daughter Dorothy, who modeled for him from childhood; she attributed her “love” of prints to the “piles of Japanese books” in their home.40 Memoirs and novels similarly represent artist studios as spaces where women perused Japanese prints while posing

Figure 3.3 William Merritt Chase, The Japanese Woodblock Print, c. 1888, oil on canvas, 51.2 × 61.6 cm, Neue Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemaeldesammlungen, Munich, Germany.

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or waiting for friends, as in Philippe Burty’s Grave imprudence where Pauline lounges on a couch examining albums of Japanese prints collected by the artist Brissot (an amalgam of James Tissot, James Whistler, and Claude Monet).41 Poet Renée Vivien (the pseudonym of Pauline Tarn, 1877–1909), is said to have similarly spent her time waiting for a friend to pose for Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer by examining his collection of shunga. The Japanese prints reproduced in her 1904 book, Netsuke (signed “Paule Riversdale”) remain in the family collection today.42 Clémence-Hélène Dufau’s Portrait of a Woman in a Kimono (Figure 3.4), is dated 1910, the second year of the Estampes japonaises exhibits. The magnifying glass the female sitter holds, juxtaposed with the open catalogue of Japanese prints to her left,

Figure 3.4  Clémentine-Hélène Dufau (French, 1869–1937), Portrait of a Woman in a Kimono, c. 1910, oil on canvas, 158.4 × 110.5 cm (62 3/8 × 43 1/2 in.), Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Gift of Herbert D. and Ruth Schimmel, 85.048.001, photo by Peter Jacobs.



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suggests, like Dorothy Chase’s intent expression in Figure 3.3, a level of feminine interest that contradicts the few examples of French women known from extant sales records to have purchased.43 Women, it would seem from these images and from the experiences of those who loaned works to Koechlin’s exhibits, did appreciate Japanese prints, but often in private, perhaps in deference to social conventions that discouraged public recognition of their acquisition and display. Financial control represents another explanation for the lack of records pertaining to women who purchased prints: even fabulously wealthy American Louisine Havemeyer (1855–1929), who also collected in partnership with her husband (and in consultation with her friend Mary Cassatt), often had her husband settle the bill for her acquisitions, thus leaving records in his name.44 She bequeathed their collection of 816 Japanese prints (personally compiled by Tadamasa Hayashi) to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1929 along with their extensive collection of European paintings, all in the name of her husband: the “H. O. Havemeyer Collection.”45 She did, however, chronicle her own agency by composing a book entitled Memoirs of a Collector. She modestly framed her project not as an attempt to make a mark on posterity (as it most certainly was intended), but rather as a private gesture to satisfy others’ curiosity.46 Given French women’s tenuous legal status it is not incidental that the couples readily identified as joint collectors were Americans like the Havemeyers and the Curtises and that women who did purchase prints in Paris were identified largely as English and American. Louisine Havemeyer is quite likely the “crazy” (folle) “Yankee” disparaged by Edmond de Goncourt in 1892 who, he notes, hung a Utamaro print in her sitting room alongside a Gainsborough and who spent 30,000 francs on a group of prints from Bing.47 Although neither Havemeyer nor Cassatt is listed as having loaned works to the Estampes japonaises exhibits, they, like Berthe Morisot, frequented Impressionist social circles, visited exhibits of ukiyo-e, and owned Japanese prints.48 Their cases—like Paris auction records—suggest an even greater number of women print collectors then those represented in Koechlin’s exhibits. Among those who did loan works, “Mme Charles Du Bos” (Juliette Siry, 1884– 1970), “Mme Pierre Girod” (née Richardine Susanne Poirson, 1871–1926), “Mme Ernest Chausson” (Jeanne Escudier, 1862–1936), and “Mme Raoul-Duval” (Americanborn Georgina Raoul-Duval, née Jenny Urquhart, 1866–1913, the wife of industrialist René Raoul-Duval )49 all had connections to the artistic milieus where japonisme was in vogue. Juliette Siry (“Mme Charles Du Bos”) moved in the same Franco-English circles of aesthetes that included Edith Wharton, Paul Bourget, and André Gide. She purchased and exchanged Japanese prints and lacquers and bibliophilic editions with her literary critic husband (they married in 1907).50 Suzanne Poirson (“Mme Pierre Girod”) is celebrated as a subject of John Singer Sargent (1884), but was herself known as an accomplished collector of Chinese art.51 “Mme Ernest Chausson” (Jeanne Escudier, 1862–1936) was widowed when her composer husband died in 1899, but she continued to frequent and host key figures of the Impressionist and Symbolist movements (Claude Debussy, Stéphane Mallarmé, Edgar Degas), often in tandem with her sister, Madeleine, who married the painter, musician, and collector Henry Lerolle. Jeanne’s niece would marry the son of artist and collector Henri Rouart, who also

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loaned prints to the Estampes japonaises exhibits.52 Surrounded by collectors, Jeanne’s own agency was recognized in the title of a catalogue produced for a posthumous June 5, 1936, auction at Drouot: La Collection de Mme Ernest Chausson. If we expand participation to women listed as subscribers to Koechlin’s catalogues (like Ainsworth) we find American Jeannette Scott, a professor of art history at Syracuse University. She first trained in Philadelphia with Emily Sartain (1841–1927), a friend of Mary Cassatt, before traveling to Paris (1889–94) to study at the Académie Julian and the Académie Colarossi where Scott worked with Alphonse Mucha, among others.53 The identity of another American, Sallie Casey Thayer (1856–1925), is masked under the gender-neutral “S. C. Thayer,” a use of first initials that may also obscure the identities of other women subscribers to these catalogues. Her extensive collection of art, including some 1,800 Japanese prints (among them a set of surimono from Frank Lloyd Wright and many others purchased largely from Chicago dealers), forms the basis of today’s Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, bequeathed in 1917 as a “memorial” to her late husband William Bridges Thayer.54 The remarkable attraction Japanese prints held for Ainsworth, Scott, Thayer, and many other American women who travelled to or studied in Paris during this period, suggests a similar—if not yet critically recognized—enthusiasm on the part of their French counterparts.55 What emerges clearly from the catalogues from the Estampes japonaises exhibitions is that the women lenders approached by Koechlin had genealogical or artistic links to the small circle of male Japanese admirers he described in his memoirs. In fact, these overlapping social networks suggest a kind of aristocracy of French japonisme in which an aesthetic pedigree was transmitted from artist to pupil (Grasset to GillotSeure, Collin to Curtis, Mucha to Scott) or from father or mother to daughter and/or son-in-law (Gillot to Seure, Burty to Haviland).56 These women named in Koechlin’s archives thus provide tangible evidence of how prints were circulated and studied, gifted, traded, or bequeathed within this community, often without leaving any record at all, which also suggests that similar patterns may have taken place outside the japoniste community known to Koechlin. Gonse’s spontaneous gift of prints to Raymond and Hélène Koechlin was a common occurrence recorded in memoirs, as was trading prints among friends and acquaintances.57 Artists were particularly likely to participate in these kinds of shadow economies. Raphaël Collin, Henri Rivière, Camille Claudel (whom her brother, poet Paul Claudel, credited with inspiring his subsequent interest in Japan), Berthe Morisot, and Claude Monet are all known to have traded their own work in exchange for Japanese prints.58 In addition, actresses appear in Koechlin’s lists, from Mme Léry (likely Jeanne Léry, friend of Coco Chanel) who loaned works from 1911–13, to Mlle Marti of the Comédie Française, who subscribed to the exhibition catalogue. As their fortunes rose and fell with the arrival of benefactors or commercial success and failure, actresses’ collections were often dispersed soon after they were formed.59 Florine Ebstein Langweil (1861–1958), the single most active woman to loan prints from her collection to the 1909–14 exhibits, belongs to yet another category: socially mobile art dealers. Langweil’s trajectory was remarkable: originally from Alsace, she



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took over her husband’s antiquarian shop on the Boulevard des Italiens when he abandoned the family.60 By the time of her death at the age of 98, the self-taught dealer was considered a leading specialist in Japanese and especially ancient Chinese art; she made major bequests from her personal collection to Parisian and Alsatian museums (including Salles Langweil at the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar). Remarkably, Koechlin mentions her only in passing in his memoirs, noting her “graciousness” (bonne grâce) and the “special place” (place à part) she occupied in a milieu otherwise characterized as male. His brevity is particularly striking given her activity: she imported art directly from Asia, was named an expert for auctions, organized exhibits, and served alongside Koechlin on the board of the Musée Cernuschi. He is similarly circumspect about the role of Suzanne Poirson Girod, whose “artistic intelligence” he admires, but whom he characterizes less as a collector than as someone who has amassed “pretty decorative things” at Madame Langweil’s shop.61 These “special” roles, like Mary Ainsworth’s “unconventional” status, are largely a product of gender conventions, which so often precluded women from obtaining access to the education or the social situations necessary to participate “conventionally” in a connoisseurship model predicated on work within institutional settings, production of scholarly publications, and service as international experts. Women collectors of the late nineteenth century did, in fact, exist, as Koechlin’s exhibition catalogues demonstrate, but they did not or could not fit into the categories increasingly considered necessary to be described as a “connoisseur” for reasons that map the ideological, institutional, and educational barriers identified by Linda Nochlin in “Why Have There Been no Great Women Artists?”62 Furthermore, because of social conventions related to money and property, French women left few traces in the places habitually used to find evidence of agency: sales ledgers, collector’s stamps, and auction records. Museum donations are also misleading given the number of women, such as Louisine Havemeyer, Marie Gillot, and Sallie Casey Thayer, who followed the social norms of their day by making bequests in the name of their husbands, thus effacing their own agency and tacitly, if unintentionally, confirming Koechlin’s “gentleman-only” account of japonisme. As a result, women collectors like Ainsworth, who made bequests in their own name, were (and continue to be) marginalized as “special” or “unconventional,” even when appreciation of Japanese prints was a resolutely mainstream activity for women. This chapter has argued that silence surrounding women’s japoniste activities does not mean that they did not collect Japanese prints or that they were not considered collectors in their own day. The developing model of the collector as a “man of great aesthetic taste,” a useful conceit for allowing dealers and auction houses to enhance the value of their wares (like Christie’s choice to promote Gillot’s daughter’s collection as the “Ancienne Collection Charles Gillot”) has, in many cases overshadowed what was in reality a much more fluid and collective enterprise based not just on sales and auctions, but also on gifts (Gonse and Kochelin, the Du Bos family), souvenirs (Ainsworth’s 1905 travel to Japan), and work through intermediaries (Gillot and Bing, Havemeyer and her husband). If the scholarly community is willing to begin questioning the established myths about japonisme as a male-only pursuit and to return to source

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materials (increasingly accessible as the digitization of archives continues apace), it will likely discover that many more women than I have mentioned here participated in collecting, examination, and conservation of ukiyo-e prints, even when sales records suggest otherwise.63 Study of the social networks of the early twentieth century makes it clear that even those women who did not actively collect large numbers of prints or loan them to Koechlin’s exhibits would nonetheless have had the opportunity to engage with them. The women who examined Japanese prints while posing for japoniste painters such as Whistler, Tissot, Chase, and Lévy-Dhurmer provide a case in point (See Figures 3.3 and 3.4). Mary Cassatt, who did collect ukiyo-e prints and was inspired by them to create her own dry point series, had links to Morisot and helped the Havemeyers who, in turn, relied on Bing and Hayashi. Koechlin was also a good friend of American collectors Mildred and Robert Bliss, the future founders of Dumbarton Oaks, who were themselves in contact with the Havemeyers. Artist Marie Nordlinger, best known for helping Proust with À la recherche du temps perdu, served as Bing’s sales agent in the United States, notably working with Charles Freer to catalogue his extensive Japanese and Whistler collections, now housed at the Smithsonian Museum.64 Tracing such social links can spiral infinitely, but recognizing their existence helps provide new perspectives into a world that has long been considered the exclusive realm of a small group of elite male connoisseurs. *** I have sought to provide an overview and some thoughts about how we might begin to reconstruct the social history of women as Japanese print “collectors.” In order to do so, however, we must recognize the ideal of the single brilliant European or American connoisseur and his purchase, display, sales, and cataloguing for the myth that it is. As we have seen, the history of the contribution of women, like those of the many (largely unsung) Japanese nationals who helped Goncourt, Gonse, and Koechlin with their projects remains to be reconstructed. Koechlin figures prominently in this chapter, for example, but what about Inaba, the expert behind the production of the Estampes japonaises exhibit catalogues? Although lacking the space here to expand on individual collectors at greater length, I hope this chapter will encourage further exploration of the ways in which women were much more implicated in the collection, display, and discussion of Japanese prints than male-penned, mid-twentieth-century memoirs would have us believe. Mary Ainsworth, for example, appears much less “unconventional” than the epigraph suggests when considered in the context of the many other women who loaned works to the 1909–14 Estampes japonaises exhibits and subscribed to catalogues. Unmarried, the American Ainsworth possessed the legal rights, financial means, and time necessary for traveling to Japan. She built upon her initial acquisitions by establishing a coherent collection through participation in learned societies and subscription to international exhibition catalogues. In fact, although she did not herself loan prints to the Paris exhibits, Ainsworth participated fully, drawing inspiration



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from Koechlin’s chronological curatorial choices to build the United States’ first historically representative collection of 1,300 Japanese prints. She, in turn, bequeathed this collection to Oberlin College as a tool to educate future connoisseurs.

Notes Research for this chapter was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (for a book forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic entitled Reframing Japonisme: Women and the Asian Art Market in Nineteenth-Century France). My thanks to Laure Halberstam and her colleagues at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs for their advice and assistance. 1 Nancy S. Allen, “Japanese Treasures,” review of Japanese Woodblock Prints: The Mary A. Ainsworth Collection, by Roger Keyes, Art Documentation (Winter 1985): 185. 2 Roger S. Keyes, Japanese Woodblock Prints: A Catalogue of the Mary A. Ainsworth Collection (Oberlin: Allen Memorial Art Museum, 1984); Charles P. Parkhurst, “The Mary A. Ainsworth Bequest of Japanese Prints and Books,” Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin 7, no. 3 (Spring 1950): 61–74 (61). Parts of the collection are digitized: http:​//www​2.obe​rlin.​edu/l​ibrar​y/spe​cial/​ainsw​orth.​inven​tory.​html 3 Throughout this chapter I refer to japonisme (a term coined by Philippe Burty in 1872 to refer to his contemporaries’ fascination for Japanese culture) as distinct from the modern term Japanism (European art inspired by Japanese models). Christopher Reed’s Bachelor Japanists analyzes the competition inherent in the “origin narratives” that sought to establish the legitimacy of japonisme in exclusively male terms (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 4 Ainsworth herself subscribed to the exhibition catalogues; her forms are conserved in these archives. 5 Migeon and Koechlin were both actively involved in the development of collections, exhibitions, and government support of Japanese art (at the Louvre, the Union Centrale des arts décoratifs [henceforth “UCAD”], and the Ministry of Beaux-Arts). Marcel Guérin describes Koechlin’s major contributions in each of these areas. “Raymond Koechlin et sa collection,” Bulletin des musées de France 4 (1932): 66–88. Their alleged acumen has, however, increasingly come into question, as in Rémi Labrusse’s article, “Louis Gonse,” for the Dictionnaire critique des historiens de l’art (2008). https​://ww​w.inh​a.fr/​fr/re​ssour​ces/p​ublic​ation​s/pub​licat​ions-​numer​iques​/dict​ ionna​ire-c​ritiq​ue-de​s-his​torie​ns-de​-l-ar​t/gon​se-lo​uis.h​tml. Souren Melikan similarly criticizes Migeon and collector Charles Gillot in “From Gems to Duds, Charles Gillot’s Collection Kills a Myth,” New York Times, March 7, 2008. 6 Gaston Migeon, “Charles Gillot,” Collection Ch. Gillot (Paris: Durand-Ruel, 1904), vii–xix (vii). Raymond Koechlin, Souvenirs d’un vieil amateur d’art de l’Extrême-Orient (Chalon-sur-Saône: Imprimerie française et orientale E. Bertrand, 1930), 55. 7 The call numbers for the relevant UCAD archives at the Bibliothèque du Musée des Arts Décoratifs: D1/44 (1909: Estampes japonaises primitives); D1/49 (1910: Harunobu, Koriusaï, Shunsho); D1/55 (1911: Kiyonaga, Buncho, Sharaku); D1/66 (1912: Utamaro); D1/77 (1913: Yeishi, Choki, Hokusaï); D1/88 (1914: Toyokuni, Hiroshige).

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8 A number of such images of affluent women examining Japanese prints are reproduced in Gabriel Weisberg, ed., The Orient Expressed: Japan’s Influence on Western Art, 1854–1918 (Seattle and London: University of Mississippi Press, 2011). Ruth E. Iskin and Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho discuss representations of women as print connoisseurs in late-nineteenth-century posters. De Carvalho has noted the dearth of women represented in sales records. Both have suggested that these posters were a marketing tool: such representation, notes Iskin, “cannot in itself be considered proof that women print collectors existed at the time—at all or in significant numbers—it is at least an indication that the advertising image was attempting to attract middle-class women.” The Poster: Art, Advertising. Design, and Collecting, 1860s–1900s (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2014), 97. Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho, Prints in Paris 1900: From Elite to the Street (Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2017). The fact that japoniste props such as ukiyo-e prints, kimonos, and fans appear repeatedly in studio paintings by Whistler, Chase, or James Tissot should also not be taken as a straightforward reflection of individual women’s home decoration even if the vogue for japoniste accessories was much discussed and studied in magazines for women. See, for example, Jennifer Criss, “Japonisme and Beyond in the Art of Marie Bracquemond, Mary Cassatt, and Berthe Morisot, 1867–1895,” Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 2007. 9 Shanti Devi Luraghi, “Six expositions d’estampes japonaises au Musée des Arts Décoratifs (1909–1914),” Master thesis, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2014. 10 Raymond Koechlin, preface to Charles Vignier and Hogitaro Inada, eds., Estampes japonaises primitives. Harunobu, Korriusaï, Shunsho, Kiyonaga, Buncho, Saraku (Paris: Des Ateliers Photo-Mécaniques D.-A. Longuet, 1909), n.p. 11 I am using Luraghi’s counts, but I do not arrive at the same figures, probably because the rubrics in these catalogues are slippery (“painters” and “artists” contain overlapping names, while “engravers” exists as a separate category alongside “editors” and “printers”). It is best to consult the individual catalogues, all but the last (1914) now digitized by the Bibliothèque Nationale. Luraghi’s list of collectors totals sixtyeight, including Odon Guéneau de Mussy and Albert Kahn, neither of which I can confirm in the catalogue listings. She may have replaced “E. Kann” (not in her list) by Albert Kahn. 12 All volumes were published in Paris by the Ateliers Photo-mécaniques D.-A. Longuet and edited by Vignier and Inada (and Lebel in 1913 and 1914): Estampes japonaises primitives exposées au Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 1909; Harunobu Koriusaï Shunsho, 1910; Kiyonaga Buncho Sharaku, 1911; Utamaro, 1912; Yeishi Choki Hokusaï, 1913; Toyokuni, Hiroshighé, 1921 [the First World War delayed the publication of the catalogue from the 1914 exhibit]. Luraghi describes the catalogues, their printing techniques, and choice of subjects at great length in her thesis. 13 Koechlin credits Migeon with nearly single-handedly cajoling the Louvre administration into exhibiting and then accepting bequests of Japanese prints. Raymond Koechlin, Gaston Migeon et le Louvre (Paris: Imprimerie Générale Lahure, 1931), 7–10. 14 Koechlin, Souvenirs, 61–2. 15 This percentage is probably ±2 percent given the fact that the Koechlin and his team were not consistent in using first initials, which creates complications when relatives who collected Japanese prints, such as Henri and Alexis Rouart or Louis and Bernard Metman, are identified only as “Rouart” and “Metman.” Of the sixty-seven



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named individuals (counting “Mr et Mme Curtis” as two people), ten are identified as “Mme” or “Miss.” Luraghi’s default assumption is that the collection is the husband’s: “Collection de Mr. Charles Du Bos,” for example. This is likely because Koechlin himself describes collections of Japanese art entirely as the work of men in his Souvenirs, 34–41. 16 Cited by Véronique Long, “Les collectionneurs d’oeuvres d’art et la donation au musée à la fin du XIXe siècle: l’exemple du musée du Louvre,” Romantisme 112 (2001): 45–54. 17 For more about the nefarious effect of the 1804 Code civil on women and property ownership and laws increasingly favorable to women passed from 1891–1907, see Jennifer R. Waelti-Walters and Steven C. Hause, eds., Feminisms of the Belle Époque (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). 18 Nicolas Boring provides a succinct summary for the Library of Congress: “France: Inheritance Laws in the 19th and 20th Centuries,” https​://ww​w.loc​.gov/​law/h​elp/i​ nheri​tance​-laws​/fran​ce.ph​p#Cod​e. 19 One might speculate as to why Koechlin chose to acknowledge their participation. Was he following the model of Louis Gonse who chronicled the loans of Sarah Bernhardt and Louise Cahen d’Anvers in an 1883 exhibit of Japanese art? Did the women themselves insist on having their loans recognized as a form of social distinction? Was Koechlin influenced by the politics of his mother, Emma KoechlinSchwartz, who worked tirelessly to advance the education, visibility, and rights of women by founding proto-feminist schools and organizations such as the Union des femmes de France for which Koechlin himself served as vice president upon her death in 1911? See Monique Vaugenot-Deichtmann, Raymond Koechlin, L’homme qui a retrouvé la Joconde (Mulhouse: Editions Jérôme Do Bentzinger, 2011). Or was it simply a vestige of an 1865 UCAD policy stipulating that names of the private collectors who loaned works be published? See Article 7 of the Musée Rétrospective (Paris: Librairie Centrale, 1865): v–x. 20 François Boeuf, Des droits du conjoint survivant (loi du 9 mars 1891). Paris: La Rose et Forcel, 1891. 21 Koechlin, Souvenirs, 56–7. The rich American was likely H. O. Havemeyer. The Berlin Museum and Charles Freer also attempted to purchase it (Bing was apparently also bidding for Freer). See Frelinghuysen, et al., Splendid Legacy: The Havemeyer Collection (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993), 141–4. 22 Her activity can be gauged by the auction records (Procès-verbaux des commissaires-priseurs) conserved in the Archives de Paris, D48E3 87, Chevallier 1903. She also made gifts to the Louvre in the name of her husband, as Koechlin does acknowledge, Souvenirs, 103. 23 The museum has reconstructed this room: http:​//www​.lesa​rtsde​corat​ifs.f​r/fra​ncais​/ muse​es/mu​see-d​es-ar​ts-de​corat​ifs/p​arcou​rs/xi​xe-si​ecle/​une-s​alle-​a-man​ger-p​ar-eu​ gene-​grass​et-18​80/mo​bilie​r-pou​r-cha​rles-​gillo​t-et-​sa. 24 Marketing materials presented it as the collection of Gillot himself, while the catalogue more accurately acknowledges it as his daughter’s. See the Christie’s press release of January 28, 2008 [http​://ww​w.chr​istie​s.com​/pres​scent​er/pd​f/012​ 82008​/1454​43.pd​f ], and Ancienne Collection Charles Gillot (1853–1903) et un ensemble provenant de Louise-Marcelle Gillot-Seure (1884–1958), sa fille (Paris: Christie’s, 2008). Many entries trace the mixed provenance of her collection: items “repurchased by Mme Gillot” at the 1904 auction, objects designated as having

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belonged to Georges Seure, and pieces from Louise-Marcelle’s personal collection. Results: http:​//www​.chri​sties​.com/​ancie​nne-c​ollec​tion-​charl​es-gi​llot-​21950​.aspx​?sale​ title​= 25 Allen, “Japanese Treasures,” 185. 26 The notable exception is the Goncourt Journal where the brothers regularly evoke hostesses including Mme Auguste Sichel (née Louise Emilie Laure Dulong), Julia Daudet (née Julia Allard), Léontine De Nittis (née Léontine Lucile Gruvelle), and La Princesse Mathilde. The Journal contains some 150 references to the Sichel family, among his closest friends at the end of his life, but no references to Madame Sichel’s interest in art. Manuela Moscatiello has shown, on the other hand, the active participation of Léontine De Nittis in her husband’s collections and decorating. Manuela Moscatiello, Le japonisme de Giuseppe De Nittis: un peintre italien en France à la fin du XIXe siècle (Amsterdam: Peter Lang, 2011). 27 Julia Meech-Pekarik, “Early Collectors of Japanese Prints and the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Metropolitan Museum Journal, 17 (1982): 93–118. [97] 28 Goncourt, Journal (April 25, 1883). 29 Several photographs of the couple in Japanese costumes are reproduced in Francis Gonse, “Louis Gonse et le Japon,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 119 (1992): 81–8. Others figure in Hugues Krafft’s photo albums of events at his Japanese home (Midori no Sato) now in the collection of the Musée le Vergeur in Reims. It is surprising that Gonse, who organized so many other exhibits, did not loan to Koechlin’s. 30 Private conversations with the Gonse family confirm that Anna was known to have had a keen intellect and an active interest in cultural and artistic pursuits. Sabina Fogle’s discovery of the fact that Mathilde Béraldi, wife of legendary bibliophile Henri Béraldi, was herself an active (and uncredited) print collector lends further support to this argument. “Henri Béraldi (1849–1931) and the Quest for the Belle Épreuve in Fin-de-Siècle Paris,” presentation for “Creating Markets, Collecting Art,” the July 14–15, 2006 Christie’s Education Conference. 31 Guérin, “Raymond Koechlin,” 66. 32 Koechlin, Souvenirs, 13–15. 33 Guérin specifically credits Koechlin’s “détresse” for his entry into and attachment for the japoniste milieu. Guérin, “Raymond Koechlin,” 66. 34 Guérin, “Raymond Koechlin,” 66. 35 See the finding aide for the Haviland family records (105J Fonds Nicole MarićHaviland) established by Anne Gérardot for the Archives départementales de la Haute-Vienne. http:​//arc​hives​.haut​e-vie​nne.f​r/_de​pot_a​d87/_​depot​_arko​/arti​cles/​ 2061/​consu​lter-​l-ins​trume​nt-de​-rech​erche​_doc.​pdf. 36 Lugt’s Marques de collection, digitized by the Fondation Custodia, provides a detailed biography of the Curtises and their collecting habits: http:​//www​.marq​uesde​colle​ ction​s.fr/​detai​l.cfm​/marq​ue/53​83. Louise also had her own collector’s mark: http:​// www​.marq​uesde​colle​ction​s.fr/​detai​l.cfm​/marq​ue/12​192 37 http:​//exp​ositi​ons.b​nf.fr​/japo​naise​s/rep​eres/​01-2.​htm. 38 Jennifer Criss speculates about the importance played by the Japanese art in the homes of painters Marie Bracquemond (née Marie de Quivoron, 1840–1916), wife of Félix, a major collector of Japanese prints, and Eva Gonzalès (1849–83), married to Henri Guérard, the engraver responsible for the reproductions in Gonse’s 1883 L’Art japonais, “Japonisme,” 135–7.



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39 “She gave me the interest,” he insists. “An Interview with Collector Gerhard Pulverer.” Smithsonian Institute. https://pulverer.si.edu/node/18617. 40 Cited in Bruce Weber and Sarah Kate Gillespie, Chase Inside and Out: The Aesthetic Interiors of William Merritt Chase (New York: Berry-Hill Galleries, 2005), 69. 41 Philippe Burty, Grave Imprudence (Paris: Charpentier, 1880): 143–8. 42 Michel Maucuer, “Renée Vivien dans son sanctuaire d’Asie,” Images de l’étranger: actes du colloque, Université de Limoges, 28-29 mars 2003 (2016): 261–75. My thanks to Melanie Hawthorne for sharing this information about the family. 43 Carvalho identifies only one French woman collector from print dealer Emile Sagot’s purchase records housed at the Bibliothèque de l’INHA and Peter Parshall’s study of Lugt’s list of 3,000 collectors’ marks. Comparing Parshall’s list of marks with Lugt’s reveals only two French women in addition to Louise Curtis (who lived and worked in France): Sophie Jay and Henriette Sergy, neither of whom participated in the Estampes japonaises exhibits. One of the women identified by Parshall (Lugt 2288) is a man (presumably a misprint). Parshall, The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2009): 23 n. 39. 44 Louisine Havemeyer, From Sixteen to Sixty: The Memoirs of a Collector (New York: Privately printed for the family of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1961). 45 Frelinghuysen, et al., Splendid Legacy, 134–5. 46 Havemeyer, 8–9. 47 Goncourt, Journal, July 1, 1892. 48 Criss discusses the impact of the 1890 Japanese print exhibit at the École des Beaux-Arts on both Cassatt and Morisot, who visited together. Criss, “Japonisme” (especially chapter 2) and Deborah Johnson, “Cassatt’s Color Prints of 1891: The Unique Evolution of a Palette,” Source: Notes in the History of Art 9, no. 30 (Spring 1990): 31–9. 49 She was notorious for having been portrayed as the bisexual character Rézi of Colette and Willy’s Claudine en ménage (1902). 50 See Michèle Leleu, Charles Du Bos: Approximation et certitude (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1976), 166. 51 Koechlin, Souvenirs, 77–8. 52 Dominique Bona’s Deux Soeurs traces the rich history of the Lerolle-Rouart family during this period (Paris: Grasset, 2012). 53 Kihm Winship, “Jeannette Scott,” Skaneateles (September 21, 2009). https://kihm6. wordpress.com/about/ 54 Carol Shankel, Sallie Casey Thayer and Her Collection (Lawrence, KS: The University of Kansas Museum of Art, 1976), 8. A 2017 exhibit, “Civic Leader and Art Collector: Sallie Casey Thayer and an Art Museum for KU,” has brought new attention to Thayer’s collecting acumen. https​://sp​encer​art.k​u.edu​/exhi​bitio​ns/ci​vic-l​eader​-and-​ art-c​ollec​tor-s​allie​-case​y-tha​yer-a​nd-ar​t-mus​eum-k​u. My thanks to Kristan Hanson for bringing Thayer to my attention and for sharing her forthcoming article about the Chicago Japanese print trade: “‘Art Progress in the West’: Sallie Casey Thayer and the Chicago Art Scene, 1908–1911,” in What Does it Mean to Collect? Sallie Casey Thayer and the Creation of an Art Museum for the University of Kansas, ed. Celka Straughn (Lawrence, KS: Spencer Museum of Art, 2019). Hanson also discusses the work of Helen C. Gunsaulus, whose own collection of surimono led to a 1912 exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Alice C. Hall, a curator and lecturer on Japanese prints.

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55 Kendall H. Brown suggests, in fact, that American women favored prints above all other forms of Japanese art. “Visions of the Orient: Western Women Artists in Asia 1900–1940,” Women in the Arts (Fall 2011): 22–5. 56 Although I have not been able to identify her, the “Miss Genova” mentioned in the 1914 catalogue may well have belonged this category of friends and children of friends who proposed objects for Koechlin to display. 57 See Keyes, Japanese, 11. 58 See the letters contained in Brigitte Koyama-Richard, ed. Correspondance adressée à Hayashi Tadamasa (Tokyo: Institut de Tokyo, 2001). Jan Hokenson describes the japoniste influence exerted by Camille Claudel on her better-known brother in France, and East-West Aesthetics: French Literature, 1867–2000 (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2004): 227–9. 59 Sarah Bernhardt is the classic example. A wooden tiger featured in Louis Gonse’s 1883 “Rétrospective” exhibit of Japanese art was later sold to Henri Cernuschi, either to make money (as recorded by Goncourt), to enhance the museum, or because of the object’s association with Sarah herself. 60 Elizabeth Emery, “La Maison Langweil and Women’s Exchange of Asian Art in Fin-de-siècle Paris,” L’Esprit Créateur 56, no. 3 (November 2016): 61–75. 61 Koechlin, Souvenirs, 33, 66–8, 77–8. 62 Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in Women, Art, and Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 145–78. 63 Julie Verlaine, for example, has recently argued for the need to “reattribute” the collections bearing the names of male family members to the women who often built them. Femmes collectionneuses d’art et mécènes (Paris: Editions Hazan, 2013). 64 P. F. Prestwich, The Translation of Memories: Recollections of the Young Proust (London: Peter Owen, 1999).

Selected Bibliography Iskin, Ruth E. The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s–1900s. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2014. Koechlin, Raymond. Souvenirs d’un vieil amateur d’art de l’Extrême-Orient. Chalon-surSaône: Imprimerie française et orientale E. Bertrand, 1930. Luraghi, Shanti Devi. “Six expositions d’estampes japonaises au Musée des Arts Décoratifs (1909–1914).” Master 1 thesis, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2014. Reed, Christopher. Bachelor Japanists. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

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Collecting Ukiyo-e Prints in Japan during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Shigeru Oikawa

Ukiyo-e prints1 are one of the most popular Japanese artifacts in the West today. Museums such as the British Museum or the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston hold outstanding collections and are proud to display these treasures regularly. Yet, prints were not considered to be works or art at the time they were produced, in the Edo period (1603–1868) and the Meiji era (1868–1912), mainly in Edo (present-day Tokyo) and later Ôsaka. They were intended for mass appreciation, seen as disposable, and it took a long time before they were thought to be valuable and collected by amateurs. This chapter focuses on the process that led to their recognition and the emergence of collectors both in Japan and the West. The Tokugawa shogunate government began in 1603 when the first shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616) established its government in Edo. Before that, Kyoto had been the capital of Japan for more than 800 years. Yet Ieyasu wanted to avoid the influence of the emperor and moved to a small country village in the east, called Edo. The village soon transformed into a vivid city. After long years of civil war, Japanese people could enjoy a peaceful life, kabuki theaters, music, and dance.2 They also liked novels with small illustrations. At the end of the seventeenth century, these illustrations became so popular that some artists began publishing the images independently from books. This was the birth of ukiyo-e—prints of the floating world. The making of a print was a collaborative process. The drawing was designed by the artist and engraved by the carver on a block of cherry wood. Then the printer printed the design on a sheet of paper. The first edition of a design was generally about 200 copies. In the beginning, prints were simply black and white but soon several colors were added, and by the middle of the eighteenth century, full-color woodblock prints were produced, called nishiki-e (brocade prints). They represented kabuki actors and beautiful courtesans. Ukiyo-e prints were the only popular printed materials at the time, in addition to religious or Chinese texts. Once they had been enjoyed, most prints were thrown away or used to repair holes in the paper sliding doors of houses. The situation was entirely different with paintings. Early examples in the style of the floating world such as Hishikawa Moronobu’s (1618–94) Woman Looking over her Shoulder (Tokyo National Museum) or the Kaigetsudô school’s (active in the beginning

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of the eighteenth century) pictures of tall, standing beauties have survived to the present day because the wealthy merchants or cultivated samurai who ordered them went out of their way to preserve them. Takeda Taijirô, a famous old bookshop owner active in the Meiji era (1868–1912), gives us a hint at the way Japanese and foreign people regarded ukiyo-e prints in the second half of the nineteenth century. He writes about a man called Benkei who bought many ukiyo-e prints from an old bookshop that was open on the street of Ginza, the most popular district in Tokyo in the early 1880s. At that time, secondhand book dealers had no shops, and displayed their books and prints on mats. The name “Benkei” is thought to refer to Captain Francis Brinkley (1841–1912), who arrived in Japan in 1867 to teach English, then became a journalist and published the Japan Weekly Mail. He died in Tokyo in 1912. “Benkei,” which could be the Japanese pronunciation of Brinkley, would have been an easy name to remember, since it was also the name of a very popular Japanese hero of the twelfth century. Benkei chose about fifty prints and asked the dealer what the price was. At that time, prints by artists such as Utamaro (1753?–1806), Harunobu (1724–70) or Hokusai (1760–1849)—who are especially famous today, and whose prints are sold currently for hundreds of thousands to a million dollars or more—were sold for one sen each (100 sen were one yen, and one sen would be about one dollar today). The dealer displayed five fingers meaning fifty sen, but Benkei misunderstood him and gave him five yen. The dealer was surprised at such a large amount of money, and hurried back home, afraid that the client would return to demand his money back. A week later, he opened his shop again on the same street, and saw Benkei come again. Benkei chose prints and gave him five yen. The dealer noticed that Benkei had picked up only works by Utamaro, and understood that, according to foreigners, ten sen for one sheet was a fair price. To the Japanese, prints were seen as disposable at the time. This is attested to by the fact that early works like Torii Kiyomasu’s (active from the end of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth century) large ôban3 print of Ichikawa Danjûrô in the Role of Takenuki Gorô (Tokyo National Museum) and A Beauty Reading a Letter (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), or Torii Kiyonobu (1664–1729)’s Chôryô and Kôsekikô (private collection) are known today by only one copy, although hundreds must have been published. These are not exceptions. Several prints by celebrated eighteenth-century artists like Harunobu or Sharaku (active in 1794–95), are known from only a single impression. This is also the case for many Meiji prints. During the Meiji era, artists such as Yoshitoshi (1839–92), Kunichika (1835–1900), Kyôsai (1832– 89), or Kiyochika (1847–1915) produced prints daily that were sold for about seven sen each (less than seven dollars today). Precious prints by Utamaro, Hokusai, or Kiyonaga were sold for the same price. This led people not to distinguish between works by Utamaro and Kunichika. Despite this general situation, a few individuals deliberately formed collections of ukiyo-e prints at a time when most regarded them as little more than throw-away pamphlets. Ôta Nanpo (1749–1823), also known as Shokusanjin, owned these prints. He was a government officer and was known for writing many novels, essays, and satirical poems. He is known as the first compiler of Ukiyo-e ruikô, the first history of ukiyo-e,

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written at the end of the eighteenth century or the beginning of the nineteenth century and published only in 1889. He had at least two prints by Kiyomasu: Zôhiki (NelsonAtkins Museum) and Shibaraku (Hiraki Art Museum)—both bear Nanpo’s collector seals Nanpo bunko (Nanpo’s library) and Ôtashi zôsho (Mr. Ôta’s property).4 He may have been the first ukiyo-e print collector. Ukiyo-e ruikô was hand copied by subsequent collectors, each of whom would add new information.5 It seems reasonable to assume that these contributors were also active collectors. The diaries of Saitô Gesshin (1804– 78), for example, mention purchases of prints by Shunshô, Harunobu, Kiyonaga, and other artists, and indicate that he had them backed and mounted as hand scrolls.6 In the late Edo period there was at least one collector of prints by Sharaku. Sharaku made about 150 actor prints around 1794–5 and then suddenly disappeared. We know nothing about his life, occupation, date of birth, or death. He was forgotten during the nineteenth century, but in 1910 the German scholar Julius Kurth published a biography entitled Sharaku in which he stated that the artist was a portraitist as important as Rembrandt and Velázquez.7 Sharaku suddenly became famous, not only in Japan but also in Europe and America. About twenty hosoban prints by the artist exist today that bear ink inscriptions, all in the same hand, giving the names of actors and the roles they played, including Kumajû Hangorô (Art Institute of Chicago, formerly the Doucet Collection, Paris), Nakajima Wadaemon (Brooklyn Museum, formerly the Comte de Sartiges Collection, Paris), Segawa Tomisaburô, also known as Nikutomi (Metropolitan Museum of Art), and Ichikawa Yaozô, later Suketakaya (Art Institute of Chicago) (Figure 4.1). Since all the actors and roles depicted in Sharaku’s prints have only recently been fully researched and identified, we may assume that the writer of these historically accurate inscriptions must have lived around the same time as the artist or only slightly later.8 As is widely known, the practice of collecting ukiyo-e was initiated by Western collectors. The first foreign collectors of ukiyo-e prints were Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796–1866) and other individuals associated with the Dutch Factory (trading post) in Nagasaki. At the end of the sixteenth century, the Japanese government had conflicts with Portugal and England related to Catholicism. During the Edo period, Japan remained closed to foreign countries, fearing Christianity would return. Only China and Holland were permitted to engage in business, because Holland was a Protestant country and its government promised not to bring religion into Japan. Von Siebold was a German citizen and stayed in Japan from 1822 to 1829 disguised as a Dutch doctor. His collection of more than 100 prints is now housed in the Leiden Ethnology Museum. In 1853, an American delegation led by Matthew Perry came to the Edo Bay and forced the country to open its borders after 250 years of isolation. In 1865, Napoleon III invited the Tokugawa government to the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris. This aroused interest in Japanese woodblock prints among the French. During the same year, Édouard Manet painted a portrait of Émile Zola (Figure 4.2), which includes a print Manet had bought at a sale that took place after the end of the exhibition. This print was by Utagawa Kuniaki I and represented the sumô wrestler Ônaruto Nadaemon in the background (Figure 4.3). Despite growing European enthusiasm for ukiyo-e

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Figure 4.1  Sharaku, (Ichikawa) Yaozô later Suketakaya, Art Institute of Chicago. prints, there were still only a few serious collectors in Japan until the beginning of the twentieth century. During the late Edo and early Meiji periods (roughly 1850–90) the largest collection in Japan was probably that formed by the painter Kawanabe Kyôsai (1831–89), which is now dispersed among museums and private collections around the world. The prints and paintings from his collection are usually stamped with a square seal with his name Kyôsai shu (“property of Kyôsai”). We do not know when he bought these works, nor how many he had, but it is thought that he used them as reference material for his own study. His interest in ukiyo-e was only one part of his wide-ranging collection which encompassed works by artists of several different schools.9 The presence of the Kyôsai shu seal on works that he formerly owned makes his ukiyo-e print collection one of the very earliest identifiable in Japan.

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Figure 4.2  Édouard Manet, Emile Zola, 1868, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. When Sakai Tôbei (1844–1911)10 opened his print shop Sakai Kôkodô in Tokyo in 1874 and Matsuki Zen’emon (1863–1931) started trading in ukiyo-e prints and paintings in Kyoto in 1879, it is likely that most of their major clients were Europeans.11 There are no records of Japanese people buying prints at that time. We do know the names of several Westerners who came to Japan and started their collections around this period, including Théodore Duret (1838–1927), Siegfried (Samuel) Bing (1838–1905),12 Philippe Sichel (1839/40–1899), Émile Guimet (1836– 1918), and Félix Régamey (1844–1907).13 Among the Western experts employed by the Meiji government, ukiyo-e prints were collected by Edoardo Chiossone (1833– 1898), a specialist of modern printing, William Anderson (1842–1900), an English doctor, Erwin Baelz (1849–1913), a German doctor and founder of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Tokyo, Josiah Conder (1852–1920), an architect and also professor of the University of Tokyo, Curt Netto (1847–1909), a metallurgist and professor of the University of Tokyo, Ernest Francisco Fenollosa (1853–1908), an art historian and professor of the University of Tokyo, and Edward Morse (1838–1925), a zoologist and professor of the University of Tokyo.14 They purchased their prints

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Figure 4.3  Hokkei, Seal of Kyosai, Kyosai shu, collection of the author. from dealers such as Sakai and Matsuki, who sold mostly prints as well as some paintings. It was probably through Hayashi Tadamasa (1856–1906) that news first reached Japan of the vogue for collecting ukiyo-e prints in Europe and especially in France. Hayashi was born in Toyama, and learned French when he was young. He became the first student of the University of Tokyo, but when the 1878 Universal Exhibition opened in Paris, he left the university and travelled to France as an interpreter at the exhibition that year, remaining in Paris after it closed and working briefly as a dealer in Japanese works of art for companies such as the Kiryû Kôshô Kaisha and Mitsui Bussan, which opened just after the exhibition in order to sell the contents of exhibits that had not been taken back to Japan. He then opened his own shop in Cité d’Hauteville and later on Rue de la Victoire in Paris. The earlier 1867 exhibition could have provided an opportunity to spread awareness of ukiyo-e prints in France, but in fact the Japanese officials who participated in the event were unaware of the intense popularity that had already developed in Paris, themselves regarding these prints as

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only the sort of souvenirs that could be given to provincials to take home with them after a visit to Edo. The Tokugawa delegation of the Universal Exhibition brought 5,500 prints to Paris, but we do not know what happened to these prints because no records were created or kept of them being sold after it closed. My hypothesis is that they might have been given away to the visitors of the Japanese pavilion, which would explain why a wave of japonisme began to spread widely among Parisians. The Meiji government, which took over from the Tokugawa government the following year, pursued a similar policy, showing so little interest in ukiyo-e that not a single print was displayed at the 1878 exhibition.15 Hayashi’s decision to take up print dealing was probably prompted by his awareness of the success enjoyed by dealers in Paris, such as Madame Desoye who had a shop of japonaiserie on the Rue de Rivoli, and shops such as those run by Philippe Sichel and Siegfried Bing as well as other entrepreneurs who imported their stock directly from Japan. For example, Bing opened a Yokohama branch and his brother bought objects in Japan and exported them to Paris. Realizing that he needed a partner in Japan to acquire prints while he himself remained in Paris, Hayashi returned home in 1886 after an eight-year absence, and opened a branch of his business, training his staff in how to successfully acquire prints. Since pieces acquired in Japan for a few sen or yen could be sold in France for ten or even 100 times as much, his business was highly profitable and a number of imitators and rivals soon emerged. Kobayashi Bunshichi (1864–1923)16 started as a dealer of ukiyo-e prints in Tokyo and later opened shop in San Francisco, while companies such as Yamanaka and Yoshizawa, who specialized in Japanese goods, developed new markets in the United States. Kobayashi tried to organize several exhibitions in Japan, but few were interested. In 1892 he succeeded in mounting the first ukiyo-e exhibition in Tokyo, which consisted of 150 paintings and forty prints. Hayashi contributed an introduction to the catalogue in which he mentioned the opinions of several foreign collectors, such as Duret, Charles Havilland (1839–1921), Louis Gonse, Edmond de Goncourt, and Philippe Burty. In their view, ukiyo-e prints and paintings deserved to be ranked alongside the paintings of such Western masters as Watteau and Rubens. The best way to stimulate interest in ukiyo-e prints among the Japanese public, who were still largely unaware of their merit, was to stress the very high regard in which these works were held in Europe. The individuals who loaned pieces to this first large-scale ukiyo-e exhibition in Japan were some of the earliest Japanese collectors in the field. Those listed by name in the catalogue included not only well-known figures such as Hayashi and Kobayashi but also more than thirty others, among them Wakai Kanesaburô (1834–1908), Masuda Takashi (1848–1938), Nagasaki Senri, Honma Kôsô (1841–1909), and Hirakawa Kenkichi.17 In 1897 Kobayashi staged the second ukiyo-e exhibition that drew exclusively on his own collection and included about 230 paintings and thirty prints. In the catalogue introduction he lamented that ukiyo-e was held in such low esteem in Japan and warned that if this situation were to continue, all of the finest examples would disappear from Japan and go abroad. Kobayashi held another exhibition the following year, and this time the catalogue introduction and entries were written by Fenollosa. There were 300 items, which were divided almost equally between paintings and prints.18

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Ukiyo-e prints were still being published in Japan as records of current events, including many graphic depictions of the Sino-Japanese (1894–5) and Russo-Japanese (1904–5) Wars. There were also outsized actor portraits by Kunichika and his pupils, Chikanobu and Chikashige, and reprints of compositions by Hiroshige, many of them despised by the intellectuals for their cheap quality and garish, predominantly red hues. In addition, countless reprints were made of rare mid-Edo-period prints. In an age when the concept of the “original” was not widely appreciated, all prints were accorded the same low value. As discussed above, Sharaku was not yet appreciated by the Japanese, and copies of his work were made to be sold to foreign customers. Sharaku’s reputation was so poor that he faded into oblivion within about a year. Yet some of his ôkubi prints preserved in foreign museums today have many variations. How could Sharaku have made all of them in only ten months? Scholars suspect that many of the prints were made during the early Meiji for the Western market, but that we can no longer distinguish them from genuine prints because at that time craftsmen could still produce prints as beautiful as those of a half century before. Along with the individuals mentioned above in connection with the 1892 exhibition, other Japanese collectors in the first decade of the twentieth century included Kuki Ryûichi (1852–1931), the vice minister of education; Hattori Ichizô (1851–1929), a businessman and member of the congress; and Miyatake Gaikotsu (1867–1955), a publisher and scholar. Miyatake wrote several books on ukiyo-e including Hishikawa Moronobu gafu (An Album of Works by Hishikawa Moronobu) in 1909. In 1910 he published the founding issue of Konohana, the first Japanese publication devoted to research on ukiyo-e art. Unfortunately, his somewhat contrary nature, which led to his being arrested on several occasions, tended to put off potential students of Japanese prints.19 But overall, these people were interested in ukiyo-e paintings more than prints. The publication of Kurth’s study on Sharaku in 1910 brought about a decisive change in Japanese attitudes toward ukiyo-e prints. In the beginning of the Meiji era, the government had discovered the importance of Germany in the fields of medicine, law, and technology, and employed many German experts. Many Japanese people were familiar with the German language, and could read Kurth’s book. During the Edo period Ukiyo-e ruikô only made a few passing and generally unfavorable mentions of Sharaku. While exhibitions organized by Kobayashi, Hayashi, and Fenollosa did not ignore him completely, they gave him only token acknowledgement, including just a handful of his works.20 Kurth’s publication, which introduced fifty-nine of Sharaku’s prints, elevated this virtually unknown individual to the status of a portrait artist of global significance. Beginning in 1909, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris held a series of major ukiyo-e exhibitions. The first featured Moronobu and other early artists, the exhibition in the following year focused on Harunobu and Shunshô, and the exhibition in 1911 was an ambitious survey of the work of Kiyonaga and Sharaku. It included 105 different prints by Sharaku, far more than had been published by Kurth the previous year.21 Kurth’s book made a dramatic impact on its Japanese readers and exerted a powerful influence on those scholars who had continued to regard ukiyo-e as an inferior,

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plebeian art form, and now saw that Sharaku was given a major exhibition in Paris and treated as a portrait artist of global importance. Yet its influence was not immediate. It was not until four or five years after its publication, following an initial reassessment of ukiyo-e as a genre, and tentative attempts at research and historical investigation, that Japanese studies of prints began to appear in appreciable quantities. Starting with the publication by Sakai Kôkodô in 1915 of the first issue of the journal Ukiyo-e, a number of specialist writers emerged, including Inoue Kazuo (1889–1946), a future scholar of ukiyo-e; Kojima Usui (1873–1948), a banker and collector of Hiroshige, who became the pioneer of mountain climbing in Japan; Hashiguchi Goyô (1881–1921), a painter and scholar of ukiyo-e; Ishii Kendô (1865–1943), a scholar of popular culture; Uchida Minoru, the first scholar specialist of Hiroshige; Fujikake Shizuya (1881–1958), a professor of the University of Tokyo and art historian; and Nagai Kafû (1879–1959), the famous novelist, who discovered the studies of ukiyo-e by French collectors and introduced them to Japan. Others reacted adversely to Kurth’s approach to Sharaku. The German author had suggested that Sharaku’s period of activity could be divided into three broad phases, assigning the hosoban to the early period and the ôban to the middle and late periods. He believed that Sharaku had published from the Tenmei period (1781–88) until the early Kansei period (1789–1800) and that toward the end of his career he had taken the pseudonym Kabukidô Enkyô. Since Kurth had no access to kabuki theatrical records when he undertook his study, he based his periodization on an analysis of stylistic change (which at the time formed the basis of Western art-historical methodology). Regarding the technically immature standing portraits as products of Sharaku’s apprenticeship and the gorgeously printed large-head portraits with mica-decorated backgrounds as the pinnacle of his achievement, Kurth’s less-than-perfect appreciation of Japanese cultural and theatrical history made him a target for critics. Although he had, in a sense, “discovered” Sharaku, he was often dismissed as possessing no true knowledge of Japan. Kurth’s Japanese critics were especially irked by their contention that Sharaku’s merits should have been first pointed out by a foreigner, rather than a Japanese. This stimulated new and serious study of ukiyo-e art in Japan, where it had previously been consistently ignored. For many years, while one could be proud to own a collection of landscape paintings or narrative scrolls by artists of the academic school such as Tosa school, Kanô school, or Rinpa school, possession of an ukiyo-e collection had been almost a matter of shame. The important part played by shunga, erotic prints, within the genre was an obstacle to a more widespread social acceptance. Foreign appreciation of ukiyo-e art, however, fueled its academic recognition within Japan. The scholars listed above also owned Japanese prints but did not think that they were important until this time, and after the publication of Ukiyo-e, many exhibitions were held. A number of other leading collectors began to loan works to ukiyo-e exhibitions, including Watanabe Shôzaburô (1885–1962), an ukiyo-e dealer; Kubota Beisen (1852-1906), a painter; Hirose Tatsugorô (1906–94), an ukiyo-e publisher; Urushiyama Tendô (1873–1948), a specialist of Japanese literature; Sasagawa Rinpû (1870–1949); and Mihara Shigekichi, a leading businessman and president of Japan Mail Shipping Line, along with those who had been collecting since the Meiji period

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such as Kobayashi, Sakai Shôkichi (Kôkodô), and Matsuki Zen’emon. However, such a huge quantity of ukiyo-e prints had already left Japan by this time, when only a small number of the finest prints of Utamaro, Sharaku, and other leading figures were still in Japan. Hence, Hayashi’s heirs were, for many years after his death, even blamed for his business and Tadamasa was seen as a villain who had betrayed his country by selling so many prints abroad. In 1921, the first Ukiyo-e Society was established by Tokugawa Yorisada (1892– 1954), Mihara Shigekichi, and Inoue Kazuo. This was the first society of ukiyo-e amateurs, scholars, and collectors in Japan. The journal The Study of Ukiyo-e was published and Inoue became chief editor. The combined issue number 13–14, published in November 1925, contains the list of members, which includes the leading collectors of ukiyo-e prints of the time: Iwanami Shigeo (1881–1946), the founder of the Iwanami publishing company; Torii Kotondo (1900–76), the heir of the Torii school of theater prints; Yamamura Kôka (1885–1942), one of the last ukiyo-e painters; Yashiro Yukio (1890–1975), a specialist of Western painting; Matsuki Zen’emon; and others.22 The collection formed by Kobayashi, then regarded as the greatest in Japan, was destroyed in the great Kanto earthquake of 1923, including 2,000 paintings and 100,000 prints. Fortunately, in 1918, Matsukata Kôjirô (1866–1950), a businessman and president of the Kawasaki Dockyards, succeeded in buying back the largest and finest collection of ukiyo-e prints in the world from the French jeweler Henri Vever (1854–1942). This collection was housed in the Tokyo National Museum. At last, Japan could boast an outstanding collection of ukiyo-e prints. Connoisseurs such as Nagase Takerô also started to form smaller collections by buying prints at foreign auctions, but setbacks occurred some years later with extensive losses during the Second World War. Not much information is available about the collections that survived the war, making it difficult to trace their subsequent history. Rises in the commercial value of ukiyo-e meant that prints that had once been considered almost worthless were now subject to swinging inheritance taxes, with the result that many collectors’ names remained hidden.23 Some ukiyo-e collections and museums were also established recently in Japan.24 Japan succeeded in regaining many ukiyo-e prints and paintings from abroad, yet the most valuable and rare prints of the eighteenth century are now housed in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of New York, and other important museums in the world. This situation saved ukiyo-e from quite a few disasters: thousands of prints survived both the great Kanto earthquake in 1923 and the American bombings during the Second World War. While Japanese people had no interest in ukiyo-e prints, many European and American scholars and collectors studied them and published numerous books on Japanese woodblock prints. When the Japanese government recognized the importance of Japanese arts, the law prohibiting the exportation of artistic objects was created in 1897. Unfortunately, this law also prohibited the exportation of many contemporary forms of art, preventing foreigners from appreciating them. Consequently, there are

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few collectors of modern Japanese paintings. Today ukiyo-e is the only Japanese form of art that is internationally studied.

Notes 1 Ukiyo-e literally means “image of the floating world.” The term refers to works representing scenes of everyday life and the entertainment business like kabuki or courtesans. These topics could be treated both in prints and paintings. 2 Kabuki theater was first born in Kyoto, then developed in Osaka, Nagoya, and Edo. In the beginning actors were women but as they played erotic scenes and caused public disorder they were replaced by men in the middle of the seventeenth century. 3 There are different sizes of prints but the basic one is ôban (39 × 26.5 cm). The chûban size is 26.5 × 19.5 cm and the smallest, koban, is 19.5 × 13 cm. There are also oblong prints such as tanzakuban (39 × 9 cm) or large Oo-Tanzakuban (39 × 18 cm) and hosoban (33 × 15-6 cm). 4 Narazaki Muneshige, Ukiyo-e taikei, Moronobu, Ukiyo-e Masterpieces, vol. 1, Moronobu (Tokyo: Shûeisha, 1976), 123. 5 Sasaya Kuninori (n.d.), a poet and private scholar; Santô Kyôden (1761–1816), an ukiyo-e artist and novelist; Shikitei Sanba (1776–1822), a pharmacist and novelist; Keisai Eisen (1779–1848), an ukiyo-e artist; and Saitô Gesshin (1804–78), a landlord and private scholar. 6 Urushibata Shôkôbô, “Saitô Gesshin Nikki shû” (Selections from the Diaries of Saitô Gesshin), Kikan Ukiyo-e, 74 (Tokyo: Gabundô July 1978), 44–50. 7 This reputation was famous among Japanese scholars but its origin is not clear. Kurth’s book mentions neither Rembrandt nor Velázquez. 8 Ichikawa Yaozô II (1747–1818) took the name Suketakaya Takasuke II in 1804, indicating that the inscription referring to him could not have been written before the early Bunka era (1804–18). There are several similar examples of early inscriptions on Sharaku prints, some of them quite incorrect such as the words “Nakamura Utaemon” added to an ôkubie print of Tanimura Torazô (British Museum) and the words “Matsumoto Kôshirô” added to a print of Ichikawa Komazô (Riccar Art Museum). In the case of the Sharaku hosoban prints discussed here, however, the writing is clearly all from the same hand. This is the only known example of a group of more than twenty prints of the same type, suggesting that they were assembled by a collector who deliberately set out to put together a coherent body of work in a particular format and by a particular artist. 9 Kyôsai’s collecting activities were well known. In his Shodai Rinrôkaku Shujin to sono shûhen (Rinrôkaku Shujin I and His Circle), Saitô Kenzô mentions that around 1879–80 “Kawanabe Kyôsai who lived at Daikonbata in Hongô also owned large quantities of nishikie.” See Sorimachi Shigeo, Shimi no mukashigatari (Tales of a Bookworm) (Tokyo: Yagi Shoten, 1987), 117. Kyôsai’s collection included not only ukiyo-e but works in many other genres as well. 10 Sakai Tôbei was the eighth heir of the rich Sakai family in Matsumoto, Nagano. His parents and grandparents had met Hokusai, Hiroshige, and other ukiyo-e artists. Tôbei moved from Matsumoto to Tokyo in 1870 and opened an ukiyo-e shop in

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1874. Matsuki Zen’emon was a merchant in Kyoto and opened an ukiyo-e shop in the beginning of the Meiji era. 11 The date 1879 is recorded in some sources, but since Matsuki was born in 1864 it is hard to believe that he began his business at the age of fifteen, and it is more likely that he started a few years later. 12 Some scholars mention the first name of Bing as Samuel, but the name engraved on his tomb is Siegfried. He usually signed only S. Bing but on some official papers, he used the name Samuel. 13 Duret came to Japan in 1871 and Sichel in 1872. Guimet and Régamey came in 1876, spending three months in the country and forming a large collection of ukiyo-e prints. In the mid-1870s Bing started a company in Yokohama that traded in works of art and other items. Bing sold to Japanese people through that company or to foreigners who came to Yokahama. 14 Both Anderson and Netto came to Japan in 1873, the former as a naval physician, the latter as a specialist in metallurgy. Chiossone, who arrived in 1875, advised on the printing of paper money, share certificates, and postage stamps. The zoologist Morse and Baelz, who taught medicine at the University of Tokyo, came in 1877. Both Conder, who taught architecture and arrived in 1877, and Fenollosa, who taught philosophy and social sciences and came in 1878, formed particularly large collections of ukiyo-e. Even those for whom ukiyo-e prints were their main collecting interest also made acquisitions in other areas of Japanese art. 15 Because the Meiji authorities regarded international exhibitions as an opportunity to show off new technology, they mainly sent craft goods and industrial products and did not display any fine art at this time. The only work of visual art shown in Paris in 1878, an oil painting by Takahashi Yuichi (1828–94) mounted as a screen, was sent as an industrial product. It is quite clear that both the Tokugawa and the Meiji government failed to appreciate the commercial potential of ukiyo-e. 16 Kobayashi Bunshichi began his career as an ukiyo-e dealer in Hayashi’s shop, then opened his own shop and became publisher under the name of Hôsûkaku in the 1890s. He made three exhibitions of ukiyo-e in Tokyo in 1892, 1897, and 1898. He published Hokusai, the first biography of Hokusai by Iijima Kyoshin in 1893, which Edmond de Goncourt used to write his own biography of Hokusai. It was Hayashi who helped to translate the text into French. 17 Wakai Kanesaburô had been a collaborator of Hayashi’s ever since the 1878 Paris Exhibition. The well-known collector Masuda Takashi focused mainly on traditional arts from earlier periods but also acquired ukiyo-e paintings. Nagasaki Senri was Hayashi’s younger brother and was adopted by the Nagasaki family. Honma Kôsô was a member of the Honma family of Sakata, in the Yamagata Prefecture. Hirakawa Kenkichi was a Tokyo employee of Yamanaka and Co. Most of the exhibits, however, were simply described as having been loaned by “a gentleman” and it is thought that Kobayashi may have lent anonymously. It is possible that these prints were sold on the occasion of the exhibition and the names of collectors were hidden. 18 It is worth noting that these early exhibitions focused on paintings, as opposed to prints. Masuda Takashi and other collectors of traditional art could only see value in ukiyo-e paintings mounted as hanging scrolls, and in the case of the 1897 exhibition, the catalogue simply mentions “30 prints” at the end of a detailed listing of 230 paintings. It was not until later that ukiyo-e prints came to be widely appreciated.

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19 When the Meiji Constitution was promulgated in 1889, Miyatake published a satirical cartoon that depicted the emperor as a skeleton, a serious offense which resulted in three years of imprisonment. The experience did nothing to change his attitude and after his release he endured further periods in jail as well as seeing his publications banned as punishment for reprinting shunga prints, in contravention of laws designed to uphold public morals, or being openly critical of the government. 20 The 1892 exhibition featured one painting by Sharaku, Ichikawa Danjûrô Playing the Shibaraku Scene and one print, Actor Portrait with a Mica-Treated Background. In 1898 only one actor print was displayed. Fenollosa acknowledged his genius at the same time, saying that “Sharaku almost made a cult of the ugly and grotesque, and as such he must be regarded as the most decadent of all artists in a period of general decadence.” 21 This series of exhibitions at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs was recorded in six sumptuous volumes published by Vignier and Inada. The Sharaku prints were loaned by virtually all the leading French collectors of the day, including Vever, Doucet, Rouart, Camondo, Rivière, Javal, Koechlin, Cosson, Havilland, Bing, and Gillot. Their contribution to the exhibition drew attention to the fact that Sharaku had been well known in France before Kurth, and demonstrated their deeply felt hostility toward his book. It is often claimed, without total justification, that Sharaku was completely ignored during the Meiji period. In fact his exceptional qualities were recognized in both France and Germany and there were collectors who acquired examples of his work, with the inevitable result that he became more widely known. In Japan, too, the Japanese dealers were aware of his existence, realizing that when a print by Sharaku came on the market it could easily be sold abroad. In fact, we see seven prints by Sharaku presented at the famous 1890 Ecole des Beaux-Arts exhibition. Five of them were presented by Bing, one by Clemenceau and the one by Tanguy. See Catalogue de l’Exposition de la Gravure Japonaise, 24. 22 The Society included among others, Ishii Kendô, a famous scholar of popular ethnology; Ochiai Naonari, one of the first collectors of ukiyo-e prints; Watanabe Shôzaburô, a publisher of ukiyo-e and shin-hanga prints; Uchida Minoru, a specialist of Hiroshige; Kuroda Genji, a specialist of Osaka prints; Kuwabara Yôjirô (1868–1956), one of the first collectors; Matsuki Kihachirô, the son of Matsuki Zen’emon; Fujikake Shizuya (1881–1958), a professor of the University of Tokyo; Satô Shôtarô, a publisher of shin-hanga; Sakai Shôkichi (1878–1942), an ukiyo-e merchant and one of the first collectors; Miyao Shigeo (1902–1982), a specialist of popular culture; Shibui Kiyoshi (1899–1992), a specialist of ukiyo-e; Shigyô Hiromichi (1853–1927), a scholar and businessman; Hirose Tatsugorô, a publisher of ukiyo-e prints; Hirakawa Kenkichi, a collector and dealer; and Suzuki Toranosuke, a businessman and collector. 23 The following listing is therefore confined to the principal collections formed since the Meiji period which still exist today and are on permanent display in Japan. Examples include Iwasaki Kyûya’s collection in the Tôyô Bunko (Tôyô library); Sakai Tôbei and Sakai Shôkichi in the Nihon Ukiyo-e hakubutsukan (The Japan Ukiyo-e Museum); Matsuki Zen’emon, Mihara Shigekichi and Hiraki Shinji in the Hiraki bijutsukan (Hiraki Art Museum); Hirose Kinosuke in the Kamakura Nikaidô bunko (Nikaidô Library, Kamakura); Takahashi Seiichirô in Keiô gijuku daigaku (Keiô University); Nagase Takerô and Ôta Seizô in the Ôta kinen bijutsukan (Ôta Memorial Museum of Art); Ujiie Takeo in the Ujiie Ukiyo-e korekushon, hosted in the Kamakura kokuhôkan

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(Ujiie Ukiyo-e Collection, Kamakura Museum); Tanba Tsuneo in the Kanagawa kenritsu hakubutsukan (Kanagawa Prefectural Museum); and Mizuta Mikio in the Jôsai daigaku Mizuta bijutsukan (Mizuta Museum of Art, Jôsai University); as well as the private collectors Uchiyama Susumu, Aoki Tetsuo and Adachi Toyohisa. Among other important holdings, mention should be made of the priceless collections of theatrical prints in the Waseda daigaku Tsubouchi hakase engeki hakubutsukan (The Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University) and the Tôkyô kokuritsu gekijô (National Theatre, Tokyo), the collection of Kamigata-e in the Hankyû gakuen Ikeda Bunko (Ikeda Library, Hankyû Institut), and important groups of prints owned as part of their wider collections of Japanese art by museums and galleries such as the MOA bijutsukan (MOA Museum of Art, Atami), the Seikadô bunko (Seikadô Collection) and the Idemitsu bijutsukan (Idemitsu Art Museum). 24 They include Chiba-shi bijutsukan (Chiba City Museum, Chiba), Edo Tôkyô hakubutsukan (Edo-Tokyo Museum, Tokyo), Hara Yasusaburô collection, Hishikawa Moronobu bijutsukan (Hishikawa Moronobu Museum, Chiba), Hokusai-kan (Hokusai Museum, Nagano), Isago-no-sato shiryôkan (Isago-no-sato Museum, Kawasaki), Itabashi kuritsu bijutsukan (Itabashi Ward Museum, Tokyo), Kawanabe Kyôsai kinen bijutsukan (Kawanabe Kyôsai Memorial Museum, Saitama), Kumon kodomo kenkyûjo collection (Kumon Institut of Education), Nakagawamachi Batô Hiroshige bijutsukan (Nakagawamachi Batô Hiroshige Museum, Tochigi), Nakasendô Hiroshige bijutsukan (Nakasendô Hiroshige Museum, Gifu), Sumô hakubutsukan (Sumô Museum, Tokyo), Tabako to shio no hakubutsukan (Tobacco and Salt Museum, Tokyo), Tendô Hiroshige bijutsukan (Tendô Hiroshige Museum, Yamagata), Tôkaidô Hiroshige bijutsukan (Tôkaidô Hiroshige Museum, Shizuoka), and Yamaguchi kenritsu Hagi bijutsukan Uragami kinenkan (Uragami Memorial Museum, Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum, Hagi). For full details see Nagata Seiji, Nihon no Ukiyo-e bijutsukan (Ukiyo-e museums in Japan), six volumes, Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1996.

Selected Bibliography The chronological order chosen here shows clearly that foreign studies were predominant in the beginning, and that Japanese research came later. Ôta, Nanpo. Ukiyo-e Ruikô, 1795–1800? Chesneau, Ernest. L’Art japonais, conférence faite à l’Union centrale des Beaux-Arts appliqués à l’Industrie. Paris: A. Morel, 1869. Sichel, Philippe. Notes d’un bibeloteur au Japon. Paris: Dentu, 1883. Gonse, Louis. L’Art japonais, 2 vols. Paris: Quintin, 1883. Gonse, Louis. Catalogue de l’Exposition Rétrospective de l’Art japonais. Paris: Quintin, 1883. Anderson, William. A Collection of Japanese and Chinese Paintings in the British Museum. London: Longmans & Co, B. Quaritch, Trübner & Co, 1886. Burlington Fine Arts Club. Catalogue of prints and books. London: Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1888. Huish, Marcus B. Japan and Its Art. London: Fine Art Society, 1889.

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Bing, Siegfried, ed. Le Japon artistique, 36 vols. Paris: Charles Gillot, 1889–1891. Exposition de la gravure japonaise ouverte à l’École des Beaux-Arts. Paris: Bing, 1890. Collection Philippe Burty. Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1891. de Goncourt, Edmond. Outamaro – le peintre des maisons vertes. Paris: Charpentier, 1891. Hayashi, Tadamasa. Ukiyo-e tenrankai hinmoku (List of the works in the Ukiyo-e exhibition). Tokyo: Kobayashi Bunshichi, 1892. Iijima, Kyoshin. Hokusai. Toyko: Hôsûkaku, 1893. de Goncourt, Edmond. Hokusaï. Paris: Charpentier, 1896. Revon, Michel. Études sur Hokusai. Paris: Lecène, Oudin, 1896. Fenollosa, Ernest F. The Masters of Ukiyoe. New York: Ketcham, 1896. Kobayashi, Bunshichi. Ukiyo-e rekishi tenrankai hinmoku (List of the works in the Historical Ukiyo-e exhibition). Tokyo: Kobayashi Bunshichi, 1897. Objets d’Arts japonais, collection Edmond de Goncourt. Paris: Hôtel Drouot, 1897. von Seidlitz, Woldemar. Geschichte des Japanischen Farbenholzschitts. Dresden: Gerhard Kühtmann, 1897. Kobayashi, Bunshichi. Ukiyo-e tenrankai mokuroku (Catalogue of the works in the Ukiyo-e exhibition). Tokyo: Hôsûkaku, 1898. Duret, Théodore. Livres & albums illustrés du Japon. Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1900. Fenollosa, Ernest F. An Outline of the History of Ukiyo-e. Tokyo: Kobayashi Bunshichi, 1901. Collection Hayashi Tadamasa, 3 vols. Paris: Hôtel Drouot, 1902–1903. Collection Pierre Barboutau. Paris: Philippe Renouard, 1904. Collection Charles Gillot. Paris: Hôtel Drouot, 1904. Strange, Edward. Japanese Colour Prints. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1904. Tei-San (Comte de Tressan). Notes sur l’art japonais. Paris: Mercure de France, 1905. Migeon, Gaston. Au Japon. Paris: Hachette, 1908. Catalogue of the Happer Collection-Hiroshige. London: Sotheby, 1909. Vignier- Inada catalogues, 6 vols. Paris: Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 1909–1914. Kurth, Julius. Sharaku. München and Leipzig: Piper, 1910. Kurth, Julius. Suzuki Harunobu. München and Leipzig: Piper, 1910. Miyatake, Gaikotsu, ed. Konohana (These Flowers), 24 vols. Osaka: Gazoku bunko, 1910–1912. Conder, Josiah. Paintings and Studies by Kawanabe Kyosai. Tokyo: Maruzen Kabushiki Kaisha, 1911. Gookin, Frederic W. Japanese Colour-Prints and Their Designers. New York: The Japan Society, 1913. Aubert, Louis. Les Maîtres de l’Estampe japonaise. Paris: Armand Colin, 1914. Lemoisne, P. André. L’Estampe japonaise. Paris: Bibliothèque d’Art et d’Histoire, 1914. Ficke, Arthur Davidson. Chats on Japanese Prints. London: Ernest Benn, 1915. Sakai, Kôko-dô (Sakai Shôkichi), ed. Ukiyo-e, 55 vols. Tokyo: Ukiyo-e sha, 1915–1920. Kubota, Beisai and others, ed. Nishiki-e, 38 vols. Tokyo: Fûzoku emaki zuga kankôkai, 1917–1923. Inoue, Kazuo, ed. Ukiyo-e no kenkyû (Studies in Ukiyo-e), 23 vols. Tokyo: Nihon Ukiyo-e Kyôkai, 1921–1929. Succo, Friedrich. Katsukawa Shunsho. Dresden: Schulz, 1922. Migeon, Gaston. L’Estampe japonaise, 2 vols. Paris: Albert Morancé, 1923.

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Norton Brown, Louise. Block Printing and Book Illustration in Japan. New-York: Routledge, 1924. Ômagari, Kuson, ed. Ukiyo-e shi, 32 vols. Toyko and Kyoto: Unsôdô, 1929–1931. Rumpf, Fritz. Sharaku. Berlin: Würfel, 1932. Narasaki, Muneshige, ed. Ukiyo-e Geijutsu (The Art of Ukiyo-e), 44 vols. Tokyo: Taihôkaku and Kôgeisha, 1932–1935. Henderson, Harold G. and Louis V. Ledoux. The Surviving Works of Sharaku. New York: Weyhe, 1939.

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Building Hemispheric Unity to Serve Corporate Identity: IBM’s Collection of Prints from the Americas Rachel Kaplan

In 1924 under the leadership of Thomas J. Watson, Sr., the thirteen-year-old ComputingTabulating-Recording Company changed its name to the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), reflecting the broadening range of devices it sold as well as Watson’s ambitions for worldwide reach.1 Over the following decades, IBM opened offices and plants in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America, a multinational expansion that supported Watson’s idealistic slogan of “World Peace through World Trade.”2 In 1937 at Watson’s behest, IBM began collecting paintings from countries where it did business, initiating the company’s fine arts department and an early model of corporate collecting in line with Watson’s global vision for his company. The collection soon expanded into other formats, including prints, drawings, sculpture, and ceramics, and circulated publicly through touring exhibitions. Prints could be quickly acquired and easily transported, making IBM’s expanding collection of graphic art a privileged component of such presentations. In numerous public statements Watson asserted his belief in the power of art as a tool to foster relations, linking art, trade, and diplomacy in the formation and dissemination of IBM’s public image. In the early 1940s IBM’s art programs focused on exchanges with Latin America, responding to wartime imperatives of cultural diplomacy. With the outbreak of the Second World War, the threat of neighboring countries joining opposing sides reinvigorated the rhetoric of pan-Americanism and Good Neighbor Policy that had shaped relations between Latin America and the United States during the 1930s. A US foreign policy that opposed military intervention in Latin America, the Good Neighbor Policy came to encompass ideas of cultural diplomacy as it promoted trade and cooperation. These ideas manifested themselves in the arts in a variety of ways including museum exhibitions of Latin American art and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s creation of the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA) in 1940, which leveraged art exhibitions and other cultural programs to keep political and economic pathways open with Latin America.3 By organizing similar exhibitions through a corporation rather than a cultural institution or government initiative, IBM’s art

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program introduced commercial motivations in line with related projects promoting reciprocal understanding through art. In assembling and circulating a collection of prints from the Americas, IBM embraced ideas about the corporation’s unifying role in the international sphere and the relationship between art and business. The idea of using art to facilitate understanding between the US corporation and its neighboring countries resulted in a two-pronged effort beginning in 1941: circulating art from the United States abroad, and from Latin America within the United States. Bringing together artworks from North, Central, and South America under the framework of the Western Hemisphere, the organization of these projects attempted to promote a shared identity and created a supposed geographic rather than ideological category for the art. However, as has been argued by Walter Mignolo, the “Western Hemisphere” itself is an imaginary symbolic structure which gained prevalence at the end of the nineteenth century.4 According to Mignolo, the idea of the “Western Hemisphere” first appeared on maps at the end of the eighteenth century. It became solidified 100 years later following the Spanish-American War as President Theodore Roosevelt asserted the autonomy of the Americas—and specifically the United States— against European interventions. From a business perspective, it was beneficial for IBM to embrace this imagined space of the Western Hemisphere to promote a context for facilitating trade and commerce within the region. Stemming from a shared idea, IBM’s two traveling exhibitions demonstrate important distinctions in their approach to conceptualizing the hemisphere. Arte gráfico del hemisferio occidental (Graphic Art of the Western Hemisphere) comprised prints from eighteen countries including Canada and the United States and traveled to museums and cultural centers throughout Latin America. Organized for audiences in the United States, Seventy-Five Latin-American Prints also featured works representing eighteen countries, substituting Chile, Colombia, and Nicaragua for Canada, Puerto Rico, and the United States.5 Including Puerto Rico as a “Latin American Republic” in Arte gráfico but not Seventy-Five Latin American Prints suggests nuanced ideas of identity based on the intended audience, undermining the corporation’s overarching claims of unity. While these two exhibitions have been noted for their circulation of prints, either in the United States or Latin America, they have not been analyzed together or as part of a larger corporate project. As this chapter will demonstrate, an understanding of IBM’s self-envisioned role in the global field emerges by considering IBM’s exhibitions and collection of prints from the Americas in the context of corporate collecting as well as circulating inter-American exhibitions of the 1940s.

Art, Business, Politics, and the Birth of the IBM Permanent Collection Contextualizing the IBM Permanent Collection in a broader history of corporate collecting demonstrates the distinctive nature of the assembly and circulation of IBM’s prints from the Americas. The relationship between art, business, and politics has



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a long history, often tied back to the Medici family and the legacy of its members as important patrons of the Renaissance. In the United States, modern corporate art collecting is routinely traced to 1959, when David Rockefeller established the art collection for the Chase Manhattan Bank.6 Earlier connections between art and industry related more specifically to design commissions and commercial art. The piano manufacturers Steinway & Sons, for instance, began commissioning paintings to be reproduced as advertisements and form the basis of a paintings collection in the 1910s.7 In one such commission, Beethoven and Nature of 1917, N. C. Wyeth painted the composer in an original artwork that related directly to the company’s interests and could be used to promote Steinway pianos.8 In 1937 the Chicago-based Container Corporation of America began commissioning artists to create advertisements that would promote not just the cardboard box company and its products, but modern art and design as well.9 The Steinway and Container Corporation collections emerged from these advertising purposes, rather than as separate entities motivated by the act of collecting and display.10 Also originating in 1937, IBM formed its fine-art collection by acquiring paintings from each of the seventy-nine countries where the corporation then conducted business. The collection’s public and bicoastal debut occurred through two simultaneous exhibitions in 1939. Contemporary Art of 79 Countries appeared in the IBM Gallery of Science and Art at the New York World’s Fair and the venue of the same name at Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco.11 By building the collection specifically with paintings by artists in countries where IBM did business, Watson and the fine arts department made an implicit connection between the nascent art program and corporate motivations. The seventy-nine paintings in each exhibition provided a physical illustration of the corporation’s global footprint. Presented at these grand international fairs alongside the latest technologies and office machines available from IBM, the collection suggested the corporation’s competitive role in global markets and its ability not only to sell machines but to buy fine art within such networks. In forming a stand-alone collection of paintings, rather than one of commissioned artworks connected to advertising, the IBM holdings represent a departure from previous programs of corporate collecting. Writing for the Magazine of Art in March 1946, art critic and educator Walter Abell identified this singularity in IBM’s collecting practices.12 For Abell, IBM’s collection of paintings initiated a new phase in the relationship between art and industry that removed art patronage from strictly advertising purposes such as in the case of the Container Corporation and sought to bolster the company’s “public relations.”13 The genesis of IBM’s fine arts collection in anticipation of the fairs—grand international showcases—underscores the act of public display as a key motive in building the collection. Providing a visible mechanism of outreach and marketing, the consequent exhibitions promoted the corporation and its global ambitions as a whole, rather than any specific product. However, Abell’s assessment does not account for the renewed wartime interest on behalf of the government in the utilization of art for diplomatic motives, which linked art and business with political interests. While operating on a commercial and public relations level, the IBM collection of prints from the Americas and its deployment

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through tours resonated with these programs and must be understood within this larger context. Furthermore, governments both at home and abroad represented important customers for IBM machines, providing further impetus for the corporation’s activities in the realm of cultural diplomacy to align with political initiatives. In the summer of 1941, the aforementioned OIAA sponsored La pintura contemporánea norteamericana, an exhibition of nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting from the United States. Organized jointly by the American Museum of Natural History, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and the Whitney Museum of American Art, the project circulated to ten cities in Latin America.14 The exhibition included 300 paintings and watercolors lent from these organizing institutions as well as a number of public and private collections.15 Boasting of a scope and quality “unequalled in American art history,” the OIAA show consisted exclusively of works by artists in the United States.16 To complete the exchange, in the following years the OIAA circulated three exhibitions of Latin American art in the United States through the joint efforts of MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Art. Following a brief preview at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in late April 1941, the exhibition traveled south, coinciding with IBM’s own circulating exhibitions in Latin America.17 The government- and business-sponsored exhibitions, however, differed greatly in their organizations and underpinnings. Whereas the OIAA exhibitions developed through loans, IBM owned all of the works in its presentations, working with local galleries to purchase works specifically with these exhibitions in mind. The corporation’s resources allowed this purchasing power and facilitated tours by assuming costs.18 Though organized independently, Arte gráfico often traveled with a complementary exhibition of paintings owned by IBM, Arte contemporáneo del hemisferio occidental (Contemporary Art of the Western Hemisphere), which contained ninety-three paintings and watercolors by artists from North, Central, and South America. In the catalogue preface for the latter exhibition, Watson explained that museum directors in Latin America had invited the corporation to send both the exhibitions of paintings and graphic arts.19 In these two exhibitions, IBM fashioned a display of hemispheric unity for its Latin American audiences by presenting works by their compatriots alongside those made in the United States and Canada. Rather than focusing on pan-American or inter-American terminologies, IBM organized the traveling exhibitions under consideration within the geographical framework of the Western Hemisphere. The conception of Arte gráfico and Seventy-Five Latin American Prints occurred within a larger program of touring exhibitions, again focused on the creative output of the region. IBM simultaneously presented exhibitions of its recently compiled collections of sculpture, ceramics, prints, and paintings, including Arte contemporáneo del hemisferio occidental (1941), Contemporary Art of the Western Hemisphere (1941), Contemporary Ceramics of the Western Hemisphere (1942), and Sculpture of the Western Hemisphere (1942). The titles of these exhibitions demonstrate a conscious insistence on a shared hemisphere as the overarching structure for these collections and presentations. Recognizing the distinctive emphasis of IBM’s collecting activities during these years, Fabiana Serviddio has credited the



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corporation with inventing the category of “hemispheric art” in her analysis of the history of exhibitions in creating understandings of Latin American art.20 In his brief forewords to the catalogues that accompanied these exhibitions, Watson commented on the “strong sense of hemisphere pride” felt by the United States “when we reflect on the achievements of our neighbors.”21 Watson effectively claimed neighboring artistic achievements both for his company and country, while promoting an image of unity that in turn served his corporation’s global ambitions. This hemispheric focus departed from IBM’s previous collecting patterns that encompassed the full range of the corporation’s international presence; however, the mechanisms and impetus for collecting remained the same. A brief foreword to the 1939 World’s Fair and Golden Gate exhibitions’ accompanying catalogues offers IBM’s strongest stated motive behind the collection and its debut within the international industrial showcases as creating a “universal kinship”: When we see what painters reveal, it increases our hope for better understanding among the peoples of the earth. We believe that all who view these paintings will recognize, through the many different forms of expression, traits common to all men which bind humanity together in universal kinship.22

In other words, the works of art on display were envisioned to create direct ties between viewers and the painters, who in turn were meant to simultaneously represent the experience of their home country and humanity at large. Of course, the corporation’s business interests guided these lofty aims, seeking to demonstrate IBM’s connections to art—and by extension to global business—in the public eye. Rather than simply employing local artists to advertise products abroad, IBM collected their works, recognizing existing cultural production and suggesting the corporation’s power to acquire it. In a 1937 statement regarding his involvement with the Exposition Internationale in Paris, Watson proposed that art would promote better trade relations and even provide the “shortest road to international peace.”23 At the same time, Watson was busy advocating for “World Peace through World Trade,” giving a keynote address on the subject at the Berlin Congress of the International Chamber of Commerce, for which he served as president.24 Defining world trade as the “exchange of goods and services among nations,” Watson’s understanding of art can be understood as part of this system of commercial transactions.25 The IBM art collection in effect became a visible manifestation of the ideological underpinnings of Watson’s global ambitions for his corporation. Promotional interest in the unifying power of art reappeared in 1941 through the touring exhibitions of prints from the Americas. Organized to travel across Canada, the United States, and Latin America, the exhibitions were accompanied by catalogues published in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Each catalogue included a brief introduction by Watson, a slightly longer statement by artist John Taylor Arms—who worked with IBM in assembling the collection—and a full checklist of each exhibition with artist biographies and reproductions. Watson’s introduction echoed his previous statements, writing: “In presenting graphic art of the Americas in this year, 1941, we

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once more affirm our faith that through the language of the artist people will be better able to recognize those traits common to all men which bind humanity together in universal kinship.”26 Again Watson and IBM capitalized on claims of kinship and humanity—now focused on affinities within the Americas—to suggest a unified bond between countries (and consumers) as illustrated through their transnational collection of prints. The consequent exhibitions strove to perform this unity as the works traveled across borders, an artistic stand-in to suggest IBM’s commercial networks traversing geopolitical boundaries. Turning now to a focus on the assembly and framing of the hemispheric print collection, I aim to evaluate the success and limitations of IBM’s approach.

IBM and Graphic Art of the Americas IBM’s print collection fit squarely within its larger fine arts program, mobilized to improve relationships in the countries where it conducted business and more broadly to promote the corporation’s embrace of neighborly ideals through visual displays. Following its established model of working with art experts, Watson and IBM enlisted the help of the recently formed American National Committee of Engraving (ANCE) and particularly its founder and president, the etcher John Taylor Arms, to acquire prints. An artist-run organization, the ANCE arranged exhibitions to promote printmaking in the United States. In late 1940, Arms and the ANCE organized American Printmaking, an exhibition of 101 prints by artists from Charles Willson Peale to Peggy Bacon. Shortly after the exhibition’s display at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, IBM purchased the entire group as its own collection of prints from the United States.27 In buying an already assembled body of works, the IBM agents did not participate in the curatorial selection of art, a typical trend of the corporation’s collecting practices. Presented by its new owners at the Grand Central Art Galleries in New York in February 1941, the acquired collection became the bulk of the traveling Arte gráfico. The ANCE’s partnership provided a fitting collaboration not only in the acquisition of holdings, but also in inspiring relations between the United States and Latin America through the circulation of prints. In December 1939, quoting Arms, the New York Times reported on the committee’s intention to organize a series of exchange exhibitions between the United States and Latin America.28 The aims of the ANCE therefore corresponded directly with Watson’s intended program of artistic exchange at IBM. To begin this series, Arms traveled to Mexico “to survey the contemporary graphic art of that country.”29 There he met with dealers Inés Amor of the Galería de Arte Mexicano and Alberto Misrachi of the Central Art Gallery, initiating relationships that led to an exhibition of modern Mexican prints for the 1940 season of the New York World’s Fair. This collection of 117 prints by twenty-six artists shown in the American Art Today Pavilion, located near IBM’s own Gallery of Science and Art, provided a likely point of contact between IBM and the ANCE and a merging of their interests. Through the financial support of IBM, the committee gained the resources to



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pursue its programs of exchange while in ANCE, the corporation found the expertise to assemble a print collection. For regional guidance in assembling IBM’s collection, Arms and the ANCE themselves turned to local advisers. The case of Mexico, identified by Arms as one of the “most active [countries] in this field” of contemporary prints, clearly illustrates how one facet of the collection, and one of the best-represented countries, came into being.30 Arms returned to the connections established over the course of planning the 1940 exhibition, working again with Amor and Misrachi. Gallery records show that Amor sent a selection of twenty-seven prints to ANCE to be sold to IBM in March 1941, including José Clemente Orozco’s lithograph Danzantes (Dancers) (Figure 5.1).31 From this group, Danzantes and four other prints traveled with Arte gráfico and an additional ten traveled with Seventy-Five Latin-American Prints. Created in 1934, after the artist returned to Mexico following a period in the United States, Danzantes was exhibited shortly thereafter in New York at Alma Reed’s Delphic Studios. Thanks to such exhibitions, as well as murals painted in California, New York, and New Hampshire, Orozco was one of the better-known artists for US audiences included in IBM’s collection. The print depicts a group of Indigenous dancers outside of a tavern that sells pulque, a fermented alcoholic beverage from the maguey plant. While a group of men perform a ritual dance, the figure closest to the viewer drinks pulque out of a jug while just behind him another man sleeps on the ground, cradling his jug as a pillow. Danzantes (alternately titled Pulquería, an establishment that sells the beverage) critiques stereotypical expectations of Indigenous people in postRevolutionary Mexico, especially by foreign audiences, eschewing the folkloric view embraced by several of Orozco’s contemporaries. The course of exchange charted

Figure 5.1  José Clemente Orozco, Pulquería (Danzantes), 1934, lithograph, Collection of the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Gift of Robert L. B. Tobin. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SOMAAP, Mexico.

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by this print demonstrates how the relationship with galleries in Latin American countries and other local specialists enabled Arms and the ANCE to assemble parts of IBM’s collection. Despite the stated aims of fostering understanding and dialogue, a bias on the part of the exhibition organizers is evident. In a review for ARTnews, Aline Kistler wrote of the collection’s cautious start, describing the argument that “outside of Argentina, Mexico and two or three other countries, ‘there was no printmaking.’”32 According to Kistler, “returning travelers, visiting nationals, even ‘art authorities’ in various countries” affirmed this point of view.33 Kistler’s statement exposes the organizers’ low expectations and preconceptions in gathering Latin American material for the print collection. Rather than being an independent reviewer, Kistler in fact served as the ANCE’s executive secretary and worked closely with Arms in assembling IBM’s collection, exhibitions, and corresponding catalogues. Kistler’s comments therefore represent the direct experience and perceptions of the ANCE organizers on behalf of IBM. Speaking specifically of Seventy-Five Latin American Prints, Kistler claimed that the exhibition proved that printmaking in the region was a “veritable Cinderella. . . . A princess of good will, holding in her hand the keys that should unlock any barrier to understanding the varied temperaments and cultures of LatinAmerica.”34 Characterizing the collective body of work as “Cinderella” communicated a patronizing outlook, even though assembling the collection presumably exposed the organizers to the breadth of prints available. In his catalogue foreword for the same exhibition, Arms similarly undervalued the Latin American prints by emphasizing perceived differences from their counterparts in the United States. He concluded that contemporary graphic work in Latin America, “if inclined to be somewhat less proficient technically by the standards of the English speaking printmakers, is none the less fresh and varied in spirit and strong in its expression.”35 Not only did Arms disparage the artistic merits of the Latin American prints, he made a distinction based on language, undercutting the exhibition’s intended message of unity. Within the Latin American prints, Arms privileged woodcuts as “stronger . . . than any other medium.”36 Relief prints represented half of the works included in Seventy-Five Latin American Prints, followed by intaglio prints, lithographs, and a monotype.37 Following the exhibition’s debut, a two-page spread in the New York Times Magazine celebrated the woodcut as “naturally lend(ing) itself to what may be called the ‘rough’ genius of the people who have undertaken the task of taming the biggest and wildest part of the hemisphere.”38 The reviewer drew a parallel between the “rough” woodcut and “wild” land. Kistler’s review praised woodcuts as well and included a reproduction of The High Plains by Camilo Blas (José Alfonso Sánchez Urteaga) (Figure 5.2). Associated with Peru’s Indigenist art movement, here Blas depicts scenes from daily life in the Altiplano or Collao, the high Andean plateau. While Blas’s work presented US audiences with a view of a perhaps unfamiliar place, the artist celebrated native Andean traditions and natural landscape as part of the national heritage of his country in a distinctly modernist visual mode. Children and Young Burros, an etching by the Argentinean Mauricio Lasansky, also features a pastoral scene (Figure 5.3). Playing with perspective, proportion, and patterning,



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Figure 5.2  Camilo Blas (José Alfonso Sánchez Urteaga), El Collao (The High Plains), 1934, woodcut, private collection, photograph by Daniel Giannoni, ARCHI, Archivo Digital de Arte Peruano. Lasansky’s work bears a surreal quality, demonstrating an exemplary alternative to the woodcuts the exhibition organizers foregrounded and hinting toward the breadth of the imagery presented. The organizers’ prejudices about Latin American printmaking carried over into the organization of Arte gráfico del hemisferio occidental. The larger of the two exhibitions, Arte gráfico heavily favored works by artists in the United States. Comprising a total of 151 works, Arte gráfico presented only thirty-nine prints from Latin America, half the number included in the corresponding show organized for audiences in the United States.39 Eleven prints by Canadian artists joined this grouping, while the remaining 101 prints presented the broad survey of printmaking in the United States acquired from the ANCE. The sections on Latin America and Canada featured exclusively contemporary prints, organized by country and province respectively, whereas the US section presented prints in chronological order, beginning with Peter Pelham’s portrait of Cotton Mather of 1727. The catalogue identified the portrait as the first mezzotint printed in North America, giving the collection a historical scope. The latest works were executed in 1940, the time of the collection’s assembly. While illustrating a long history of printmaking in the United States with works created in three centuries, the IBM collection’s prints from Latin America and Canada focused solely on contemporary production, falsely suggesting a lack of tradition in these regions. Though Arms acknowledged this discrepancy in his prologue to the catalogue, the unequal representation underscores the limits of the IBM print collection’s approach to the Western Hemisphere. In contrast to the foreword of Seventy-Five Prints, Arms’s Arte gráfico prologue barely discussed the prints and their respective traditions. Instead, he relied on the usual general statements about the role of the exhibition as an ambassador of goodwill

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Figure 5.3  Mauricio Lasansky, Changos y Burritos (Children and Young Burros), 1937, etching with drypoint on zinc, image courtesy of the Lasansky Corporation. and the power of art to transcend borders. He briefly described the selection of prints from both Latin America and Canada as “extremely eclectic and important.”40 The catalogue included reproductions of each work in these two sections as well as brief artist biographies. The works representing the sixteen Latin American republics demonstrated a breadth of subjects and styles, from Argentinean Pompeyo Audivert’s woodcuts of cubist workers to Venezuelan Pedro Ángel González’s mythological etching of Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons.41 The Canadian prints had a more limited scope, exclusively depicting landscapes or city scenes with the exception of one religious etching of the dead Christ being delivered to Mary by Quebecois artist Simone Hudon. The section of prints by US artists only reproduced select works, among them In Memoriam by Arms himself, identified as “one of the most prominent figures in the graphic world of North America (Figure 5.4).”42 Arms’s print, a 1939 etching of the façade of Chartres Cathedral, demonstrates the artist’s meticulous attention to detail, gothic interests, and conservative tendencies. The inclusion of Arms’s own etching represented not only his artistic eye, but by extension his curatorial point of view. Arms expressed affinity to artists and “all to whom art is a necessity, rather than a luxury, in human life,” self-identifying among this group.43 By selecting a representation of Chartres as his contribution, Arms’s own print leaves the Americas, looking instead to European cultural heritage.44 While the cathedral represents a retrospective study of the history of art and architecture, in the context of the hemispheric exhibition it also foreshadowed an upcoming shift in focus of IBM’s arts programming. Despite the evident preconceptions in the organizers’ framing of the print selection, the large body of work assembled sought to create individual human connections across the Americas using prints as a conduit in the service of IBM’s greater public



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Figure 5.4  John Taylor Arms, In Memoriam, 1939, etching, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bequest of Staunton B. Peck, 1950, 1950-103-1, courtesy of Suzanne Arms Hawkins. relations aims. The extensive tours of the collection underscored the program’s interest in outreach and visibility, reaching a range of audiences beyond simply installing the works in corporate offices. Presented in the United States and Latin America alike, the IBM exhibitions demonstrated to visitors the corporation’s global reach by assembling and presenting an international display of prints. These simultaneous traveling exhibitions indicate that IBM’s interest in art from the Western Hemisphere was not just about asserting a visible presence in Latin America, but envisioning an expanded network to circulate both art and trade throughout the Americas. The hopeful insistence on the diplomatic possibilities of art, accompanied Watson’s equally confident belief in the power of business to bring nations together (despite the wartime context that suggested otherwise) as he continued to expand his global vision for IBM.

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While operating in the realm of art, the ideological inspiration underlying IBM’s collection of hemispheric prints and its circulation contributed to this corporationwide approach.

Aftermath and Conclusion Following the end of the Second World War, IBM’s strong emphasis on fostering a common hemispheric identity through arts promotion waned as the wartime imperative for programs of cultural diplomacy within the Americas ended. Additionally, as European venues became available to host exhibitions and US foreign cultural policy focused more of its attention across the Atlantic, IBM followed suit. Working with the State Department, IBM’s fine arts department in 1946 organized an exhibition of paintings from the United States since 1800. As with Seventy-Five Latin American Prints, the exhibition opened first at the Grand Central Art Galleries in New York before embarking on its tour, traveling first to Cairo and continuing on to Italy and other European locations.45 Through this exhibition, IBM championed national art abroad while continuing to tour exhibitions of Latin American prints around the United States. These exhibitions continued to tour around the United States throughout the remainder of the 1940s and the 1950s to various museums and educational institutions, maintaining IBM’s visible presence in the arts at the domestic level. In 1949 the corporation’s global expansion became formalized with the founding of its World Trade Corporation subsidiary, a commercial organization to fulfill the international ambitions performed through the formation and circulation of the IBM art collection. Although the exhibitions continued, IBM’s acquisitions of art from Latin America stalled in the following decades. While IBM did acquire new works, these later acquisitions were limited. This trend is indicative of the broader activities of the corporation’s arts department as well. The bulk of the company’s art acquisitions occurred between 1937 and 1946, when the focus on building the collection catalyzed the acquisition of 30,000 works.46 The emphasis on collecting disappeared in the ensuing years and by 1989, IBM had sold, exchanged, or donated many of the works.47 IBM had first opened a permanent Gallery of Science in Art next to its Manhattan headquarters in 1955, but the final closing of this dedicated gallery space in 1994 led to the auction of much of the remaining collections the following year.48 The closing of the gallery and the sale of artworks accompanied broader cutbacks, with IBM selling many other properties and laying off tens of thousands of employees, reflected broader economic troubles at the corporation.49 As IBM’s involvement in the arts through acquisitions and exhibitions decreased, corporate collecting in the United States experienced an upsurge, gaining momentum in the 1960s and reaching a boom of activity by the 1980s.50 However, IBM’s model of collecting art as a practice independent of commissioning works for use in direct advertising created a clear precedent for its peers as corporations sought to build collections as part of their global brand and public image. IBM’s activities in the 1940s



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introduced the use of art in promoting corporate identity and business relations as part of a larger political moment. Watson and IBM’s fine arts department championed the power of art to cross and transcend borders, with the stated aim of improving political tensions and, by extension, the global market. The deployment of this rhetoric by IBM mirrored the programs of cultural diplomacy instituted in the 1940s by the US government and arts institutions, while consciously and specifically putting forth the corporation as an international player. The implicit promotional goal behind IBM’s arts initiatives highlighted the company as patron and extended its ethos from the marketplace into the cultural sphere, a public relations strategy embraced by future corporate collections.

Notes 1 For more information on the histories of IBM and Watson, see Kevin Maney, The Maverick and His Machine: Thomas Watson, Sr., and the Making of IBM (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003); Richard S. Tedlow, The Watson Dynasty: The Fiery Reign and Troubled Legacy of IBM’s Founding Father and Son (New York: HarperBusiness, 2003); and the chronology and archives provided on the corporation’s website at www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/index.html. 2 Some international offices did exist previously as opened by C-T-R, for example those in Berlin and Buenos Aires. 3 Originally founded as the Office for Coordination of Commercial and Cultural Relations Between the American Republics, the cumbersome name was soon replaced with the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and eventually the Office of Inter-American Affairs. For more on the OIAA and its activities, see History of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1947); and Gisela Cramer and Ursula Prutsch, eds. ¡Américas unidas! Nelson A. Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs (1940–46) (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2012). Catha Paquette’s essay in that volume, “Soft Power: The Art of Diplomacy in US-Mexican Relations, 1940–46,” is of particular interest for the art exhibitions organized under this aegis. 4 See Walter D. Mignolo, “Coloniality at Large: The Western Hemisphere on the Colonial Horizon of Modernity,” trans. Michael Ennis, CR: The New Centennial Review 1, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 19–54. 5 The fifteen countries represented in both exhibitions were Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. 6 For example, see the history of corporate collecting included in the introduction of Charlotte Appleyard and James Salzmann, Corporate Art Collections: A Handbook to Corporate Buying (Burlington, VT: Lund Humphries in association with Sotheby’s Institute of Art, 2012). 7 Mitchell Douglas Kahan, Art Inc.: American Paintings from Corporate Collections (Montgomery, AL: Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in association with Brandywine Press, 1979), 10, 101. See this source also for a broad overview of early practices and examples of corporate collecting in the United States from 1900 to 1970.

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8 Kahan, Art Inc., 102–103. 9 For more on the history of the Container Corporation of America and its art and design program, see Art, Design, and the Modern Corporation (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985). 10 In 1984 the collection entered the National Museum of American Art (now known as the Smithsonian American Art Museum) as a gift. 11 The 1940 seasons of the fairs again included exhibitions of IBM’s developing collection, this time focused on Contemporary Art of the United States. 12 Walter Abell, “Industry and Painting,” Magazine of Art 39, no. 3 (March 1946): 82–93, 114–18. 13 Abell, “Industry and Painting,” 84. 14 Paquette, “Soft Power,” 148–9. The group was divided into three smaller exhibitions that traveled simultaneously for the remainder of the year. 15 For the full list of lenders and works, see Contemporary Painting in the United States: A Special Exhibition April 19 through April 27 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1941). 16 Press release quoted in Paquette, “Soft Power,” 149. 17 Arte gráfico del hemisferio occidental departed the United States in early May. See “News and Notes of Art,” New York Times, May 14, 1941. 18 Justo Mellado, “El efecto Siqueiros,” in México y la invención del arte latinoamericano, 1910-1950, eds. Esther Acevedo and Pilar García (Mexico City: Dirección General del Acervo Histórico Diplomático, 2011), 218. 19 Thomas J. Watson, “Prefacio,” in Arte contemporáneo del hemisferio occidental (New York: International Business Machines Corporation, 1941), n.p. 20 Fabiana Serviddio, “Exhibiciones y propaganda panamericanista. La construcción de identidades culturales,” in Anais do XXXII Colóquio CBHA 2012: Direções e sentidos da história da arte (Brasília: Universidade de Brasília, 2012), 1631. 21 Thomas J. Watson, “Foreword,” in Contemporary Art of the Western Hemisphere (Canada: International Business Machines Corporation, 1941), n.p. 22 Thomas J. Watson, “Introduction,” in Contemporary Art of 79 Countries (New York: International Business Machines Corporation, 1941), n.p. 23 “Highlights of Service Performed by IBM Art,” c. 1960, IBM Corporate Archives, Somers, New York, 11. Watson served as Commissioner General for the fair’s US section. 24 During this visit to Berlin in late June and early July of 1937, Watson met Adolf Hitler and was awarded with the Merit Cross of the German Eagle With Star for his work in improving international relations. Though Watson returned the medal in 1940, its presentation draws attention to a darker side of IBM’s international reach. 25 Thomas J. Watson, “World Peace through World Trade,” The Rotarian 51, no. 5 (November 1937): 50. 26 Thomas J. Watson, “Introducción,” in Arte gráfico del hemisferio occidental (New York: International Business Machines Corporation, 1941): “Al presentar al arte gráfico de la Américas en este año de 1941, afirmamos una vez más nuestra fe de que por medio del lenguaje del artista, las gentes podrán reconocer mejor aquellos rasgos comunes a todos los hombres, que unen a la humanidad en un parentesco universal.” Similar text in English in Watson, “Foreword.” 27 Edward Alden Jewell, “Printmaking Show Will Open Today,” New York Times, February 19, 1941.



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28 Thomas G. Linn, “Print Exchange Weighed Here,” New York Times, December 24, 1939. 29 Linn, “Print Exchange.” 30 John Taylor Arms, “Foreword,” in Seventy-Five Latin-American Prints (New York: International Business Machines Corporation, 1941), n.p. 31 “Exposición para la pabellón de México en la feria mundial de Nueva York enviado por la Secretaría de Economía. Marzo de 1939” Exhibition File, Galería de Arte Mexicano Archives, Mexico City. 32 Aline Kistler, “The Best So Far from Latin America Is Prints,” ARTnews 40, no. 13 (October 15–31, 1941): 11. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Arms, “Foreword,” n.p. 36 Ibid. 37 The exhibition contained thirty-eight relief prints (including woodcuts, wood engravings, and linoleum cuts), twenty-four intaglio prints, twelve lithographs, and one monotype. 38 H.I.B., “Woodcuts from Lands to the South,” New York Times Magazine, October 5, 1941. 39 The catalogue and checklist originally only listed 38, with Carlos Hermosilla’s linocut Moliendo Trigo as an addendum. See Arte gráfico del hemisferio occidental. 40 John Taylor Arms, “Prólogo,” Arte gráfico del hemisferio occidental (New York: International Business Machines Corporation, 1941), n.p. 41 González’s etching is in fact a detail of the monumental work by Venezuelan painter Arturo Michelena, painted in Paris and celebrated at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The detail of González’s etching is not only removed from the rest of the scene, a battle leading to the queen’s death, but in so doing the print is isolated from a larger important narrative of Venezuelan art. 42 Arte gráfico del hemisferio occidental, no. 132. Original: “Una de las figuras más prominentes en el mundo gráfico de América del Norte.” (Translation mine) 43 Arms, “Foreword,” n.p. 44 European scenes and architecture were frequent subjects for Arms, however this particular print carried personal meeting. According to the artist’s granddaughter Suzanne Arms Hawkins, Arms created this etching in memory of his mother-in-law, who died while the family was traveling in Europe and unable to return to the states in time for her funeral. Suzanne Arms Hawkins, phone conversation with the author, February 13, 2019. 45 See A. M. F. (Alfred M. Frankfurter), “60 Americans since 1800,” ARTnews 45, no. 10 (December 1946): 30–9. 46 “Highlights of Service Performed by IBM Art,” 8. 47 IBM Corporation, 50 Years of Collecting Art at IBM (New York: IBM Corporation, 1989): n.p. 48 See Mexican Paintings from the IBM International Foundation (New York: Sotheby’s, 1995). The IBM Gallery of Science and Art first opened in 1955 at 16 East 57th Street, next to the company’s Corporate Headquarters. In 1983, the Gallery moved to the lower level of the newly designed IBM skyscraper at 590 Madison Avenue, by which time it primarily showed traveling exhibitions organized by other institutions.

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49 For more on these cutbacks and the context of the sale, see “First Layoffs Seen at I.B.M.,” New York Times, February 16, 1993; Nigel Cope, “IBM Learns the Art of Cost-Cutting,” The Independent, February 15, 1995; “IBM to Close Its Gallery of Art in Manhattan,” Corporate ARTnews 10, no. 3 (May/June 1993): 2–3. According to Corporate ARTnews, IBM reported a loss of $5.46 billion in the fourth quarter of 1992, leading to the announced lay-off of 25,000 workers. According to a focus on corporate collecting in The Art Newspaper (2000), the Sotheby’s sales in 1995 led to sale of 160 pieces from the IBM collection for a total of $31 million. (See “Major Corporate Collections in Canada and the United States,” The Art Newspaper 11, no. 105 [July–August 2000]: 47.) 50 Again, see Appleyard and Salzman, Corporate Art Collections.

Selected Bibliography IBM Corporation. 50 Years of Collecting Art at IBM. New York: IBM Corporation, 1989. International Business Machines Corporation. Arte gráfico del hemisferio occidental. New York: International Business Machines Corporation, 1941. International Business Machines Corporation and American National Committee of Engraving. Seventy-Five Latin-American Prints. New York: International Business Machines Corporation, 1941. Kahan, Mitchell Douglas. Art Inc.: American Paintings from Corporate Collections. Montgomery, AL: Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in association with Brandywine Press, 1979. Maney, Kevin. The Maverick and His Machine: Thomas Watson, Sr., and the Making of IBM. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003. Serviddio, Fabiana. “Exhibiciones y propaganda panamericanista. La construcción de identidades culturales.” In Anais do XXXII Colóquio CBHA 2012: Direções e sentidos da história da arte. Brasília: Universidade de Brasília, 2012.

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Introduction, Part II: Collecting Posters and Other Ephemera: From Modernity to the Digital Era Ruth E. Iskin

This volume is the first to address the collecting of (fine-art) prints along with posters and other ephemeral prints, and to look at collecting during the modern and contemporary period in a broad scope of cultures and geographies.1 Treating the collecting of prints, posters, and other ephemera in a single volume makes sense for several reasons. Today’s increasing tendency is to consider a broad visual culture that includes fine art but extends far beyond it. This actually has a longer history, beginning in the nineteenth century, and was directly related to the poster. Critics such as Roger Marx in France, who was a strong supporter of the illustrated poster, called for an elimination of the traditional hierarchy of “major” art (painting, sculpture, architecture) and “minor” art, such as prints, posters, and “decorative arts.”2 They regarded the “artistic poster” as a democratized art that stimulated them to reconsider what art was during their own changing times of modernity and its industrial revolution. There is further historical justification for treating the collecting of posters and prints together. During the 1890s, illustrated artistic posters and original color lithographs were strongly interrelated in France, where both began, and from where they soon spread to other industrialized nations. The French critic André Mellerio, who wrote extensively about color lithography in the 1890s, recognized the crucial role of the lithographic illustrated color poster in developing the color print, because the poster was designed as an original, with color lithography in mind, rather than serving as a reproduction.3 The poster thus departed from the earlier use of color lithography for reproducing preexisting paintings. The fin-de-siècle art print followed.4 It rejected the tradition of the monochromatic print—the only one taken seriously by most print collectors, who were scandalized by the color print. For example, Henri Bouchot, a print historian who in 1898 became the director of the Cabinet des Estampes of the Bibliothèque Nationale, and author of the 1895 volume La Lithographie, objected to the “cruel” and “violent” coloring of prints, referring to their creators as “color blind.”5 These ideas were not exclusive to France. About the same time, one of the editors of the German journal Pan complained that Lautrec’s color print was too close in style to contemporary posters.6 Given these views, those who did collect posters and color prints were stepping outside of what most considered the proper purview for a print collector. Thus they

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were subjected to much derision and sought support from the network of poster collectors.7 By the twentieth century, advertising posters were no longer made with traditional lithography but rather with offset techniques, becoming increasingly separate from lithographic prints that were considered fine art. Beyond shifting technologies, the increasing separation between advertising and prints was caused by the fact that after the 1890s advertising and graphic design each developed into separate, new professional fields. During the twentieth century when offset lithography was the most widely used technology for printing advertising posters, numerous artists made prints using color lithography, working with master printers in specialized lithography workshops such as Tamarind in Albuquerque and Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles, while some artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and others used offset lithography for prints, More recently after the latter was replaced by digital printing, some artists produced prints in that medium. Nevertheless, color lithography continues to be a major technology used by artists for prints. Collecting Prints, Posters, and Ephemera is not a survey, but rather a selection of case studies that we commissioned especially for this volume. Each chapter focuses on specific collectors and collections. The wide geographic scope of the volume includes collectors of prints of all kinds made in the Americas, France, Germany, Holland, Iran, Japan, Mexico, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The volume focuses primarily on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and includes a roundtable discussion about twenty-first-century issues in collecting digital images (Chapter 14). The mobility of paper, and therefore print, enabled collectors of prints, posters, and ephemera to collect not merely nationally, but internationally. This wide scope was already the mark of many poster collections in the late nineteenth century. Although globalization, travel, and access to journals from different locations in the world had affected nineteenth- as well as twentieth-century collectors, today’s speedy and easy access to information on the internet and the intensification of globalization further impact the cross-cultural collecting of posters and ephemera. The volume includes numerous examples of cross-cultural collecting; to name just a few: the large collection of Chinese posters of the Revolution, currently housed at the University of Amsterdam, was accumulated by the Dutch collector and scholar of Chinese culture, Stefan Landsberger, who is the author of the chapter on this topic (Chapter 11); the phenomenon of collecting Japanese woodblock prints in Japan, which was itself a continuation of the cross-cultural collecting of such prints by Europeans in the nineteenth century before such prints were accorded value and collected in Japan, as discussed by Japanese art historian Shigeru Oikawa (Chapter 4); Elizabeth Emery’s Chapter 3 focuses on Western women’s collecting Japanese prints, a topic traditionally overlooked in studies on the topic; the collection of Iranian film posters today housed in a US university library was assembled by an American film scholar who was born in Iran and emigrated to the United States after the revolution, Hamid Naficy, who authored a chapter on this topic (Chapter 13); and the collection of Cuban posters was assembled by the American, Cuban-born librarian, archivist, author, and poster expert, Lincoln Cushing, who wrote on this topic (Chapter 12).



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Collecting and collectors of modern prints, posters, and ephemera have rarely been addressed in depth. Moreover, the fact that many critics and scholars of the poster were collectors has been marginalized, if not altogether forgotten. This is the case for example with Maindron, who is remembered today primarily as the first historian of the poster, for authoring his two volumes on the illustrated poster (1886 and 1896), while his collecting, which was a major activity for him and central to his scholarly work, has rarely been addressed (Chapter 6).8 Similarly, Loys Delteil, an etcher, dealer, publisher, print scholar, auction expert and collector, is known today almost exclusively for his scholarly publication—the 31-volume Le Peintre-graveur illustré (1906–25)— but little is known about his collecting (Chapter 2). Analyzing the collecting of such figures offers insights into the way collecting functioned as part of a broad range of related practices. As this introduction argues, and several chapters in the volume demonstrate, collecting is integral to producing knowledge not only on the specific objects collected, but also on the culture in which they were made and collected. Collecting posters and ephemera in the nineteenth century, for example, was not merely research that preceded curating an exhibition and writing articles or books on objects and their culture. Rather, collecting itself produces culture and knowledge by making a new entity—the collection. Once a collection enters the archive, library, museum (Chapters 10 and 9), or university research center (Chapter 7), it becomes accessible and enables additional production of knowledge by those who study it. Furthermore, the dissemination of specific objects from the collection in the print and electronic media brings them to the attention of wider circles. Reproducing or showing the objects and discussing them, or the collection as a whole, invests them with a new visibility, an afterlife, both scholarly and popular. Despite its centrality to culture, production of knowledge, and the afterlife of objects, collecting is rarely addressed when prints, posters, and other ephemera are discussed in art history or graphic design history. Discussions of posters in these contexts primarily focus on the artist, movement, style, representation, and the social and historical contexts. Collecting modern prints, posters, and ephemera is also missing from most of the work done on the history of collecting. The significance of collectors and collections emerges when we consider the social life and material existence of the objects and of the collections, and issues of circulation.9 It is also relevant to the history of institutions such as museums, and the system of the art market, within which collections of posters and of prints have usually been auctioned. That we are missing an important dimension of objects by overlooking the significance of collectors and collections can perhaps best be understood when comparing it to the period before museum and exhibition studies were developed. These fields have made a great contribution to our understanding of art and artists as mediated by museums and exhibitions, including special exhibitions such as biennales. Likewise, it could be argued that when we discuss posters and other ephemeral objects without addressing how, why, when, and by whom they were collected, we are looking at a truncated object; an object removed from its own history, including the history of its collection, within which its cultural meanings accumulate.10 The case of Hans

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Sachs (Chapter 8) demonstrates that the history of the collector and the afterlife of the collection itself are highly significant, bringing up important issues about politics, looting, restitution, and justice. As the topics of collecting and collections of posters and ephemera emerge from the margins, the role of collectors and collections may be seen as not merely a separate “niche” that deserves to be studied, but also as integral to studies of visual and material culture, art history, cultural history, cultural studies, institutional history, museum and curatorial studies, and related areas. This introduction and the volume as a whole aim to contribute to this orientation—in focusing on collectors and collections of prints, posters, and ephemera—on collections of art and visual culture within their wider historical, global, material, and diverse cultural and political contexts. Whereas the volume has a broad cultural and geographic scope, this introduction draws on more examples from my own geographically limited area of expertise— nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century France and Europe. In the following pages I analyze the role and significance of collecting everyday prints in modernity, exploring the interconnections among collecting prints, ephemera, and modernity. I begin by discussing collecting posters and ephemera in the nineteenth century and then turn to an analysis of posters and ephemera as an “archaeology of modernity,” addressing the relationship of print ephemera, writing history, and constructing memory. The introduction proceeds by exploring the relationship between museums and collecting posters and concludes with remarks on the transition from print to digital culture, addressing issues of collecting posters and ephemera in the digital era.

Collecting Posters and Ephemera in the Nineteenth Century Illustrated color posters became a new form of advertising in the late nineteenth century, stimulated by the industrial and consumer revolutions. Whereas earlier posters were dominated by typographic text with no images or with small vignette images surrounded by a lot of text, late nineteenth-century posters featured images that embedded a minimal text.11 The design, production, and display of nineteenthcentury illustrated posters spanned the industrial nations, including, among others, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In the 1920s, advertising color posters also spread to Shanghai, China. Posters advertised a wide range of commodities, for example, bicycles, biscuits, beverages, cosmetics, fashions, books, illustrated journals and newspapers; services, such as transportation, particularly specific train lines; diverse entertainments from circuses to concerts and café concerts; brands, such as Pears’ soap; and large shops, especially department stores. Printed on cheap paper, posters were made to serve their advertising purpose quickly. Since most of them were displayed outdoors, they survived only briefly, for a few days, or just hours, before being pasted over with other posters, or ravaged by soot,



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rain, wind, and sun. The illustrated poster was designed to be ephemeral. Made for a short-lived existence, it was meant to disappear as so much urban debris following its transient visibility in public spaces—on walls, fences, or Morris columns (cylindrical advertising structures placed on city sidewalks). Some posters lasted longer on designated hoardings of advertising distribution companies, which maintained a poster’s display by regularly pasting fresh posters over it for an extra charge. Already in the last decades of the nineteenth century, posters constituted a specialized field within the broad category of ephemera, defined by Maurice Rickards as the “minor transient documents of everyday life,” which includes a wide variety of graphically designed printed items such as tickets, pamphlets, illustrated programs of entertainment events, calendars, and menus (for a discussion of Rickards and collecting ephemera see Chapter 7).12 By the 1890s collecting posters became a virtual craze not only in Europe but also in the United States and Canada.13 This enabled members of the middle class to collect artifacts, a practice that earlier on had been limited mostly to aristocrats and the wealthiest classes. The case of Ernest Maindron (the subject of Chapter 6) exemplifies this broadening of significant collecting by members of the middle class who turned to posters and ephemera, or, as in the case of Loys Delteil, to prints (the subject of Chapter 2). For some of these middle-class collectors, as in the case of Delteil, collecting prints was integral to their professional identity and practice. For some, like Maindron, collecting posters and ephemera on a grand scale was an extension of his professional practice as an archivist. So popular were posters with a wide range of collectors at the time that several Parisian dealers and printers published numbered and signed limited editions as well as unlimited editions of posters for collectors.14 Designed from the start to enter collections (rather than to be displayed as advertising), these posters were printed on high-quality paper, made to last in collectors’ portfolios. Collectors struggled with difficulties of storing large-scale posters, and the British based journal The Poster, for example, featured illustrated advertisements of efficient storage systems designed to save space and enable easy access. Poster dealers and collectors during the 1890s used the kind of space-saving system of storing and displaying posters on two sides of panels one could leaf through that is visible in a photograph of the premises of the Belgian Society of Poster Collectors (Affichophiles) in Antwerp, c. 1900 (Figure 0.5). High-end poster collectors could also purchase or commission a specially designed furniture piece for this purpose, or design a unique system especially for their own collection.15 Collectors salvaged posters which otherwise would have disappeared with no trace. They selected, preserved, and classified them; some of them assembled vast collections with thousands of posters. Their practices invested posters with a cultural valorization. Collectors gave posters a new temporality and space, removing them from the hoardings and street into the portfolio and interior. They also changed the context of the poster. Removing posters from their usual sites where they were displayed to attract potential consumers—collectors actively produced a new context, namely that of the collection. As Walter Benjamin points out, the “decisive” act in collecting is detaching the object “from all its original functions in order to enter into the closest conceivable relation to things of the same kind.”16 Preserved, restored, dated, catalogued and stored, the

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Figure 0.5  Société Belge des Affichophiles in Antwerpen, c. 1900, photograph, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. poster is remade as an object of study, whether aesthetic, historical, art historical, or a hybrid of these. Being part of a collection, posters gained cultural value. The collection also contributed to the economic value of the poster by becoming an object valued by collectors, traded, bought, and sold. During the second half of the nineteenth century the increasing numbers of collectors of posters and ephemera played a major role in posters gaining a new cultural value. Some private collectors were pioneers in producing knowledge on the objects of their interest long before museums regarded posters and ephemera as legitimate objects for institutional collecting. Thus, the first scholars of the poster and ephemera were some of its major collectors. In their writings they primarily addressed other collectors, and their insights were based on their participation in the emergent field of the illustrated poster. Nineteenth-century collectors also organized large exhibitions of posters in numerous cities in Europe (including Brussels, Reims, Nantes, London, Leeds, Hamburg, Dresden, Vienna, Strasbourg, and Milan) and in the United States (including Boston, Chicago, New York, and Washington DC.). Through these, larger circles of people came to see the poster and the numbers of collectors grew. For collectors who wrote about posters or organized exhibitions, collecting was inherent to their own critical or scholarly practice. Their collecting was also necessitated by the fact that at the time museums did not yet collect posters. Along with the spread of collecting posters, a market developed, including specialized poster dealers and auctions of entire print and poster collections.17 Henri Beraldi, who was a print collector and preeminent print scholar, is known primarily for his monumental 12-volume catalogue of nineteenth-century prints that also included insightful essays by him. He pioneered a focus on the contemporary print of his time rather than focusing on old masters. (The latter was the focus of the



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Viennese Adam Bartsch, who a few decades earlier had produced a catalogue of old master prints by Dutch, Flemish, German, and Italian painters-printmakers from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century.) As its subtitle stated, Beraldi’s catalogue was intended as a guide to collectors of modern prints: Les Graveurs du XIXe Siècle: Guide de l’amateur d’estampes modernes. It is highly significant that Beraldi expanded the category of “print” to aesthetically designed ephemera. He contributed to recognizing the artistic value and cultural significance of posters and other ephemera, which had been outside of the field of collecting prints. Being the first to catalogue posters as well as other ephemera designed by Jules Chéret, Beraldi took a bold step in staking the place of both within the category of the artistic print.18 Yet he legitimized only collecting Chéret, who was considered the father of the artistic poster, because he considered the aesthetic value of his work superior when compared with other poster designers of his time (Beraldi was making this judgment during the period that preceded Toulouse-Lautrec and other innovative poster designers). In 1886, Beraldi dramatically expressed his encounter with ephemera in everyday modern life.19 He noted that prints were everywhere: at work and in environments of leisure; on the way to the mairie or to church, and in books; on display at the print merchants, and in kiosques on the boulevards. The print mediated every facet of contemporary culture—it displayed the news; was used for portraits, caricatures, and fashions; and appeared on the covers of books and journals and on the programs of music and theater performances.20 When you entered a café, someone immediately offered you an illustrated journal. The label on the bottle placed in front of you was a print. The stamp you put on your letter was a small print. You paid with a bank note—yet another print.21 We have long since taken all that for granted, but Beraldi’s astonishment helps us grasp of the newness of the ubiquity of printed ephemera in everyday modernity; it is akin to how our attention today is captured by an increasing digital presence in everyday life. Beraldi declared that his was “a new mode of considering the print”22 and likened his stance to that of the French politician and historian Adolphe Thiers, that to consider the marginal was to inaugurate a new mode of writing history: For those who reproach us about including them [menus], we insist on pieces of that genre, “we cite the words of M. Thiers, who said in a preface to his Revolution Française: I inaugurate a new mode of writing history, I do not hesitate to give the prices of bread, of soap of candles.” And we say the same: “we have today a new mode of considering the print: we do not hesitate to catalogue posters, menus, and programs.”23

Print Ephemera, History, and Memory The critic, journalist, prolific author, publisher, and bibliophile Octave Uzanne referred to poster collections as “amazing archives” and an “archaeology of

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modernity.”24 By being placed in collections, posters constitute the “memory” of the everyday of an epoch, an aspect of the history of the time that may not otherwise be accessible. Major collectors of posters saw themselves as preserving an archive for scholars’ future research.25 This was a common transnational belief held by major poster and ephemera collectors during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Poster collectors in England, France, Germany, and other nations all made similar statements about how posters were crucial for future historians. There are little differences among the critics and collectors expressing this general idea. To cite just a few examples, in 1884 the French writer Gustave Fustier: “Posters tell you the history of a country, its political life, its mournings and its celebrations, its customs and its public manners!”26 A year later, Beraldi: “Posters are a microcosm of our society: touching on everything, they will give precious information on our habits, our customs, our costumes, our food, our readings, our maladies, above all our pleasures.”27 Poster critics, historians, and collectors of the 1890s in the United Kingdom had similar ideas. The most important British poster critic and historian, Charles Hiatt, wrote that posters are “capable of embracing every conceivable thing, of proclaiming every variety of enterprise . . . the picture poster becomes valuable as a mirror of life …”28 In 1894 the British poster collector Joseph Thacher Clarke added an aspect by referring to posters as “an unconscious and unimpeachable witness,” but did not elaborate on this intriguing idea: “In no other branch of design do the most characteristic features of everyday life  .  .  .  providing us with an unconscious and unimpeachable witness to the present status of our civilization.”29 Like others, he wrote, “From these documents the future historian may derive the fullest information … concerning our vocations, our amusements and our morals.”30 But he went further when evoking the archaeologist, adding legitimation to posters as important documents by likening what posters can offer to archaeologists of the future to a set of “documents” from ancient Athens or Rome: “What would not the archaeologist be willing to give for a set of such documents, relating, let us say, to the Pericleian Athens or to Augustan Rome?”31 The most important twentieth-century poster collector and scholar in Germany, Hans Sachs, expressed similar beliefs to his nineteenth-century predecessors, writing in 1931, “Whoever collects posters compiles histories of art, culture, and customs” (Chapter 8).32 For ephemera collectors in the twentieth century, this idea was also central (Chapter 7). Most collectors agreed that posters enabled writing a history of the everyday. The twenty-three-year-old Alfred Delvau, a journalist and prolific author who had witnessed the 1848 revolution, expressed this idea forcefully in his 1852 preface to the volume Les Murailles Révolutionnaires (which included reprints of posters, decrees, and bulletins from the February 1848 revolution). Delvau referred to the political posters of the revolution as “a collective oeuvre, whose author is Mr. Everyone.”33 For him such political posters were themselves writing history—a new kind of democratic history that is collective and anonymous. For Delvau, political posters were themselves “a living history,” the most “truthful, original and eloquent.”34 For poster collectors, advertising posters were documents that constituted evidence, an “archaeology” to be excavated for a history yet to be written.



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Museums and Collecting Posters The legitimation of posters and graphic art grew over the course of the twentieth century. Roger Marx (himself a collector of prints and posters, a French museum official, curator, and art critic) first called for establishing a state museum of the poster in France in 1899.35 Seven decades later, in 1978, the Musée de l’Affiche (Museum of the Poster) opened in Paris, later becoming the Musée de la Publicité (Museum of Advertising), and today it is a department of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, housed in a wing of the Louvre. Marx rightly foresaw that collectors of posters would be motivated to contribute their collections to such a museum. Of course, some private poster collections were dispersed at auction, sometimes posthumously, as in the case of Constant Dessolliers (as well as Marx’s own collection). Successively employed by numerous French poster publishers,36 Dessolliers had great access to posters at their source enabling him to create a collection that “was the envy of our Bibliothèque nationale and the Musée Carnavalet.”37 Some collectors donated their collections to museums or libraries, forming the nucleus of the poster collections at many institutions. For example, the botanist and politician Gustave Dutailly, who began collecting posters in 1889, bequeathed his 5,000 posters and 3,500 books, magazines, and other printed items to the city of Chaumont in 1905.38 Georges Pochet-Deroches donated his collection of illustrated posters to the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in 1901; Roger Braun’s bequest went to the same museum in 1941, and these two were the largest in the museum’s history.39 Hans Sachs, the dedicated poster collector who began collecting posters at age seventeen, in 1897 in Berlin, worked to create a community of poster and graphic design collectors during the first decades of the twentieth century by founding the Society of Poster Friends and publishing and editing an important periodical, Das Plakat. Later on he built a new wing to his home in Berlin, dedicated to A Museum of Applied Graphic Art. He carefully selected an architect who designed the large gallery and storage system for his posters and graphic ephemera. This private museum was open to all those interested. It was a culmination of Sachs’s practice as a collector who had used his collection to serve numerous public functions, not only by curating exhibitions from it and sending them around the world, but also by fulfilling many “practical purposes for the public, for artists active in applied graphic art, for collectors, printers, and for art institutes.”40 The museum and collecting activity of the German-Jewish Sachs ended abruptly in 1938 when Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, confiscated the renowned poster collection, claiming that he planned to found a museum of the “art of the merchant,” to be housed in a new wing of Berlin’s applied arts museum. The museum was never established. Tragically, once the collection was finally restituted to Sachs’s heirs after many years of court battles, it was dispersed at auction.41 Over the course of the twentieth century, many art and design museums have developed poster collections. To name just a few: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, the Albertina in Vienna, and the Cooper-Hewitt in New York. Poster collections are also housed in a variety of specialized museums. For example, the

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Imperial War Museum, London, has a large international poster collection related to the First and Second World Wars, along with other ephemera (such as postcards and proclamations). It also collects more recent posters by movements protesting war. American museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Smithsonian have collections of protest posters against the Vietnam War. In addition, some museums are dedicated to posters, including the Poster Museum in Wilanów, Poland; the Danish Poster Museum in Aarhus, Denmark; the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Center in Shanghai and the recently opened Poster House in New York City. Sizeable collections of posters are also housed in libraries and archives. An example of the latter is the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles. Most of these institutions employ expert curators, whose research, preservation, and curatorial work have to a large extent replaced the amateur collector/scholars that initiated the field. Nonetheless, there are areas in which collectors of posters continue to fulfill many of the roles undertaken by the pioneer collectors of the nineteenth century. For example, private collecting of Chinese posters from the Maoist period was crucial in salvaging posters from extinction, because these posters were not valued by the political regime that followed the revolution. Two prominent examples are the Dutch scholar Stefan Landsberger who assembled a large collection in Amsterdam (Chapter 11), and the Chinese Yang Pei Ming, who was a student during the early days of the Chinese Revolution and began collecting Chinese posters in the 1990s. He stores and displays his substantial collection in the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Center that he created in a basement space in an apartment building in a residential neighborhood in Shanghai. Whereas, in the nineteenth century, private collectors blazed new ground in collecting what others considered ephemeral urban refuse, the situation has changed considerably. Today some museums and libraries are not only collecting posters and other ephemera as examples of contemporary graphic design, but also collecting discarded signs, posters, and ephemera of protest demonstrations. Recently, for example, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington DC, the Newberry Library in Chicago, and the Bishopsgate Library in London all tweeted that they were collecting signs and other ephemera of the Women’s March, a worldwide protest that took place the day after the inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the United States.42 The use of ephemera is particularly apt for protests, new revolutionary regimes, and revolutions. As Richard Taws writes in The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France: Visual practice in revolutionary France was characterized by the productions and circulation of a range of transitional, provisional, ephemeral, and half-made images and objects, whose frequently uncertain, fleeting, or makeshift materiality paradoxically provided some effective ongoing means of negotiating the historical significance of the Revolution.43

Posters made by participants of the 1968 student revolution in France are a good example of how such ephemeral graphic objects functioned during the events of the



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time, and continue to be an important source for historical testimony because they are tangible material remnants of the revolutionary actions of students and their collaborators at the time.44 Posters and other graphic design objects are central to movements of protest and calls for political change.45 Among the better-known posters of recent times are the Guerilla Girls’ posters. A well-known example is their poster featuring a reclining female nude based on an Ingres painting, with the statement “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women but 85% of the nudes are female.” Although these posters were initially designed as activist interventions during the 1980s and were originally posted in New York City, they have since been collected by quite a few museums and have been displayed in various museum exhibitions, including, for example, in the Elles@Centrepompidou exhibition in Paris from 2009 through 2011.

Collecting in the Digital Era The new phase of digital culture is an important factor in what precipitated my own interest in this volume, whose focus is on prints, posters, and ephemera, presenting case studies in a pre-history of digital culture. Today vast amounts of digitized images of posters and ephemera in libraries, archives, and museums are for the first time becoming easily accessible to global audiences online. Paradoxically, if we consider Walter Benjamin’s ideas, the remediation of posters from paper prints into digital images that are presented in museum online sites, along with the fact that the posters are in the collections of museums—lend posters and ephemera a valued status of “originals” even though they were mass produced. As newer digital media and technology emerge, our ideas on what is ephemeral are changing. Now that digital images on screens are ubiquitous, a paper print seems less ephemeral by comparison. Post-analog digital ephemera makes paper/print appear to be a more solidly lasting “material” in comparison with the seemingly immaterial digital ephemera. In museums, paper/print is now seen as the opposite of the new digital ephemeral in that it necessitates space and labor to be physically preserved. Once digitized, paper prints are often stored away in off-site locations of museums and libraries. These are modern and contemporary examples within a longer history of ephemeral media, cultural products, and events, yet to be written. They show that ephemerality is relative, historically changing, and technologically and socially interdependently produced. Today, both still and moving digital images appear on a variety of screens: large scale to miniature; public, private, and personal; in urban, suburban, and rural environments; in work and living spaces; and carried by, or affixed to, one’s own body.46 On these screens the type of advertising seen in posters has mutated into a variety of digital ways of catching our attention, often turning the screen or part of it into a momentary poster. Moreover, in the networked digital age, the conditions of viewing, storing, and accessing paper posters have entirely changed. The digitization of poster collections has radically reshaped the ability to study posters for collectors, scholars, students, and the general public. First, it has revolutionized

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accessibility. Sitting at a computer with internet access, one can see a vast wealth of images of posters and fine-art prints. As a result, posters that previously were not visible to scholars can now be studied. Second, while low-resolution images of posters present an impediment to their viewing, high-resolution images available on the internet allow enlarging the image for viewing details—a digital substitute for the function of the monocle or other magnifying visual implements used by connoisseurs in the past. Third, computers and the internet enable a different kind of “collecting” digital images of posters, allowing flexibility by utilizing the new mobility and speed of digital images, facilitating selecting, grouping, cataloguing, and studying. The internet and global marketplace have also changed the ways in which collectors of posters and print search, find, and acquire the posters and prints, through websites and online auctions. The contemporary digital poster itself has been radically transformed turning into a mutable event (Chapter 14). The paper/print objects in collections are vulnerable to tears, folds, light exposure, wear and tear of handling and transport, as well as fire and flood. Physical vulnerability is even greater for posters, which, unlike art prints, were printed on cheap paper. The large scale of many posters also presents a storage difficulty, especially for individual collectors. In contrast, digitized images appear as a trans-decay medium because they are not subject to physical tears, folds, light exposure, etc. On the other hand, digitized images are vulnerable to degradation in other ways. They become fodder for endless circulation and transmission as low-resolution images. Another problem affects images that were originally made to be digital—namely the inevitable obsolescence of hardware and software, which necessitates a different kind of conservation, not of the image, but of the technology. Digitization of posters and other ephemera make the images immune to paper decay and allow the images to circulate widely while the original paper posters rest in storage. Yet, an implicit problem of digitized images of posters, at least those produced by museums, is that they are often “corrected” rendering any decay or other damages invisible. While this may have some obvious advantages, it also obscures important material characteristics that are part of the social life of paper objects. Corrected digitized images of posters negate the consequences of the paper object’s ephemeral materiality, recreating it as if it were immaterial. The digitized image has, as Hito Steyerl notes, its “own real conditions of existence” including “swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities.”47 Yet when digitized images reproduce paper objects such as a print or poster, their own conditions of existence overpower those of the original materiality, perception, and type of circulation, associated with the paper object. Today’s poster scholars and collectors can do an enormous amount of research via the internet while seeing the originals in collections of libraries and museums is not readily available. However, the new technologies raise many challenges to collecting posters and ephemera that are originally made for new media (rather than documenting paper posters). Recognizing the importance of the digital media revolution to the topic of prints, posters and ephemera, this volume concludes with a chapter that presents ideas and practices of contemporary professionals who are blazing new ground as they are working with museums on preserving and collecting digital posters and ephemera (Chapter 14).



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Whereas individual collectors of paper prints of all kinds could (and did) themselves tackle issues of preservation and collection before institutions, principally museums and libraries, attended to the task, this is no longer possible. Today’s challenge of preserving an archive of our present for the future—an “archaeology” of an ephemeral digital culture—requires resources usually not available to an individual. If we consider the internet as a vast archive changing every nanosecond, its defining feature is no longer merely an accelerated fleetingness, but rather perpetual instability. To constitute an archive of digital ephemera demands interdisciplinary teams of experts in technology and curatorship, and thus necessitates substantial institutional resources and support. This means a new kind of collecting and preservation. Today’s new digital ephemera, which are even more ubiquitous than paper/print ever was, do need to be selected, curated, and preserved if any of them are to be available to future historians. This means that the act and practices of collecting—that is selection, preservation, cataloguing, and storing— gain a new relevance in the digital age. Ironically, an invisible “collecting” performed by nonhuman agents and referred to as “cookies” collect our “data selves,” keeping track of the computer user’s internet browsing in order to trade data, and tailor advertising and political propaganda to particular users, for example through pop-up ads on the screen.48 If such invisible digital collecting became accessible for scholarly research, it could take to new heights the promise that poster collectors saw in the potential of collections of advertising posters to reveal the preferences, habits, and desires of an époque.

Notes 1 Thanks to Paula Birnbaum and Britany Salsbury for their close readings and for sharing insights that guided the revisions of this article. Most of the time the term “print” will be used to designate fine-art prints, as well as posters and other ephemera, counting on the context to identify the different kind of prints. 2 See Ruth E. Iskin, The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s-1900s (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth Press, 2014), 72–3. 3 André Mellerio, La Lithographie originale en couleurs (Paris: L’Estampe et l’Affiche, 1898), 33. 4 Both the color poster and print participated in the “color revolution.” Phillip Dennis Cate and Sinclair Hitchings, The Color Revolution: Color Lithography in France, 1890–1900 (Santa Barbara: P. Smith, 1978). 5 Henri Bouchot, La Lithographie (Paris: Ancienne Maison Quantin, LibrairiesImprimeries Réunis 1895), 208–11. 6 Iskin, The Poster, 131. 7 In 1908 the collector Roger Braun urged “affichophiles” (poster lovers) not to fear the sarcasms and mocking that their collection may elicit. Braun, Bibliographie et Iconographie de l’Affiche illustrée (Lille: Imp. Lefebvre-Ducrocq, 1908), 4. Reprinted in Alain Weill, L’Affichomanie: Collectionneurs d’affiches--Affiches de collection, 1880–1890 (Paris: Musée de l’Affiche, 1980), 4–18. 8 See brief discussions on Maindron in Iskin, The Poster, 287–94, and Nicholas-Henry Zmelty, L’affiche illustrée au temps de l’affichomanie (1889–1905) (Paris: Mare et Martin, 2014), 17–18.

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9 Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 10 Edmond de Waal’s novel The Hare with Amber Eyes, A Hidden Inheritance (London: Chatto & Windus/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010) is superb example of integrating the social life and material existence of his inherited collection of small Japanese netsuke—carved figurines used to fasten purses to kimonos—into a wider scope of history, politics, and biography. 11 See, Iskin, The Poster, chapter 6. 12 Maurice Rickards, edited and completed by Michael Twyman, The Encyclopedia of Ephemera (London: The British Library, 2000), v. For an analysis of definitions of ephemera see, Twyman, The Encyclopedia of Ephemera. 13 An American poster journal estimated that there were 6,000 collectors in North America: Will Clemens in Poster 1, no. 2 (February 1896): 15. See discussion in Iskin, The Poster, 268–9. 14 For analysis of a case of a major reprinting of posters, Les Maîtres de l’affiche, see Iskin, The Poster, chapter 4. 15 For example, Hans Sachs designed his own system of storage (chapter 8). For a photograph of a 1904 wooden poster stand that allows the display of several posters, see fig. 109 in Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho, Prints in Paris, 1900: From Elite to Street (Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum/Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2017), 98. 16 Walter Benjamin, “The Collector,” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard EIland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999) [H1a,2], 203–11, at 204. 17 On public auctions of prints, see Pierre Juhel, Le ventes publiques à Paris sous la Troisième République: Répertoire des catalogues 1870–1914 (Paris: Éditions du Cercle de la Librairie, 2016). On poster dealers, see Zmelty, L’affiche. 18 Henri Beraldi catalogued Chéret’s posters in Les Graveurs du XIXe Siècle, guide de l’amateur d’estampes modernes (Paris: Libriarie L. Conquet, 1889–1892), 12 vols.; vol. 9, 1886, and vol. 10, 1890. 19 Beraldi, Les Graveurs, 1889, vol. 9, 256. 20 Beraldi, Les Graveurs, 1886, vol. 4, 168–9, at 169. 21 Ibid., 169. 22 Beraldi, Les Graveurs, 1889, vol. 9, 162. 23 Ibid. 24 Octave Uzanne, “La monomanie des affiches: Précis historique, -- Les Collectionneurs. Les Artistes français de l’Affiche,” in La Nouvelle Bibliopolis (Paris: Henri Floury, 1897), 85–139, at 92. On Uzanne as bibliophile and book publisher, see Willa Z. Silverman, The New Bibliopolis: French Book Collectors and the Culture of Print, 1880–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). 25 See, Iskin, The Poster, 169–72. 26 Fustier, “La Littérature murale: Essai sur les Affiches Littéraires en France,” Le Livre, Revue du Monde Littéraire (November 1884): 337–56, at 337. Fustier focused primarily on the earlier “literary poster” that promoted books in the 1830s and 1840s, as well as on Chéret. 27 Beraldi, Les Graveurs, 1886, vol. 4, 176. 28 Ibid., 178. 29 In Edward Bella, ed. A Collection of Posters: The Illustrated Catalogue of the First Exhibition, exh. cat. (London: Royal Aquarium, 1894), 7–12, at 7–8.



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30 Bella, A Collection of Posters. 31 Ibid. 32 Hans Sachs, “Die künstlerischen und kulturellen Werte einer Plakatsammlung. Teil II,” Gebrauchsgraphik 8, no. 1 (1931): 57. 33 Les Murailles révolutionnaires, collection complète des professions de foi, affiches décrets, bulletins de la république, fac-similé de signatures, préface, Alfred Delvau (Paris: J. Bry [Ainé], 1852), vol. 1, 2. 34 Les Murailles révolutionnaires, vol. 1, 1. 35 Roger Marx, pref. In Les Maîtres de l’affiche (Paris: Chaix, 1889), vol. 4, 16. Discussed in Iskin, The Poster, chapter 4. 36 Four thousand of his posters dating 1835–1889 were auctioned in 1968: Ancienne Collection de Constant Dessolliers, 4000 affiches 1835–1889 (Troyes: Imp. Renaissance, 1968); 7,000 were auctioned in a second sale in 1974; Affiches 1900, 27 mai 1974 (Paris: Hôtel Drouot, 1974). On Dessollier’s collecting illustrated posters and his claim to have been the first to do so, see Fustier, “Littérature murale,” and Zmelty, L’Affiche, 14 and 16. 37 Fustier, “Littérature murale,” 339. 38 Les Silos, Chaumont, Gustave Dutailly, Les Plaisirs d’un collectionneur d’affiches. Préface Jean-Claude Daniel et Pascal Crisoni, exh. cat. (Chaumont: Le Pythagore, 2006). 39 Réjane Bargiel-Harry and Christophe Zagrodzki, Le Livre de l’affiche. The Book of the Poster, exh. cat. Musée de la Publicité (Paris: Editions Syros-Alternatives, 1985), 22. For discussion of the fate of several poster collections, see Zmelty, L’affiche, 52. See also preface by curator Geneviève Gaetan-Picon in Weill, L’affichomanie, 1. 40 Hans Sachs, The World’s Largest Poster Collection, 1896–1938: How It Came about and . . . Disappeared from the Face of the Earth (New York: Privately published, 1957), 26. 41 Sachs would have preferred to keep what was left of his collection intact in a museum, as was recounted to me by the New York poster collector, scholar and dealer, Jack Rennert, based on his correspondence with Sachs during the latter’s years in New York. 42 Claire Zillman, “Museums are Collecting Women’s March Signs as Historical Artifacts,” Fortune, January 23, 2017, http:​//for​tune.​com/2​017/0​1/23/​women​s-mar​ ch-si​gns-m​useum​s-his​tory/​ 43 Richard Taws, The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 3. 44 Mai 68, Posters from the Revolution, Paris, May 1968. Texts and Posters by Atelier Populaire (London: Dobson Books, 1969). 45 For analysis and ample visual documentation, see Liz McQuinston, Graphic Agitation: Social and Political Graphics since the Sixties (London: Phaidon, 1993). 46 See for example the penetration of digital screens and technologies into Amish communities that still use the horse-drawn buggies, Kevin Granville and Ashley Gilbertson, “In Amish Country Future in Calling,” The New York Times, September 15, 2017, https​://ww​w.nyt​imes.​com/2​017/0​9/15/​busin​ess/a​mish-​techn​ology​.html​ 47 Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux Journal, no. 10 (November 2009), http:​//www​.e-fl​ux.co​m/jou​rnal/​10/61​362/i​n-def​ense-​of-th​e-poo​r-ima​ge/ 48 On cookies, see Elinor Carmi, “Review—Cookies More than Meets the Eye,” Theory, Culture and Society (2017): 1–5. DOI: 10.1177/0263276417736367

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Selected Bibliography Benjamin, Walter. “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian.” In Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935–1938, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 260–302. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002. Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking My Library.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 59–68. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Beraldi, Henri. Les Graveurs du XIXe Siècle, guide de l’amateur d’estampes modernes. 12 vols. Paris: Libriarie L. Conquet, 1889–1892. Bouchot, Henri. La Lithographie. Paris: Ancienne Maison Quantin, Librairies-Imprimeries Réunis 1895. Cate, Phillip Dennis and Sinclair Hitchings. The Color Revolution: Color Lithography in France, 1890-1900. Santa Barbara: p. Smith, 1978. Fustier, Gustave. “La Littérature murale: Essai sur les Affiches Littéraires en France.” Le Livre, Revue du Monde Littéraire (Nov. 1884): 337–56. Iskin, Ruth, E. The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s-1900s. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth Press, 2014. Les Murailles Révolutionnaires, Professions de Foi, Affiches Décrets, Bulletins de la République, Fac-Simile de signatures, préface, Alfred Delvau. Paris: J. Bry (Ainé), 1852. Mellerio, André. La Lithographie originale en couleurs. Paris: L’Estampe et l’Affiche, 1898. Rickards, Maurice, edited and completed by Michael Twyman. The Encyclopedia of Ephemera. London: The British Library, 2000. Rickards, Maurice and Michael Twyman. The Encyclopedia of Ephemera. London: The British Library, 2000. Sachs, Hans. The World’s Largest Poster Collection, 1896-1938: How It Came about and . . . Disappeared from the Face of the Earth. New York: Privately published, 1957. Steyerl, Hito. “In Defense of Poor Images.” e-flux, November 2009. http:​//www​.e-fl​ux.co​m/ jou​rnal/​10/61​362/i​n-def​ense-​of-th​e-poo​r-ima​ge/. Taws, Richard. The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. Uzanne, Octave. “La monomanie des affiches: Précis historique, -- Les Collectionneurs. Les Artistes français de l’Affiche.” In La Nouvelle Bibliopolis, 83–139. Paris: Henri Floury, 1897. Weill, Alain. L’Affichomanie: Collectionneurs d’affiches--Affiches de collection, 1880-1890. Paris: Musée de l’Affiche, 1980. Zmelty, Nicholas-Henry. L’affiche illustrée au temps de l’affichomanie (1889-1905). Paris: Mare et Martin, 2014.

6

From Commune to Commerce: Ernest Maindron’s Collecting Ephemera and Posters, Late 1850s–Early 1900s Ruth E. Iskin

Collecting posters and ephemera constituted a dramatic democratization of collecting during the 1890s, when it became an international craze the French dubbed affichomanie.1 It attracted thousands of mostly middle-class men, and rarely women, although posters frequently featured women as connoisseurs and attentive visitors to gallery exhibitions.2 Estimates varied but all agreed that the rise in the number of poster collectors was dramatic. According to the French bibliophile, publisher, author, and critic of the poster, Octave Uzanne, in Paris, before 1870 there were only about ten collectors; by 1887, about fifty; by 1891, 200;3 and in 1897 he estimated there were eight- or nine-hundred, and noted that in addition, collectors multiplied in Europe and America.4 In the same year, a French journalist stated that there were one thousand poster collectors in Paris alone.5 Collecting posters was not limited to France. In 1896, the American journal The Poster claimed there were over 6,000 collectors in North America, which likely suggests a more liberal idea of what constituted a poster collection than that held in France.6 Leading collectors in France had many thousands of posters in their collections, and choice pieces of the most important poster artists. Why did so many collect posters and what were their major motivations? What was the cultural significance of collecting posters and ephemera during the late nineteenth century? And what role did poster collectors play in the development of the poster market? I argue that collecting posters and other ephemera in the late nineteenth century was not only a matter of class and affordability but also attracted those who embraced modernity and recognized the importance of preserving ephemeral everyday print media for future historians. Rather than the past, poster collectors focused on collecting the present for posterity. This chapter focuses on Ernest Maindron, one of the most important collectors of posters and other ephemera in the second half of the nineteenth century. His extensive collection of typographic posters of the French Commune has barely been addressed, thus the focus here is on them, rather than

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on his collection of illustrated posters.7 I conclude with comments on the poster art market and the significance of poster collectors.

Ernest Maindron: Collector, Archivist, Curator, and Historian Ernest Maindron (1838–1907) was a leading collector of posters and ephemera in Paris, who began collecting in the late 1850s and continued most likely through the end of 1890s and possibly a bit later. So extensive was his collection that the French critic and museum official Roger Marx asserted in 1889 that the true museum of the poster resided only in the portfolios of Maindron and Constant Dessolliers.8 Today Maindron is primarily remembered as the first historian of the poster (his earliest article on posters was published in 1884, his first volume, Les affiches illustrées, in 1886, and the second in 1896).9 Maindron was the secretary-archivist of the French Academie de Sciences (until sometime before 1897) and his extensive activity as collector was a labor of love executed with the professionalism of an archivist.10 His interest was not only in posters but also in other everyday print ephemera, such as illustrated programs for theaters and café-concerts, menus, and invitation cards, about which he authored a book.11 Maindron started collecting posters when he was about twenty years old, or perhaps even a bit earlier. We learn this from H. B. Coudray’s comment in a profile he wrote on Maindron for Les hommes d’aujourd’hui, published c. 1887: “Here are more than thirty years in which he laboriously united with a particular flair, mostly that which concerns our époque.”12 Judging from the size of Maindron’s collection accumulated in the thirty years prior to c. 1887, when it consisted of some 15,000 posters (according to Coudray),13 we can calculate that if Maindron collected at a similar pace each of these thirty years, he would have had to acquire about 500 posters annually. Maindron continued to collect vigorously, probably at an even higher rate since it was only during the 1890s that the illustrated poster reached its zenith, attracting numerous artists including Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre Bonnard to create posters. Maindron’s second volume, covering the decade of 1886 to 1895, confirms his great interest in posters of the 1890s. Maindron’s portrait, published in Les hommes d’aujourd’hui, was commissioned from Jules Chéret to accompany its profile on Maindron (Figure 6.1). It emphasizes his activity of collecting as quite intense, showing him carrying numerous posters. The satiric portrayal shows that Chéret ignored the traditional iconography of the collector even though the journal made an explicit suggestion to represent Maindron with a magnifying glass.14 Unlike traditional representations of collectors, this one does not show Maindron in the dignified act of looking closely at an artwork. Collectors/ connoisseurs were usually depicted looking with the help of some hand-held implement to see the artworks’ details. For example, Fernand Fau’s poster promoting an exhibition at the Salon des Cent in 1895 shows a fashionable woman looking at works on the wall



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Figure 6.1 Jules Chéret, Ernest Maindron, cover illustration for Les hommes d’aujourd’hui 6, no. 277 [1887], author’s collection. through hand-held glasses (Figure 6.2). Frédéric-Auguste Cazals’s poster, promoting an exhibition at the same venue in 1894, depicts the spectacled, preeminent poet Paul Verlaine and the poet and critic Jean Moréas, with a monocle, each looking intently at an artwork on the gallery wall (Figure 6.3) Chéret’s portrayal of Maindron parts company with the iconography of Honoré Daumier’s The Connoisseur, c. 1860–65 (Figure 6.4). Daumier depicts a collector reclining in a comfortable armchair in the privacy of his own interior, surrounded by walls filled with framed art works. A portfolio of prints at the collector’s feet indicates that he has prints in his collection. The collector contemplates a tabletop replica of the Venus de Milo, who represented antiquity rather than contemporaneity. By contrast, Maindron, who is interested in contemporary posters, is active rather than reflective, mobile rather than still. He is in transit, walking in public space rather than leisurely seated, sheltered in a private space surrounded by his collections. Whereas Daumier

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Figure 6.2  Fernand Fau, 14e exposition – 31 rue Bonaparte, Salon des Cent, 1895. Public domain. firmly anchors his collector in his study, which provides an escape from the instability and dislocation of modernity, Chéret characterizes Maindron as collector participating in the transience of modern life. Moreover, Maindron is shown transporting many posters, almost too numerous to carry. A bursting portfolio under each arm, he is straining to hold on to three large rolls, each of which contains more posters. The sketch suggests that he is on a constant chase to collect large quantities of posters, and that he does not merely acquire a single poster at a time, but rather a whole lot. Chéret further highlights Maindron’s mobility with the prominent black ink scribbling shaded in pink under the feet. A collector of posters and ephemera on a grand scale, such as Maindron, could not be represented in the lofty aesthetic examination of a single



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Figure 6.3  Frédéric-Auguste Cazals, 7me exposition – 31 rue Bonaparte, Salon des Cent, 1894. Public domain. artwork. Like the posters themselves, he too had to be out on the street. His collecting required him to engage intensely with contemporary life, looking at everyday prints and posters circulating in public spaces—streets, print shops, secondhand stores, galleries, and studios. Represented in mid-action of the mundane act of transporting exemplars destined for his vast archive, Maindron was captured humorously in the act of accumulation, rather than contemplation. Maindron’s collection of illustrated posters was extensive and included a nearly complete collection of the posers of Jules Chéret, who was considered the father of the artistic illustrated poster. Although it has rarely been discussed, long before Maindron started to collect illustrated posters of the 1880s and 90s (about which he wrote two volumes), he had amassed a large collection of earlier posters, among which was an extensive collection of typographic posters of the Commune.15 Maindron did not write

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Figure 6.4 Honoré Daumier The Connoisseur, c. 1860–65, pen and ink, wash, watercolor, lithographic crayon, and gouache over black chalk. 43.8 × 35.5 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929. about these posters in his books on the illustrated poster, presumably because they were typographic, rather than illustrated.

Maindron’s Collection of Commune Posters Maindron’s collection of Commune posters appeared anonymously in a volume titled Les murailles politiques françaises depuis le 4 Septembre 1870, published in the early 1870s by Armand Le Chevalier.16 The publisher did not divulge the name of the “ardent collector” who, as Le Chevalier testified in a brief preface, had assembled this complete and “precious collection” during the months of the Commune.17 Hence Maindron has not usually been associated with this book. Maindron chose to remain anonymous around 1873, when Le Chevalier’s volume was published, probably because it was too close in time to the controversial political event. The Commune, formed in response



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to the French government’s capitulation to the invading Germans, was a revolutionary government with socialist principles, a “government of the people by the people,” to quote Karl Marx;18 and “the citizen-created order,” to quote the painter Gustave Courbet, who joined the Commune and became president of the Arts Commission and then of the Artists Federation that succeeded it.19 Consisting mostly of the working class and supported by tradesman, shopkeepers, and artisans, the Commune was deemed an unruly insurrection by the right. It ended when the French army killed many thousands of communards, and the government exiled or jailed thousands, reestablishing the power of the bourgeoisie in a conservative Third Republic. Amnesty was granted in 1880, and with further historical distance from the events, Maindron acknowledged (around 1887 to Coudray, who authored his profile) that Le Chevalier had published Maindron’s own collection of Commune posters. In 1900, Maindron included Les murailles politiques in a list of books he authored.20 Maindron’s collection of Commune posters included many that were printed by the Imprimerie Nationale, and others printed by private print firms (imprimeries). The National Guard took possession by force of the national printing enterprise on March 18, 1870, and held on to it until May 21, 1871.21 During this period the Imprimerie Nationale, which had been the printer of the French state, printed posters by the official voices of the Commune. While the directors of the Imprimerie Nationale were replaced, 820 out of the 900 workers continued to work under the regime of representatives of the Central Committee.22 The new directors reorganized the workplace in accordance with the principles of democratization and equality of the Commune, and instituted changes in salary.23 The Imprimerie Nationale produced five to six typographic posters per day (in addition to pamphlets and other materials), printing about 6,000 exemplars of posters destined for the entire Parisian population, and 1,000–3,000 copies for specialized audiences such as a single arrondissement, or the halls of markets.24 Fifty afficheurs employed by the Imprimerie Nationale during this period were charged with posting the posters in Paris, placing many posters on large arteries.25 The Commune posters in Maindron’s collection constituted a wide variety of political communications, between the communards, and with their supporters. These posters included proclamations, and explanations of particular political positions, announcements, orders, manifestos, calls for action, and opinions, by numerous voices mostly of the communards, the National Guard, officials, mayors of arrondissements, women’s committees of certain arrondissements addressing women of their districts (usually asking for donations for the communards), an army general, ministers, including Léon Gambetta, various committees and groups. In some exceptional cases, well-known individuals, such as Victor Hugo, were signed on the text of a poster, which in this case appeared more like a printed article. Hugo’s poster, dated September 9, 1870, was addressed “Aux Allemandes” (To Germans), and argued that Paris should be spared. The mode of address of Commune posters was crucial to the radical politics of the Commune. Addressing “workers,” “brothers,” “citizens,” and “Paris inhabitants” was far removed from the genteel bourgeois address of “mesdames et messieurs.” The appellation of “citoyennes et citoyens,” which was widespread in the 1789 revolution and again in 1848, had been forgotten for a quarter of a century until it was used by an

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orator in a public meeting in 1868, as recounted in the memoirs of the Communard Gustave Lefrançais: Up until then, orators had begun to speak with the sacramental formula: “Mesdames et Messieurs . . .” This speaker, in a clear and sufficiently vibrant voice cried out an appellation that had been deeply forgotten for a quarter century: “Citoyennes et citoyens!” The room erupted in applause. . . . he had evoked . . . a whole world of memories and hopes. Each person present gave a start, shivered . . . the effect was immense and its reverberation spread outdoors.26

Kristin Ross clarifies that the interpellation “originating in another moment in the political past . . . creates the now of a shared-political subjectivization. . . . It interpellates the listeners to be part of that present.”27 Although her insights are about an orator’s mode of address rather than posters, the comments are highly relevant to typical modes of address in Commune posters. It should be noted, however, that the French feminine form of citizen (citoyennes) and of other modes of address of the female gender, is usually missing in Commune posters. One Commune poster, for example, was addressed thus: Au Peuple de Paris, A la Garde Nationale, CITOYENS. [To the People of Paris, to the National Guard, CITIZENS.]

Another addressed itself to Le Peuple de Paris Aux Soldats de Versailles, FRERÈS! [The People of Paris, to the Soldiers of Versailles, BROTHERS!]

Rare was the poster that addressed specifically women. A few such posters appeared in Maindron’s collection. For example, a poster signed by members (women) of the executive commission of the central committee of the Union des femmes, addressed women workers: “Appel aux ouvrières” (A call to female workers) urging them to attend a meeting in order to elect delegates for the formation of the Chambre fédérale des travailleuses (Federal office of women laborers). What is consistent in the typographic posters of the Commune, whether they have a relatively sparse or longer text, is that they constitute a direct communication with specific political aims, from those signed as the authors to those addressed. Often there is a sense of urgency to the communication. These posters do not merely constitute Commune “thought” but rather are political actions. Even Commune posters that appeared primarily informative expressed the voice of the revolution. For example, one



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poster presented the detailed plans of the Commune to seize the home and possessions of the Versailles government’s leader, Adolphe Thiers. The linen was to be given to the ambulances; art objects and precious books to the national libraries and museums; furniture was to be sold at auction and profits of the sale assigned to pensions and indemnities to the widows and orphans of the victims of the war; the grounds of the residence were to be turned into a public park.28 The communication on specific matters was most often directed to comrades, influencing their views but also their actions. The role of many posters was not merely informative but performative. Most posters addressed members of a collective. They interpellated individuals as revolutionary subjects, but also addressed them as a collective of revolutionary citizens. As such, reading Commune posters on the street differed from reading newspapers. Moreover, during the Commune, the voice of the revolutionary Commune was the official one, printed by the national printer, pasted in prominent locations in the city with the protection of the Paris police, and thus reading political posters was not considered subversive at the time. This was quite contrary to the post-Commune era, when police surveillance and immediate removal of clandestinely plastered political posters attempted to eject the posters from the public sphere.29 Ironically the police, who were not a “collector” of posters, were nonetheless responsible for the survival of political posters during the post-Commune era. By placing these posters in its archives along with meticulous documentation of location, date, time, how the posters were discovered, etc. the police inadvertently helped preserve them and information about them.30 Taken as a whole, Commune posters, which are a rich and still underused source for historians, constitute a collage of day-to-day communications and actions during the Commune, providing information on the social, military, and financial needs, and the strategies for organization and support of the cause. Collecting Commune posters in real time, Maindron salvaged ephemeral political communication—history in the making written anonymously, from the bottom up. As the publisher of Les murailles politiques writes: “The posters are the history written for everyone, day by day, in the streets, on the walls. They are the most truthful expression, vivid in details.”31 The Commune posters were a mass medium of the time that played an active part in the historical events. Recognizing political posters as shreds of history had motivated an earlier publication of political posters in book form, Les murailles révolutionnaires, which included posters, decrees, and bulletins from February 1848 (initially published in Paris in the early 1850s).32 This publication relied on the enormous collection of political posters from 1848 amassed by the poster collector Georges Pochet-Deroches.33 Alfred Delvau, who authored the preface to the 1852 volume on the 1848 posters, referred to them as “a collective oeuvre, whose author is Mr. Everyone.” The posters were a living history, he wrote, the most “truthful, original and eloquent .  .  .  the most animated panorama of the days that were so diverse and so moving, which we all witnessed and in which we all were actors.”34 This volume must have inspired Maindron’s own collecting efforts over twenty years later.

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Maindron’s Classification Maindron’s own elaborate description of poster collectors evokes the archivist: collectors conserve numerous “important documents” that otherwise would be “lost to history”; distinguished by “perseverance,” they take great care in gathering the posters and “piously” classifying them: “each [collector] in the specialty that is dear to him, constituting the most precious elements, the most indisputable and necessary for the knowledge of art.”35 Although he stressed that “pious” classification was central to the collector’s practice, Maindron does not tell us what his own system was. In 1889, however, Henri Beraldi did. The preeminent scholar on contemporary fine-art prints, Beraldi elevated the status of Chéret’s posters and other ephemera by cataloguing them along with fine-art prints.36 This progressive approach was controversial because during this period traditional print collectors tended to focus on black-and-white prints and did not even accept fine-art color prints, let alone posters and other printed ephemera that were created for an everyday function (such as advertising, theater programs, menus, etc.). Beraldi’s cataloguing of Chéret’s oeuvre legitimized posters and other ephemera for contemporary print collectors, opening the path for poster dealers and facilitating sales.37 Beraldi, who knew Maindron, reports with admiration on the latter’s extensive collection and details its classification system. The thousands of posters were catalogued into some 400 dossiers.38 While many were classified according to subjects, others were catalogued by artists, and non-French posters were categorized by nation (Italian, Spanish, German, English, and American). Posters categorized by subjects were classified according to types of establishments, and these were further divided by subcategories of specific examples. For instance, under the category café concerts appeared: “Alcazar, Harmonie, XIXe siècle Ambassadeurs, Horloge, Folies-Bergère,” etc. The subject of librarie (the book shop) included subcategories based on book subjects such as religious works, classics, education, science, art, travel, and history. Political posters were organized in several separate categories such as anticlerical; the category “for memory” included political posters and other non-illustrated posters since 1848, which filled fifty portfolios.39 There were 200 dossiers of political caricature and a collection of posters of the siege of the Commune in 1871.40 Known as “a fanatic of Daumier,” Maindron constituted Daumier as a separate category comprising 3,000 pieces, which according to Beraldi constituted “a full collection.”41 Some dossiers were also organized by the name of the graphic artist, such as Gavarni, Cham, Gill, Grévin, and Willette. His classification according to artists included many of those who made the early nineteenth-century illustrated posters promoting books, and only a handful of contemporary poster artists: Léon Choubrac, Alfred Choubrac, and Chéret. This changed later on, because Beraldi’s description written in 1889 preceded the 1890s when many leading artists, including ToulouseLautrec, Bonnard, Grasset, Mucha, and the British artists Beardsley and the Beggarstaff Brothers, began to make posters. Since Maindron continued to collect posters during the 1890s, he no doubt added many dossiers for individual artists. True to his interest



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in everyday ephemeral prints, additional categories in Maindron’s collection included print items other than posters: cards, programs, and menus. Walter Benjamin states that the collector orders the world through his collection, in a way that resembles the connection between the dictionary and the natural arrangement.42 Maindron’s system appears to have been more individual than that since he used not one but several principles of classification. Although Maindron privileged subject matter over chronology (the latter was the principle for Lépine’s vast poster collection),43 he also used the category of specific artists, and of nation. Moreover, Maindron’s system likely accommodated some changes when the field of illustrated posters grew in an unprecedented scope (which happened after Beraldi described Maindron’s system). Maindron not only collected posters and other everyday print ephemera but also labored actively to make his collection and knowledge public. To this end, he wrote two volumes and some articles on the history of the poster; catalogued Chéret’s enormous production of posters (in his 1896 volume); prepared his own collection of Commune posters for publication (in 1873); and in 1899 organized the first major exhibition of posters, a historical exhibition at the centennial exposition universelle, titled Histoire résumée de l’affiche française, based on his own museum-scale collection.44 Maindron could not have accomplished this work as a historian, curator, and (anonymous) editor without his own poster collection, given that at the time, no significant museum collection of them existed. Maindron was a new type of bourgeois collector in accordance with Republican democratic values of knowledge, education, and science, quite the opposite from Balzac’s fictional Cousin Pons who leads a cloistered life and shows his collection to no one, or aristocratic collectors for whom collecting was an activity of private pleasure.45 Toward the end of his life, Maindron put up for auction only his collection of a few thousand of Daumier prints, many of them extracted from the journals in which they had been printed.46 Maindron, however, did not put on the market his vast poster collection. Nor did he bequeath it to a museum or library as some other major collectors did (for example, Gustave Dutailly, Pochet-Deroches, and Roger Braun). Instead, Maindron arranged for his collection to survive him intact and continue to be expertly conserved, by selling it to the leading poster collector Alexandre Henriot. A Champagne producer, Henriot was the director of the Syndicat des Grandes Marques and the president of the Society of Friends of the Arts in Reims,47 and had organized the ambitious 1896 Reims poster exhibition. The latter included 1,690 posters, of which 1,100 were from France, while the rest were from Germany, the United States, England, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Holland, Italy, Sweden, Annam (Vietnam), and Japan.48 By merging his own collection with that of Henriot, Maindron must have been satisfied that it would not be dispersed and would later on likely be donated to a museum or library. As fate would have it, however, some seven years after Maindron passed away, all of his posters along with all of Henriot’s went up in flames in a 1914 fire, at the beginning of the First World War.49 The demise of Maindron’s collection came to light only recently when Nicholas-Henry Zmelty, who studied the Sagot archive (housed in INHA, Paris) found a record of Henriot’s asking Maurice Le Garrec (son-in-law

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and successor of the preeminent poster dealer Sagot) to sign a declaration for an insurance company, confirming that Henriot had purchased the celebrated collection of Maindron and that the posters in the latter’s collection had been in very good condition.50 Tragically, the ephemerality of the thousands of paper posters was reaffirmed in spite of all of Maindron’s and Henriot’s best efforts to salvage them for posterity.

The Late Nineteenth-Century Poster Market Maindron began collecting before the market for posters emerged. Although we have little evidence of how he acquired his posters, his special status in the field gave him exceptional access in going directly to the source—artists and printers, and during the Commune, he most likely peeled posters off the wall. Moreover, he acquired the posters whenever possible, immediately as they were printed, which prevented the difficulty of getting them once they became rare. The poster market developed differently in Paris than in other cities, for example London. Charles Hiatt, who was the most important British critic writing about posters, stated that Mr. Bella of London (who had organized the large poster exhibitions there) had “called the English collector into existence.”51 In contrast, in Paris collectors called into existence the poster dealer. They preceded the emergence of poster dealers, and thus their collecting activities took place long before the market for posters was established. Finally, the poster artists and the emerging, illustrated advertising industry also played an important role in the development of the poster market. Rogers’s insight applies to both the London and Paris: “As soon as the advertisement became artistic, it appealed to the aesthetic instincts of a certain proportion of the crowd, and became an object of desire.” Thus, he stated, “the poster collector came into existence at the bidding of the artist.” We may conclude that the poster market developed in response to an interactive process among collectors, dealers, and exhibitions. Another significant factor in the poster field and its market was the fact of blurred boundaries and crossovers: many of the critics were also collectors, while some collectors were also dealers; for example, Mr. Bella was a dealer, a collector, and in the paper business. Some dealers were also in production, publishing luxury editions of posters (for example Edmond Sagot, Gustave Pellet, and Ambroise Vollard).52 Finally some print firms, which published vast numbers of commercial and election posters, published special editions for collectors. Chaix (where Chéret was employed) edited, printed, and distributed a special high-quality edition of posters in reduced size, the Maîtres de l’affiche (Masters of the Poster), which was made specifically for poster collectors.53 As this shows, no single actor or institution in the field can claim exclusive primacy. Rather, the market was an adaptive, complex system that grew with the reciprocally causal relationships of collectors, dealers, printers, publishers, artists, critics, exhibitions, journals, galleries, objects, and collections. Collectors were important active agents in developing this interrelated network, and dealers of course played a crucial role in the market.54 Yet, it should be noted that much poster collecting took place without dealers, since collectors cherished strategies that



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circumvent dealers. Some, especially when still young and just beginning to collect, peeled posters off the walls in the dead of night, as, for example, was the case of the preeminent poster collector, the architect Jean-Baptiste Lépine (who also collected political posters) during his student days.55 Gustave Fustier, in his 1884 article, advises his readers not to pursue this practice and to look for posters where they are available for sale, or strike up advantageous relationships, even bribing those who have access to posters at printers, or at establishments where posters were on display.56 Early on, some collectors bought posers clandestinely from the afficheurs who were charged with posting them in the city, or from the print firms who printed them. While these practices disappeared or were greatly diminished once regulations tightened,57 some collectors continued to go directly to the source. Even as late as 1901, Rogers provided advice on how collectors could obtain posters free of charge, approaching, for example, the artist, writing to a theater whose poster they wished to obtain, or when all else failed, exercising their ingenuity, for which the author provides further ideas.58 In addition, quite a few journals published lists of posters that collectors could buy directly from them. Finally, barter among collectors was a common way of obtaining posters, especially exchanging duplicates for a poster the collector did not have.59 Many of those writing on posters, including Maindron, addressed themselves to collectors, yet almost none explicitly discussed the market. Uzanne, writing in 1897, noted that collectors might be crushed by their own collection and the weight of so much paper, and offered help by writing up a list of artists whose work any serious collector should have in his collection. In effect he established a canon of poster artists, and recommended acquiring those, including those whose posters had become rare by the end of the nineteenth century.60 Although Uzanne generally does not discuss the market, he did note that political posters never had the kind of market success of “frivolous illustrated posters.”61 He recalls that in 1881 one could acquire at auction a superb collection of about 7,000 posters, including those related to the 1848 revolution, the Second Empire, the Siege and the Paris Commune, as well as illustrated political journals—but “not a single collector was interested.”62 Only one critic, Charles Hiatt, provided detailed advice to collectors by including a discussion of prices in his analysis of the market for posters in the mid-1890s. Hiatt, whose 1895 book provides a history of the illustrated poster (including France, England, America, Spain, Germany, Italy, Holland, and Belgium), also discussed poster designers who were contemporary in the mid-1890s and concluded with a chapter on the poster market. He noted that price fluctuations take place almost daily and that dealers vary in their prices.63 As he asserts, rarity was the primary cause of higher prices.64 Thus, he distinguished between the higher prices of 1830s posters promoting books, by French designers who were no longer alive, and the advantageous prices of posters by contemporary designers still alive in the mid-1890s (when Hiatt’s book was published).65 Giving concrete examples, he discussed Chéret, who was the most collected poster designer, recommending to “the collector of modest means” not “to regret that the older and rarer examples of Chéret’s work were beyond his reach,” because “the artist’s more recent posters are

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the best that he has accomplished.” Thus “for a comparatively small outlay, one may secure the flower of Chéret’s work.”66 For just thirty or forty shillings one could get four recent posters of Loie Fuller, which were “the most daring and characteristic” of Chéret’s work.67 Hiatt also recommends acquiring posters by other living French artists which can still be purchased for a few shillings each, such as by ToulouseLautrec, Anquetin, Bonnard, Steinlen, and Ibels, who “are in great demand,” and provide an opportunity for collectors “to procure a series of these curiously interesting designs before prices rise.”68 Hiatt’s advice, written over 120 years ago, appears remarkably contemporary.

Collecting Posters and Ephemera for Future Historians Unlike collectors of high art, including those who collected fine-art prints, at least before the poster market evolved, early collectors of posters and other ephemera did not acquire artistic objects, but rather sought out prints destined for destruction. To take such a position, poster collectors had to be enthusiastic about modernity, its ephemerality, and what most would have considered its refuse. Their passion was for salvaging posters from assured destruction. They saw themselves as saviors of mundane transient physical objects, which they considered to be important documents for future historians. This belief was common throughout different nations. Diverse poster collectors stated in a variety of ways that posters are a “microcosm of our society,” giving “precious information on our habits, our customs, our costumes, our good, our readings, our maladies, above all our pleasures.”69 They were committed to a history of modernity that would include posters as representing the everyday of their own time. Whereas collecting commercial illustrated posters, especially those that were considered “artistic,” was highly popular, few collected political posters. Several major collectors who early on assembled political posters, including Maindron, Lépine, and Pochet-Deroches, later collected illustrated commercial posters once these had emerged. Pochet-Deroches, who, as mentioned earlier, had amassed an enormous collection of political posters from the 1848 revolution that served as the basis for the publication of posters in the volume Murailles revolutionaries,70 continued to collect illustrated posters after his first collection was dispersed. Lépine’s collection of 60,000 items, which included posters, as well as illustrated journals, caricatures, and other ephemera, and was particularly strong in political posters, was auctioned in 1898.71 At first sight it may seem that collecting typographic political posters had little in common with later collecting illustrated posters that promoted a wide range of products, entertainments, and services. Whereas political posters were clearly valuable to political and social history, the colorful illustrated posters advertising a wide range of products, entertainments locales, and services—from biscuits, alcohol, and café- concerts to leisure locations and train lines—expressed and expanded capitalist consumption. Nonetheless, Maindron and other collectors recognized that such commercial posters too, had a historical value as documents of modern everyday life.



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Although Maindron wrote extensively about illustrated posters, he did not write about Commune posters.72 Like other key players in the network of collectors, critics, and scholars of posters, Maindron was keenly aware of the historical importance of capturing the fleeting “now” of the everyday in illustrated posters in allowing future historians to make use of a crucial archive. Political posters of the Commune were a unique record that provided a glimpse into the day-to-day Commune communications, the urgent needs voiced by those actively involved in the Commune, and the politics they espoused. Poster collectors repeatedly expressed that they saw themselves as fulfilling an important function of rescuing illustrated (commercial) posters from their brief existence on the street. When Maindron and others collected Commune posters they saw themselves as salvaging a piece of history that had a political urgency: rescuing a revolutionary moment for posterity. Maindron’s collecting the Commune posters was a radical act not only because it preserved ephemeral public printed communications of political actors, but also because in doing so, his commitment was to the future. Preserving a political present moment for posterity was the extreme opposite of conservative, royalist, counterrevolutionary collectors, who chose to preserve a past they longed for—pre-revolutionary France. As Tom Stammers demonstrates, royalist collectors usually focused on the eighteenth century, and salvaged books, libraries, furniture and a wide gamut of material culture of the Court, which represented to them “a pure French past.”73 Both poster collectors and counterrevolutionary collectors adopted the rhetoric of rescue and salvage. But whereas Maindron and other poster collectors saw themselves as rescuers of Commune posters and the revolutionary history they represented, counterrevolutionaries castigated the Commune as destroyers of French patrimony. For example, Jules Cazin, director of the Musée Carnavalet, expressed the sentiments of counterrevolutionary collectors like himself who resolved to “wipe out . . . the trace of such a shameful act of vandalism.”74 Poster collectors were mostly republicans, and valued not only entirely different objects then those collected by royalists, but also identified with opposing temporalities. Royalist collectors regarded their “possessions [as] a welcome remembrance of better times and a ‘consolation for their despair.’”75 Whereas they wanted to restore the past, and viewed contemporary culture with contempt, poster and ephemera collectors valued the present while looking to the future. Whereas the former yearned for, and attempted to restore, a past long gone, the latter saw value in their own transient contemporary moment and cherished a future in which historians would use the collections they had amassed. Thus, like other poster and ephemera collectors, for Maindron his collecting activity was crucial to a history of his own time, yet to be written.

Notes 1 Thanks to Paula Birnbaum and Britany Salsbury for their close readings and for sharing insights that guided the revision of this chapter. This chapter draws in part on material discussed in Ruth E. Iskin, The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design and Collecting, 1860s–1900s (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2014), chapter 8.

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2 Posters depicting women as collectors/connoisseurs are discussed in Iskin, The Poster, Ch. 2. 3 Octave Uzanne, “Les collectionneurs d’affiches illustrées,” [Part I] in Le livre moderne, revue du monde littéraire et des bibliophiles contemporains (April–May 1891): 191–205, at 195. 4 Uzanne, “La monomanie des affiches,” in Uzanne, La nouvelle bibliopolis, voyage d’un novateur au pays des néo-icono-bibliomanes (Paris: Henri Floury, 1897), 83–139, at 90. 5 André Maurel, “L’Amateur d’affiches,” Le Figaro (January 10, 1897): 1. 6 Will Clemens in The Poster 1, no. 2 (February 1896): 15. 7 This chapter expands on my earlier discussion of Commune posters, Maindron, and collecting the illustrated poster, in Iskin, The Poster, ch. 8. On collecting the illustrated poster, see also Alain Weill, L’affichomanie: collectionneurs d’affiches— affiches de collection, 1880–1900, exh. cat. (Paris: Musée de l’Affiche, 1980); Karen L. Carter, “L’Age de l’Affiche: The Reception, Display, and Collection of Illustrated Posters in Fin-de-Siècle France” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2001), ch. 5; Nicholas-Henry Zmelty, L’affiche illustrée: au temps de l’affichomanie, 1889–1905 (Paris: Mare et Martin, 2014). On political posters of the 1789 French Revolution, Frank Gallo, The Poster in History, trans. Alfred and Bruni Mayor (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972, repr. 2000), 17–18. 8 Cited in Beraldi, Les graveurs du XIXe siècle: Guide de l’amateur d’estampes modernes, 12 vols. (Paris: L. Conquet, 1885–1892), vol. 10, 1890, 20. 9 Ernest Maindron, “Les Affiches illustrées,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 2nd ser., 30 [Part I and II] (November and December, 1884): 419–33, 535–47; Maindron, Les affiches illustrées (Paris: H. Lainette 1886); Maindron, Les affiches illustrées (Paris: G. Boudet, 1896). 10 Maindron must have retired from his position at the Académie by 1897, the year Uzanne refers to him as the “ex-secrataire” in “La monomanie,” 88. Maindron authored quite a few books between 1881 and 1900, while he held the post and thereafter. 11 Maindron, Les programmes illustrés des théâtres et des cafés-concerts, menus, cartes d’invitations, petites estampes, etc. Préf. Pierre Véber (Paris: Librairie Nilsson - Per Lamm, 1897). 12 H. B. Jean Coudray, “Ernest Maindron,” Les hommes d’aujourd’hui 6, no. 299 (c. 1887): n.p. [1–3], at [1]. 13 Ibid., [2]. Beraldi had estimated a year or so earlier that Maindron possessed over 10,000 posters, Les graveurs, vol. 4, 1886, 203. 14 Coudray, “Maindron,” [3]. 15 Maindron’s collection also included illustrated posters promoting books, created during the 1830s and 1840s, but it is not clear at what point he began to collect those. 16 Les murailles politiques françiases depuis le 4 septembre 1870 (Paris: Armand Le Chevalier, 1873). 17 Ibid. [1]. 18 Karl Marx, “The Third Address, May 1871,” in The Civil War in France, https​://ww​ w.mar​xists​.org/​archi​ve/ma​rx/wo​rks/1​871/c​ivil-​war-f​rance​/ch05​.htm.​ For a recent study of the Commune thought during the years preceding the Commune and those that followed it (which does not study the posters of the Commune), see Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (London: Verso, 2015).



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19 On this topic, see Courbet et la Commune (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux/Musée d’Orsay, 2000); Adrian Rifkind, “Cultural Movement and the Paris Commune,” Art History 2, no. 2 (1979): 201–20, at 215–16. 20 The list appears in the front matter in Ernest Maindron, Marionnettes et guignols, les poupées agissantes et parlantes à travers les âges (Paris: F. Juven, 1900). 21 Gwladys Longeard, “L’imprimerie nationale pendant la Commune de 1871,” Revue d’histoire modern et contemporaine 1, no. 52–1 (2005): 147–74, at 151. 22 Ibid., 152–3. 23 Ibid., 162–7. 24 Ibid., 154. 25 Ibid., 156. 26 Gustave Lefrançais, Souvenirs d’un révolutionnaire [1902] (Paris: La Fabrique, 2013), 266–7. Cited in Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury, Loc 275 in the Kindle version, or: https​://ww​w.ver​soboo​ks.co​m/blo​gs/21​21-ci​toyen​nes-e​t-cit​oyens​-kris​tin-r​oss-o​n-the​ -poli​tical​-voca​bular​y-of-​1789-​and-1​871 27 Ross, Communal Luxury. 28 See illustration and discussion in “Brandeis Special Collections Spotlight,” by Drew Flanagan, http:​//bra​ndeis​speci​alcol​lecti​ons.b​logsp​ot.co​.il/2​013/0​1/par​is-co​mmune​ -post​ers.h​tml 29 Karen L. Carter has studied these police archives, focusing on Paris of the postCommune era (1881–93), and discusses police suppression of political posters and dispersal of their communal reading, despite the freedom of the press legislated in 1881 Press Law. The latter included the liberty of Affichage (posting posters) excepting designated buildings, and eliminated the demand of prior approval for posters. Carter, “‘Masterpieces for Ragpickers’: Working-Class Crowds, Collective Spectatorship, and the Censorship of Posters in Late 19th-Century Paris,” Space and Culture 18, no. 4 (2015): 358–71. 30 Préfecture de police, Service de la mémoire et des affaires culturelles, Série B. My thanks to Britany Salsbury for making these documents available to me. 31 Préface, Murailles politiques, 1873 [1]. 32 Alfred Delvau, Les murailles révolutionnaires, professions de foi, affiches décrets, bulletins de la république, fac-simile de signatures, préface (Paris: J. Bry [Ainé], 1852). Maindron was surely familiar with this publication, which was republished with additions in the late 1860s with the involvement of Le Chevalier (who wrote a long preface to the sixteenth edition published by E. Piccard in 1869) who later published Maindron’s collection of Commune posters. 33 Gustave Fustier, “La Littérature murale: Essai sur les Affiches Littéraires en France,” Le Livre, Revue du Monde Littéraire (November 1884): 337–56, at 338. 34 Delvau, Murailles révolutionnaires, 1852, vol. 1, 2. 35 Maindron, “Affiches illustrées,” 1884, 419. 36 Beraldi, Les graveurs, vol. 12. 37 Weill, L’affichomanie [4]. 38 Beraldi, Les graveurs, 1889, vol. 9, 162–64. 39 Ibid., 164. 40 Beraldi, Les graveurs, vol. 9, 1889, 164. 41 Ibid. Coudray, “Maindron” [2]. Maindron was asked to be the secretary of the exhibition by the prestigious committee of Republicans (whose honorary president was Victor Hugo), which organized the 1878 Daumier exhibition at the Durand Ruel

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Galleries. See Michel Melot, “Daumier and Art History: Aesthetic Judgment/Political Judgment,” trans. Neil McWilliam, Oxford Art Journal 11, no. 1 (1988): 3–24, at 4–5, and 20 n.13. 42 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 205. 43 Lépine’s chronological classification was based on the historical governments of France; each had its own dossier, and in turn contained dossiers of posters of the same type. Fustier, “Littérature murale,” 346. 44 Maindron, 1751–1889. Le champ de Mars, avec la collaboration de M. Camille Viré (Paris et Lille: Impr. de L. Danel, 1889); Ségolène Le Men, “L’art de l’affiche à l’Exposition Universelle de 1889,” Bulletin de la Bibliothèque Nationale (June 1991): 64–71. 45 Dominique Pety identifies the Republican and aristocratic collectors as two types of collectors represented in French literature from the 1840s to the end of the century, in “Le personnage du collectionneur au XIXe siècle: de l’excentrique à l’amateur distingué,” Romantisme 31, no. 112 (2001): 71–81. 46 Maindron and Loys Delteil, eds. Catalogue d'un intéressant oeuvre lithographié de Honoré Daumier formé par M. Ernest Maindron. Loys Delteil. (Paris: Frazier-Soye, 1905). 47 On Henriot, see Weill, Affichomanie, [6]; Zmelty, L’affiche, 76. 48 Alexandre Henriot, Exposition d’affiches artistique françaises & étrangères, modernes & rétrospectives, Cirque des Reims, August - November 1896, exh. cat., reprint. (Paris: Union central des arts décoratifs, 1980). 49 Zmelty, L’affiche, 81. 50 Ibid., 78. 51 Hiatt, Picture Posters, 360. 52 Cate in Phillip Denis Cate and Sinclair Hamilton Hitchings, The Color Revolution, Color Lithography in France 1890–1900, exh. cat. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Art Gallery, 1978), 19–20. 53 For a detailed analysis on the Maîtres de l’affiche, see Iskin, The Poster, ch. 4. 54 For a discussion of the poster market in France, including the dealers and particularly Sagot, see Zmelty, L’affiche, 96–140. 55 Fustier, “Littérature murale,” 348. 56 Ibid., 349. 57 Rogers, A Book, 18. See also Weill, L’Affichomanie [5]. 58 Rogers, A Book, 12–19, 16. 59 On associations for the exchange of posters, see Zmelty, L’affiche, 94–95. 60 Uzanne, “La monomanie,” 100–11. 61 Ibid., 89. 62 Ibid. 63 Hiatt, Picture Posters, 359. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 362. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid., 363–64. 68 Ibid., 364. 69 Beraldi, Les graveurs, 1886, vol. 4, 176. 70 Fustier, “Littérature murale,” 338.



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71 On Lépine’s collection, see Fustier, “Littérature murale,” 346–48, and [Vente. Affiches. 1898–03-31. Paris], Catalogue d’une importante et curieuse réunion d'environ 60,000 affiches relatives à l’histoire de Paris et des provinces . . .: collection de feu de M. Lépine . . . (Montluçon: Grande impr. du centre, 1898). 72 The author of the brief preface discussed earlier, for the volume that published his collection of Commune posters was not Maindron, but the publisher, Armand Le Chevalier. 73 Tom Stammers, “Collectors, Catholics, and the Commune: Heritage and Counterrevolution, 1860–1890,” French Historical Studies 37, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 53–87. 74 Jules Cousin, “Biographie d’un musée et d’un homme,” La plume, January 15, 1892, cited in Stammers, “Collectors,” 66–67. 75 Jules Cousin, “Biographie d’un musée et d’un homme,” 63.

Selected Bibliography Bargiel-Harry, Réjane and Christophe Zagrodzki. Le livre de l’affiche. The Book of the Poster. Exh. cat. Paris: Musée de la Publicité/Editions Syros-Alternatives, 1985. Bella, Edward. A Collection of Posters. The Illustrated Catalogue of the First Exhibition. Exh. cat. London: Royal Aquarium, 1894. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Beraldi, Henri. Les graveurs du XIXe siècle: Guide de l’amateur d’estampes modernes. 12 vols. Paris: L. Conquet, 1885–1892. Braun, Roger, Bibliographie et iconographie de l’affiche illustrée. Lille: Imp. LefebvreDucrocq, 1908. Reprinted in Weill, L’Affichomanie. Carter, Karen, L. “‘Masterpieces for Ragpickers’: Working-Class Crowds, Collective Spectatorship, and the Censorship of Posters in Late 19th-Century Paris.” Space and Culture 18, no. 4 (2015): 358–71. Coudray, Jean H. B. “Ernest Maindron.” Les hommes d’aujourd’hui 6, no. 299 (1887): n.p. Fustier, Gustave. “La Littérature murale: Essai sur les affiches littéraires en France.” Le Livre, Revue du Monde Littéraire 5 (November 1884): 337–56. Hiatt, Charles. Picture Posters [1895]. East Ardsley, Wakefield: EP Publishing, 1976. Iskin, Ruth E. The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design and Collecting, 1860s–1900s. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2014. Longeard, Gwladys. “L’Imprimerie nationale pendant la Commune de 1871.” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 1, no. 51–52 (2005): 147–74. Maindron, Ernest. Les murailles politiques françaises depuis le 4 Septembre 1870. Paris: Armand Le Chevalier, 1873. Maindron, Ernest. Les affiches illustrées. Paris: H. Lunette, 1886. Maindron, Ernest. Les affiches illustrées, 1886–1895. Paris: G. Boudet, 1896. Rifkind, Adrian. “Cultural Movement and the Paris Commune.” Art History 2, no. 2 (1979): 201–20. Rogers, W. S. A Book of the Poster. London: Greening & Co, 1901. Ross, Kristin. Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. London: Verso, 2015.

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Stammers, Tom. “Collectors, Catholics, and the Commune: Heritage and Counterrevolution, 1860–1890.” French Historical Studies 37, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 53–87. Uzanne, Octave. La nouvelle bibliopolis, Voyage d’un novateur au Pays des néo-iconoBibliomanes. Paris: Henri Floury, 1897. Uzanne, Octave. “Les Collectionneurs d’affiches illustrées,” [Part I] in Le livre moderne, revue du monde littéraire et des bibliophiles contemporains (April–May 1891): 191–205. Weill, Alain. L’Affichomanie: collectionneurs d’affiches--affiches de collection, 1880–1890. Exh. cat. Paris: Musée de l’Affiche, 1980. Zmelty, Nicholas-Henry. L’Affiche illustrée: au temps de l’affichomanie, 1889–1905. Paris: Mare et Martin, 2014.

7

The Maurice Rickards Collection of Ephemera Michael Twyman

Nearly all collections have been assembled with a degree of passion, and the collection of ephemera brought together by Maurice Rickards (Figure 7.1) is no exception. But what may be unusual in any field—and certainly with ephemera—is the concept of building up a representative collection as part of a broader approach to its study and promotion. Rickards cannot be considered a pioneer as far as the collecting of ephemera is concerned, and he fully acknowledged that he was building on the shoulders of many others, some of his precursors going back centuries. Indeed, his discussion of the role of important early ephemerists formed part of his promotion of the field. His book Collecting Printed Ephemera (1988), which was published after his own collection was well advanced, makes this abundantly clear. He devotes one chapter to what he called “The Ephemerists” and traces the history of collecting ephemera from John Selden and Samuel Pepys in the seventeenth century through to major collectors of the twentieth century, particularly Bella C. Landauer (1875–1980) in the United States and the one who influenced him most, John de Monins Johnson (1882–1956) in England.1 Rickards’s own personal collection, built up over some thirty years, eventually passed to the University of Reading, England, where it now provides an essential focus for study and research in the Centre for Ephemera Studies of the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication. Rickards is also untypical of collectors of ephemera in that he wrote about collecting from several points of view: the nature of collecting generally and ephemera in particular; why he regarded the preservation of ephemera as so important; practical aspects relating to the curation of documents, such as conservation, description, and display; and also—significantly as things transpired—the issue of finding appropriate homes for collections once a collector has fulfilled his or her ambitions or is no more. Most of these issues, and others too, are discussed in Collecting Printed Ephemera, though he had already addressed them in articles while serving as the unnamed editor of the Ephemerist for twenty years.2 There is therefore no shortage of published information about his motives and activities as a collector. Nevertheless, the ideas that he committed to paper and expressed in lectures and talks have also to be interpreted in the context of his legacy as a collector and the experiences of those who worked alongside him, the present author included. As this chapter is written for a book about

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Figure 7.1 Maurice Rickards surrounded by items from his ephemera collection before it was transferred to the Centre for Ephemera Studies at the University of Reading, c. 1990. Photographer unknown, c. 1990. collecting, it needs to be said that he was not by nature a collector. Possessions meant little to him, and as far as I am aware he did not collect anything other than ephemera: it was the particular field of interest that turned him into an insatiable collector. For most of Maurice Rickards’s life, until his all-consuming passion for ephemera left little time for anything else, he had been a photographer, graphic designer, and public relations consultant. When he died in 1998 the writers of obituary notices in the major newspapers3 had great difficulty documenting his early life.4 Though gregarious, he was also immensely private. What is known about his early life is that he was named Maurice George Mansbridge soon after his birth in Twickenham on August 11, 1919, and that he changed his name in early adulthood out of respect for his adopted father, George Somers Rickards (d. 1976), his own father, Captain Eric Mansbridge, having left home when he was a young child. Though he married in 1945 (later dissolved), he spent most of his later life—the years he spent collecting—in partnership with Elizabeth Greig. She was also an ephemerist, with a special interest in aviation material and hotel labels, though her collecting always took second place to his. She cared for him in his later years, was his chauffeur when he needed one, financed some of his more extravagant buys, and was a constant supporter of his collecting activities. In Collecting Printed Ephemera, Rickards begins his chapter on “Collecting” with the following short paragraph: The collector in any field usually starts from a position of personal interest or special enthusiasm. The man with the world’s biggest collection of corkscrews is on



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the whole unlikely to be a teetotaller. The big-time collector of dental instruments usually turns out to be a dentist. The collection is an expression of the collector.5

How, we may ask, does this passage relate to its writer? Strangely, he does not seem to have recognized, or at least chose not to reveal, that his own background in the writing and designing of documents might have inspired his own interest in collecting and studying ephemera. What comes across loud and clear from his published writings is that he collected ephemera for their “evidential value”: for what they can tell us about society in the past and, in the case of current ephemera, what they might reveal to future generations. Similar phrases crop up over and over again in his writing. It may be significant when considering his reasons for collecting ephemera—given his reluctance to talk about his early life—that he occasionally let slip that he was in the same class at Marylebone Grammar School as the eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm.6 Rickards’s fascination with the past first found an outlet in the books he authored before he became seriously committed to ephemera. In 1968, Evelyn, Adams & Mackay published a series of his books that traced the history of the twentieth-century poster decade by decade. There followed another series of books on the poster in which he addressed particular themes: Posters of the First World War (1968), Banned Posters (1969), Posters of Protest and Revolution (1970), The Rise and Fall of the Poster (1971), The Public Notice (1973), all published by Evelyn, Adams & Mackay or David & Charles. Both series of books drew on his experience as a graphic designer. In much the same period he began tackling different kinds of topics, such as The World Fights Fire (1971), The World Saves Lives (1971), The World Fights Crime (1972), which required illustrations of historical material, albeit mostly fairly recent examples. It is by no means clear when Rickards turned seriously to collecting, but when he did so he was undoubtedly inspired by the large and varied collection of documents and related material that John Johnson had built up in Oxford. A papyrologist with experience in managing excavations in Egypt, Johnson returned to Oxford just before the outbreak of the First World War. He was found unfit for military service and took up a post at Oxford University Press, eventually rising to become Printer to the University in 1925.7 His time in Egypt led him to appreciate the ways in which even the most ordinary documents shed light on life in the past. This experience left its mark, and from the 1920s, when his position at Oxford University Press allowed him to do so, he began collecting a wide range of documents that reflected day-to-day life in Britain. He was able to justify housing these documents at the Press because they could be, and were, used to illustrate some of its publications.8 He was also fortunate that a University statute of the late 1930s permitted the Bodleian Library in Oxford to dispose of unwanted material, specifically, as it stated, material “of no literary or artistic value or of an ephemeral nature.”9 Johnson was on the spot and, in effect, had first refusal of this material, which he acquired for what was soon to be known as the Constance Meade Memorial Collection of Ephemeral Printing, after its major sponsor. Much else was added to the collection through Johnson’s network of contacts, in later years with the help of his enthusiastic assistant Lil Thrussell (Lilian Rosa Thrussell)

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who carried the flag for ephemera at the Press after his death. Later, in the 1960s, when the collection began to open its doors to the occasional visitor, Rickards arranged to see it, inspired no doubt by John Lewis’s book Printed Ephemera (1962). A graphic designer too, Lewis (1912–96) played an important role in opening up the field of printed ephemera, particularly for designers and historians of printing, and made good use of material from the Constance Meade Collection for his book, and particularly for the older material he illustrated. Rickards’s increasing interest in ephemera, combined with his knowledge of John Johnson’s activities and the interest generated by John Lewis’s book and a few other publications about ephemera,10 led him to persuade a few like-minded people to come together in 1975 to found the Ephemera Society in Britain. For many years, he was to play a leading role in the Society, becoming its first chairman (1975–86) and then its vice president (1986–98). A night-bird by nature, he had a regular, very early morning slot on a local London radio station in which he parried questions about ephemera in an easy manner. Under the umbrella of the Society he generated an interest in ephemera by masterminding a program of exhibitions and talks, and also through the pages of its journal, the Ephemerist, which he edited and saw through the press for many years.11 The founding of the Society was his first step in the promotion of ephemera, which was to develop on a much broader front in parallel with his private collecting and the idea of a dictionary or encyclopedia of ephemera. This project, discussed below, may well have been in his mind in the early days of the Society as he began to map out the scope of ephemera, though he was not to make it public until very much later. Then, in 1980, in association with Calvin Otto and William and Emily Mobley in the United States, he was instrumental in founding the Ephemera Society of America. Other societies were founded in Australia (1987) and Canada (1988), both of which stemmed from collectors of ephemera who had been inspired by him. By this time Rickards had established the Foundation for Ephemera Studies (1984), a charitable body that aimed to promote research in the field and attract funds for research, the single outcome being a project, supported by the Leverhulme Foundation, on compound-plate printing.12 With typical foresight, in order to ensure the preservation of his own private collection of ephemera for posterity, he made it over formally, with a few conditions, to this recently established Foundation. There followed another Rickards-inspired project to create a comprehensive bibliography of ephemera, which in draft form ran to thousands of entries and was subsequently abandoned because of the scale of the task and the need for constant updating in such a rapidly expanding area of study. Developing his plans for promoting ephemera even further, Rickards outlined proposals for a world body devoted to ephemera that would co-ordinate activities in the field. Though the project came to nothing, the publicity material he designed for its launch stands as evidence of what was, perhaps, an over-ambitious project. This was the organizational framework, real and projected, within which Rickards continued to build up his own collection. By the time the main elements of the program discussed above were in place, his material had begun to take on the form



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of a serious and well-focused collection of ephemera. This meant, for him, printed and manuscript documents, with some exclusions that will be discussed below. Not only had he succeeded in finding examples of a very wide range of categories of such ephemera, but he had begun to organize his material intellectually and physically as a model collection, though he does not seem to have referred to it in quite these terms. To help him with this task he encouraged volunteers, all women, to mount his items on boards (panels, as he called them) that would fit into specially made Solander boxes. These boxes, of a kind developed for storing prints and drawings, were made of plywood, lined with acid-free paper, and covered in red cloth. The boards were cut to a nominal 467 × 314.5 mm, which is a nonstandard paper size, but suited his material and provided a convenient format for its display. A few items that exceeded these dimensions were carefully folded to fit on the boards or, failing this, remained as outcasts in architects’ drawers. For the most part the collection consists of relatively small items, mounted several or many to the board (Figure 7.2). The most delicate items were covered with a sheet of archivally approved polyester film. A room of Rickards’s small apartment in Fitzroy Square was dedicated to the storage of this material, the Solander boxes being stacked on wooden racks with a tiny viewing area as a gesture toward public use and also, one suspects, to provide a photo opportunity (Figure 7.3).13 As a designer Rickards was conscious of the need to display things so that they looked well, as the red boxes certainly did. But the same principle was applied to the dark brown boards on which items were mounted, the smaller ones by means of stamp hinges. The choice of board was made to show his collection to good effect, regardless of the fact that it was not archivally sound. In this conflict between good archival practice—set out in Collecting Printed Ephemera—and the requirements of display, it was the designer in him that won. His explanation for the decision, understandable in many ways, was that since many of his items had suffered neglect in attics, cellars, and the like for decades, even sometimes for centuries, they had proved their resilience. Rickards organized the items on his boards by category. He had to devise some of these categories himself, since nomenclature was by no means established for all of them, but they reflect one or other of the two principal ways in which collectors and others think about ephemera. One describes the subject matter of the item (charity, education, prisons), the other the physical object (billhead, notice, ticket). Inevitably this distinction creates problems, since most ephemera can be described in both ways. He tended to label ephemera that could be regarded as “collectibles” following categories and terms adopted by collectors, but overall there is a fairly even distribution between subject and object labeling, with a slight bias toward the first. Access to the Rickards Collection was by alphabetic arrangement of the boards within the series of boxes, since there was no catalog. He labeled the boards himself in graphite in their top right hand corner. His tiny lettering can just about be read when the lighting strikes it at an angle, but the priority for him was that it did not disfigure the board when it was put on display. Where two or more boards represent the same category, which is nearly always the case, he put them in sequence using Arabic numerals following the name of the category. There was no real need for a catalog when the collection was held privately, and this remained the case (even after

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Figure 7.2  A board from the Rickards Collection showing a range of intaglio-printed British trade cards, mostly of the first half of the nineteenth century. Centre for Ephemera Studies, University of Reading.



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Figure 7.3  The Maurice Rickards Collection when in his own private apartment, showing a “model” way of organizing ephemera, mid-1980s. Solander boxes are stacked on wooden racks alongside a small reference collection of books and a viewing stand. Centre for Ephemera Studies, University of Reading. ownership of it passed to the Foundation for Ephemera Studies) as long as it remained in his apartment. Enough has been written about the word ephemera and its definition for it to be passed over quickly. Derived from the Greek words “epi” (through or around), and “hemera” (the day) it is applied to creatures and material things that survive for a day, or at the very least are short-lived. Rickards’s own definition of ephemera as “the transitory documents of everyday life” is one that is now widely accepted, though it is still open to different interpretations. It could be argued that there are very few pieces of ephemera that literally survive for one day only. They may have validity or relevance on a particular day, as tickets, invitations, and programs usually do, but are often preserved for sentimental reasons. Keepsakes celebrating an occasion on a particular day are specifically designed to be kept, as the word implies, and share certificates and passports are decidedly produced to provide a record. Are such documents therefore not ephemera? Issues of this kind pose all sorts of problems for curators of institutional collections, while individual collectors happily establish boundaries for themselves based on their own tastes and interests. Attempts to define ephemera have not stopped private collectors from holding strong views about what falls within their remit. Many have excluded postcards, perhaps because they form such a large and well-defined field. Rickards shunned them:

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there are none or virtually none in his collection, and certainly no “postcard” category. He was equally unenthusiastic about categories of ephemera that were designed to be collected, such as cigarette and bubble-gum cards. Like most ephemerists he excluded postage stamps, though in terms of use nothing can be much more ephemeral. Despite the fuzzy boundaries he established for his subject, he could identify what he regarded as a core item at a glance. Preferably it would be of a kind that rarely saw the light of day, and that told us something about life in the past that we would not otherwise know about. More often than not it would relate to a very specific situation (Figure 7.4). This is the “evidential value” of ephemera that he referred to so often. Items of this kind did not have to be old, though they were probably more exciting for him if they were. The first time he came to Reading to see his collection in its new home, I met him in the parking lot and we entered the building where it was housed together. Within a split second he had spotted an unpretentious photocopied notice of a prowler and, to my horror, had ripped it off the wall. On other occasions he would be on his knees rifling through boxes of old documents at a fair or in an antiquarian bookshop, scouring them to see whether any might provide an insight into the past. This usually meant reading the document, sometimes down to the small print, and his patience when on such hunts was inexhaustible. He was on the lookout for ephemera wherever he traveled. Most of the items now in his collection were probably acquired at sales and fairs, particularly those of the British and American societies that he was instrumental in founding. But he was also successful in tracking down firms that were going out of business and therefore likely to dispose of some of their material, such as the printing house of Robert Smail & Son in Innerleithen, Scotland.14 The result of such activities is a collection of perhaps 15,000 to 20,000 individual items, the bulk of them dating from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Some are considerably earlier, and Rickards was particularly proud to have acquired a tiny fragment of an ancient Egyptian papyrus. His focus was English-language documents, including American pieces acquired during his many visits to the United States. But his aim was to be as representative as his travels and pocket would allow, so the collection includes items in French, German, Italian, and Latin as well as others from parts of the world that do not use the Latin alphabet as its primary means of communication. Some of these foreign items were chosen because they showed different graphic forms of the same kind of document, such as the passport. As might be expected, there were occasional differences between Rickards’s principles and practice. Since his collection had to be housed within a small apartment in central London, there were restrictions on what he could store. For this reason, and also because he was building up a representative collection of ephemera, the principle he followed was to be extremely selective. In some situations he would choose just one or two examples of a particular batch of ephemera, when he could have taken many more. Any collector knows that this requires considerable self-discipline, and from time to time he succumbed. His design past also sometimes got the better of him, and when he came across something he regarded as visually attractive or graphically fascinating, such as examples of the early-nineteenth-century security-printing



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Figure 7.4  Announcement of an exhibition of “The only real mermaid.” Letterpress, with a skeptical manuscript observation in vernacular language revealing that the item was left at the owner’s house near Darlington, October 26, 1849. Centre for Ephemera Studies, University of Reading. process called compound-plate printing, his collecting knew no bounds, or at least only financial ones. At some stage after the Rickards Collection came to Reading I mentioned that it might be good to add a category of ephemera that had been produced by graphic designers. Since he had been a designer and had even designed ephemera, I expected him to agree. Not at all. My idea was met with a cool reception, and on reflection I came to understand why. Though he did not say so, he must have felt that the involvement

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(or interference) of a designer would have mediated an otherwise authentic reflection of an event or experience. In other words, a designer’s intervention would have reduced the “evidential value” of the message. The compilation of a dictionary or encyclopedia of ephemera, mentioned above, must have been in Rickards’s mind while he was acquiring items and putting them in order.15 When the project began to crystalize is unclear, but his assembly of a representative collection of ephemera and the idea of compiling a standard reference book in the field were clearly being planned in parallel. They have to be seen as two strands of a single idea: the preservation of ephemera and making its study respectable. Evidence for this is provided in the Centre by two filing cabinets of his supporting material. Though he must have worked on his encyclopedia over a long period, the first public notification of the project appears to be a statement on the back flap of the jacket of his Collecting Printed Ephemera (1988) that he was “currently engaged in compiling a definitive Encyclopedia of Ephemera.” The text of the book, which references his own contributions in the Ephemerist very frequently, though anonymously, does not mention the project at all. Rickards’s encyclopedia was the penultimate stage in his grand plan to put ephemera on the map. The link between his collection and the publication is evident from the similarity between the categories of items in his collection and the headwords he proposed for his encyclopedia. There are also numerous references to items in his collection in the entries he wrote for the encyclopedia. Together, therefore, they provide what would now be described as a portal or gateway to the study of ephemera, though Rickards would not have used such terms. By the standards of major collections of ephemera around the world, the Rickards Collection is not large, but it is unique in having this distinct, didactic purpose. All that remained for Rickards to fulfill his plan was to provide a place where his collection of ephemera could be used in a more public way. Though ownership of it passed to the Foundation for Ephemera Studies soon after 1984, what was to be called the Rickards Collection remained for almost a decade in Maurice Rickards’s private apartment in Fitzroy Square, where only a few privileged people were able to see it. A home for it was eventually secured at the University of Reading in 1993, where it was to provide a focus for the work of the Centre for Ephemera Studies, which was inaugurated in the same year. But though housed in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication of the University, it remained the property of the Foundation for Ephemera Studies until 2010, when ownership was transferred to the University.16 Rickards hoped that the Foundation for Ephemera Studies, a registered charity, would eventually establish a study center for ephemera. The creation of such a center at the University of Reading stemmed from discussions with the present author, then Head of the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, and the appropriate university authorities. The outcome was the Centre for Ephemera Studies, which was formally recognized by the university late in 1992, with the present author as its Director and, soon afterward, the late Lord Briggs as its Patron. For some years Maurice Rickards continued to visit the Centre, but a series of strokes soon after its inauguration prevented his playing more than a spectator role in its work



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and, more significantly, from completing his encyclopedia. The latter was taken over by a team of ephemerists with delegated tasks, a leading role being taken by volunteers at the Centre, all experts in their own fields, the longest serving being the indefatigable Amoret Tanner, a significant collector in her own right. After years of working on Rickards’s almost illegible handwriting, typing up the entries, commissioning a few new entries, and writing others, the book was published by the British Library in 2000.17 Though he was able to be shown page proofs, Rickards did not live to see the final work published, or to bask in its success as the winner of the Library Association Bestermann/McColvin Medal for an outstanding work of reference, 2001. The setting up of the Centre at Reading with a representative collection of ephemera at its core, and the publication of the Encyclopedia of Ephemera, completed Rickards’s plan to promote the preservation and study of ephemera. But it has to be emphasized that the experience of collecting ephemera had to come first. Without Rickards’s diligent searching out of lost material and the knowledge he gained from collecting (and sometimes not collecting), he would have had no sound basis for the compilation of his Encyclopedia or for the establishment of a center for the study of ephemera. The transfer of ownership of the Rickards Collection to the University of Reading, a public body devoted to teaching and research, changed everything. In the first instance there was an obligation—willingly accepted—to make the collection available to others. That was Rickards’s long-term aim. But it was also important to provide information about other collections of ephemera in the country, and with this in mind the Centre compiled a Register of Ephemera Collections in the United Kingdom (2003). The value of the collection to its host department as a resource for teaching and research meant that it became available to students and staff of Typography & Graphic Communication almost immediately. Making it known externally was more of a problem. This was mainly done through seminars and workshops on aspects of ephemera and their curation, which attracted collectors, curators, and others interested in the field, many of them members of the Ephemera Society. Among topics covered were: “The trade card,” “How to date ephemera,” “The letterpress poster,” “Fakes and forgeries,” “Black ephemera,” “Ephemera and photography,” “Identifying printing processes,” “Scrapbooks,” “Chromolithography,” “Transport maps and ephemera,” “The Victorian sheet music cover,” and “The printer and the community.” With the appointment of a member of staff to look after all the department’s collections of graphic material, the Rickards Collection became available to any bona fide user by appointment, the University’s Press Office and the department’s own publicity being the major means of making it known at that stage. The Department of Typography & Graphic Communication was clearly an appropriate host for the Rickards Collection—as it has been for other important collections of graphic material—by virtue of its central interests.18 What is more, the University already held a good range of ephemera within its special collections and archives.19 With its change of status, several decisions had to be taken about the Rickards Collection: some were determined by the University’s general policies regarding collections and their curation, others by the nature of the collection and its location. Soon after the collection was transferred to Reading, a decision was made to fill gaps

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(such as items relating to sport) and to add some new categories of material. It was also decided that items acquired by Rickards, but not regarded by him as part of his collection, would be added to it. To make a distinction between these two categories, boards on which he had mounted items were blind embossed with a device based on his initials, while the others were mounted onto similar brown boards, but not embossed. It was equally important to distinguish both categories from non-Rickards acquisitions, which have been mounted on white boards. As a private collector, Maurice Rickards was free to do what he wished, but it was clearly the responsibility of a public body to follow approved practices. Archival boards have therefore been used for all non-Rickards material, many of the individual items on them being housed in polyester sleeves for added protection. Initially, these white boards were added to the original Solander boxes following the Rickards method of classification. Later, it was realized that items on white boards would eventually outnumber those on brown boards and the policy was changed. The consequence of this decision has been that the Rickards Collection is now considered to be “historic” and will not be added to. It will be preserved as it stands, its items mounted on brown boards and stored in red Solander boxes as a testament to a private collector whose initiatives have helped to change attitudes to the study of ephemera. Items on white boards form a second collection, what is now referred to as the Millennium Collection of Ephemera, on the grounds that the acquisition of new material did not begin seriously until after the publication of the Encyclopedia of Ephemera in 2000. The transfer of a private collection to a public body is by no means unusual, though in this particular case the Rickards Collection has inspired the formation of a parallel collection. The first provides a record of an individual’s collecting activities, the second a rather broader approach to the same field of collecting that reflects the interests of its host institution. Though space in the Centre is not limitless, there are opportunities for the Millennium Collection to grow, which has led to significant changes in the policies adopted for acquiring material. Rickards had built up a representative collection of ephemera, with the idea of documenting major categories of material with a few typical examples. In its new environment (within a department with a focus on graphic material) this was felt to be too restrictive. When multiple examples of a particular category of ephemera become available, they are now usually accepted, even to the extent of adding entire collections of small ephemera. The argument is that multiple and varied examples increase our understanding of the nature of certain categories of ephemera, as well as providing greater opportunities for study and research, and for displaying material in the department’s exhibition area. Secondly, the self-imposed size restriction that Rickards adopted, which meant that all items had to fit onto the panels he had chosen, was no longer necessary. While wanting to keep to the panel sizes he had established as a norm, the availability of a range of archival storage means that large items can be added, such as broadsides, news vendors’ bills, posters, and certain kinds of maps and plans, as well as packaging and three-dimensional items.



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Thirdly, the work the Centre has recently undertaken in compiling a Thesaurus of Ephemera Terms20 has exposed some limitations in the way that Rickards classified and referred to items in his collection, as well as some significant gaps that need to be filled. For these reasons, items in the Millennium Collection, both old and recent, are described in accordance with the recommendations of the Thesaurus, while labels on the boards of the now historic Rickards Collection remain as they were. Further developments reflect a shift of purpose as a result of the move of the Rickards Collection to Reading. The Millennium Collection that it inspired, though following on from what Rickards started in so many respects, has developed some special areas of interest. The first, the acquisition of local material, may well be a direction followed by other institutional collections, whatever their field of interest. It is now part of the Centre’s acquisitions policy to add local items whenever it can. Such material forms an easily identifiable category within the Millennium Collection and, though still modest, will be used to interest the local community in ephemera. In this case, “local” is taken to mean Reading and its immediate hinterland. The second development reflects its location within a university and the possibility of interesting language departments in ephemera as a way into the study of the cultures they represent. To encourage such a development the Centre is building up a collection of French ephemera, old and new. It is also a partner in a project led by the University of Cergy-Pontoise in France to provide a French equivalent of the Thesaurus. More broadly, acquiring foreign language material from other parts of the world opens up the possibility of the cross-cultural study of ephemera, which is a long-term objective of the Centre. The third way in which the Millennium Collection of Ephemera reflects its location is in the acquisition of material relating to the interests of students and staff of its host department. Already it helps to support an undergraduate ephemera module and postgraduate courses in Type Design and Information Design, while also providing material for research. These various shifts in direction away from Maurice Rickards’s well-focused objectives as a private collector of ephemera do not represent a significant departure from his overall approach. The Centre’s Millennium Collection provides a specialized resource for the study and research of ephemera quite as much as his own collection does, but in a slightly different way. Though there are many general collections of ephemera around the world, and also many specialist ones, it has to be said that it is unusual to find collections that have as their focus the study of ephemera. It may be worth reminding ourselves, therefore, that the idea of a study center for ephemera with collections at its core stemmed from the vision of this single-minded private collector.

Notes 1 Rickards had files on these two ephemerists, which show that they corresponded regularly from the mid-1930s until after the Second World War (Centre for Ephemera Studies, University of Reading: files). 2 Nos. 1–91 (November 1975–December 1995).

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3 Daily Telegraph, March 12, 1998; Independent, February 20, 1998 (by Patrick Hickman-Robertson); The Times, March 11, 1998. 4 For a concise life story see his own entry in Debrett’s Distinguished People of Today (London: Debrett’s Peerage, 1990), 1550. 5 Maurice Rickards, Collecting Printed Ephemera (Oxford: Phaidon/Christie’s, 1988), 30. 6 Hobsbawm was invited by Rickards to become a Trustee of the Foundation for Ephemera Studies; he accepted, though he is not known to have attended meetings. 7 Charles Batey, rev. Julie Anne Lambert, “Johnson, John de Monins,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), vol. 30, 280–2, and Michael Turner, ed. “John Johnson and his Collection of Printed Ephemera,” in The John Johnson Collection; Catalogue of an Exhibition (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1971), 5–18. 8 For example, the Oxford Junior Encyclopaedia, 12 vol. (London: Oxford University Press, 1948–55). 9 Turner, “John Johnson,” 12. 10 Rickards, Collecting Printed Ephemera, 57–58. 11 see above, n. 1. 12 The outcome being Maureen Greenland and Russell E. Day, Compound-plate Printing, 2 vol. (s. l.: Foundation for Ephemera Studies, 1991). 13 Rickards, Collecting Printed Ephemera, 78–9. 14 See in particular several articles in the Ephemerist: Anne Cowan, “History in the Printing,” no. 55 (December 1986): 174–5; Elizabeth Greig, “The Day We Looked in on the Printer,” no. 69 (June 1990): 344–5; Anne Cowan “Opening Day at Innerleithen,” no. 70 (September 1990): 354–7. 15 Rickards wrote anonymously in 1994 that work on the encyclopedia “has been in progress for nearly twenty years” (Ephemerist, no. 86 [September 1994]: 550 [i.e. 549]). 16 The establishment of the Centre and the physical transfer of the Rickards Collection are reported in several articles in the Ephemerist: “Reading University Sets Up Ephemera Study Centre,” no. 80 (March 1993): 478, 479; Michael Twyman, “The Centre for Ephemera Studies,” no. 80 (March 1993): 480–1; “Special delivery: Reading Receives a First Consignment of Rickards,” no. 81 (June 1993): 489 [i.e. 490], 491; “Inauguration at Reading,” no. 81 (June 1993): 496–7. 17 Maurice Rickards, The Encyclopedia of Ephemera, edited and completed by Michael Twyman, with the assistance of Amoret Tanner and Sally de Beaumont (London: British Library; New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 2000). 18 For example: the Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection, the John Soulby (Junior) and William Kitchin collections of nineteenth-century jobbing printing, the Elizabeth Greig Aviation Collection, the Non-Latin Typeface Collection, the Bankes and Miles Graphic Design Archive, the Paul Peter Piech Collection. 19 For example: the Baron Collection of Lithographed music, the Ellic Howe Collection of Petits Papiers, the Records of Huntley & Palmers, the John and Griselda Lewis Collection of Printing, the Archive of the London Typographical Designers Ltd, a Collection of Publishers’ Catalogues, Prospectuses and Announcements, 1816–89, the Archive of Ransome, Sims & Jefferies Ltd, and the Records of Sutton Seeds Ltd. 20 Barbara Morris, Thesaurus of Ephemera Terms (Reading: Centre for Ephemera Studies, University of Reading, 2013), published in draft form for public discussion.



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Selected Bibliography Rickards, Maurice. Collecting Printed Ephemera. Oxford: Phaidon/Christie’s, 1988. Rickards, Maurice. The Encyclopedia of Ephemera, edited and completed by Michael Twyman, with the assistance of Amoret Tanner and Sally de Beaumont. London: British Library; New Castle DE: Oak Knoll, 2000. The Ephemerist, no. 1, November 1975. Twyman, Michael. “The Long-term Significance of Printed Ephemera.” RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage 9, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 19–57.

8

Hans Sachs: The Most Dedicated Collector of Posters in Germany Kathleen Chapman

From 1896 until 1938, Hans Sachs (1881–1974), a Berlin-based, German-Jewish dentist and avowed “friend of the poster,” assembled a collection of 12,500 carefully selected posters. It was the most important poster collection in Germany, and perhaps in the world at the time (Figure 8.1). As a co-founder of the Berlin-based Verein der Plakatfreunde (Society for the Friends of the Poster, 1905–21) and the founder, editor, and frequent writer for Das Plakat (1910–21) (The Poster), Sachs was a leading force in creating an increasingly sophisticated German discourse about the poster and graphic design. Sachs has been recognized as the most significant collector of posters during the early twentieth century, and, due to his tireless advocacy of the aesthetic, historical, and practical merits of the poster, he was widely hailed as its most devoted advocate. His efforts on behalf of the poster in Germany were pioneering. Whereas in France, England, and the United States, innovative, vibrant poster design had flourished since the late nineteenth century, in Germany the first truly inventive posters emerged later in the fin de siècle and encountered a cultural atmosphere that was often openly hostile to advertising, especially in public space. Through his collecting, publishing, and exhibiting practices, Sachs encouraged others to embrace the poster as a definitive modern visual form. Sachs and his collection were well known both nationally and internationally. Unfortunately, however, the renown of his collection meant that the National Socialist Party, which came to power in 1933, was also well aware of its scope and significance. In 1938, the Nazis confiscated the entire collection, and Sachs and his family fled Germany, settling in New York City. Uprooted from the cultural environment to which he had contributed richly, and unable initially to practice dentistry, Sachs lived the life of an uprooted immigrant. Recently Sachs and his posters regained international attention due to the fact that a portion of his original collection, the entirety of which he had been led to believe had been destroyed during the Second World War, was finally, after years of court battles, restituted to his son, Peter. The story of Sachs’s collection is, in many ways, the story of Sachs himself. This chapter traces the fate of Sachs and his poster collection as they were caught up in the turbulent cultural and political events in twentieth-century Germany.



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Figure 8.1  Unknown photographer, Hans Sachs in Study, undated, Estate of Hans Sachs. Sachs, his collection, and legacy were devastated by the Nazi regime, the Second World War, East German censorship, and the numerous obstacles posed by both West and East German reparations practices. Despite these ravages, the impact that Sachs, his collection, and his publications have had on the history of posters and graphic design is significant. While many historical surveys of European graphic design note the importance of Das Plakat for its contributions to the poster movement and the emerging field of graphic design, there has been little sustained examination of Sachs’s collection and his publishing and exhibition activities, particularly in the English-language context.1 This chapter will revisit the story of his collection, discussing the significance of Sachs’s efforts to build it and share it with others; it will discuss his publishing and networking efforts, which advanced the level of graphic design discourse in Germany and internationally. It will conclude by assessing the fate of the collection after the Second World War, its restitution to Sachs’s son, and its ultimate dispersal at auction.

“The World’s Largest Poster Collection” The story of the creation of this collection is well-documented by Sachs himself.2 The most detailed account is his memoir, The World’s Largest Poster Collection, 1896–1938: How It Came about and  .  .  . Disappeared from the Face of the Earth, which he wrote in New York during the 1950s and published himself.3 He composed

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this narrative long after he had last seen his collection, well after he had been misled that it had been destroyed, and before he discovered that a large portion of it had in fact survived the Second World War. This memoir is a retrospective meditation on the meticulous labor he had dedicated to building, cataloguing, storing, and exhibiting the massive collection. A melancholy tone inflects his recollections but he also conveys the sense of excitement, joy, and commitment that had enabled him to assemble a collection of posters and other “applied graphics” on such a comprehensive scale.4 In his memoir, nearly every significant moment Sachs recalls has a connection to posters—pleasures of looking at them, the process of collecting them, proper procedures needed to organize and store them, and efforts to cultivate awareness of their aesthetic and communicative value through exhibitions and publishing. Information about his family life and friendships are scarce. Sachs’s account also serves as an epitaph for a bygone era in which time and space for deep study and intensive reflection were cherished, even as they were threatened by an increasingly fast-paced and changing world. The deliberative process of collecting anchored him in the former while his interest in the time-bound quality of the advertisements and printed ephemera he collected placed him in the latter. Clarifying why he emphasized the differences between the past and the period when he wrote the memoir, Sachs states: I want to give the younger generation an answer to the question of how it was possible to devote myself so thoroughly to such a quiet collecting activity—or better still, a passion—so that many hours were devoted to it daily. I shall reveal the secret:—we had time, a great deal of time, without the distraction of movies, nightclubs, television, cars and bars.5

Notably, his poster-related activities all occurred during his “spare” time. Sachs was a practicing dentist, whose patients included Albert Einstein, and after working from 9:00 until 3:00, he returned home to spend four to five hours on his collection and related activities.6 Sachs understood his collection as a significant cultural contribution, and he worked tirelessly to share its riches through exhibitions, publications, and public lectures. In his dedication to these pursuits, he embraced the values of Germany’s Bildungsbürgertum—the educated middle classes—who revered culture as the realm of freedom, productivity, social unity, and stability.7 Throughout the Wilhelmine era (1890–1918) and the economically destabilizing years of the Weimar Republic (1918–33), many believed that contributing to the cultural sphere could provide as much to the well-being and stability of German society as political activities. This class identity steadily weakened because of burgeoning mass culture, economic shifts, and increased bourgeois access to political power. The Nazi regime definitively ended the illusion of the coherence of this class, denouncing and sending its Jewish members to concentration camps; some managed to flee into exile, while many others were murdered.



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Recalling how he began collecting posters, Sachs states that, as a teenager in Breslau, he had been casting about for something to collect. One day, around 1897, one of his classmates invited Sachs to his home. Sachs recalls: .  .  .  (could it have been destiny?). The walls of his room were decorated with a new kind of advertising art. Two of the pictures impressed me especially,—Otto Fischer’s poster “The Old City,” drawn for an exhibition at Dresden in 1896, and Robert Engels’s “Literarische Vereinigung Düsseldorf, 1897.” My friend had helped himself to these pictures in waiting rooms of railway stations. The next morning I decided to start a poster collection.8

Among the posters that stood out to Sachs during that fateful visit was Fischer’s Old City (Die alte Stadt) (Figure 8.2). This advertisement for an 1896 Dresden exhibition of Saxon applied arts and crafts is considered the first German example of the modern “artistic poster.”9 Sachs was immediately struck by Fischer’s poster, revealing his keen eye for compelling design, a skill he continued to develop as he selected posters for his collection. Initially, Sachs found it difficult to get his collection started. He was reluctant to “help himself ” to posters in public spaces as his schoolmate had, and when he asked shopkeepers or attendants at train stations if he could have the posters on display, he was consistently rebuffed. However, in 1898, a family friend in Paris sent Sachs’s father three life-sized posters by Alphonse Mucha featuring the actress Sarah Bernhardt.10 Sachs persuaded his father to let him have them and requested more. The Parisian friend readily agreed, and the next shipment included posters designed by leading

Figure 8.2  Otto Fischer, Exhibition of Saxonian Arts and Crafts. “The Old Town” Dresden, 1896 (Ausstellung des saechsischen Handwerks und Kunstgewerbes Dresden 1896 Die alte Stadt), lithograph printed in yellow, red, brown, blue, and black on wove paper mounted on muslin, Gift of the Robert Gore Rifkind Collection, Beverly Hills, CA.

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poster artists working in France, including Eugène Grasset, Charles Léandre, Théophile Alexandre Steinlein, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Once Sachs’s family moved in 1900 to Berlin, at the time a major center of innovative poster design, his collection expanded impressively.11 As he recalls, the posters he hung in his room constituted “possibly the first poster exhibit on German soil.”12 Already at the outset Sachs was thinking about his collection in terms of exhibitions, indicating his early interest in sharing it with others.13 The number of his posters grew very quickly. By 1900, he had acquired 100 posters; by 1910, 2,000; in 1922, 8,000; and in 1935, the collection reached its highest number, approximately 12,500.14 Sachs added to his collection in a number of ways. Whenever he traveled within Germany or abroad, he returned with outstanding posters from the places he visited. He also expanded his collection by building relationships with printing houses, such as Hollerbaum & Schmidt of Berlin and Vereinigte Druckereien und Kunstanstalten of Munich, persuading them to allow him to acquire samples of their work.15 Over the course of his forty years of collecting, he developed an extensive network of national and international contacts that provided additional sources for acquisitions. The collection was wide-ranging. It included posters advertising a variety of cultural events, commercial products, and political issues and parties. It also included around 16,000 “smaller graphic works,” such as greeting cards, postcards, magazine covers, packaging, and theater programs. Sachs consistently advocated for the greater appreciation of the poster as an aesthetic object, and he started his collection with examples of what in Germany was celebrated as das künstlerische Plakat or das Künstlerplakat (the artistic poster).16 As the collection grew, he added works by exemplary late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century poster artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Lucian Bernhard, Leonetto Cappiello, Wilhelm Defke, Fritz Erler, John Hassall, Ludwig Hohlwein, Julius Klinger, Koloman Moser, and Edward Penfield. In gathering works by such eminent artists, Sachs was guided by the commitment to create an exhaustive collection of posters of the highest quality. In his memoir, he states that, at the point when his collection had reached “over 10,000 specimens . . . [it] encompassed all that had been created between the years 1865 and 1926.”17 This included 240 posters by Jules Chéret, the father of the modern poster; thirty-one by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (out of a total of thirty-three); and the entire poster production of German designers such as Ludwig Hohlwein and Lucian Bernhard. As he compiled his collection, Sachs filtered out the countless visually mundane posters that comprised the majority of poster production in order to assemble a thorough collection of outstanding examples of European and US artistic posters.18 He favored color lithographic posters that emphasized the artist’s “hand” and rarely acquired examples that integrated photography into their design. As a whole, Sachs’s vast collection offered a survey of the range of inventive design approaches that emerged during the forty years that he collected. Although he highlighted the aesthetic soundness of these posters, Sachs was not arguing for understanding posters as fine art. Instead, he celebrated the communicative effectiveness that a well-crafted poster—an example of modern “applied graphic arts”—could achieve.



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Aesthetic concerns were not the only factors driving Sachs’s collecting. Although Sachs was highly attuned to the aesthetics of the poster, for him collecting was also a form of historical documentation; he believed that he was compiling important documents capable of providing unique insights into the times in which they circulated. For example, his posters showed the increasing public presence of women, most frequently as consumers, but also as workers and voters. They also documented the range of technologies and commodities available to increasingly broad segments of society, including light bulbs, zeppelin travel, cigarettes, typewriters, bicycles, and ready-to-wear fashion. His posters also record the diversity of art and entertainment events held during the years he collected: art exhibitions, musical and theatrical performances, cabarets, nightclubs, circuses, balls, movie palaces, and films. Sachs’s collection also included the political poster, specifically First World War posters from many nations. Unlike the armed forces of the Allied nations, German military officials were initially reluctant to “sell the war” like a common consumer product, and avoided using posters with images to deliver their messages. Sachs and others who understood the persuasive impact of posters lobbied to change this. Sachs recognized the effectiveness of the Allies’ military recruitment and war bond posters and, through his international connections, managed in the second year of the war to procure around thirty of England’s recruiting posters. Sachs found these posters “inartistic,” but respected the significance of their documentary value “from the point of view of politics, anthropology, psychology, ethnology, etc.”19 He was invited to organize an exhibition of these posters, which, he states, was successful, receiving coverage in both German and foreign newspapers. In 1915, after Germans began to suffer due to Allied blockades, the German military permitted images on posters to rally the home front, and Sachs collected examples of these as well.20 He also acquired a sampling of the numerous German election posters from the turbulent period following Germany’s defeat in the First World War. Additionally, Sachs’s collection included posters opposing the Nazis.

The Society of the Friends of the Poster and the Journal Das Plakat Single-mindedly dedicated to posters as Sachs was, he never regarded his posterrelated work as a solitary pursuit. From the start, he sought contact with other German poster fans and worked to foster a community of poster enthusiasts and collectors. Sachs believed building a network of like-minded people would benefit collectors and improve the reputation of posters. Hoping to expand his network internationally, Sachs approached Walter von Zur Westen, a German judge who was known as a connoisseur and serious collector of applied graphic arts. Zur Westen, who would later ascend in the ranks of the Nazi Party, “reluctantly” gave Sachs addresses of people in Russia, Belgium, France, and England. But when Sachs described his “plan to form a ‘club of

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poster friends,’” Zur Westen discouraged him, warning that posters were fast fading from relevance, and “the entire poster movement [was] subsiding.”21 Sachs was not deterred. He and his close friend, the architecture student and fellow collector Hans Meyer, decided one night in November of 1905 to found the Society for the Friends of the Poster (Verein der Plakatfreunde).22 The first formal organizational meeting included six members: Sachs, Meyer, Emil Schulze-Malkowski, Ernst-Moritz Lesser, Carol Hilarius (Karl Jahnke), and the graphic artist Lucian Bernhard.23 The group’s stated goals were “to influence advertising, especially posters, in an artistic sense and to promote interest in the artistic poster among members of the public and the business world by means of exhibitions, competitions, lectures, and the exchange and sale of posters.”24 The Society had a considerable degree of success. Its membership grew and its lectures and exhibitions helped establish the Society’s reputation as an organization of knowledgeable advocates of posters and other forms of graphic design. Key to the group’s expansion and continued success was its publication, Das Plakat, which was published 1910–21. Sachs started Das Plakat initially to serve as a newsletter to help the Society keep members up to date with its various events and proceedings. It also listed posters available for collecting and information about poster exhibitions, competitions, and commissions. Under Sachs’s ambitious editorship, Das Plakat soon became the most important periodical about the newly emerging field of commercial graphic design in pre-First World War Germany and beyond.25 It included articles written primarily by Society members, who represented a range of perspectives. Feature articles focused primarily on posters and significant poster artists, but they also examined other forms of commercial art and graphic design, including fashion illustration, packaging, trademarks, and menus, among many other design works. Das Plakat was a luxurious publication filled with rich, full-color and black-and-white reproductions of posters and other modern graphics. Nearly all the illustrated posters were drawn from Sachs’s collection. Given its sophisticated content and high-quality reproductions, Das Plakat quickly became a central forum in Germany for introducing and debating graphic arts and advertising-related matters. Initially, in keeping with Sachs’s interests, the topic that structured virtually all of the articles in Das Plakat was the status of advertising as visual form in relation to art. However, as advertising became increasingly professionalized over the course of its publication, especially after the First World War, writers and readers developed interests in different types of content. As a result, articles focused less frequently on the aesthetic qualities of posters and more on practical matters. This shift reflected the fact that advertising professionals were relying more on economic rather than aesthetic criteria for evaluating posters and other graphics. In 1920, tensions roiled the Society when members of its main board, most of whom were Jewish, were accused of conflicts of interest. Sachs recognized these attacks as motivated by anti-Semitism, and constituting “pre-Nazi” agitation.26 After a meticulous weeks-long examination of the Society’s books and all its activities, an investigative committee completely cleared Sachs and the Society. Despite this vindication, Sachs was crushed, stating, “to be smeared and suspected after more than 15 years of untiring



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work . . .  was more than even person with a tougher skin could take”; he and the board “faced the unhappy fact that the club and its periodical had become a dead issue and must be dissolved.”27 The final issue of Das Plakat appeared in September 1921, and the Society disbanded in 1922. For Sachs, the disappointment that his years of dedicated efforts had come to such an end was so great that, for two years, he could not bear to enter the room where he kept his collection, let alone add new acquisitions. Sachs rediscovered his devotion to his collection only when a house fire in 1924 nearly destroyed it. He joined the firefighters in the battle to extinguish the flames, and they succeeded in rescuing his beloved posters. His home, however, needed to be rebuilt, and he decided to commission an architect to design a special room to serve as a gallery for storing and viewing his collection. Sachs conceived of this room as a museum that would accommodate visitors. He noted that his “private collections had long since become a so-called public possession. . . . They fulfilled many practical purposes for the public, for artists active in applied graphic art, for collectors, printers, and for art institutes.” Thus, he acknowledged that “[f]rom the realm of the private collector, they had entered into the higher functional sphere of a productive national economy of applied graphic art.”28 To provide a site both for safely storing his collection and for visitors’ optimal educational and viewing experience, Sachs selected the Hungarian-born, Berlin-based, Jewish architect Oskar Kaufmann. After a series of delays, Sachs’s “Kaufmann room” was finished in 1926. It consisted of ten storage cabinets that included “all the technical finishing touches” that Sachs himself devised, including a system for “12,300 posters [that] were suspended from swinging aluminum arms—invisible as long as none of the 10 cabinet doors was opened.”29 This storage and display environment enabled Sachs to easily find each of his thousands of posters and to display them one at a time so that a viewer could examine a single poster, isolated from the potential distractions posed by the other colorful specimens in the collection.

The Plundering and Dispersal of the Collection When the National Socialists seized power in 1933, they passed laws that dramatically restricted German-Jewish citizens’ public and private lives. A series of increasingly punitive statutes made it impossible for Jews to earn a living, own businesses, or participate in public life. As conditions for German Jews worsened, Sachs could no longer continue his advocacy of posters. His final public presentation of his collection occurred in 1935, when he loaned posters to one of the last exhibitions held at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, “Jewish Poster Artists in Berlin,” and presented a lecture related to the show.30 By 1938, Sachs realized that he had to flee Germany and began the long, complicated process of arranging emigration to the United States. Before he managed to depart, Josef Goebbels, the minister of propaganda, dispatched a group of Nazi officials to Sachs’s home. Among them was Walter von zur Westen, Sachs’s long-time acquaintance and frequent contributor to Das Plakat. The group demanded that he

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show them specific posters, including political campaign posters denouncing the Nazis. They then informed him of a new law that made it illegal to possess any kind of “political printed matter” and stated that the entire poster collection, along with its supporting card catalogue and library, and the collection of smaller graphics, would be confiscated.31 Moreover, they ordered Sachs to personally assist in packing and loading his entire collection into trucks. When he asked where everything would be taken, they replied that Goebbels himself wanted the collection for a proposed addition to Berlin’s applied arts museum, a wing devoted to the “art of the merchant.” Recalling the day he last handled his collection, Sachs stated, it was “the blackest day of my life.” He never saw his collection again.32 Shortly afterward, Sachs was imprisoned at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for seventeen days.33 Upon his release, Sachs, his wife, and son left for New York in 1938. As part of his preparations for emigration, Sachs had given his thirty-one Lautrec posters to long-time friend Hans Meyer, who himself managed to flee to London, for safekeeping. Once in the United States, Sachs had to sell them all to help support himself and his family during the early, impoverished period of his exile. However, because Lautrec’s posters were still under-appreciated in the United States at that time, he received the meager sum of $500 for all of them.34 Only a few years later, Lautrec’s popularity exploded in the United States, and Lautrec’s posters began to sell at much higher prices. Sachs recounts several occasions when he encountered his own former posters in exhibitions, galleries, or a collector’s home, and reveals the heavy emotional toll this took on him.35 From New York, Sachs began in 1956 to try to learn what had happened to his collection. This was a daunting task for a number of reasons, including because, by then, Germany had been divided into the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany); Berlin had also been divided into West and East. Moreover, at that point, neither German government demonstrated little, if any, interest in returning collections confiscated during the Nazi regime. Things became even more challenging after the Berlin Wall was built in 1961.When Sachs started his inquiries, he was only able to communicate directly with officials in the west. He first contacted the director of public education in West Berlin, and received a reply that, in that city, there was no definitive evidence that his posters had either survived or had been destroyed. This official could only tell him that they were not in Berlin’s Museum of Applied Arts, where they were meant to have been taken; the assumption was that they had been stored in an adjacent building that had served as Gestapo headquarters, which had been destroyed. The conclusion, therefore, was that the collection had also likely been obliterated, or that perhaps the Soviet army had carried it off since it was the “first army of occupation.”36 Disheartened, at that point, Sachs believed his collection was likely “forever lost to the world of graphic art.”37 He thus applied to the West German government for compensation for his stolen collection and, in the 1960s, received a very inadequate settlement. Perhaps unbeknownst to that West German official, in East Berlin, approximately 4,300 posters from Sachs’s collection had been found three years earlier, in 1953, in the basement of a building that served as the temporary offices of the staff of East



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Germany’s recently founded Museum of German History. Details about how, when, and why these posters arrived in that particular basement, and what purpose the building had served under the Nazi regime, have not made it into accounts of the posters’ discovery. One of the first to discover the posters was Hellmut Rademacher, a historian who had recently completed his studies at Humboldt University, Berlin. Rademacher had been appointed in 1953 by the new museum’s first director, Alfred Meusel, to work as an assistant in a department responsible for history of mass media, including posters. In an account of his career at the museum, Rademacher describes the state of the posters when they were first revealed: In the basement, beneath all sorts of clutter, there was a mountain of shabby, tattered rolls of paper. Something for recycling? Luckily, these rolls were brought first to my department for assessment. It was truly wonderful when we opened up the first roll and what immediately appeared . . . was a series of illustrated posters from Munich by Thomas Theodor Heine, Bruno Paul, Olaf Gulbrannson and other greats from the Simplicissimus circle and Jugend, in other words, works of the greatest historical and artistic value, and of the highest exemplary significance for the German poster art that emerged at that time.38

Rademacher, still new to the job and unfamiliar with poster history, learned about the historical importance of these designs from the museum’s artistic director Peterpaul Weiss, who had worked as a graphic artist before the war. Weiss remarked to Rademacher, “You could write a book about all this,” and these remnants of Sachs’s collection were crucially important for Rademacher’s subsequent scholarship and career.39 Rademacher noted that the posters all bore Sachs’s stamp, but at the time he knew nothing about him. Attempting to learn more about poster history, he relied on issues of Das Plakat, which, until the Berlin Wall was built, he was able to read at the Kunstbibliothek in West Berlin. Drawing on the surviving portion of Sachs’s collection, he wrote what is still a standard reference for twentieth-century German poster history, Das deutsche Plakat. Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (1965), and he curated exhibitions featuring Sachs’s posters, including a 1957 show that displayed over 750 of them, which was so well-received that it traveled to several East German cities. Rademacher stated he felt he came to know Sachs as he read his articles, developing a deep respect for Sachs’s “towering significance as the driving force behind the flowering of poster culture in Germany”;40 this awareness, however, did not include his acknowledging his debt to Sachs. At that time and throughout the existence of East Germany, Sachs’s name was never mentioned in the official context of Rademacher’s publications and the poster shows for the museum. In a 2011 account of the 1957 exhibition, Rademacher states, “The name Sachs was mentioned in passing. Later, as those persecuted by the Nazis, or their families  .  .  .  were successfully winning reparations from the West German government for the looting of their art, we had to keep his name from the public.”41 Notoriously, East Germany systematically denied any connection to the Nazi regime, and its government refused to accept claims and

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compensate Jewish families whose property had been confiscated by the Nazis. Official recognition that art and other valuables in East German collections had been stolen from Jewish owners would not have been permissible, and the museum, as a state institution, helped to enforce this policy by publicly avoiding any reference to Sachs. Accordingly, no one at the museum, including Rademacher, attempted to determine whether or not Sachs had survived the war. Sachs and his connection to the 4,300 surviving posters were officially erased, despite the fact that they bore his collector’s stamp. Additionally, despite the fact that Rademacher had been researching Sachs and his collection in West Berlin, and that it was no secret that the East German museum had a substantial number of Sachs’s posters, no officials in West Germany actively tried to determine Sachs’s whereabouts either. It was not until 1966 that Sachs learned that part of his collection had survived the war. Eberhard Hölscher, editor of the graphic design periodical Gebrauchsgraphik, contacted Sachs to let him know that part of his collection had been found, and was being tended to by a specially appointed curator.42 Sachs eagerly contacted Rademacher, offering him research assistance. However, because his health was poor and travel was difficult for him at that point, Sachs proposed that they meet in Bad Nauheim in West Germany, where he would be staying for a rest cure. Rademacher never agreed to such a meeting. According to Rademacher, he was delighted to have been contacted by Sachs and they exchanged friendly letters for a time. Then Rademacher received a letter from Sachs that revealed how frustrated and insulted the collector was due to the fact that Rademacher had done nothing to help him gain access to his collection, and because Rademacher had published a history of German posters based on Sachs’s years of work without ever crediting him. Sachs denounced Rademacher for stealing his collection, his life’s work, and stated that, following his sense of honor, he wanted nothing further to do with him.43 Conceding that Sachs’s decision was “not entirely unjustified,” Rademacher tried to explain his actions in his memoir: . . . stating [Sachs’s] name was undesirable, and my museum made not naming him a condition of the publication of my book.  .  .  .  It was well known that the East German government rejected—and did not even address—reparations for art looted by the Nazis. Given the political circumstances in East Germany, letters sent to anyone in the west were monitored, so I was unable to explain the situation as fully as he deserved.44

In this memoir, which he published in 2011 on the occasion of his having won an award for outstanding work on behalf of his scholarly work on posters, Rademacher acknowledges his participation in the decades of efforts by East Germany to deny fully compensating Jews for the massive amounts of art looted by the Nazi regime. His achievements came at a high cost to Sachs—the erasure of Sachs’s life’s work of creating a comprehensive collection of posters and producing valuable research about them. After German reunification, Rademacher organized a 1992 show for the German Historical Museum that celebrated Sachs’s significance and displayed many of his posters.45 For Sachs, such renewed public recognition came too late—he had died in



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1974 without having seen his posters again. In 2005, Sachs’s son Peter, a retired airline pilot, began to research what had happened to his father’s renowned collection. Peter had never learned from his father that parts of his collection had been intact in East Germany, and his mother never told him because she relied on reparations payments from the West German government.46 Peter discovered that roughly 4,300 posters of his father’s collection were housed in the German Historical Museum in Berlin, and contacted lawyers to help him win them back. After unsuccessfully trying to reach a settlement that would enable him to claim the posters without court intervention, in 2008 Peter filed a case with the civil court in Berlin. After a long series of victories, losses, and appeals, the German High Court ruled that in March 2012, he was the rightful owner of the posters. Because Peter found no practical way to store and manage 4,300 posters, he decided to sell them.47 For him, it was more important to get the posters to people who enjoyed them as much as his father did than to allow them to continue to languish in museum storage. Given the size of the collection, no museum was able to purchase them all, and they were sold individually at a series of auctions.48 Sachs himself would likely have been deeply saddened about the dispersal of the restituted posters. For him, his collection was a coherent whole, a rigorous survey of a significant period of poster history, not a series of isolated masterpieces. In 1957, believing that his entire collection was lost forever, Sachs had already written that its story had ended in a “cold epilogue”—an era that, in the wake of the destruction of war and the Holocaust, was characterized by materialism and little of the “spiritual, aesthetic, and human” aspirations that had guided his years of work with posters.49 Sadly, the final dissolution of the remains of his collection meant that there would be no happy end to this story. Some measure of justice has been served in that Sachs’s remaining posters were returned to his son. And although his physical collection did not survive, Sachs’s impact on the history of the poster and graphic design endures. As Sachs himself declared, “Collecting artistic posters becomes suprapersonal. . . . It presents us with a contemporary cultural and artistic document that contains deep insights into a people and a nation. Whoever collects posters compiles histories of art, culture, and customs.”50 His life as a collector and scholar of posters provides a uniquely insightful history of the cultural richness and the unbearable tragedy that defined this collector’s own life and the turbulent historical period in which he lived.

Notes Very special thanks go to Ruth E. Iskin for her careful guidance and editing during the conception and writing of this chapter. Thanks also to editors Iskin and Britany Salsbury for their clarity and attentiveness during the process of producing this volume. 1 See bibliography in René Grohnert, Hans Sachs und seine Plakatsammlung, Der Verein der Plakatfreunde und die Zeitschrift “Das Plakat” im Prozess der Herausbildung. Bedeutungswandel und Konsolidierung des Plakates in Deutschland zwischen 1890 und 1933 (Berlin/Neersen: VDP und Freunde-Verlag, 1993).

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2 See bibliography in Grohnert, Hans Sachs. 3 Hans Sachs, The World’s Largest Poster Collection, 1896–1938: How It Came about and . . . Disappeared from the Face of the Earth (New York: self-published, 1957). 4 Sachs and others used “angewandte Graphik” (applied graphics) for posters and “angewandte Kleingraphik” (small–scale applied graphics) for smaller forms of graphic design such as menus, ex libris plates, greeting cards, postcards, certificates, etc. 5 Sachs, World’s Largest, 6. 6 Ibid., 19, 23. 7 Wolf Lepenies, The Seduction of Culture in German History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 8 Sachs, World’s Largest, 4. 9 Poster historian, director of Dresden’s Museum of Prints and Drawings, and later director of the Grünes Gewölbe, Louis Sponsel, acknowledged Fischer as the first German artist who produced an artistic poster comparable to international predecessors. 10 Sachs, World’s Largest, 4. 11 Munich, Dresden, and Stuttgart were also important centers for innovative poster design. 12 Sachs, World’s Largest, 4. One of the first poster exhibitions in Germany took place in 1896 at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg. 13 Sachs later loaned posters internationally, for example, to Japan, South Africa, and Holland, World’s Largest, 11. 14 For comprehensive information on the growth and composition of Sachs’s collection, see Grohnert, Hans Sachs. 15 The influential, Berlin-based Hollerbaum & Schmidt was the agency with which Sachs had closest ties; Das Plakat frequently discussed posters it issued, Christiane Lamberty, Reklame in Deutschland, 1890–1914. Wahrnehmung, Professionalisierung und Kritik der Wirtschaftswerbung (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2000), 282. 16 In fin-de-siècle Germany, “artistic poster” referred to the type of color lithographic poster first produced in France by poster artists such as Chéret, Steinlein, and ToulouseLautrec from the late 1880s onward. Germany’s versions appeared only around 1900. 17 Sachs, World’s Largest, 15–16. 18 David Ciarlo argues that German advertising professionals and collectors during this period had their own “archive” of acceptable posters, selected to legitimize the role of advertising. See Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2011), 14-15. 19 Sachs, World’s Largest, 17. 20 Christine Brock, “‘Unser Schild muss rein bleiben!’ Deutsche Bildzensur und – propaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg,” Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift 67 (2008): 25–51. 21 Sachs, World’s Largest, 8–9. 22 Hans Meyer, “Der Verein der Plakatfreunde, 1905–1915. Ein Rückblick,” Das Plakat 7, no. 1 (January 1916): 31–69. Meyer’s article provides the definitive overview of the Society’s activities and goals. 23 Bernhard and Meyer were completing university studies at the time, Grohnert, Hans Sachs, 43. Jahnke was a lawyer employed by Hollerbaum & Schmidt, Lamberty, Reklame in Deutschland, 281. 24 Meyer, “Der Verein,” 33. Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine.



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25 In the first issue of the early graphic design periodical, Gebrauchsgraphik (Commercial Graphics), editor Hermann Karl Frenzel acknowledges the groundbreaking work of Sachs and Das Plakat, Gebrauchsgraphik 1, no. 1 (1924), 3. 26 Sachs, World’s Largest, 23. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 26. 29 Ibid., 28. 30 Ibid., 29. Grohnert dates the exhibition as 1937, Hans Sachs, 94. The Jewish Museum in Berlin opened in 1933, shortly before Hitler assumed power, and held exhibitions until 1938. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, the Gestapo closed the museum and seized its holdings. 31 Sachs, World’s Largest, 33. 32 Ibid., 31–4. 33 It is unknown what exactly led to Sachs’s release from the concentration camp (an extremely rare occurrence) but according to his descendants’ account, Sachs’s wife Felicia secured it. Suzanne Glass, “Einstein’s Dentist, Goebbels, and Me,” The Times (London) (January 28, 2010): 34–5. 34 Sachs, World’s Largest, 36. 35 Ibid., 36–9. 36 Ibid., 34. 37 Ibid. 38 Hellmut Rademacher, “Wie ich zu den Plakaten kam und ihre Bedeutung als Quellen historischer Erkenntnis—Bilanz eines Berufslebens,” in Preis des Deutschen PlakatMuseums im Museum Folkwang für Plakatpublizistik (Essen: Museum Folkwang, 2011), 20. Simplicissimus (1896–1944) and Jugend (1896–1940) were Munich-based magazines featuring works by leading early-twentieth-century German poster artists. 39 Rademacher, “Berufsleben,” 20. 40 Ibid., 22. 41 Ibid., 23. 42 Sachs, World’s Largest, 34. Hölscher, a graphic designer, edited Gebrauchsgraphik from 1937–1944 during the Nazi regime; he restarted the publication in 1950 in West Germany. As an editor and graphic artist, he knew of Sachs’s work. 43 Rademacher, “Berufsleben,” 25. 44 Ibid. 45 West German GHI absorbed the East German museum’s collection, including Sachs’s posters. 46 Glass, “Einstein’s Dentist,” 34. 47 Peter Sachs, interview by David Rising, Associated Press Archive, January 17, 2013, online, http:​//www​.omah​a.com​/go/a​p-int​ervie​w-pos​ters-​seize​d-by-​nazis​-bein​g-sol​d/ art​icle_​4575f​ef3-6​329-5​25e-9​7a2-6​c214f​5293b​9.htm​l. 48 For example, Guernsey’s held auctions on January 18–20, 2013 and on November 22–24, 2013, in New York, and Christie’s South Kensington held one June 8, 2016. 49 Sachs, World’s Largest, 41. 50 Hans Sachs, “Die künstlerischen und kulturellen Werte einer Plakatsammlung. Teil II” (“The Artistic and Cultural Values of a Poster Collection”), Gebrauchsgraphik 8, no. 1 (1931): 52–7. This article appears in bilingual format; my translation modifies the published English.

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Selected Bibliography Grohnert, René. Hans Sachs und seine Plakatsammlung, Der Verein der Plakatfreunde und die Zeitschrift “Das Plakat” im Prozess der Herausbildung. Bedeutungswandel und Konsolidierung des Plakates in Deutschland zwischen 1890 und 1933. Berlin/Neersen: VDP und Freunde-Verlag, 1993. Rademacher, Hellmut. Das deutsche Plakat. Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1965. Rademacher, Hellmut and René Grohnert. Kunst! Kommerz! Visionen! Deutsche Plakate, 1888–1933. Heidelberg: Edition Braus, 1992. Sachs, Hans. The World’s Largest Poster Collection, 1896–1938: How It Came about and . . . Disappeared from the Face of the Earth. New York, printed by the author, 1957. Sachs, Hans, Martijn F. Le Coultre, René Grohnert, Bernhard Denscher, Robert K. Brown. Hans Sachs and the Poster Revolution. Hoorn: Stichting Affiche Museum Nederland, 2013. Sponsel, Louis. Das moderne Plakat. Dresden: Kühtmann, 1897.

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To Possess is to Belong: Carlos Monsiváis’s Collection of Ephemera and Popular Culture in Mexico City Liliana Chávez Díaz

For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? Walter Benjamin1 In 2006, Graciela Iturbide photographed the Mexican author Carlos Monsiváis at the first exhibition of his collection at the Museo del Estanquillo (Figure 9.1). In the picture the collector is deeply absorbed in observing peasants entering a typical old Mexican Catholic church. Like an ethnographer doing fieldwork or a child among his toys, Monsiváis views the mock-up from above, but from an angle that allows him a close and comfortable position—a liminal perspective that characterized his standing in Mexican society. His objects align with his ambitions to, in his words, show “all the points of view to which a person has access,” in order to understand his own ambivalence toward the society into which he was born.2 Monsiváis interpreted collecting as the accumulation of all points of view. He referred to his possessions as delirios del kitsch (kitsch delirium), and saw the act of collecting as a question of taste, pleasure, and fate.3 I suggest that his collection can be interpreted as a more tangible and modern manifestation of Jorge Luis Borges’s metaphor of the “aleph.” In Borges’s homonymous short story, the aleph is an object that can contain and reflect all objects of the universe.4 Like Borges’s aleph, Monsiváis’s collection aims to expose a chosen reality from all possible points of view. Built over the course of forty years, Carlos Monsiváis’s collection is in fact composed of multiple collections of objects from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, created by national or foreign artists living in Mexico. Monsiváis’s collections include around 30,000 prints, art works, and ephemera; 24,000 books; and around 2,000 films.5 In 2003 Monsiváis gave about 20,000 of these objects to a civic association as a loan in order to be exhibited at the Museo del Estanquillo (Museum of the Little Shop) in Mexico City’s historic center (Figure 9.2). The

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Figure 9.1  Graciela Iturbide, Retrato de Monsiváis en su cuarto de juegos, c. 1996, gelatin silver print, Carlos Monsiváis / Museo del Estanquillo Collection.

Figure 9.2  Héctor Herrera, Fachada Museo del Estanquillo Día, 2017, digital print, Museo del Estanquillo.



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museum opened in 2006 to house this collection, which is shown in temporary and itinerant exhibitions throughout the year.6 Since Monsiváis’s death in 2010, his books have been kept in a special site at the Biblioteca Nacional (National Library) and his films are part of the Videoteca Digital “Carlos Monsiváis” (Digital Video Library “Carlos Monsiváis”), at Cineteca Nacional, the Mexican State’s film archive. In addition to the now public collection, there are other objects that have remained in his former house: sketches and small paintings by Mexican artists, such as Leonora Carrington, Diego Rivera, Vicente Rojo, and Francisco Toledo; pop-up books, miniature bone sculptures depicting Mexican traditions made upon Monsiváis’s request to artist Roberto Ruiz, plastic toys, contemporary postcards of cats, and early-twentieth-century homoerotic photographs and postcards. These objects have not been catalogued yet and they currently belong to Beatriz Sánchez Monsiváis, Monsiváis’s cousin and the collection’s guardian. This chapter analyzes how personal and national identity intersect in Monsiváis’s search for Mexico’s counter-hegemonic history through prints and ephemera. I propose that Monsiváis’s collecting was encouraged by two apparently contradictory desires. First, his desire to belong to Mexican society, because his Protestant and queer identity was likely not accepted in a deeply Catholic and conservative country.7 This desire was represented by the recovery of documents and objects from popular culture, which aimed at understanding the country’s roots. Second, he desired to uncover the creative spirit of el pueblo (the people), by proposing, and defining, the idea of a more diverse and inclusive Mexican history. He typically collected objects made by anonymous artisans, as well as anonymous postcards and photographs of homosexual life in Mexico. Author, public intellectual, and celebrity, Monsiváis (1938–2010) was born in and lived in Mexico City all his life. His passion for collecting might have started during a brief visit to New York in 1965, where he saw some drawings by Mexican cartoonist Rogelio Naranjo displayed in an art gallery. He felt frustrated because he could not afford them.8 This lack of money was consequential for Monsiváis’s collecting practices. Even though he spent almost all he earned as a professional writer on his collecting, he never earned enough to satisfy his obsession. He frequently exchanged writing, particularly book prefaces, for objects and used his literary awards to buy more. His intelligence and easy-going nature enabled him to develop strong friendships with art dealers and artists who provided him with gifts or discounts of artwork.9 He started collecting art, prints, and ephemera in 1973, when he bought fifteen sketches by Mexican artist and ethnographer Miguel Covarrubias (1904–57) in Mexico City.10 He paid for these drawings in irregular installments over several years.11Although it is not known which specific pieces by Covarrubias started the collection, among these works there must have been those portraying painters Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the American actresses Fanny Brice and Corinne Griffith, and the former president of Mexico, Manuel Ávila Camacho.12 According to the artist and curator of the Museo del Estanquillo, Rafael Barajas, he was motivated to collect after realizing that he could buy something he liked. Barajas remembers that when he asked Monsiváis about his purchase criteria, he answered, “I buy what I think is worthy and what I can afford.”13

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In one of the few texts in which Monsiváis writes about his own collection, he confessed that he was not particularly passionate about Covarrubias’s work, but was already aware of his importance, even though retrospective exhibitions and books legitimizing the artist would come much later.14 This is but one instance of his collecting practice fitting his view of himself as an “intuitive or romantic collector.”15 However, it was not by chance that works by Miguel Covarrubias were the first Monsiváis had to possess. Like Monsiváis himself, Covarrubias was a bright, self-taught young man who was interested in understanding others through popular art. Both were collectors of, by then, strange pieces of unclassifiable or hybrid identity. Both expressed themselves through unorthodox artistic forms. Like Covarrubias’s drawings, which were commercial in appearance, Monsiváis’s journalismlike writing on popular culture was not considered high literature. Rather than looking for specific, valuable objects, Monsiváis let himself be surprised by the objects he found in flea and antique markets wherever he travelled. “The truly great tradition is fate,” he wrote of his first purchase as collector.16 He preferred weekend walks around the Mexico City markets, especially the antiques bazaar at Plaza del Ángel (Angel Mall), an indoor market on Hamburgo Street in the Zona Rosa neighborhood. He also visited the antiques section of the popular Lagunilla market, at the heart of the informal-illegal commerce in the city.17 Monsiváis sometimes did not have to leave his house to acquire items for his collection since artisans and antiques dealers approached him, waiting outside his front door every day to be invited to his office to negotiate.18 By collecting prints and ephemera, Monsiváis tried to understand a society toward which he had mixed feelings. On the one hand, he collected popular prints, such as communist leaflets and satirical cartoons about Mexican political corruption and everyday urban violence. On the other, his wide collection of popular art, such as miniature portraits and idealized scenes of rural Mexico, shows Monsiváis’s deep admiration of the people’s creativity. In a prologue to the first exhibition of his collection, “En orden de aparición” (In order of appearance, 2006), Monsiváis wrote about what he considered the highlights of his collection: photography, comics, postcards, popular art, prints, cinema, and wrestling. Unfortunately, he did not explain his collecting practices, and the history of his objects remain unknown even to those closest to him. However, by analyzing Monsiváis’s own writings about collectors’ and art historians’ lack of attention to visual culture, we can infer that he sought to legitimize these objects and give them a place in Mexican cultural history.19 He collected what he considered to be valuable to Mexican culture, such as objects made for popular festivities, including the Independence celebration or the Day of the Dead.20

The Public Monsiváis After the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) against the thirty-year dictatorship of the conservative Porfirio Díaz, the country began to transform from a largely rural, agricultural society to a modern urban and cosmopolitan one. Monsiváis was born in this post-Revolutionary context, on May 4, 1938, in Mexico City, into a family that had recently transitioned from working to middle class. When



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Monsiváis was still a child, his mother—a Sunday school teacher—bought a house in Colonia Portales, a lower-middle-class neighborhood on the lands of a former colonial hacienda. The family then moved from the working-class neighborhood of La Merced, in the city center, to the house in which Monsiváis lived until his own death.21 His identity was shaped by his early experiences as a Protestant boy attending state schools in a Catholic country. There is hardly anything published about Monsiváis’s family; he was quite private about them, particularly his father, who was not part of his life. In 1955 Monsiváis studied economics and literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), although he never graduated and considered himself self-educated. In 1965 he went to Harvard University for a few months. It is not clear what the nature of the invitation was, but there is a photograph in his collection of his participation in a seminar on international culture.22 In 1970 he was a visiting professor at the University of Essex, where he taught translation and Latin American literature, and in 1975 he had a similar position at King’s College in London.23 Monsiváis began his journalistic career as a radio presenter and music critic, and from 1975 to 1987 was editor in chief of La Cultura en México (Culture in Mexico), a cultural supplement of the magazine Siempre!. He became a prolific author, publishing essays, articles, reviews, translations, short stories, prologues, and plays. His writing on popular culture, film, music, politics, and human rights was published in major national newspapers and magazines, from right-of-center publications such as Excélsior, El Universal, Proceso, Nexos, and Letras Libres, to the traditionally left-wing ones, such as La Jornada; he also published in the counter-culture and avant-garde press such as the feminist magazines fem and Debate feminista. His books explored diverse aspects of mass culture from a sociological and literary perspective.24 He developed close friendships with powerful intellectuals, politicians, and entrepreneurs. For example, he was part of “El ateneo de Agangueo” (The athenaeum of Agangueo), a group of influential Mexican journalists and intellectuals, along with his dearest friend, the writer Elena Poniatowska, and journalists Miguel Ángel Granados Chapa and Héctor Aguilar Camín. Sometimes Gabriel García Márquez would also appear there.25 He was also a friend of the Mexican businessman, magnate, and art collector Carlos Slim.26 Rafael Barajas remembered that when he was invited to an upper-class neighborhood, such as Lomas de Chapultepec in Mexico City, Monsiváis used to say “I am going to do social tourism.”27 One of the striking characteristics of his public persona is in fact that he was a friend of both those whose thinking was defined by left-wing ideology—generally opposed to the state’s corruption and human rights violations—and those who were of a right-wing persuasion, mainly of conservative, government-aligned thinking. Being critical of power without leaving its protective sphere made him a controversial character but also offered him a privileged position both as a witness and as a mediator between society and the state.28 A true citizen of Mexico’s capital, Monsiváis was popularly known as cronista de la ciudad (the city’s chronicler), an honorary title that goes back to the first Spanish conquerors and monks who wrote reports about Mexico City’s everyday life. He was also known as an activist on issues regarding animal protection and rights for the

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LGBT community. While there is a long tradition of left-wing intellectuals involved in politics in Latin America, few of them have openly defended such causes. Monsiváis wrote widely about gay movements and homosexual authors in Mexico, usually in underground publications; a selection of these texts was collected by feminist activist Marta Lamas in Que se abra esa puerta (May that door be open).29 Monsiváis died from pulmonary fibrosis at the age of seventy-two in Mexico City, on June 19, 2010. The Mexican government and diverse political organizations convened a massive public funeral at Palacio de Bellas Artes, the country’s most important cultural forum. His funeral was as eclectic as his collection itself: there was mariachi and bolero music, people praying, and singing of Christian chants and the national anthem. For a moment, a rainbow flag was placed on the coffin by musician Horacio Franco, as a symbol of gay pride, scandalizing public opinion.30 Monsiváis’s ashes were deposited into an urn with the shape of a cat, which was designed by Mexican artist Francisco Toledo and is currently on display at the Museo del Estanquillo.

The Private Collector Before a four-story museum building was designed to house his collection, Monsiváis kept it at the family home in Colonia Portales, where he lived in one of three small houses, alongside his mother and uncles. He used the first floor as his studio; his bedroom and library were on the second floor, where he displayed his ephemera, miniatures, and film collection. The second floor was also used as a dining and living room. On the weekends, Monsiváis would organize film viewings for his friends. Monsiváis’s mother used to organize the collection to maintain order around the home. Friends and family members remember the chaos that ensued after she died.31 The objects competed for space with old books and documents. Monsiváis did not keep notes or records of each purchase and he was unable to remember their locations. Moreover, he had thirteen cats, which were permitted to play freely around the house, making it difficult to keep the collecting spaces free of hair and urine. Accounts of visitors describe how, after his death, restorers who worked in his house suffered from skin irritation while touching the damaged objects.32 Monsiváis was initially inspired by other collectors of Mexican popular culture who were artists, such as the painter Diego Rivera who collected pre-Hispanic objects, and the nineteenth-century Mexican lithography collectors Ricardo Pérez-Escamilla and Manuel Toussaint. Collecting antiques, such as family albums, colonial paintings, or French furniture was already a tradition in the country before Monsiváis began to acquire them. However, as Monsiváis acknowledged in his essay about collecting history in Mexico, this was generally an amateur enterprise, conducted by the new bourgeois class during the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship (1876–1911). Upper-class families that claimed direct European ascendance, for instance, used to collect antiques primarily for social prestige.33 Collector and researcher Arturo Saucedo argues that Monsiváis continued this tradition by focusing on collecting aristocratic family photographs and prints from the nineteenth century, for example.34 Carlos Monsiváis found new



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niches in collecting objects of recent popular culture, such as political comics and toys, particularly miniatures representing Mexican traditions and wrestlers.35 Trying to make sense out of the objects that Monsiváis did not classify, Rafael Barajas classified them into nine main groups: 1) scaled models, recreating Mexican daily life and rituals, by popular artists Teresa Nava, Roberto Ruiz, and the couple Susana and Teodoro Torres; 2) drawings referring to Mexican politics since the nineteenth century, including lithography and drawings by Miguel Covarrubias, Andrés Audiffred, El Chango Cabral, Abel Quezada, Rius, Rogelio Naranjo, and Helioflores; 3) original comic strips by Hugo Tilghman, Audiffred, Gabriel Vargas, Germán Butze, and Rius; 4) leaflets, notebooks, and plates by Manuel Alfonso Manilla and José Guadalupe Posada; 5) prints and personal notes by the artists’ collective Taller de Gráfica Popular (Workshop of Popular Graphics), especially Leopoldo Méndez’s archive; 6) photographs and negatives in diverse formats, including daguerreotypes, family albums, and visiting cards (some of which were anonymous while others were taken by internationally recognized artists working in Mexico, such as Hugo Brehme, Man Ray, Manuel and Lola Álvarez Bravo, Agustín Jiménez, Nacho López, Héctor García, Luis Márquez, and Guillermo Kahlo, the father of the painter Frida Kahlo; 7) posters, film stills, and cinema-related ephemera; and 8) autographs, first editions, comics, photographs, and original drawings by recognized artists, such as Francisco Toledo, Vicente Rojo, Gunther Gerzso, Rodolfo Morales, Juan Soriano, and Diego Rivera.36 The collection’s disorganization—el desmadre, as Monsiváis called it—might have been meant to be an allegory of Mexican history. Making or living in a desmadre means, according to colloquial Mexican Spanish, to be surrounded by chaos or the mess generated by an out-of-control situation. The word also alludes to the idea of living without (des-) a mother (madre). In my view, Monsiváis’s collecting practices were driven by both spontaneity and fate, and therefore became a metaphor for a country without clear origins, in which hierarchies and categories are constantly changing.37 In this sense the collection mirrors a fin-de-siècle intercultural phenomenon that Argentinean scholar Néstor García Canclini called culturas híbridas (hybrid cultures). According to García Canclini, Latin American contemporary culture mixes tradition, art, and media technologies, all from an undefined or hybrid position, between modernity and postmodernity.38 Monsiváis’s prints and ephemera are also a testimony of the collector’s experiences in his city. It is no coincidence that one of the forty-nine temporary exhibitions the Museo del Estanquillo has put on so far is entitled “Los Rituales del Carlos. Homenaje a Monsiváis y sus Manías” (Carlos’s rituals. Homage to Monsiváis and his obsessions).39 The author indeed had numerous manías regarding Mexican rituals: throughout his collection there is a fixation with documents and figures that explore religion, nationalism, and festivities, usually satirically.

Collecting Mexican Archetypes Monsiváis’s miniatures, drawings, and postcards offer a creative view of Mexican archetypes. Figures such as the peasant, the wrestler, the mother, and the policeman

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are represented in the traditional public spaces occupied by the average citizen, such as squares, churches, streets, little shops, and markets. An example of these archetypes in Monsiváis’s collection are the Claudio Linati print series “Costumes Mexicains,” in which he portrays, in a romantic style, traditional professions of nineteenth-century Mexico, such as the water carrier, the hen seller, and the brewer. For example, there is a color lithograph by Linati depicting a public escribano (copyist) listening to an Indigenous woman while writing in a public square (Figure 9.3). Until very recently, this scene was common in Mexican squares and around government buildings,

Figure 9.3  Claudio Linati, Escribano público, 1830, hand-painted lithograph, Carlos Monsiváis / Museo del Estanquillo Collection.



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as illiterate people coming from rural areas to the city hired professionals to write letters or to complete official forms. These images can be compared to anonymous, collected photographs, which depict similar activities, or to the lead miniatures made by Teodoro Torres and Susana Navarro. After Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821, common practices, festivities, and ceremonies gave a sense of lo nacional (the national) to Mexican culture and transformed urban life. As Monsiváis noted, Mexican literature also found a way of becoming “national,” naming Mexican places, recognizing a new social space, and creating el pueblo as a character. The masses, therefore, are represented in the collection, particularly in engravings and lithographs from illustrated books of Mexican folklore. Monsiváis’s knowledge of Mexican history and art has rescued this kind of work, which was at risk of being forgotten. The collection includes newspaper clips and leaflets, along with the work of other famous visual artists, such as Guadalupe Posadas’s first drawings of Catrinas—the Mexican female allegory of Death. As a self-made bourgeois interested in forms and appearances, and who was able to move from one social class to another, Monsiváis was a modern dandy, drawing upon camp aesthetics. Rather than cultivating his own image, he expressed himself through his collection, using it in a way described by Michael Camille: as an ethnographic and anthropological tool for exploring the social life of things.40 Tracing the history of homosexual collectors, Camille also sees collecting as a performance crossing temporal, spatial, and cultural boundaries. This is relevant to Monsiváis because, as Camille perceives, “the collector’s desire has often seemed to strain the limits of the heterosexual matrix and to problematize the logic of structuring it. It is not just that the unmentionable nature of same-sex desire has often meant that the subject had to communicate the ‘secret’ in a coded language, but the fact that this language was a system of objects.”41 This secret language can be decoded especially from Monsiváis’s collection of photographs and postcards, in which anonymous artists depicted male and female transvestites from the 1910s to the 1990s. Some homoerotic drawings, such as those of Alfredo Zalce, Juan Soriano, and Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, were specially dedicated to Monsiváis.42 The perspective from which Monsiváis’s “system of objects” is arranged communicates a camp taste, which, for Susan Sontag, is closely related to the epicene. In “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Sontag made a list of objects and people that can be considered camp, from Tiffany lamps and Swan Lake to Mozart and Wilde.43 Alluding to Sontag’s essay, in Días de guardar (Days to remain at home, 1970), Monsiváis wrote an essay in which he added to the original list an eccentric variety of Mexican figures and things, such as the film star María Félix, the poet Salvador Novo, the singer Jorge Negrete, the Palacio de Bellas Artes building, Amado Nervo’s poems, and Chapultepec’s Castle.44 All of them are included in his collection, through old posters and photographs, mock-ups, and magazines. Considering Monsiváis’s broad interest in popular culture, the list of camp objects and people could be infinite. His own consciously camp perspective enables a different view of Mexican reality through his texts and collection. Monsiváis’s taste particularly embodies camp’s nostalgic approach to the past and its close relationship with kitsch aesthetics. The colorful miniature sculpture “Monsiváis

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a la mesa con la familia Burrón” (Monsiváis eating with the Burrón family) is perhaps the object from the collection that most literally expresses the collector’s intimate relationship with his kitsch-like possessions. This piece, made by the artistic collective Skelos, represents an aged Monsiváis having a typical Mexican family lunch with the characters from Gabriel Vargas’s popular La familia Burrón (The Burrón family). Monsiváis was a fan of this comic strip, which was printed in Mexican newspapers from 1948 to 2009 and depicted the everyday lives of a working-class family in Mexico City. His collection contains Vargas’s comics and sketches. This piece acts as the artist’s homage to both popular culture and to Monsiváis himself. By incorporating Monsiváis, as if he were another strip character, the piece represents the collector as a protagonist in Mexican popular culture.45 Monsiváis did not need to be depicted in the objects of his collection for his perspective and taste to be perceived. The archetype of the Mexican family is critically addressed in the collection in diverse representations. Comparing two prints, both entitled “Familia Mexicana” (Mexican family), highlights the variations of this archetype. Luis Hidalgo’s drawing depicts a poor revolutionarylike family living in an urban area but wearing peasant clothes. In contrast, Andrés Audiffred’s drawing of a Mexican family is clearly representing an upper-class one. Both mother and father are dressed in an elegant urban manner and the child is dressed as a mariachi. Both families seem to be on their way to celebrate something. While the poor family has two children, slightly concealed, the rich family has only one, accompanied by a toy and a mascot. Regardless of their differences in social class, both are smiling and show patriotic aspects. Furthermore, Hidalgo’s miniature sculpture “Mi hermanito chiquito” (My baby brother), depicts another variation: the Indigenous extended family in which the eldest sister has to assume the role of a second mother. Taken alone, each piece could be seen as a colorful, folkloristic representation of Mexican traditions; when placed together as part of this collection, however, they become powerful statements that reflect Mexico’s inequalities of race and class.

The Collection as an Alternative View of the Nation Monsiváis used language and objects to appropriate camp style as a means of selfexpression, but also as a way of creating his own version of Mexico. This is particularly evident in the collected ephemera on queer culture, which contain striking images that salvage another face of Mexican society, one beyond traditional family life. These include, for example, an undated black-and-white postcard of three women dressed as cowboys, wearing make-up and high heels; a leaflet about a scandalous homosexual party during the conservative Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship; and a 1911 newspaper clipping showing two women kissing on the lips. It is in this camp version of Mexico that Monsiváis’s identity could be hinted at if not fully expressed. Monsiváis collection is a personal testimony, as well as documentation of an alternative portrayal of the nation both as an open and joyful society and as a repressed one.



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From the 1920s to the 1940s, Mexico’s national culture was in the process of being constructed from above by the post-revolutionary ruling party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Revolutionary Institutional Party). Since the 1950s, however, the public policy of desnacionalización (privatization) began to challenge the customs of the lower classes.46 As a child of the second half of the twentieth century, Monsiváis critiqued national chauvinism and, thus, represented Mexico City’s public space as heterogeneous and dynamic. Monsiváis considered the national culture to have been a construction of the Mexican elite, created as much by the intellectuals as by the prevailing institutions. In his “Notes about popular culture,” he contrasts the concept of national culture with that of popular culture, the latter being the creation of el pueblo (the people) that arises through a process involving the re-appropriation and transformation of the former: “That which among us has had the name of ‘popular culture’ is the result of the dominant class’s will and of the anarchic adaptations made by the masses, which take joy in doing so.”47 In his texts, such as Los rituales del caos and Apocalipstick (2009), Monsiváis deconstructed the stereotypes created by nationalism, and in so doing he acted in opposition to those writers who were part of the hegemonic political system. In his collection, however, this may not be as clear, because he acquired, among other items, numerous posters, booklets, and pieces of sheet music that were created as apologies for nationalism, like Claudio Linati’s lithographs and anonymous posters made for stores and product advertising. Although this particular part of his collection could be interpreted as a manifestation of Monsiváis’s national identification, perhaps even chauvinism, this is not necessarily the case. When seen together with other more countercultural pieces, such as satirical cartoons or communist pamphlets, the narrative changes. I suggest that by collecting patriotic ephemera, Monsiváis traced the blurred and obscured origins of nationalism to show that popular culture is indeed an uneasy mixture of both state policies and the joyful appropriation by the people of a sense of motherland. This is shown, for example, in Monsiváis’s collection of José Guadalupe Posada’s prints and Andrés Audiffred’s comics. Monsiváis managed to rescue from the markets what he thought should have a better place, in the hope that history could be narrated anew from below by considering a wide range of ephemera such as official memorabilia like the plates designed to commemorate the 100 years of Mexican independence during the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship. He also collected business cards printed during Maximilian I of Mexico’s empire, erotic photographs, and figures of saints and virgins. Religion, nation, and entertainment are intertwined in his collection as if they were only variations of the same ritual in search of collective identity. In this regard, Monsiváis’s collection of nineteenth-century illustrated scores published in Mexico is particularly interesting. They are printed in booklet format, edited by music houses that hired their own illustrators to make attractive covers. The buyers were usually upper-class single women who were expected to play piano as part of their domestic education.48 The scores for the national anthem, and for patriotic or religious songs, contain illustrations of Mexican landscapes and people in a romantic style. Monsiváis was not a musician himself, but he was interested in music. However, this particular collection

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aligns more with his interest in costumbrismo, an aesthetic with Spanish origins, which mixed realism and a romantic style to depict an exalted version of what is considered typical or local. It was at its most popular in late-nineteenth-century Latin American literature and art. In fact, Monsiváis’s writing, particularly his crónicas, resemble the costumbrista press articles in which the author describes, in colloquial language, a picturesque scene of everyday life in the city. It is possible, thus, that he admired visual projects that aimed to document Mexico and its inhabitants, despite the high degree of exoticism that the style demanded. The score covers usually show nationalistic symbols, such as the Mexican flag or an eagle on a cactus, in combination with pre-Hispanic

Figure 9.4  Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, Souvenir de México, 1905, lithograph, cover by unknown artist for Wagner and Levien, Carlos Monsiváis / Museo del Estanquillo Collection.



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elements, like a pyramid or an Indigenous warrior. Monsiváis’s camp sensibility—if one considers it as a way of looking at things—is acknowledged in this part of his collection. The unintentionally funny effect of a naïve desire to be charming, referenced by Sontag as a factor in “pure camp” taste, can be perceived in the piece Souvenir de Mexico (Mexican souvenir), which is the piano score of a waltz composed by Miguel Lerdo de Tejada (Figure 9.4). The booklet cover depicts a petrified Indigenous emperor in the foreground while in the background we see a colonial town and church. It is not clear what the souvenir is of; it could be the music itself, the memory of the Mexican valley depicted in the cover, or the Indigenous emperor with his back to the colonial town. The genre of the music, a waltz, contrasts with the exotic landscape, in which European music would have rarely been heard, except at high-society parties. Collecting this kind of object is a camp pastime. Like it, Monsiváis’s ironical, playful attitude toward national emblems can be traced through his writings. Monsiváis looks for degrees of artifice and finds in Mexican popular culture the perfect parody of the nation and its average citizen.

The Collection at The Little Shop Although there are similar museums in Mexico dedicated to popular culture, such as the public Museo de Arte Popular (Popular Art Museum) and the private Museo del Objeto (Museum of the Object), the Museo del Estanquillo is currently the only public institution in Mexico dedicated to a single collection.49 For this reason, its opening raised debates among art historians and collectors in Mexico concerning its artistic quality. Art historian José Luis Barrios, for example, criticized the cult of personality as influencing the museum.50 “El Estanquillo,” as the place is popularly known, was conceived as a museum of urban popular culture and holds temporary exhibitions from Monsiváis’s collections. This may be the only museum in the center of Mexico City whose pieces can be confused with those on display in the shops surrounding the building. Some pieces could, in fact, have been found in any typical little shop in a small town, as the word estanquillo suggests. The museum is run by the government of Mexico City through a public trust, which is regulated by a civil association, Fundación del Centro Histórico and the Universidad National Autónoma de Mexico. It is located in the city center, in a nineteenth-century building that formerly housed a luxurious jewelry store, a public office, a bank, and even a discotheque, successively. It was renovated to become a museum and features a public reading room, a book shop, and a café. It is mostly visited by locals and national tourists already familiar with Monsiváis’s literature. It also offers guided visits for schools and families.51 Although the character of the collection is diverse, with so many anonymous objects and ephemera, the exhibitions are usually centered on a well-known artist or on a recent period of Mexico’s history. Latin American visual culture has been developed as an effective form of communication within illiterate communities, from the retables in the first colonial churches, aimed to educate Indigenous people in the Catholic faith, to murals used to exhibit historical scenes in public buildings, and even the modern icons of Mexico City’s metro stops, representing pre-Hispanic and colonial sites and designed to be

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interpreted easily by any user.52 In this sense, it is not surprising that a museum focusing on popular culture would be driven by a didactic spirit. In fact, some critics have seen this tendency in the collection itself. For researcher Jezreel Salazar, for instance, the public interest inherent in each work and its potential use to disseminate information would have guided Monsiváis’s act of collecting.53 The objects displayed in the rooms are usually inserted into a narrative that aims to tell Mexico’s history anew, often in a critical way. Regardless of the didactic intentions of the museum’s own curatorial agenda, I contend that Monsiváis’s collection exhibits, firstly, a personal taste closely aligned to both camp aesthetics and folklore. Secondly, the collection shows a playful tendency to display a parodic version of Mexican history. The museum exhibitions created from Monsiváis’s original, dispersed, and apparently illogical collection have ultimately become evidence for the ever uneasy relationship between the state, artistic work, collector, and public.54 It is ironic that a collection that started in the popular flea market in the working-class neighborhood of La Lagunilla and the antique bazar in the Plaza del Ángel ended up in a French building that used to be an elegant jewelry store. For Walter Benjamin collecting was a way “to renew the old world—that is the collector’s deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things.”55 Like a child, the collector finds pleasure in a rebirth made possible by his act of possession. Rather than an act of sublimation, a perversity, or a cure for a disease, pleasure is a fundamental experience of collecting because the “urge to possess” is related to a particular object choice, motivated by a productive stimulation of the senses.56 For Monsiváis, collecting conferred this specific sort of pleasure. An object’s acquisition, and its ability to be contemplated changes its value; an old newspaper or an ignored leaflet bought for a few pesos at a flea market increases in value not because of the object itself, but because of its collector’s ownership and prestige. In a traditionally visual country like Mexico, it is notable that a man of letters tried to show the value of things that were normally hidden, lost, or ignored. What Carlos Monsiváis slowly built through his collection was a funhouse mirror through which reality can be explored. More than educating, his collection helps to de-educate, and to confront the observer with a chaotic national history, in the hopes that someday certain stereotypes will change. Monsiváis’s collection of ephemera and popular culture motivates reflections on the damaging effects of nationalism and religious intolerance, the incomplete project of the Mexican Revolution, and the repression of civil rights. The collected objects, however fine, grotesque, naïve, or childish, represent both sides of Mexican society and its desmadre: the uncontrolled disorder in which collective memory may be at risk, but also the capacity for joy, liberation, and rebirth.

Notes 1 Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” in Illuminations, ed. Hanna Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 60. 2 Carlos Monsiváis, “El museo del Estanquillo,” in En orden de aparición (Mexico City: Museo del Estanquillo, 2007), 27.



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3 Monsiváis, “El museo del Estanquillo,” 34. 4 The “aleph” is described in Borges’s short story as a single point that contains all the places of the world, and which can be seen from every angle. Jorge Luis Borges, “El Aleph,” in Cuentos completos (Mexico City: Penguin Random House, 2014), 338. 5 The exact number of objects is not known. Most of the ephemera and prints have not been exhibited and are currently on storage. Henoc de Santiago, conversation with the author, December 18, 2017. 6 Some of the exhibitions can be visited online at https​://ww​w.mus​eodel​estan​quill​ o.cdm​x.gob​.mx 7 Carlos Monsiváis’s homosexual identity was never part of his public life as an intellectual. For more about his work and personal involvement with the LGBT community in Mexico see Marta Lamas, “Presentación. La puerta de la dignidad,” in Carlos Monsiváis, Que se abra esa puerta. Crónicas sobre la diversidad sexual (Mexico City: Paidós, 2010), 11–15. His sexual preferences were known among friends and artists, but the topic was such a taboo that even after Monsiváis’s death a memoir published by journalist Braulio Peralta about the collector’s private life scandalized the Mexican media. See Braulio Peralta, El clóset de cristal (The Crystal Closet) (Mexico City: Ediciones B, 2016). 8 Beatriz Sánchez Monsiváis, conversation with the author, January 16, 2018. 9 Arturo Saucedo and Jorge Sanabria, conversation with the author, December 16, 2017. 10 The anecdote of this first purchase is not documented in detail, but Monsiváis narrates it in “El Museo del Estanquillo,” 27. See also Arturo García Hernández, “Con un acervo excepcional de Monsiváis, abrió sus puertas el Museo del Estanquillo,” La Jornada (Mexico City), November 23, 2006, http:​//www​.jorn​ada.u​ nam.m​x/200​6/11/​23/in​dex.p​hp?se​ction​=cult​ura&a​rticl​e=a05​n1cul​. 11 García Hernández, “Con un acervo.” 12 Rafael Barajas, conversation with the author, January 19, 2018. 13 Barajas, conversation with the author. 14 Monsiváis, “El museo del Estanquillo,” 27. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Arturo Saucedo, conversation with the author, December 16, 2017. 18 Saucedo, conversation with the author, and Beatriz Sánchez Monsiváis, conversation with the author. 19 Monsiváis, “El museo del Estanquillo,” 26–35. 20 Ibid., 27. 21 Consuelo Sáizar, conversation with the author, December 15, 2017, and Saucedo, conversation with the author. 22 According to Rafael Barajas, Monsiváis was awarded a scholarship by Harvard to study economics, but he was never clear about what happened, and Monsiváis never graduated from the program. 23 Biographical information for this part is mostly taken from the information displayed in the exhibition “Monsiváis y sus contemporáneos.” 24 The main collections of essays and chronicles published while he was alive are Días de guardar (1970), Amor perdido (1977), Entrada libre (1987), Escenas de pudor y liviandad (1988), and Los rituales del caos (1995). In English only two collections

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have been published thus far: Mexican Postcards, translated by John Kraniauskas (Verso Books: London, 1997), and A New Catechism for Recalcitrant Indians, translated by Jeffrey Browitt and Nidia Esperanza Castrillón (Fondo de Cultura Económica: Mexico City, 2007). 25 Information displayed in the exhibition at Museo del Estanquillo “Monsiváis y sus contemporáneos,” (Monsiváis and his contemporaneous) curated by Francisco Vidargas (Mexico City, July 2017–January 2018). This exhibition also displayed photographs of Monsiváis with other important figures of the Hispanic artistic elite, such as authors Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Salvador Elizondo, Octavio Paz, and the filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar. He also appears with the popular singers Juan Gabriel, Chabela Vargas, Gloria Trevi, and Paquita la del Barrio. 26 See Carlos Slim, “La invitación de Carlos Monsiváis,” in En orden de aparición (Mexico City: Museo del Estanquillo, 2007). According to Henoc de Santiago, in conversation with the author, Slim donated around one million USD for the restoration of works in Monsiváis’s collection and he lent the vault of one of his buildings in Mexico City to protect those pieces that had no room in the museum. 27 Rafael Barajas, in conversation with the author. 28 Linda Egan, Carlos Monsiváis: Culture and Chronicle in Contemporary Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001). 29 Carlos Monsiváis, Que se abra esa puerta. Crónicas sobre la diversidad sexual (Mexico City: Paidós, 2010). 30 See Peralta, El clóset and Salvador Camarena, “México se rinde ante Monsiváis,” El País [Madrid], June 21, 2010, https​://el​pais.​com/d​iario​/2010​/06/2​1/cul​tura/​12770​ 71204​_8502​15.ht​ml 31 Beatriz Sánchez Monsiváis, conversation with the author. 32 Information based on personal communication with Consuelo Sáizar, Julia de la Fuente, Arturo Saucedo, and Henoc de Santiago, December 2017. 33 See Carlos Monsiváis, “La hora de las adquisiciones espirituales. El coleccionismo en México (notas dispersas que no aspiran a formar una colección),” in Los rituales del caos (Mexico City: Era, 2012 [1995]), 232–47. This is one of the few texts in which Monsiváis reflects on collecting and tries to offer a brief history of it in Mexico. It is dedicated to collector Ricardo Pérez Escamilla. However, he does not mention details about his own practice as collector. 34 Saucedo, conversation with the author. 35 Monsiváis, “La hora de las adquisiciones espirituales.” 36 Rafael Barajas, “Escenas de impudicia y aliviane,” in En orden de aparición (Mexico City: Museo del Estanquillo, 2007), 21. 37 Monsiváis uses the concept of “desmadre” and “chaos” to refer to phenomena of everyday life in Mexico City, particularly in his books Entrada libre. Crónicas de la sociedad que se organiza (1987) and Los rituales del caos (1995). 38 See Néstor García Canclini, Culturas híbridas. Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (Mexico City: Conaculta/Grijalbo, 1990 [1989]). Graffiti and comics are, for García Canclini, two examples of culture hybridity—they mix diverse materials and artistic traditions. Monsiváis was highly interested in comics and the representation of urban culture. 39 Museo del Estanquillo, accessed December 18, 2018, http://museodelestanquillo. com/Rituales/



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40 See Michael Camille, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Other Objects of Desire; Collectors and Collecting Queerly (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 1–6. 41 Camille, “Editor’s Introduction.” 42 Some of these postcards are kept privately by Monsiváis’s family, but many of these objects can be found at the website of the exhibition “Que se abra esa puerta” (2016). See Museo del Estanquillo, accessed December 18, 2018, http:​//mus​eodel​estan​quill​ o.com​/Sexu​alida​d/ 43 Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Against Interpretation (London: Penguin, 2009), 275–92. 44 Carlos Monsiváis, Días de guardar (Mexico City: Era, 2010 [1970]). 45 Many Mexican fine artists painted him, such as Juan Soriano, Vicente Rojo, and Francisco Toledo. The portraits are part of his private collection. Beatriz Sánchez Monsiváis, conversation with the author. 46 Carlos Monsiváis, “Notas sobre cultura popular en México,” Latin American Perspectives 5, no.1 (1978): 98–118. 47 Monsiváis, “Notas sobre cultura popular en México.” 48 Evelio Álvarez Sanabria, conversation with the author, December 18, 2017. There is no information left about how Monsiváis obtained this particular collection. 49 Henoc de Santiago, conversation with the author, December 18, 2017. 50 See Berenice Elizabeth Jaimes Peña, “Conformación de los servicios educativos en el museo del Estanquillo/Colecciones Carlos Monsiváis 2006–2008” (MPhil diss., Universidad Iberoamericana, 2009). 51 Jaimes Peña, “Conformación de los servicios educativos.” 52 For more on the relationship between visual culture and illiteracy in Latin America, see Néstor García Canclini, Culturas híbridas (Conaculta/Grijalbo, 1990). 53 Jezreel Salazar, “El coleccionismo como historia cultural,” Taller de Letras 50 (2012): 271–82. Salazar also wrote briefly about Monsiváis’s collection as a fragmented reorganization of Mexican history; see “Monsiváis: vouyerismo moral y pasión coleccionista,” Textos híbridos 1 (2011): 58–74. 54 See García Canclini, Culturas híbridas, for an interesting critique of populist policies toward museums in Latin America. Canclini is against the common practice of the massive dissemination of certain ideas of “culture” and evaluating a museum’s success in terms of attracting the general public, because in countries in which there are huge differences in education the free access to a museum does not always mean access to an artistic experience. 55 Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” 61. 56 Camille, “Editor’s Introduction,” 2–3.

Selected Bibliography Egan, Linda. Carlos Monsiváis: Culture and Chronicle in Contemporary Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001. García Canclini, Néstor. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Translated by Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López. Foreword by Renato Rosaldo. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

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Monsiváis, Carlos. Mexican Postcards. Translated by John Kraniauskas. London: Verso, 1997. Monsiváis, Carlos. “The Neobaroque and Popular Culture.” PMLA 124, no. 1 (January 2009): 180–88. Sontag, Susan. “Notes on ‘Camp.’” In Against Interpretation, 275–92. London: Penguin, 2009.

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The David King Collection of Russian and Soviet Ephemera at Tate: Expanding the Museum Narrative with Ephemera Sofia Gurevich

In 2016, Tate acquired the collection of the late David King (1943–2016), British graphic designer and arts editor of The Sunday Times magazine during 1965–75.1 The collection consists of over 250,000 objects of Russian and Soviet visual culture, including posters, postcards, periodicals, newspapers, pamphlets, books, and photographs, spanning from the late nineteenth century to the death of Stalin in 1953 and beyond. This chapter explores the challenges and opportunities arising for Tate as a result of the David King collection acquisition. It will consider the ways in which the collection’s contents create potential for Tate to respond to the expansion of the museum canon globally, and how the acquisition can, in new and exciting ways, build and challenge the narratives Tate presents to its audiences. Equally, the chapter will argue that the museological discourse is further expanded by the broader context of the collection’s development and of what it stands as a reflection of—historically, socially, geographically, and ideologically. I will propose that underpinning the David King collection’s acquisition by Tate is the strong presence within it of material of ephemeral nature. Consequently, this case study also acts as an example of the role which ephemeral objects play in enriching museological environments. The admittance of ephemeral collections into museums foregrounds the recognition of their objects as intrinsic elements of cultural production within the geographical localities and historical contexts they are associated with. Simultaneously, these types of objects help transform museums into increasingly experimental spaces, where art-historical and museum narratives are contemplated and re-formulated. King’s interest in Soviet material was sparked by articles commissioned of him during his time as The Sunday Times arts editor. In 1970, on the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution, King produced features on the life of Vladimir Lenin and the so-called “A-Z of the Russian Revolution,” an alphabet-structured supplement dedicated to major characters, locations, events, and objects of the revolutionary years. Later that year, the editorial team commissioned from him an article on the life of

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one of Lenin’s closest allies, Leon Trotsky, a figure that had already deeply fascinated King. In his own words from a 2005 interview, “I was attracted to Trotsky because I felt the need for an alternative to Stalinism—an alternative that retained the tradition of international revolution.”2 King’s interest was not, however, individual. It reflected the broader fascination, by adherents of the New Left movement in Britain and other Western capitalist states, with leftist ideas, as a counterforce to conservative values propagated by the political establishment during the 1960s and 1970s. When he travelled to Moscow and Leningrad in 1970 to collect relevant materials, King quickly discovered that most written and visual material on Trotsky disappeared from official circulation during the Stalinist period. Trotsky’s controversial status as one of Stalin’s greatest enemies led to his exile from Russia after Lenin’s death, and later his assassination. King thus decided to retrieve any remaining Trotsky-related material, including photographs of him at the peak of his power during the first postrevolutionary years, to establish Trotsky’s true contribution to Soviet history. This led him around the world, seeking out Trotsky’s acquaintances, and his family, including his grandson, who lived in Mexico.3 Although the material never appeared in The Sunday Times, it resulted in Trotsky. A Documentary, coauthored by King and the British writer and editor Francis Wyndham, published in 1972.4 For King this was the beginning of forty years of avid collecting of objects of Soviet visual culture, resulting in one of the most comprehensive Western collections of its kind.5 In the early years, collecting required considerable inventiveness from King, since the material that interested him remained, for a while, unrecognized as potentially valuable in the West and as such, was often out of view. Later, with King’s particular interests becoming more widely known, many people reached out to him directly. In introductions to his more recent publications, King shared numerous fascinating, detective-like accounts of how certain items entered his collection. King stated that his collection started as a functional library for his work as a designer, allowing him to learn from the visualization of political ideas during Russia’s revolutionary years.6 The visual inspiration he drew from it allowed him to spread political ideas he identified with across wider audiences. This fueled his work on Trotsky’s book and the designs produced for The Sunday Times. Later, it also influenced his book projects and the political artwork he created for UK-based organizations such as the Anti-Nazi League and the Anti-Apartheid Movement.7 The collection formed an intrinsic part of David King’s life, occupying the entirety of his Islington home. Most rooms and corridors were, from floor to ceiling, filled with books and periodicals, for which he had custom-made shelves constructed. Extensive photographic material was housed in the attic, inside designated red filing cabinets.8 In 2016, the collection’s contents were transferred to Tate. While the collection was, from its inception, widely known among scholars of Russian and Soviet history and culture, King’s relationship with Tate started in the mid-2000s. Its discovery by the museum’s curators coincided with Tate’s growing interest during that period in politically engaged art. Interested in experimenting with potential ways of displaying such material within the museum, Tate Modern organized several temporary displays that showcased aspects of King’s collection and proved very



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successful with the museum’s audiences. The displays were curated by Matthew Gale, Head of Displays at Tate Modern, with additional input by King. These included rare posters from the first decades of Soviet power (2008, 2013) and selected issues of a 1930s periodical USSR in Construction (2006) (Figure 10.1). Additionally, King co-produced with Tate Publishing several publications exploring aspects of the collection in more depth, including Red Star over Russia: A Visual History of the Soviet Union from the Revolution to the Death of Stalin (2009) and Russian Revolutionary Posters: from Civil War to Socialist Realism, from Bolshevism to the end of Stalinism (2012). The former was the most commercially successful publication since the foundation of Tate’s publishing branch in 1911.9 In Tate curators’ opinion, this reflected a range of factors, including its striking design (which won the 2009 Art Book Prize) and the previously unpublished visual material it contained. King’s close collaboration with Tate resulted in him gradually becoming invested in the idea of his collection finding its permanent home at the museum. His priority was preserving his collection as a whole, or archive. He considered this crucial, since alongside Soviet material, the collection contained examples of 1930s anti-Nazi graphic design, such as works by renowned German artist and graphic designer John Heartfield, and representations of Chinese visual culture from the Maoist era, including posters, postcards, periodicals, etc. For King, keeping these materials together allowed for the logic of his initial collecting impetus to be maintained, and for preserving important links between disparate objects in the collection.

Figure 10.1  Installation view of the Red Star display at Tate Modern, 2008.

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At first sight, this acquisition appears to be unusual for Tate in many respects. Firstly, the collection is primarily paper-based, with most, due to its fragile material condition, housed at Tate Archive and Library. Historically, Tate Archive only holds material related to British art or international artists and art world figures whose life and work contributed to the development of British culture. Secondly, King’s collection includes many periodicals, pamphlets, and newspapers, that is, objects traditionally considered as ephemera. Many are not unique, but rather mass-produced and exist in other private and public collections across the West and Russia, if they were collected at all. Additionally, King’s photographic collection features official archival reprints of original photographs, together with King’s own reprints of negatives obtained during his archival research in Russia from the 1970s to the early 1990s. The nature of these materials makes them seem to be more appropriate candidates for one of the UK’s public collections that has historically focused on examples of printed culture and graphic design, such as the Victoria and Albert Museum.10 Nonetheless, a detailed inspection of King’s materials clearly links its acquisition with Tate’s strategy and vision for the future, beyond King’s own personal preference for the museum becoming his collection’s home. While David King material is part of Tate’s wider collection, most of it is housed at Tate Archive and Library, ensuring its wider availability for research. This contributes to a goal stated in the 2016–19 vision plan of Tate to maintain its status as a “centre for exemplary research into art and museum practice.”11 Thorough cataloguing, completed in January 2018, has ensured full access to it, with multiple research opportunities for tapping into aspects of the collection that King himself either was personally less interested in or did not possess specialist knowledge of. The paper-based nature of the bulk of the material also means that enormous potential exists for its future digitization, increasing its accessibility, and ensuring that fragile items within it are preserved. Firstly, this acquisition allowed the museum to build its existing collection of pre-revolutionary Russian and early Soviet art. Until then, this had been limited to paintings, drawings, and sculpture by artists such as Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, Natalia Goncharova, and artists born in the Russian Empire, whose artistic activity primarily took place abroad, such as Ivan Puni, Naum Gabo, Antoine Pevsner, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Jacques Lipchitz, and Chaim Soutine. The King collection adds examples of printed materials and graphic design, either by these artists or by contemporaries engaging in the period’s developments, thus contributing to the museum’s construction of a more comprehensive art-historical narrative.12 These additions to Tate’s existing collection are crucial, considering the move of many Russian artists, in the post-revolutionary context, away from painting and toward applied arts, including printed media and graphic design. These materials allow visitors to trace the development in ideas and style of these artists and demonstrate broader shifts that occurred in the early post-revolutionary context, in which the purpose of artistic creation and the artist’s role in society were re-assessed from art for its own sake to functional art. Parts of the collection provide insights into King’s work as a graphic designer and book editor, highlighting its partial function as “a working library.” This also



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creates important parallels with contemporary artists, whose projects are archiveoriented, and whose work Tate has been collecting and researching in recent years.13 It facilitates dialogues between seemingly unconnected works within the museum’s collection, strengthening Tate’s thematic approach to its displays that transcends periods and geographical contexts. This fits Tate’s ambition, expressed by its current director, Frances Morris, in the latest edition of Tate Handbook, “to present a more complex history of art, to build a collection around several histories rather than a signal narrative, and to use displays as contexts for exploring broader ideas as well as modernism’s style-based ‘isms.’”14 However, perhaps, the most important consequence of this acquisition is the potential that the research and display of its objects offer in terms of their contribution to the evolution of expanded narratives Tate aims to present to its audiences. Recently, as new art-historical and museum-studies scholarship has addressed different national, gender, and political discourses, Tate has, alongside other major public collections of modern and contemporary art, such as MoMA and the Centre Georges Pompidou, increasingly sought ways to recognize a multiplicity of art-historical narratives. Museums have gradually become more self-critical, attuned to the new issues that art historians such as the Polish Piotr Piotrowski have brought to the fore about their need to recognize that their “historical narrative is a consequence of choice, not an outcome of some historical inevitability” and that “art history, like any kind of knowledge, is an open structure that requires continuous revision and negotiation with our individual and collective sensitivity, which is always historically, ideologically, and aesthetically determined.”15 Despite the British origins of the David King collection (the implications of which will be considered below), its contents primarily reflect the evolution of Soviet visual culture. Thus, Tate’s acquisition of it must be considered within the broader context of Tate’s geographical expansion and, more specifically, as part of looking East.16 It represents a crucial aspect of Tate’s, and more generally, Western museums’ recognition, responding to Post-Colonialist scholarship, of the necessity to geographically expand beyond the European and American “West.” It exemplifies museums’ growing interest in art from East Europe and Russia since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It also shows the recognition that Soviet art requires further incorporation into wider modern and contemporary narratives, as well as renewed readings by Western museums. Prints and ephemera, in particular, allow museums to achieve this, due to their geographical mobility, political focus, and the diversity of their target audience. There are numerous other ways in which the David King collection can assist Tate in creating more inclusive narratives for its audiences. For instance, the institutionalization of this collection creates multiple opportunities to highlight aspects of Soviet art history that have been omitted from, or dismissed, within scholarship both in Russia and in the West. Such new perspectives are only recently becoming part of local and global art-historical discussions. Tate curators paid significant attention to these aspects in their planning of Red Star over Russia: A Revolution in Visual Culture 1905–1955 exhibition (Tate Modern, November 8, 2017–February 18, 2018). The show

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paid homage to King’s lifework and celebrated the acquisition, while allowing Tate to commemorate the centenary of the October Revolution, like other Western cultural institutions. The museum has also utilized the archive to recognize the contributions of female artists of the period, responding to feminist critiques about the exclusion of women artists throughout art history. One of the exhibition’s sections, “The Future is Our Only Goal,” showcased artworks from the 1920s and 1930s conceived by artists Rodchenko, El Lisstizky, and Klutsis together with women they were respectively married to: Varvara Stepanova, Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, and Valentina Kulagina. Another section, focusing on the period of the Second World War, highlighted the immense contribution to the period’s visual culture by Nina Vatolina, the renowned Soviet female poster artist.17 Another important, previously largely overlooked aspect of Soviet history brought to light by King’s collection, which was explored in detail within the exhibition, is the contested Sovietization of the Central Asian and Caucasian republics, and dissemination of official messages from the Soviet “center” in those regions through printed word and image.18 An example is a poster related to the controversial 1920s Hujum campaign, which forced the removal of veils in Muslim regions of Soviet Russia, and photographs depicting comprehensive educational campaigns, which involved strict imposition of Russian language as official. This type of material presents general audiences, who may not have previously considered Soviet Russia part of this process, with a more rounded conception of twentieth century colonial policies and their legacy. The David King collection consists primarily of objects of mass visual culture, which fall under the category of ephemera. While the boundaries between art, ephemera, and popular culture have increasingly blurred, objects within this collection pose challenges in terms of incorporating them into the institutional narratives, as objects of research or display; some, for example, are by anonymous makers. Nonetheless, they present Tate with opportunities to make its audiences question the notions of artistic authorship, uniqueness, and originality. Equally, they allow for concepts of spectatorship and artistic commission to be contemplated anew. In terms of posters, the collection includes iconic examples by well-known artists, such as Viktor Deni, Dmitry Moor, Mikhail Cheremnykh, and Alexander Apsit. Their status as artworks has been long established, making them more easily fit into traditional museum narratives and displays. These objects and their makers have been written into art history as early as 1925, with the publication The Russian Revolutionary Poster by magazine editor and journalist Vyacheslav Polonsky (a highly prized object within the David King collection, due to its rarity and early publication date). In the introductory chapter to the volume, Polonsky describes revolutionary posters as “painterly monuments” born “out of the Russian street” and “out of Russian art”—a combination that makes them an especially interesting subject for “historians of revolution and art.”19 Closer study of the volume, however, unveils a more complex reading of revolutionary posters, as they were understood and valued in their own time. In its original context, a poster’s authorship was secondary. Although Polonsky gives considerable space to biographies of specific



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artists, no particular distinction is made between posters with or without attribution and the book opens with two color reproductions of anonymous posters. Equally, Polonsky highlights the unique ephemerality of the poster, referring to it as podionka, or “something that lasts a day.”20 He uses this Russian colloquialism to highlight the poster’s urgency and immediate effect on its viewer, which demand specific formal attributes but do not reduce its artistic value. Ephemerality and the political function of the poster are also important within the broader departure, during this period, by many artists from painting to concentrate on objects of more urgent social relevance. Creators of revolutionary posters were inspired by sweeping social and political changes and commissioned by the newly formed Bolshevik state. Their art was valuable because of its immediate applicability and enormous potential to agitate audiences. These objects made politically charged messages seem engaging to as many people as possible across the vast Soviet territories. The more copies of a poster that were produced and disseminated, the more successful was the endeavor. Many of the visually striking posters from the first post-revolutionary decade within King’s collection were created by unknown artists or, as was the case later on, during the Five Year Plans, from 1928 onward, by anonymous artists’ brigades. These were groups of artists who collectively undertook state-commissioned work, evoking the work carried out in Soviet factories and fields. As such, the posters force reconsideration of the importance of artistic authorship, enabling more nuanced readings of such objects by contemporary museum audiences. Also widely represented in the collection, periodicals can trigger reconsideration of the concept of artistic commission. The previously mentioned USSR in Construction acts as one particularly representative example. Like posters, its apparent museum value lies in its design by famous artists, some of whom were part of Tate’s collection prior to the acquisition (e.g., Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky). Issues of USSR in Construction contain striking experimentation with typography and photomontage from throughout the 1930s. Equally interesting is the effect of this publication on the regime’s reputation. Through its issues, the Soviet state (the publication’s sole commissioner) promoted the country’s industrial achievements. Its target audience included both Soviet citizens and Western intellectuals who sympathized with Soviet Russia and whose public status enabled them to further spread a positive image of the Soviet Union in their home countries (Figure 10.2).21 This, however, also links to a problematic aspect of contribution to this endeavor by specific artists, since it is a well-known fact that its contributors regularly visited industrial sites across the USSR, where large numbers of political prisoners were employed. Consequently, they were fully complicit in the periodical’s contribution to Stalinist propaganda efforts toward audiences at home and abroad. In this way, objects such as USSR in Construction reveal crucial links between authorship and commission in Soviet ephemera. In a museum today, they can enrich the audiences’ understanding of these concepts, and their potentially problematic connections. The King collection’s ephemeral nature is also relevant within a contemporary museum context for its contribution to the formation of Soviet identity and mentality. Posters, magazines, newspapers, books, and postcards surrounded citizens of the

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Figure 10.2 Unknown photographer, The Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw, holding a copy of “USSR in Construction,” at his home in London, c. 1930–41, later print, photograph, gelatin silver print on paper, The David King Collection at Tate. newly formed state every day.22 The Soviet population grew to associate itself with ideas perpetuated through this mass-produced imagery.23 Unlike objects in museums, posters were displayed in public places, such as walls, fences, shop windows, book stands, agitational trains, and reading huts. They were conceived specifically for “collective spectatorship,” to be discussed and polemicized; their portable nature also made it possible for people to take them home, sharing them with family, friends, and colleagues.24 Through these objects, Soviet authorities propagated ideas of collectivity, community, and shared experience, with their everyday “consumption” by citizens consequently playing a pivotal role in the formation of Soviet identity. Focusing on the original creation, dissemination, and consumption of these objects provides Tate with an opportunity to rethink the inclusion of ephemera more comprehensively within its narratives. These objects possess immense potential for exploring issues of artistic authorship, commission, and spectatorship, as these were re-formulated within a radically different sociopolitical environment than Western modernism. The process of their institutionalization allows Tate to reintroduce these objects, and topics related to them, in the post-Soviet context, as part of the wider history of the period. Prior to the Red Star . . . exhibition, Tate Modern already exhibited certain objects from the King collection, including issues of USSR in Construction and posters, as part of the museum’s thematic displays exploring issues of politically motivated art and art’s response to, and relationship with, mass media.



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Figure 10.3  Page from the 10 Years of Uzbekistan publication designed by Alexander Rodchenko, featuring a defaced portrait of Dzhakhan Abidova, deputy chairwoman of the Presidium of the Central Committee of Uzbekistan, c. 1930s, printed in the 1990s, photograph, gelatin silver print on paper, The David King Collection at Tate. Certain ephemeral objects within the collection act as revealing case studies of originality. In 2003 King published Ordinary Citizens. Victims of Stalin, containing selected mugshots of victims perished during Stalinist repressions of the late 1930s through early 1950s.25 The book draws from a larger photographic collection amassed by King, illustrating this gruesome period in Soviet history and highlighting, yet again, the strong anti-Stalinist focus of his collection as a whole. The mugshots are reprints of archival negatives, which King obtained during the early 1990s, when, the KGB archives briefly opened up after the Soviet Union’s collapse. King himself reprinted the negatives. Similarly, while working at Alexander Rodchenko’s archive, King photographed the artist’s copy of his book design project 10 Years of Uzbekistan (1935). Faces of former Uzbek political leaders in it were defaced by the artist himself, following their repression (Figure 10.3).26 Consequently, defacements from Rodchenko’s copy of the book exist in King’s collection only as reprints.27 Issues of originality may appear secondary in terms of the research potential of these objects, especially in their status as part of Tate’s archive. However, they become

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important when these objects are included in a museum display. For example, a selection of mugshots from the collection has been included into the “Ordinary Citizens” section of the Red Star . . . exhibition. The question arises whether the later printing of the objects lessens their value, or whether their content and connection to the Stalinist repressions are most crucial. King’s acquisition of mugshot negatives and Rodchenko’s book copy constitute, symbolically, the formation of the collection. It was assembled in and based on the East–West divide, and on King’s idea that these writtenout, “shelved” stories could be brought to life through accessibility in the West, creating a less biased alternative to Soviet history. Together with photographic reprints, objects such as books, posters, and periodicals within the David King collection exist in other public or private collections across Russia and the West, including The Russian State Library in Moscow, Merrill C. Berman Collection in New York, and Ne Boltai! in Prague. Does this multiplicity and the fact that parts of this collection are copies present a hindrance, as far as its broader museum value and relevance are concerned? Susan Pearce has suggested that “it is an instructive exercise to take any collection or group of associated museum objects and ask, not ‘What are they?,’ and ‘What can they tell us?,’ but rather, ‘When and how was the collection formed?,’ ‘Who formed it?,’ and ‘Why did this person/these people choose to assemble these objects?’.”28 In these questions, arguably, lies the very value of any collection. Objects within the King collection are tied to the persona and interests of David King. Many related to his aesthetic preferences as a graphic designer, and his particular interest in works by Constructivist artists of the 1920s–30s, their experimental approach to typography, and extensive use of photomontage. King also collected because of his political interests, reflecting how Western leftist circles and officially allied Western parties saw and understood the Soviet Union at the time.29 As such, objects within the collection crystallized his political convictions. Mieke Bal’s concept of collection as a narrative seems particularly fitting.30 She sees collecting as “a meaningful sequence,” which starts off when “a self-conscious narrator begins to ‘tell’ its story, bringing about a semiotics for a narrative of identity, history, and situation,” with objects acting as “subjectivized elements in a narrative.”31 In this way, King and people of similar convictions in Britain at the time saw Stalin as someone with whom the October Revolution’s original ideas perished. Preserving the memory of Trotsky by accumulating visual material related to him retained the possibility for an alternative historical development. This idea is supported by the designs that the collection inspired King to create for contemporary British political causes. The broader context of King’s “collecting narrative” also encompasses the 1970s revisionist turn in Western Soviet-related historiography, which placed a new emphasis on archival sources. This approach developed in response to the earlier 1950s–60s totalitarian narrative, with prominent American historian Sheila Fitzpatrick and her colleagues, including Moshe Lewin and Stephen Cohen, criticizing the model for being “tremendously value-laden in a Cold War way.”32 Revisionists pointed to “the anti-Sovietism and . . . the agenda to show the evil of the Soviet system,” and called for a reassessment of the Stalinist era.33 Most importantly, they called for the abandonment



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of the top-down approach that looked at the Soviet elites as the main decision makers. This move from “political history to social history, and from model-building to empiricism” meant that revisionists made the study of primary sources their major priority, in order to achieve an increasingly objective (in the sense of the Cold War context of the debate) outlook on the period.34 In this way, originality and uniqueness become further parameters that this collection’s objects, following their institutionalization, urge the museum to rethink. The broader sociopolitical context, in which this collection came into existence and developed, is arguably as important in terms of its relevance for a public museum, such as Tate, as the collection’s actual contents. Equally, these aspects contribute to the evolving narratives that Tate presents to its audiences, reflecting its ambition to rethink art history in more inclusive ways. The David King collection acquisition case study highlights the particular role that collections of ephemera and print culture can play in the process of reformulation of art-historical and museum narratives and their potential in the museum’s expanding beyond the canonic art object.

Notes 1 I would like to thank my PhD supervisor Dr. Klara Kemp-Welch, Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Modernism at the Courtauld Institute of Art, for her invaluable advice throughout the preparation of this chapter, and my co-supervisor, Dr. Matthew Gale, Head of Displays at Tate Modern, and Dr. Natalia Sidlina, Tate’s Curator of International Art and curator of Red Star over Russia. Revolution in Visual Culture 1905–1955 (Tate Modern, November 8, 2017–February 18, 2018), for having shared with me their experience of working with David King and their involvement with the acquisition of the King collection, as well as for the crucial insights they provided on issues discussed in this chapter. 2 “An interview with David King: Why Trotsky’s Picture Lay Hidden for 70 Years,” Socialist Worker no. 1938 (2005), https​://so​ciali​stwor​ker.c​o.uk/​art/5​690/A​n+int​ervie​ w+wit​h+Dav​id+Ki​ng%3A​+Why+​Trots​kys+p​ictur​e+lay​+hidd​en+fo​r+70+​years​. 3 David King, interview by Shirley Read, February 2009, British Library Oral History of British Photography series, audio, four sessions, http:​//exp​lore.​bl.uk​/BLVU​1:LSC​ OP-AL​L:BLL​SA721​4731.​ 4 Francis Wyndham and David King, Trotsky: A Documentary (London: Penguin Books, 1972). According to King, 25,000 copies of this book were sold, highlighting the broader context in which King’s collection started its life. 5 In Russia, historically, the most comprehensive collections of this kind were part of public library collections. Since then, several private collections, especially of Soviet posters, have come to the fore, with the relevance and value (both artistic and commercial) of objects of ephemera becoming widely recognized during the postSoviet period (e.g., Sergo Grigorian’s collection, http:​//red​avant​garde​.com/​en/co​llect​ ion/a​bout/​). 6 David King, interview by Shirley Read, Session 2, 00.39.03. 7 Examples of King’s book projects over the course of late 1970s–90s include David Elliot, ed. Alexander Rodchenko (Oxford: The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford,

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1979); David King and Pierre Broué, Trotsky (Paris: E.D.I, 1979); Robert McNeal, Stephen Cohen, and David King, Stalin (Milan: Fabbri Editori, 1980); David King and Cathy Porter, Blood and Laughter. Caricatures from the 1905 Revolution (London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1983); Isaac Deutscher and David King, The Great Purges (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984); David King, Tamara Deutscher, and James Ryan, Trotsky. A Photographic Biography (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1986); and David King, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1997). 8 For more information on how the collection surrounded David King in his day-today life and on how items entered his collection, see Inside the Home of Collector David King, a visual essay published by Tate to coincide with Red Star over Russia. Revolution in Visual Culture 1905–1955 exhibition at Tate Modern: http:​//www​.tate​ .org.​uk/wh​ats-o​n/tat​e-mod​ern/e​xhibi​tion/​red-s​tar-o​ver-r​ussia​/insi​de-ho​me-co​llect​ or-da​vid-k​ing. 9 See also David King and Ernst Volland, John Heartfield: Laughter Is a Devastating Weapon (London: Tate Publishing, 2015). 10 This fits into the established framework of acquisitions, as agreed upon by UK’s national museums, which specifies that public museums must do their best to separate the focus of their collecting activity, so as to avoid potential repetitions within national collections and any consequent “waste of resources.” See, for example, Tate Acquisition and Disposal Policy, 2014, 79 or V&A Collections Development Policy, 2010, Appendix 1.0, 1.6, 69. 11 Tate Vision and Plan 2016–2019, 3.2. 12 Equally important to note are archives of Naum Gabo and Jacques Lipchitz in the Tate Archive. 13 I would like to thank Natalia Sidlina for pointing this out to me. Artists in Tate’s collection whose work, in one way or another, is archive-oriented include Christian Boltanski, Mark Dion, Jeremy Deller, Akram Zaatari, and Susan Hiller. For more on this topic, see, for example, Ernst Van Alphen, Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in the Age of New Media (London: Reaktion Books, 2014). Van Alphen focuses on art that “mobilizes the archive” (20), whereas Sophie Berrebi, The Shape of Evidence: Contemporary Art and the Document (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2015), considers the work of artists who “expose the nature of documents as products of sited conventions of knowledge production rather than self-evident and unambiguous entities” (13). The link between David King’s material and that of contemporary artists working with the concept of the “archival” fits into what Tate’s director Frances Morris refers to in Tate Modern: The Handbook (London: Tate Publishing, 2016), 22: “It indicated, too, that Tate might productively focus on areas where strong connections could be established between the existing collection and less recognized international contexts.” 14 Frances Morris, “From Sugar Cube to White Cube and Beyond,” in Tate Modern: The Handbook, ed. Matthew Gale (London: Tate Publishing, 2016), 20. See also Matthew Gale, “Fixed and Changing: New Displays at Tate Modern,” in Tate Modern: The Handbook, ed. Matthew Gale (London: Tate Publishing, 2012), 29–33. 15 Piotr Piotrowski, “Museum: From the Critique of Institution to a Critical Institution,” in (Re)staging the Art Museum, ed. Tone Hansen (Berlin: Revolver Publishing, 2011), 84. Piotrowski discusses his ideas regarding a “critical museum,” which he was keen to incorporate into the running of the Polish National Museum



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in Warsaw, of which he was the director in 2009–10. This article formed part of a later publication, Piotr Piotrowski and Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, From Museum Critique to the Critical Museum (London: Routledge, 2016). 16 The foundation, in 2012, of a dedicated Russia and Eastern Europe Acquisitions Committee is a reflection of this impetus. It forms part of Tate’s broader effort to recognize both the increasing importance of newly emerging geographical regions and of previously overlooked media within its narratives. For more information, see http:​//www​.tate​.org.​uk/ab​out-u​s/col​lecti​on/ac​quisi​tions​ and http:​//www​.tate​.org.​uk/ pr​ess/p​ress-​relea​ses/t​ate-a​nd-ph​otogr​aphy.​ 17 On this topic, see for example, Christina Kiaer, “The Short Life of the Equal Woman,” Tate Etc. no. 15 (Spring 2009), http:​//www​.tate​.org.​uk/co​ntext​-comm​ent/ a​rticl​es/sh​ort-l​ife-e​qual-​woman​; Margarita Typitsin, Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina: Photography and Montage after Constructivism (Gottingen: Steidl, 2004); the catalogue of the seminal 1999 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum: John E. Bowlt and Matthew Drutt, eds. Amazons of the Avant-garde: Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova, Liubov Popova, Olga Rozanova, Varvara Stepanova and Nadezhda Udaltsova (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2000); and Natalia Budanova, “Stepping Out of the Shadows: Russian Women Artists on the Eve and during the Great War” (PhD diss., The Courtauld Institute of Art [University of London], 2017). 18 See Georgy Mamedov and Evgeniia Shatalova, eds. Poniatiia o sovetskom v Tsentral’noi Azii. Almanakh Shtaba No. 2. Tsentral’noaziatskoe khudozhestvennoteoreticheskoe izdanie (Bishkek: Shtab-Press, 2016); Maria Filatova and Vladimir Bobrovnikov, eds. Plakat Sovetskogo Vostoka (Moscow: Mardzhani Foundation and State Central Museum of Contemporary History of Russia, 2013); Sergei Abashin, Sovetskii kishlak: mezhdu kolonizatsiei i modernizatsiei (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2015); and Aliya Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen, Central Asia in Art: From Soviet Orientalism to the New Republics (London: IB Tauris, 2016). 19 Vyacheslav Polonsky, Russkii revoliutsionnyi plakat (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1925). [Russian], 3. 20 Polonsky, Russkii revoliutsionnyi plakat, 111. 21 On the complex nature of USSR in Construction’s readership, see Erika Wolf, “When Photographs Speak, to Whom Do They Talk? The Origins and Audience of SSSR Na Stroike,” Left History 6, no. 2 (2000): 53–82. 22 Victoria Bonnell, in her seminal study Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), writes about the strong visual tradition prevalent among Russian people, which led the Bolshevik state, from the beginning, to rely heavily on the visual image for the dissemination of their ideas (3–5). 23 Bonnell identifies five main categories of iconography recurring in Soviet posters: worker-icon, women, vozhd’ (leader), internal and external enemies, and the imperial pathos and Stalinist cult prevalent in post-Second World War imagery. See also Leah Dickerman, Building the Collective: Soviet Graphic Design 1917–1937 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), for the analysis of the collective-building trope in Soviet printed culture. 24 Maria Lind, “Restaging the Institution,” in (Re)staging the Museum, ed. Tone Hansen (Berlin: Revolver Publishing, 2011), 29. 25 David King, Ordinary Citizens: Victims of Stalin (London: Francis Boutle Publishers, 2003).

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26 These reprints were presented at a 2005 exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery, London. For more, see Sean O’Hagan, “Russian Evolution,” Guardian, January 22, 2005, https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/ar​tandd​esign​/2005​/jan/​23/ar​t1. Much of material in the David King collection on the topic of photographic erasure in Stalinist Russia consists of reprints by the collector. 27 These reprints were also used for an artistic project King carried out in collaboration with Ken Campbell: David King and Ken Campbell, Ten Years of Uzbekistan: A Commemoration (London, 1994). For more information, see http:​//col​lecti​ons.v​ am.ac​.uk/i​tem/O​12817​08/te​n-yea​rs-of​-uzbe​kista​n-art​ists-​book-​campb​ell-k​en/. 28 Susan M. Pearce, Museums, Objects, Collections: A Cultural Study (Leicester and London: Leicester University Press, 1992), 116. 29 For more information on the fascination of representatives of the Western New Left movement with Soviet avant-garde art, created prior to Stalin’s ascent to power, see Éva Forgács, ‘How the New Left Invented East-European Art,’ Centropa 3, no. 2 (May 2003): 93–104. 30 Mieke Bal, “Telling Objects: A Narrative Perspective on Collecting,” in Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, eds. Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago (Farnham: Ashgate, 2004), 84–102. 31 Bal, “Telling Objects,” 86 and 88. 32 S. Fitzpatrick, “Revisionism in Retrospect: A Personal View,” Slavic Review 67, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 683. 33 Fitzpatrick, “Revisionism in Retrospect,” 700. 34 Ibid., 703. See also Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Revisionism in Soviet History,” History and Theory 46, no. 4 (December 2007): 81, for the clarification of the term “objective” in relation to this debate.

Selected Bibliography Abashin, Sergey. Sovetskii kishlak: mezhdu kolonializmom i modernizatsiei. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozhrenie, 2015. Alphen, Ernst van. Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in the Age of New Media. London: Reaktion Books, 2014. Berrebi, Sophie. The Shape of Evidence: Contemporary Art and the Document. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2015. Blazwick, Iwona and Simon Wilson, eds. Tate Modern: the Handbook. London: Tate Publishing, 2000. Bonnell, Victoria. Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin. Los Angeles, Berkley, and London: University of California Press, 1999. Brooks, Jeffrey. Thank you, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Dickerman, Leah. Building the Collective: Soviet Graphic Design 1917–1937. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996. Filatova, Maria and Vladimir Bobrovnikov, eds. Plakat Sovetskogo Vostoka. Moscow: Mardzhani Foundation and State Central Museum of Contemporary History of Russia, 2013. Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “Revisionism in Soviet History.” History and Theory 46, no. 4 (December 2007): 77–91.



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Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “Revisionism in Retrospect: A Personal View.” Slavic Review 67, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 682–704. Forgács, Éva, “How the New Left Invented East-European Art.” Centropa 3, no. 2 (May 2003): 93–104. Gale, Matthew, ed. Tate Modern: The Handbook. London: Tate Publishing, 2012. Gale, Matthew, ed. Tate Modern: The Handbook. London: Tate Publishing, 2016. Grenier, Catherine, ed. Multiple Modernities 1905–1970. Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2014. Hansen, Tone, ed. (Re)staging the Museum. Berlin: Revolver Publishing, 2011. Iskin, Ruth E., ed. Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon: Perspectives in a Global World. London: Routledge, 2016. Kenez, Peter. The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilisation, 1917–1929. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. King, David. Ordinary Citizens: Victims of Stalin. London: Francis Boutle Publishers, 2003. King, David. Red Star over Russia: A Visual History of the Soviet Union from the Revolution to the Death of Stalin. London: Tate Publishing, 2009. King, David. Russian Revolutionary Posters: From Civil War to Socialist Realism, from Bolshevism to the End of Stalinism. London: Tate Publishing, 2012. King, David. The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia. Edinburgh: Canongate, 1997. King, David and Wyndham Francis. Trotsky: A Documentary. London: Penguin Books, 1972. Mamedov, Georgy and Evgeniia Shatalova, eds. Poniatiia o sovetskom v Tsentral’noi Azii. Almanakh Shtaba No. 2. Tsentral’noaziatskoe khudozhestvenno-teoreticheskoe izdanie. Bishkek: Shtab-Press, 2016. Norris, Stephen. A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture and National Identity, 1812–1945. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006. Pearce, Susan M. Museums, Objects, Collections: A Cultural Study. Leicester and London: Leicester University Press, 1992. Piotrowski, Piotr and Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, eds. From Museum Critique to the Critical Museum. London: Routledge, 2016. Polonsky, Vyacheslav. Russkii revoliutsionnyi plakat. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1925. Preziosi, Donald and Claire Farago, eds. Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum. London: Lund Humphries, 2004. Romanenko, Katerina. “Photomontage for the Masses: The Soviet Periodical Press of the 1930s.” Design Issues 26, no. 1 (2010): 29–39. Sidlina, Natalia and Matthew Gale, eds. Red Star over Russia: A Revolution in Visual Culture 1905–1955. London: Tate Publishing, 2017. Wolf, Erika. “When Photographs Speak, To Whom Do They Talk? The Origins and Audience of SSSR Na Stroike.” Left History 6, no. 2 (2000): 53–82.

11

Collecting Chinese Propaganda Posters Stefan Landsberger

Introduction—Chinese Propaganda Posters1 This chapter combines two narratives. One is a brief overview of the genre of the propaganda poster and aspects of its production that are relevant for collectors. The second is my personal trajectory of more than four decades of collecting of and research on Chinese propaganda posters, which has resulted in a large private collection2 and numerous publications.3 I will look at Western and Chinese collectors of posters and their motivations for collecting from 1980 to the present. I will also discuss Chinese initiatives to create museums dedicated to Chinese posters beginning in the late 1990s, and discuss the market for posters. More than forty years ago, in the early 1970s, I became interested in Chinese propaganda posters, not out of political sympathies, but because I wanted to study the use of art and political propaganda, and Chinese propaganda happened right before my eyes. Initially, I tried to obtain them through the People’s Bookstore (Renmin Shudian) branch in Amsterdam and other shops specialized in printed materials put out by European Maoist and similar politically “progressive” fringe groups.4 By the late 1970s, I contacted the Chinese international distributor, the Guoji Shudian Company in Beijing, directly. Going to the source struck me as the best way to obtain posters. Guoji Shudian regularly sent out type-written lists of posters, on the basis of which I filed my orders. This method went smoothly until Guoji Shudian started sending materials I had not ordered, such as fairly expensive mounted scrolls of traditional ink brush reproductions. It was almost as if the Company tried to steer me into collecting more established types of Chinese art and not the posters I wanted, the ones showing excited peasants welcoming Mao Zedong, the material abundance in the people’s communes, or traditionally inspired fat baby boys with gold carp or in more contemporary settings.5 I acquired the poster in Figure 11.1 from Guoji Shudian in the late 1970s and have never encountered it elsewhere (Figure 11.1). Visual aspects of revolutionary China have appealed to Westerners from the very beginning, right from the founding of the PRC in 1949. One of the reasons was that many Westerners sympathized with the new regime. Another reason was that many saw Chinese poster art as something deliciously alien, subversive and mysterious.6 However, it was difficult to get hold of propaganda posters outside of China. Only



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Figure 11.1  Designer unknown, Little guests in the Moon Palace (Yuegong xiao keren), published by Renmin meishu chubanshe (Beijing), c. 1972, IISH/Stefan R. Landsberger Collection, photo © International Institute of Social History. foreign “friends,” sympathizers of the regime who had received an official invitation to visit and witness the changes the nation was going through, had the opportunity to acquire them first-hand.7 Posters served as souvenirs from revolutionary China, as opposed to the more traditional handicrafts (silks, silk screens, calligraphy scrolls, carvings, etc.) that foreign friends also brought back. For the Chinese themselves, the propaganda poster was ubiquitous and impossible to avoid. While the propaganda wall paintings usually were only visible on the spot where they had been produced, printed posters were mass-produced and were easily and cheaply available at the Xinhua (New China) bookstores.8 Posters carried normative or political messages; they also brought some color to the places where people lived. Posters reached all levels of society: they adorned offices and factory workshops, houses, and dormitories. Schools used posters for teaching; factories, Party offices, People’s Liberation Army meeting rooms, shop floors, community rooms, etc.

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all had posters on their walls; so-called mass art centers (qunzhong meishu guan), run by local cultural (Party) authorities and located in smaller urban communities and in the countryside, offered the “masses” the opportunity to learn to produce their own art and also organized poster exhibitions for workers and peasants. Although it could be politically expedient to have a Mao poster on one’s wall, as in Figure 11.2, most people liked the posters for their colors, composition, and visual contents, but turned a blind eye to their political messages. PRC posters had the same recreational functions that traditional New Year prints had had for hundreds of years in Chinese culture. These cheaply available prints, which could be calendars, traditional paintings, or simple block prints, had circulated widely long before the PRC was established. New Year prints generally portrayed events a little more beautiful than actual reality (Figure 11.2).

Figure 11.2  Xin Liliang, Chairman Mao gives us a happy life (Mao zhuxi gei womende xingfu shenghuo), published by Sanyi yinshua gongsi (Shanghai), March 1954, IISH/ Stefan R. Landsberger Collection, photo © International Institute of Social History.



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Art and Propaganda Posters The Communist Party (CCP, established in 1921) and the PRC used posters to visualize the abstract policies and their many different grandiose visions of the future. Propaganda posters played a major role in the many campaigns that mobilized the people, and became the favored medium for educational purposes; they could easily reach the large number of illiterate Chinese in the early decades of the PRC. The government mobilized the most talented artists, many of them former commercial designers, to design the posters. Miklós Haraszti’s concept of the velvet glove of political oversight over the arts is truly apt here.9 The idealized poster images did not show “life as it is,” but “life as it ought to be,” stressing the positive and glossing over anything negative. Newspapers, journals, and magazines reproduced original art works. These reproductions also appeared as wall paintings and as large posters in the streets, in railway stations, and in other public spaces. The smaller poster versions were distributed through the network of Xinhua bookstores; some were turned into bookmarks, appeared on biscuit tins, mirrors, cigarette packages, or matchboxes; a few even were made into postage stamps. In short, propaganda images were everywhere. But what exactly is a Chinese propaganda poster? And is it art? None of the posters are originals; all have been mechanically reproduced. As Walter Benjamin famously argued, reproduced artwork lacks a unique presence in time and space.10 In recent years, an increasing number of the original designs (prior to being printed) for Chinese posters have resurfaced. Ha Qiongwen’s and Dong Xiwen’s original designs and artwork that were reproduced on numerous influential posters now are part of major Chinese museum collections in Shanghai and Beijing, respectively;11 others are in a terrible state of neglect. Reproduction, according to Benjamin, depreciates the original work, its aura and authority. One can argue that poster reproduction has made the original redundant, but the posters have another quality that Benjamin liked: their democratic potential enabled the masses to become involved in art, culture, and politics. Although the propaganda poster dominated the political and public reality of the first three decades of the PRC, it was not a new medium. Throughout its long history, the Chinese political system has actively presented and spread its ideas of correct behavior and thought. It used paintings, songs, high- and low-brow literature, stage performances, and other artistic forms, such as New Year prints, to make sure that the cultured elite and illiterate masses behaved as they should. Once China attempted to modernize after Imperial rule ended in 1911/12, both the Nationalist Party, founded in the early 1910s, and the CCP employed visual art as a weapon to spread their messages, and gain adherents and power. Many Chinese artists and designers insist that the term propaganda art does not apply to the contents of the posters. According to them, the visual arts consist of discrete genres, such as oil paintings, woodcuts, and propaganda posters. This classification mirrors the highly hierarchical bureaucratic framework that governs and administers the arts. Formerly, watercolorists did not mingle with oil painters, woodcutters worked

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separately from painters, and propaganda poster artists were at the bottom of the hierarchy. Chinese artists further maintain that only the use of slogans turns art into propaganda. They do not consider posters with explicit political or propagandistic contents that do not have slogans, as propaganda posters. Conversely, posters with one or more slogans, but without political or propagandistic images, qualify as propaganda in their opinion. Over the years, I have talked with many artists and designers. They acknowledged that they also had mixed up the various styles, in particular during the Great Leap Forward (1958–60) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), when all art had to have propaganda value and be politically inspired. But whatever goal or movement propaganda posters were designed and produced for, they had to provide information and change attitudes or even behaviors. Themes of politics and economic reconstruction dominated posters since 1949. Most featured political obedience, and glorified work and personal sacrifice for the greater well-being. The images only paid attention to the personal and private dimensions of the people’s lives to show how these had improved. In periods when the political grip on artistic production relaxed, posters of landscapes, historical scenes, and images from popular Beijing Opera plays were published.

Collecting Posters After 1949, the Chinese had no private time; the government linked every activity directly to attaining its goals. Not being productive raised questions about one’s political trustworthiness. Pursuing hobbies, like collecting, came in for criticism as “wallowing in petty bourgeois amusements.”12 The omnipresence of the posters in public and private also held many Chinese back from collecting them, because they appeared to have no value whatsoever. This changed when the nation embraced the strategy of reform and opening up to the outside world in the early 1980s. Some Chinese started collecting “calendar girl” posters, advertising posters from the 1920s and 1930s in an Art Deco-inspired style.13 Posters from politically problematic eras however, such as the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution, brought greater political risks to the collectors; the leadership was still debating the official verdict on these events. Collecting such materials could bring political trouble to the collector. Once China freely allowed visitors from the West in the late 1970s, collecting became easier. I and other Western poster collectors merely needed to find the nearest local Xinhua bookshop in every city or town we went to.14 Each Xinhua bookshop had a poster section, with the available posters on display. When I went into a Xinhua bookshop during my first visit to China in 1980, it was like entering Poster Heaven. Shop assistants and curious onlookers peppered me with questions: “Why are you buying propaganda posters?” “Why do you like them?” “Why don’t you rather buy the ‘real’ art that other foreigners buy?” By “real art” they referred to (reproductions of) traditional Chinese painting, stone rubbings, calligraphy, etc. They refused to believe that I wanted to use the posters for research purposes: “Nobody in China is interested



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in these things, so why would you study them,” etc. Some shop assistants refused to sell posters, whereas others went out of their way to help. In 1987, in a small Xinhua store in Qufu, Shandong Province, now a major tourist destination, the section head started to take posters off the wall, as the posters in stock had been sold out. If I did not mind the holes left by the thumbtacks, I could have them; I bought them, of course. One can still buy such posters from the past, but no longer at the Xinhua bookstores. The highest levels of officials in the propaganda system decided, probably around the mid-1990s, to stop producing propaganda posters for sale. Presently, propaganda is distributed through other media such as popular music, films, computer games, television, and the internet. The posters have been relegated to open antique markets such as Baoguosi and Panjiayuan,15 both in Beijing, where collectors, foreign and Chinese, young and old, converge during the weekends. Indeed, most Chinese collect something these days, and growing numbers of them are interested in posters, rationing coupons, Mao buttons, Red Guard uniforms, and other objects, mostly because of their potential future value. A considerable number of private sellers, often collectors themselves, have emerged as the most valuable source for buying posters. The internet also is now a major source for acquiring posters. A number of Chinese and Western sites specialize in posters. Although it is risky to ascertain the authenticity and quality of posters on the basis of a digital scan, when one’s relationship with the seller is good, one usually can trust the latter’s judgment about authenticity.

Collecting Chinese Posters Today: Issues and Methods The sustained use of posters for mass campaigns suggests that they were produced in massive numbers. Up until now, I have not been able to establish which publisher published which posters in what quantities. There is no central, comprehensive catalogue covering all poster publications since 1949. Although the National Library of China in Beijing has served as a “legal deposit” authority (and continues to do so) to which all publishers have to present a copy of their productions, the Library’s poster section is in disarray and not well-looked after.16 The Library lacks the official and political support, funding, and the motivation to make this treasure trove accessible in any form. In January of 1998, I visited the major publishing houses in Beijing and Shanghai.17 In interviews with their representatives, many stressed that they had no records of past poster publishing activities and that archives or samples of these activities did not exist. If the publishers themselves did not, or no longer, maintain records of the posters they produced, we need to turn to alternative sources for information. In the 1950s and early 1960s, poster publishers sent out illustrated brochures of their planned production to the Xinhua bookshops that sold posters. Such brochures can help to reconstruct the poster production of a single publisher. However, this does not tell us how widely available posters were. Did the publishers in Beijing and Shanghai monopolize the market, or did the Hunan, Liaoning, or Shaanxi publishers have a share, too? Given the problems of infrastructure and distribution that plagued China in the 1950s and later,

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one must assume that local production determined the availability of posters. In the early years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–69) for example, poster production was almost completely decentralized to the provincial, municipal, or lower-level publishers. Moreover, Red Guard factions all over the country published their own posters, often in a much sought-after, simple, red-black-white color scheme that resembled the block prints produced in the late 1930s–early 1940s, as in Figure 11.3. Even for these seemingly “spontaneous,” “locally produced” posters, the central levels often provided the originals18 (Figure 11.3).

Figure 11.3  Dandong Red Headquarters of the Lu Xun Art Academy Mao Zedong Thought 65th Battalion, General Department of the Lu Xun Art Academy Mao Zedong Thought Red Guards, Listen to the words of Chairman Mao, swear to follow the model of “Support the army, love the people”! (Ting Mao zhuxi de hua, shizuo “yongjun aimin” de mofan!), publisher unknown, c. 1968, IISH/Stefan R. Landsberger Collection, photo © International Institute of Social History.



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Collecting Posters: Scope of Publication Numbers Although we do not know how many posters were published, we can estimate on the basis of incomplete statistics. The journal Renmin meishu (People’s Art) calculated in April 1950 that in the year 1949, 379 different poster designs were published nationwide, with a total print run of almost 6.8 million copies. Some 10 percent of them featured the founding of the PRC, and 13 percent showed the deep love of the people for the new leadership. Another 10 percent illustrated the close relations between the Army and the people, and 31 percent of them dealt with agricultural production.19 The scholar Kuiyi Shen20 has calculated that the Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing House published more than 2,000 poster designs in 40 million copies between 1954 and 1966, whereas the Beijing People’s Fine Arts Publishing House published 500 poster designs in some 28 million copies between 1951 and 1959.21 Aside from these incomplete figures, many individual posters provide some information in the imprint in the lower right hand corner. These imprints give details about the publisher, printer, size of the poster, print number, number of editions, and the size of the print runs.

Collections and Museums in the West One can classify the collections of Chinese propaganda posters, both in China and the West, as either private or institutional. In recent times, the advent of the internet has made these collections much more visible and accessible. In some Western collections, the Chinese poster holdings form part of a much broader collection, enabling a comparative study of, for example, the development of graphic design. The Swiss collector René Wanner is a representative of this group of collectors of graphic design, and there are many others.22 Many Western private collectors spent time in or close to China. After their retirement or death, they often donated their collections to (academic) institutions or libraries to allow their use as research materials. The personal archives of the missionaries who worked in China in the late 1800s–early 1900s, for example, are important sources for late Imperial and Republican posters. Haverford College (Haverford, Pennsylvania, United States) has some spectacular anti-communist and anti-Japanese posters collected and later bequeathed by Dr. William W. Cadbury and his spouse Catherine J. Cadbury, Quakers who worked as medical missionaries in Southern China in the 1900s–40s.23 The late Professor Jon Sigurdson donated his superb collection of some 1,200 posters, acquired in China in the period 1962–83, to a Swedish institute of higher learning.24 Ann Tompkins25 went to China on invitation in 1965 and lived and worked there for five years. The posters she bought and collected during her sojourn in China, now named the Ann Tompkins (Tang Fandi) and Lincoln Cushing Chinese Poster Collection, were donated to the UC Berkeley’s East Asian Library and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics.26 The British journalist and China expert John Gittings

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started collecting propaganda posters and Chinese daily necessities while stationed in Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s.27 His vision was to establish the Chinese Visual Arts Project, a collection of artifacts that made daily life in China visible and tangible for Western students. He founded the China Poster Collection at the University of Westminster, London, in 1977, with some 800 posters from the late 1950s up to the early 1980s.28 The British Museum and the British Library,29 both in London, have received or acquired significant posters over the years, as has the Library of Congress in Washington DC. In 2009, the latter discovered a hitherto unknown collection of some 6,000 items related to the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45).30 My own collection, the IISH/Stefan R. Landsberger Collection, currently numbers some 6,000 items, spanning the period 1937 to the present. Together with the Chinese poster holdings of the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, and the

Figure 11.4 Designer unknown, Defeat Japanese imperialism (Dadao Riben diguozhuyi), published by Junshi weiyuanhui zhengxunchu, c. 1937, IISH/Stefan R. Landsberger Collection, photo © International Institute of Social History.



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collection of an unnamed private collector in Amsterdam, the Landsberger Collection forms one of the most comprehensive ones in the world, totaling more than 10,000 items. Some 1,500 posters from these combined collections are accessible online, with information about the images, date of production and the designers.31 A large selection of images from these three collections is also available elsewhere online.32 These two sites aim to make as many high-quality scans of Chinese propaganda posters as possible available in the public domain. The three collections collaborate in the Chinese Posters Foundation and are still expanding. I estimate that I picked up 30–40 percent of my collection from the Xinhua bookstores in the period 1980–95. Later additions largely came from private sources. After my first book on the subject appeared in 1995,33 the circles of collectors that emerged in China in the 1990s classified me as a collector and not a dealer; this enabled me to develop relations with many Chinese collectors all of over China. Other sources from which I acquired posters ranged from Hong Kong collectors and sellers to archives of Friendship Associations in Europe, auctions, etc. Presently, my collecting activities mostly take place over the internet and by going to China, to maintain contacts and scour antique markets. My earliest posters date from 1937, a series devoted to the Anti-Japanese War which I acquired outside China (Figure 11.4). My most recent ones are posters from 2015, published for official use on the occasion of the Seventieth Anniversary of the Victory of the Chinese Anti-Japanese War and the Global War Against Fascism that was marked with a military parade in Beijing in August 2015.

Collections and Museums in China The focus of Chinese collectors often differs from that of Western collectors. A great number of the former are mainly interested in collecting Mao images. Only in recent years have Cultural Revolution posters increasingly drawn the attention of Chinese collectors. When identifying representatives of the Chinese collectors’ field, some names immediately spring to mind, because their early online presence and other activities have put their collections in the spotlight. But there are many others. Yang Peiming was one of the first Chinese collectors to start exhibiting his collection. He has become renowned among many as the proprietor of the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Center in Shanghai.34 Yang started collecting posters in 1995 when government organizations started destroying propaganda materials out of political expediency. He established a physical museum in a single room in 2002; this has gradually developed into a three-room establishment totaling 400 square meters, housing thousands of posters. In March 2012, the museum obtained an official license from the Shanghai municipal government as a private museum; being private instead of official allows Yang the necessary leeway to operate. Yang has a collection of over 6,000 Chinese propaganda posters from 1940 to 1990, with a large number of Cultural Revolution posters; he has an additional collection of hundreds of original Shanghai “calendar girl” posters from 1910 to 1940. Yang also sells high-quality posters.

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A specialized collector is Beijing-based Guo Lei. A staff member of the Olympic Affairs Committee under the Ministry of Sports, as well as secretary of the Sports Committee of the Chinese Association of Collectors and editor in chief of the journal Chinese Sports Collecting, Guo focuses on sports-related propaganda in all its forms. He also maintains a website that highlights his spectacular private collection of sports posters and paraphernalia.35 In 2012, he showcased his collection in Inspire China: New China Sports Posters (1952–2012), published with the Beijing-based Contemporary China Publishing House. Dong Zhongchao, also from Beijing, is the last private collector I want to mention. He was one of the first to move beyond selling posters (initially at the famous antique outlet Curio City, next to Panjiayuan) into related fields. His poster collection numbers some 6,000 examples, some of which appeared in his book Hong hua - Red pictores 1966–1978 (sic) (Hong Kong: Zhongguo guoji tushu chubanshe, 2011). Dong has become increasingly interested in collecting the artifacts and props that appear in the posters he has collected. These range from thermos flasks, alarm clocks, and aluminum tea mugs to travel bags and children’s toys.36 Dong has become involved in the management and organizational aspects of collecting. As one of the Vice-Secretaries of the nationally approved Association of Red Collectors under the Chinese National Association of Collectors, he plays a major role in articulating collectors’ interests and in organizing exhibition activities. The most recent one was an exhibition to mark the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army, which was held at the Urban Planning Museum in Chaoyang District, Beijing, in August 2017. The compilation of Red Collection Exhibition Halls, Museums and Private Exhibition Venues, the first comprehensive overview of Chinese collections that are on display in one form or another published in September 2017, is another milestone of the Red Collectors Association. One of the destinations where some of the posters and objects that Dong Zhongchao has collected over the years end up is the Jianchuan Museum Cluster in Anren Town, Sichuan province.37 Where Yang Peiming tries to run a museum under the watchful eyes of the Shanghai municipal government, the former property developer and real estate mogul Fan Jianchuan has so much local clout and influence that he has been able to build a complete 100,000 square meter “museum settlement.” Yet, it is still a private museum, which has to navigate both local politics and national censors. With thirty buildings planned, eighteen are in operation at present; thirteen of these display materials and provide information on the Anti-Japanese War, the Wenchuan earthquake (2008), and the Cultural Revolution. Fan’s overriding aim is to present the true history of China of the last 100 years. Of particular interest for this chapter are the five so-called Red Age (i.e., the Mao era)38 Museums, devoted to porcelains; daily necessities; Mao badges, table clocks and official seals; mirrors; and educated youths. Fan Jianchuan is one of the most important and voracious Chinese collectors at the moment. Quoting Denise Ho and Jie Li, as a boy he “began collecting things related to the Cultural Revolution—Mao badges, Red Guard armbands, and various flyers and pamphlets—eventually amassing an astounding collection of millions of ‘red artifacts.’”39 He allegedly has brought together “30 tons of handwritten materials,



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20,000 diaries, a hundred thousand propaganda posters, and millions of Mao badges”; some of them are already on display, some still await an appropriate location.40 The newly established M+ Museum for visual culture, focusing on twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, design, architecture, and moving images, fairly recently emerged as a collecting unit.41 Located in the West Kowloon Cultural District in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Zone and scheduled to open officially in 2019, M+ aims “to become the hub for Chinese propaganda posters in Asia, while presenting an alternative perspective of contextualizing them with contemporaneous materials from other disciplines such as visual art, product design, graphic design, comics, and publications.”42 In its M+ Pavilion, the first exhibition space of the complex to start operation, M+ presented some of the posters it had acquired in the “Collectivisation: China under Mao” section of Shifting Objectives: Design from the M+ Collection, a show that ran from the November 30, 2016, to February 5, 2017.43

Collecting Posters: The Market The increased demand for posters has driven up prices in the past ten years, while the number of interesting posters on offer has decreased dramatically. The posters one could pick up in the 1980s for only two mao (approx. €0.03 in May 2017 prices) now fetch up to 2,000 yuan or more (€265 based on May 2017 prices). On many urban street corners, cheap fake posters, mainly recent reprints are on offer. For those not in the know, and even for those who are, with ever improving printing and copying techniques and facilities, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish the real from the fake. With more Chinese collectors active, including major ones like Fan Jianchuan and the M+ Museum, the poster market in China is getting tighter. Chinese collectors have an advantage over non-Chinese collectors because they speak the language, know the culture, and often have extensive contacts or networks sourcing interesting materials for them. While the widespread use of the internet has made it easier for Western collectors to identify and communicate with potential Chinese poster sellers, it has also made collecting more complicated. It is difficult to establish the authenticity of posters offered on the internet, and shipping them, clearing (Chinese and Western) customs, payments, etc. can also pose problems. Many members of the Red Collectors group under the Chinese Association of Collectors are active in one or more informal internet chat groups. Using the WeChat (WeiXin) app for instant messaging, commerce, and payment services, developed by the Tencent Company and first released in 2011,44 they communicate freely, refer each other to interesting opportunities, enquire about rare editions, discuss pricing strategies, etc. Many of them are nostalgic about the past, in particular about Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. The increasingly nationalistic and patriotic tone of the communications in some groups has puzzled me. Japan and the United States, and more recently South Korea, serve as the usual targets of their vitriol and hatred. But a hostile attitude has developed

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toward foreign collectors as well. In some online exchanges, sellers express alarm about posters that they consider important ending up in the hands of foreigners; in their reasoning, such posters should remain in China as they are the property of the Chinese people. They call upon each other to refrain from selling to Westerners. It should also be noted that the market for posters exists in China only, even though Western collectors participate in it. Incidental Western auctions aside, the market for posters outside of China is very small. There is no set price for a poster and the pricing policies and strategies are opaque: one seller may sell a poster for a lower price than another; today’s price may be higher than yesterday’s; buying in quantity may get one a better price; a Chinese customer may pay a lower price than a foreign one, etc. The absence of an objective, binding pricing system makes poster appraisal extremely difficult. Despite rising prices and dwindling supplies, every time I go to China I encounter posters I did not know existed beforehand—posters that I am desperate to add to my collection. I know that other collectors have the same experience. The chance to stumble upon an unexpected find, to haggle for a better price, to scour markets— all these aspects urge me on in my quest to bring together the most comprehensive Chinese poster collection possible. Over the years, collecting Chinese posters has become easier and at the same time more complicated, but it is one of the most fulfilling activities I can imagine.

Notes 1 This chapter has benefited enormously from the decades long cooperation, discussions, and talks with Mr. Marien van der Heijden, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. 2 Parts of this collection are available on https://chineseposters.net/ and https​://ww​w.fli​ ckr.c​om/ph​otos/​chine​sepos​tersn​et/. 3 Stefan R. Landsberger, Chinese Propaganda Posters - From Revolution to Modernization (Amsterdam, Singapore/Armonk: The Pepin Press/M.E. Sharpe 1995, 1998/1996); Landsberger, “Contextualising (Propaganda) Posters,” in Visualising China, 1845–1965: Moving and Still Images in Historical Narratives, ed. Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 379–405; Landsberger, Marien van der Heijden, and Shen Kuiyi, Chinese Posters - The IISH/Landsberger Collections (München: Prestel Verlag, 2009); Landsberger, “The Deification of Mao: Religious Imagery and Practices during the Cultural Revolution and Beyond,” in China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: Master Narratives and Post-Mao Counternarratives, ed. Woei Lien Chong (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002). 4 The People’s Bookstores (Renmin Shudian) were foreign branches of the Xinhua (New China) bookstore company. 5 This section is based on Landsberger, “Confessions of a Poster Collector,” China Information Anniversary Supplement (Summer 1994): 37. 6 Landsberger, “‘Revolutionärer Kitsch’: Das Beispiel China,” in Kitsch und Nation - Zur kulturellen Modellierung eines polemischen Begriffs, eds. Kathrin Ackermann and Christopher F. Laferl (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2016), 248.



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7 For example, Gerhard Pommeranz-Liedtke, in charge of art publications and exhibitions at the state-run Academy of the Arts in Berlin (East), who visited China three times in the period 1953–8. Patrizia Jirka-Schmitz, Chinese Vintage Posters from the Collection of G. Pommeranz-Liedtke (Cologne: Lempertz Auction 981, 2011), 4. 8 Lincoln Cushing and Ann Tompkins, Chinese Posters—Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (San Francisco: Chronicle Books LLC, 2007), 24. 9 Miklós Haraszti, The Velvet Prison; Artists under State Socialism (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 129–41. 10 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), http:​//www​.marx​ists.​org/r​efere​nce/s​ubjec​t/phi​losop​hy/wo​rks/g​e/ben​jamin​.htm. 11 For Ha Qiongwen, see: https​://ch​inese​poste​rs.ne​t/art​ists/​haqio​ngwen​.php;​ for Dong Xiwen, see: https​://ch​inese​poste​rs.ne​t/art​ists/​dongx​iwen.​php. 12 Shaoguang Wang, “The Politics of Private Time: Changing Leisure Patterns in Urban China,” in Urban Spaces in Contemporary China—The Potential for Autonomy and Community in Post-Mao China, ed. Deborah S. Davis, Richard Kraus, Barry Naughton, and Elizabeth J. Perry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 155. 13 See Ellen Johnston Laing, Selling Happiness—Calendar Posters and Visual Culture in Early-Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004). 14 Landsberger, “Confessions,” 38. 15 Many sellers have a small shop on the second floor of the Modern Collection Area at Panjiayuan. The “Red” collectibles are presented here: http://www.panjiayuan.com/ hc. 16 Based on talks with representatives of the Poster Department of the National Library in Beijing in 2013 and 2015. 17 The People’s Publishing House, People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, People’s Sports Publishing House, People’s Educational Publishing House (Beijing), Shanghai People’s Publishing House and Shanghai’s People’s Fine Arts Publishing House (Shanghai). 18 Geming da pipan baotou xuanji (A Selection of Revolutionary Great Criticism Mastheads) (Hangzhou: Zhejiang renmin meishu chubanshe, 1970). 19 Jian An, “Yijiuwuling nian nianhua gongzuode jixiang tongji” (Some Statistics on New Year Print Production in 1950), Renmin meishu 2 (April 1950): 52–3. 20 Kuiyi Shen, Professor of Asian Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the University of California, San Diego, is an expert on twentieth-century Chinese art, contemporary Chinese art and mass culture. 21 Kuiyi Shen, “Propaganda Posters and Art during the Cultural Revolution,” in Art and China’s Revolution, ed. Melissa Chiu and Zheng Shengtian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 156. 22 http://www.posterpage.ch/. 23 See https​://ww​w.hav​erfor​d.edu​/east​-asia​n-lan​guage​s-and​-cult​ure/n​ews/w​orksh​op-ha​ verfo​rds-c​hines​e-pro​pagan​da-po​ster-​colle​ction​ and http:​//lib​rary.​haver​ford.​edu/f​i le-i​ d-910​. 24 http://chinaposters.org/front/front. 25 Ann Tompkins, a social worker, attended the 1965 World Peace Congress in Helsinki. She was invited to China in 1965 and worked as an English-language instructor at the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute for five years.

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26 Cushing and Tompkins, Chinese Posters. http:​//www​.docs​popul​i.org​/Chin​aPost​ers. html. 27 http://www.johngittings.com/. 28 http:​//chi​napos​ters.​westm​inste​r.ac.​uk/ze​nphot​o/pag​e/abo​ut. 29 https​://ww​w.bl.​uk/co​llect​ion-g​uides​/chin​ese-p​ropag​anda-​poste​rs. 30 https​://bl​ogs.l​oc.go​v/int​ernat​ional​-coll​ectio​ns/20​16/09​/post​ers-o​n-the​-sino​-japa​nese-​ war-o​f-193​7-45-​at-th​e-asi​an-di​visio​n-lib​rary-​of-co​ngres​s/. 31 https://chineseposters.net/. 32 https​://ww​w.fli​ckr.c​om/ph​otos/​chine​sepos​tersn​et/. 33 Landsberger, Chinese Propaganda Posters (1995). 34 The Museum site is at http:​//www​.shan​ghaip​ropag​andaa​rt.co​m/abo​ut.as​p. See also Borders of Adventure, “The Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Centre—The Director’s Cut” (http​s://w​ww.bo​rders​ofadv​entur​e.com​/shan​ghai-​propa​ganda​-post​er-ar​tcen​tre/)​; Wikipedia (http​s://e​n.wik​ipedi​a.org​/wiki​/Prop​agand​a_Pos​ter_A​rt_Ce​ntre); and TripAdvisor (http​s://w​ww.tr​ipadv​isor.​com/A​ttrac​tion_​Revie​w-g30​8272-​d1887​ 174-R​eview​s-Sha​nghai​_Prop​agand​a_Pos​ter_A​rt_Ce​ntre-​Shang​hai.h​tml).​ 35 http://www.gc1999.com. The site of the Sport Collectors Association is at http:// www.ticang.com. 36 Emily Williams, “Collecting the Red Era in Contemporary China,” Made in China 2, no. 3 (2017): 81–2. 37 The Museum site is at http://www.jc-museum.cn/en/. 38 Denise Y. Ho and Jie Li, “From Landlord Manor to Red Memorabilia: Reincarnations of a Chinese Museum Town,” Modern China 42, no. 1 (2016): 27. 39 Ho and Li, “From Landlord Manor,” 26. 40 Ibid. 41 The Museum site is at https://www.westkowloon.hk/en/mplus. 42 Personal briefing by M+ curator Pi Li and others in Beijing, May 25, 2017. 43 https​://ww​w.wes​tkowl​oon.h​k/en/​shift​ingob​jecti​ves/e​xhibi​tion-​trail​er. 44 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat.

Selected Bibliography Chiu, Melissa and Zheng Shengtian, eds. Art and China’s Revolution. Asia Society/Yale University Press, 2009. Landsberger, Stefan R., Chinese Propaganda Posters—From Revolution to Modernization. Amsterdam, Singapore/Armonk: The Pepin Press/M.E. Sharpe 1995, 1998/1996. Cushing, Lincoln and Ann Tompkins. Chinese Posters – Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. San Francisco: Chronicle Books LLC, 2007. Ho, Denise Y. and Jie Li. “From Landlord Manor to Red Memorabilia: Reincarnations of a Chinese Museum Town.” Modern China 42, no. 1 (2016): 3–37. Laing, Ellen Johnston. Selling Happiness – Calendar Posters and Visual Culture in EarlyTwentieth-Century Shanghai. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. Landsberger, Stefan R. “Contextualising (Propaganda) Posters.” In Visualising China, 1845-1965: Moving and Still Images in Historical Narratives, edited by Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh, 379–405. Leiden: Brill, 2013.



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Landsberger, Stefan R. “The Deification of Mao: Religious Imagery and Practices during the Cultural Revolution and Beyond.” In China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: Master Narratives and Post-Mao Counternarratives, edited by Woei Lien Chong, 139–84. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002. Landsberger, Stefan R., Marien van der Heijden, and Shen Kuiyi. Chinese Posters - The IISH/Landsberger Collections. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2009. Williams, Emily. “Collecting the Red Era in Contemporary China.” Made in China 2, no. 3 (2017): 78–83.

12

The Cuba Poster Project: Collecting for People, not Profit Lincoln Cushing

Why collect posters? For most, it is a passion. It starts out innocently enough— someone gives us a poster they found in a garage, or we see something at a gallery that captures our fancy. Then we get another one. They are pretty, they are relatively affordable, they take us to another time and place. Before we know it, we are hooked. But with this newfound calling comes responsibility. This chapter uses my collection of post-revolutionary Cuban posters as a springboard to explore the relationship between personal poster collecting, the commercial poster market, and the role of posters as documents belonging in the public sphere. It is a springboard to examine reasons for collecting, the role of digital technologies in gathering and sharing images and metadata, and observations on the role of such “ephemeral” objects in the long arc of art history. First, the scope of the medium: I distinguish posters from prints. The former are deliberately produced in larger editions and posted in public, while the latter are limited editions intended for more controlled viewing and purchase. Of course, there is some gray area and overlap, but the works I am addressing were usually printed either to promote a product or service, or to provoke public discourse. They may be art, but they were not made purely to hang in a gallery or someone’s home. In that sense, they are related to other public visual art forms such as murals and monuments. All posters share the archival definition of an “ephemeral” medium: they are readily damaged by handling, storage, and display. It would be a sobering exercise to see the number of posters produced compared to the numbers available now. Second, the subject. Posters range from purely commercial to earnest official public messages (“recycle your glass!”) to exhortations for rebellion and utopia. As a child of the 1960s, I was drawn to the latter category. I remember seeing my first screenprint against the Vietnam War by Sister Mary Corita in a gallery in Washington, DC. I said, “I want to do that!” so I did. First, I made screenprints, and later I worked for a community-based offset print shop and designed for that medium. I also began to gather some of the political and countercultural posters I found or bought at “head shops.” I still have one I bought in high school, a giant caricature of a bad-boy motorcycle-riding President Lyndon Johnson. Over the years as I continued to produce



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posters, I slowly added to my personal collection items given or traded by other artists. My current archive of physical materials numbers about 3,000 posters, about a third of those from Latin America and almost all made between 1965 and the present. But until 1989 I never really considered myself a collector, and that changed when I went to Cuba. I was born there to North American parents before the revolution, and those curious roots would prove to be very deep.

The Cuba Poster Project I first returned to Cuba in 1989 as part of an artists’ delegation to the Third Havana Biennial Art Exhibition—a fantastic display of media from all over the world. As a printmaker I was excited to learn more about Cuba’s rich poster community. With two colleagues, Carol Wells (director of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles) and David Kunzle (professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles), I visited many of the studios and print shops that fueled the Cuban poster revolution. When I inquired about the history of their own bodies of work, the vague answers given by the producers shifted me from a path of making art to one of documenting it. Inspired by this experience, a few years later Dan Walsh and I formed the Cuba Poster Project. It was a highly unusual effort to explore the poster collections in Cuba and, through reproduction of commercial products, support the further documentation and preservation of those works. In 1986 Walsh sued the US Treasury Department, arguing that the US government’s embargo illegally restricted the exchange of trade in “First Amendment” materials (such as books and posters, which were legal to import) by restricting travel. The successful outcome of that lawsuit provided for a “specific license” from the US Office of Foreign Assets Control allowing the two of us to travel to Cuba. Our first trip was in December 1994, where we met with Cuban publishers and artists and came back with initial contracts. We reviewed many repositories, and after looking at over 800 slides, we selected a sampling of 180 slides and 100 posters. To support the project, we produced a beautiful set of T-shirts that were sold through a national mail-order company. As the project evolved, I learned two things—one, that the commercial products created unrealistic profitability expectations from our Cuban partners, and two, that I really was more interested in the scholarly side of the project than the business side. I returned to Cuba and began to seriously research postrevolutionary Cuban posters by visiting studios and print shops, talking to artists, and digging through more archives in Cuba (including the national library, the Biblioteca Nacional José Martí) as well as in the United States. The result was the first catalog raisonné ever produced of the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL)’s work.1 I shared the catalogued slide set with OSPAAAL, which they used to publish their first book of posters (Figure 12.1). Others have also been lured by the challenge of collecting and cataloguing Cuban posters. Lisbet Tellefsen, one of my primary colleagues in the small world of political

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Figure 12.1  Heriberto Echeverria, March 8—International Women’s Day, for Editora Politica, Cuba, 1972, photo by Lincoln Cushing from Docs Populi Archive. poster archives, fell in love with images of Che Guevara. She describes how her collecting started: I began collecting posters (among other things) as a kid—decorating my walls with centerfolds of Michael Jackson and other pop culture icons. As I grew older it turned to political posters of the day: South Africa, Black Women/Lesbian-related, Angela Davis and the Black Panthers. In 1985 I was part of a group of musicians that traveled to Cuba through the Center for Cuban Studies in New York. While there I stumbled across a trove of OSPAAAL posters featuring Che Guevara. The paper was damaged and it felt like these posters were in danger of disappearing so I expanded my poster collection



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to include those from Cuba. Later, my options grew as a small trading community expanded greatly with the debut of eBay in 1995.2

The path to creating the OSPAAAL catalog taught me several lessons that inform my present practice; the first was that it was very difficult to shoot good images of posters—a step I believe to be crucial in building a solid research collection. In the early 1990s I partnered with another colleague, Michel Rossman. He had been a fixture of Berkeley’s Free Speech movement in the 1960s and one of his passions was collecting political posters. For him, that started in the 1980s when he was asked to explain the social movements he had lived through, and realized that posters were invaluable props, in his words, “because they are a great way to teach history.” He built a rudimentary vacuum board system for photographing posters, which held them gently and flat. We shot Kodachrome 25 slides, at the time the archival standard for color fidelity, resolution, and permanence. We photographed the posters I had brought back, some of Michael’s, as well as some we borrowed from other collectors. Our goal was collecting the images rather than the actual posters. This was at the dawn of the digital age, and I used an image catalog using Kodak Shoebox. A local film-processing vendor offered a relatively cheap bulk process for digitizing slides onto a “Kodak Digital Science Photo CD,” and we were off to the races. It was simple but effective, allowing me to add basic metadata about artist, size, medium, etc. to a clear image on a computer screen. Once we had good digital images and data, we could share the images with others and begin to understand the scope of the field. Contact sheets from the digital catalog were faxed to the Cuban agencies for review and, with their help, the data became more authoritative. Most posters produced in Cuba were made under the auspices of three agencies: Editora Politica (EP), OSPAAAL, and ICAIC (the Cuban Film Institute). EP is the official publishing department of the Cuban Communist Party and is responsible for a wide range of (mostly) domestic public information propaganda in the form of books, brochures, billboards, and posters. In addition, many other agencies utilized the resources and distribution powers of EP for their own work, including the FMC (Federation of Cuban Women), the CNT (National Confederation of Workers), and OCLAE (Latin American Students Association). OSPAAAL is officially a nongovernmental organization recognized by the United Nations, based in Havana and run by a board of representatives from all over the world. It is the primary producer of international solidarity posters in Cuba. Its many activities include the publication of Tricontinental magazine since 1967. At its peak, its circulation was 30,000 copies, produced in four different languages and mailed to eighty-seven countries. Stuffed into the magazines were folded-up solidarity posters, thus establishing the most effective international poster distribution system in the world. (This explains the faint creases in many OSPAAAL posters—they are the result of deliberate dissemination.) ICAIC produces posters for all films made in Cuba, and for many years also created publicity posters for foreign films shown in Cuba. These posters were all identically sized to fit in special kiosks throughout Havana. Cuban posters from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s have become recognized

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internationally as exceptional examples of artistic and political design, and are sought by collectors and museums alike.

The Commercialization of Political Posters In meeting these artists and producing agencies I encountered a common story, which to me first revealed the tension between artists and the disposition of their work. The creators had happily worked for state agencies on a meager salary for years. Yet all had personal examples of seeing posters they had designed—and were printed as public service messages—being sold on the international art market for sums that were comparatively huge. They would inevitably drag out a sales catalog or a magazine clipping, point to one of their posters at auction, and ask me if that was fair. Many of them had traveled to other countries and understood that, under capitalism, people were free to buy and sell whatever they pleased. What they were asking was a more profound “Is it fair?” and I did not have an answer. They were bemoaning a huge divide in the poster making world, items produced for sale and items made for public display. The first includes almost anything made for direct sale or a poster promoting a commercial product. It is expected that such items would be bought and sold, and that is the bread and butter of the poster market outside of fine-art reproductions. The second is the world I deal with—posters about such issues as race relations, climate change, or imperialism. There have been periods in history when large numbers of such posters were created. Sometimes they were the fruit of public agencies, such as the Federal Arts Project in the US (1935–43) or Editora Politica in Cuba. More often they are made by an untold thousands of individual artists and community-based organizations. Almost everywhere in the world there have been local struggles that resulted in “oppositional” or utopian media. Most of these are to the left end of the spectrum, but many are not, for example, funky flyers about the joining the Ku Klux Klan, or beautiful broadsheets declaring the joys of Italian fascism. From a legal and mercantile stance, all these posters are the same, but when free works intended to sway public opinion are commodified in a collector’s market it can be jarring for the artists who made them. The relationship among scholars, collectors, exhibiting institutions, and the art market is also problematic. Those of us who research posters and write about them— usually involving items not held personally—contribute substantially to knowledge about the specific works, including, for example, the role that a poster played in a movement, how the artist struggled with the image, or how hard the printer had to work. All add intellectual value to the poster, and when a museum displays that poster, selected by an informed curator, that also elevates its visibility, especially if it is published in a museum catalog. Yet these free scholarly and curatorial acts also raise the interest in, and market value of posters in the art market. This relationship overwhelmingly benefits the art market, and rarely “trickles down” to help support artists and archivists.



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Let us consider some examples. The first is from a major international bookseller, Maggs Brothers. Their 2013 online catalog #1,463 offered a Cieciorka poster for sale. Note that I was the source of academic legitimacy, having been the archivist responsible for bringing in the collection, curating a 2012 exhibition, and writing the museum catalog information: Item 86 CIECIORKA (Frank). [Hand]. Original poster. 88.9 x 58.42 cm., central motif in black and reverse white on a field of red in a white border, silkscreen, signed in the stone. N.p. [The Bay Area?], n.p., n.d., 1966. £10.000. A beautiful, crisp, clean copy, a creased tear on the upper right edge, light browning on margins. A copy in the Oakland County Museum of Art (OCMA) as part of the AOUON deposit, this copy a duplicate from the same collection. Very rare in both commerce and institutions—we can find no copies on OCLC or in IISH. A countercultural “white raven.”

I was stunned by the steep price listed, and unhappy that they misattributed the institution (it is the Oakland Museum of California). A second example came from National Book Auctions, found online July 2017: 2pc Black Panthers VINTAGE PROTEST POSTERS c1969 Huey Newton Seize the Time Social Activism Computer Paper Fortran; Sold for $66. These posters come from the estate of writer, activist, and collector Michael Rossman (1939-2008). Mr. Rossman was a key figure in the Berkeley Free Speech movement. In 1977 he began the “All of Us or None” archival project to document modern American progressivism through its posters. His collection eventually grew to approximately 24,500 pieces; following his death, his family donated it to the Oakland Museum of California, which created the exhibition documented in Lincoln Cushing’s book All of Us or None, published in Berkeley by Heyday in 2012.3

This listing gave the credits correctly, and the posters are reasonably priced, but it serves as another example of the role that scholarly legitimacy plays in highlighting an item for sale. A third example came from Swann Galleries based in New York City (Figure 12.2). It is from a 2011 auction of nineteen screenprinted posters, including duplicates, from a 1970 Boston student workshop. In highlighting the importance of the prints, the catalog pointed out: “At least one exhibition has been held documenting similar posters from Berkeley during the same period (see Up Against the Wall exhibition at the Berkeley Historical Society, 2009).” I curated that exhibition. The lot sold for $2,160. Bear in mind that, at the time they were made, these posters were freely distributed as agitational propaganda. In some instances, they were sold to raise funds for activist groups, but they were never meant to be commercial products. Not only objects, but also images of them have become commodities. A final example comes from the stock photography powerhouse Getty Images, advertised online in February 2016: “Viva Cuba : Territorio Libre de América” dated 1959 in

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Figure 12.2  Swann Galleries and Getty Images websites showing examples of political poster and image sales, Swann Gallery auction held August 3, 2011, Getty Images captured February 9, 2016. their catalog.4 Getty asked $575 for use of the high-resolution digital image. There are factual errors in this vendor’s offer: the poster was made in 1968 rather than 1959, and is not Cuban, but was produced by the Young Socialist Alliance (US). But more fundamentally, Getty Images is charging for something they do not own or control. I found the same image for free in the Library of Congress’s online catalog; it has several defects that also appear in the listing credited to “MPI/Getty Images” raising questions about exactly where this image first came from.5 Moreover, scholars who wish to reproduce that image can do so using the Library of Congress image with no charge.

Sampling or Plagiarism? Appropriation of political posters by practicing artists is a particularly complicated issue in the field today, as can be seen in the prolific career of contemporary artist Shepard Fairey, which raises questions about the boundaries between legitimate appropriation and plagiarism. In 2007 I confronted Mr. Fairey after seeing a T-shirt on his graffiti blog site bombingscience.com that was directly derived from a 1972 screenprint by a Cuban artist. The image featured revolutionaries Camilo Cienfuegos and Che Guevara on horseback in a lush tropical jungle. The first known reproduction of it was in my 2003 book on Cuban posters. I promptly took a screenshot and emailed the vendor. The T-shirt vendor was based in Canada, which still maintains diplomatic relations with Cuba and is sensitive to adverse publicity. With the aim of defending the artists’ rights, I wrote: Please be advised that the “Cuban Rider” t-shirt you have listed for sale is a direct copy of a poster by Cuban artist Rene Mederos, and is an unauthorized violation of his work. I work closely with the Mederos estate and have represented them



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in several arrangements for use of his work. Given that your item is violating the intellectual property rights of another artist, you can do one of two things—either negotiate with Rene Mederos’ estate for a fair royalty (assuming they will grant it) or you can immediately stop production of this item and remove advertising from the public.6

I promptly got a reply from Fairey’s partner in the OBEY GIANT clothing brand, who agreed that the use violated the creative work of Mederos. The shirt was pulled from production and a check sent to Mederos’ estate.7 As a historian, I am troubled when artists deliberately strip away authorship or fail to do rudimentary research to give creative credit. Some images are so well known that they require no context. For example, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” was adapted in Rafael Enríquez’s stunning 1977 OSPAAAL poster, where the figure is chained and the caption reads “Capitalism: Denial of Human Rights.” More recently, the Second World War “We Can Do It!” poster (often misidentified as “Rosie the Riveter”), featuring a blue shirted woman Home Front worker with a red polka dot bandanna, has become the most appropriated image of that war. It even graced the cover of the New Yorker, with a woman of color wearing a pink cat cap for the January 2017 Million Woman March. Interestingly, the original poster was an in-house campaign by Westinghouse Corporation, displayed for only two weeks in the Midwest, where women were making helmet liners. It was rediscovered by second wave feminists in the 1980s and it took off like wildfire. Image abuse can appear in many forms. In 2012, for example, I was shocked to encounter a website featuring scores of posters I had photographed and published in books as high-resolution images without crediting me, or any other source. The site was hosted by Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. After researching the extent of the damage, I concluded the site was using seventy-three poster images from my book Revolucion! Cuban Poster Art (2003) and ninety poster images from Chinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (2007), a book I coauthored and for which I was solely responsible for providing all the images. Eventually the site was shut down and the faculty member was fired. International copyright discourages such behavior, and academic institutions usually avoid intellectual property conflicts. In the digital world there are almost no safeguards for images posted at high resolution. Aside from a robust, proprietary (and costly) digital watermark service like Digimarc, I had no way of proving that images were mine. Even more distressing, I learned that my photo documentation was not protected.8 Despite the years of experience and thousands of dollars I have invested in properly shooting large format documents, it is still considered mere “copy photography” in the eyes of copyright law. The only way to protect my work, and that of the original artists whose work I document, is to restrict public access to high-resolution images. A good example for such protection is the thousands of political posters I have shot that are appearing on the digital archive of the Oakland Museum of California, all presented in a way that allows a viewer to see details and fine type but not download a full image.

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Repositories: Personal, Commercial, and Public I offer the following schematic as a form of synthesis to better understand the ecosystem of political posters, which I have termed the “Life Cycle of a Cultural Artifact.” I developed it to understand the role of each step, and to see the interconnection of those steps into a sustainable flow (Figure 12.3). It includes the role of the art market as a participant equal to an archive or a museum. I suggest that, under the worst of circumstances, the art market step could be the end of the cycle; under the best circumstances, it could be a constructive part of it. The history of art is full of struggles over ownership and control. For example, in the early 1800s, England thought nothing of taking Greece’s Elgin Marbles, and in the twentieth century Nazi Germany actively destroyed or sold for profit looted art that it labeled “degenerate.” Yet political posters generally fall outside the status of fine art. Some specific genres and artists have attained iconic status, but the bulk of them do not get much respect. And the very issue of value means different things to different people. Many of the most “important” political posters are not aesthetically pleasing, but reflect a particular moment that is otherwise under-recorded in history. Because political posters were intended to provoke public discourse, I believe they have a legitimate claim to remain in the public sphere as much as possible. But this goal raises several practical challenges. All the steps I describe below involve curation and selection. A collector appreciates certain subjects. An art dealer knows what his or her clientele want. A museum has a designated scope of content. Therefore, almost all physical collections are incomplete. Likewise, all collection repositories have their advantages and disadvantages. Within the political poster community there is a range

Figure 12.3  The Life Cycle of a Cultural Object, by Lincoln Cushing.



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of opinion as to what constitutes the “best” setting. Here are five collections I have worked with that represent the spectrum:

Private Collections Example: Michael Rossman’s “All Of Us Or None” archive at his residence in Berkeley, California: Pros: Low cost to operate; staffed by a passionate and often well-informed collector; informal setting allows for close contact with artifacts; ownership of content assures control over messaging of collection. Cons: Generally poor security and environmental controls; lack of resources for conservation and cataloguing; access to see the collection based on availability of one individual; often facility not accessible to disabled; reliance on a single person limits long-term viability.

Small Community-Based Collections Example: Interference Archive, Brooklyn, New York: Pros: Moderately low cost to operate, staffed by several dedicated volunteers; political commitment to preserving subject messaging; informal setting allows for hands-on access to materials; nonprofit institutional status helps draw more attention and support for collection; focus on subject matter allows for a deep dive into content. Cons: Limited security and environmental controls; minimal resources for conservation, digitization, and cataloguing.

Large Community-Based Collections Example: Center for the Study of Political Graphics, Los Angeles, California: Pros: Well-developed operational budget for a nonprofit organization; political commitment to preserving subject messaging; posters are stored under decent environmental and security controls; paid professional staff; collection is catalogued for access, mounting exhibitions, sharing content online, and accommodating researchers; focus on subject matter allows for a uniquely informed exploration of content. Cons: Financial solvency and long-term institutional stability is always tenuous. CSPG founder and director Carol Wells adds: CSPG (and Interference) were founded as a resource for activists and as a basis for traveling exhibitions. CSPG’s collection is large, but the organization is mid-size (based on budget).  We also provide  up close contact with artifacts, user-friendly online access to collections. Currently have 3,000 searchable images online, and are regularly adding to this. Also, there is online access to 95 percent of the content of the collection through the Online Archive of California—

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including artists, subjects, place made, and keywords (without images at present, but we are working on this). CSPG also has a long track record of mounting high-profile exhibitions using posters. The most recent one is “Hollywood in Havana” which has been covered by the Smithsonian Magazine, Vanity Fair, and even by the Wall Street Journal. Los Angeles Times and AIGA will be covering it soon, plus all the local papers. CSPG gives scholars as full access to images as possible. Most problems/restrictions that arise are in response to requests for permission to reproduce things for which we do not have copyright. I assume all archives have this problem.

Book and Print Dealers Example: Bolerium Books, San Francisco, California: “Purveyors of rare and out-of-print books, posters, and ephemera on social movements” Pros: Very strong subject expertise; currently available materials are catalogued online; staff is engaged with the local political community and serves a vital function for disposition of collections; sales serve as benchmarks for financial appraisal of collections. Cons: “Collection” is really “inventory” and constantly in flux; long-term viability of a business is always precarious; sales to certain parties may remove the works from public access. Alexander Akin of Bolerium adds: “Many young people are unclear about what a bookstore is, and they actually have trouble wrapping their heads around the idea that everything here is for sale. People frequently try to ‘donate stuff for your collection,’ sometimes under the impression that they can come back and get it later. For this reason I always avoid words that could give the impression that our holdings are any sort of collection or archive. The stuff in the shop is simply the residue of the inefficiencies in our business model. Another category is real art dealers: the sort of people who commission limited, signed editions of Occupy posters and charge thousands for them. Their cons are similar to ours, though.” Antiquarian merchant Lorne Bair describes the value added by dealers: “We’re often at the front lines in discovering and making available the raw material that scholars use. Many of us in the trade come from academic backgrounds and we get a thrill out of knowing that our work is actually of use to someone ‘out there.’”9

Major Archives or Museums Examples: Oakland Museum of California, The Bancroft Library (University of California, Berkeley). The Bancroft Library is a much larger archive inside of a much bigger institution, but still has many of the same issues: Pros: Long-term institutional stability is likely; state-of-the-art conservation and storage facilities; strong relations with other institutions; user-friendly and relatively



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thoroughly catalogued online access to collections; ability (though not necessarily the commitment) to mount high-profile exhibitions using posters. Cons: Researcher access to physical posters is limited; access to digital images for scholarly use can be restrictive; institutional interest in collecting genre often dependent on a single curator; “one of many” place among other collection priorities can mean spotty subject expertise; and loans of original work subject to security and environmental restrictions that limit community venues. The major archives, museums, and universities experience more self-censorship about controversial content because of the influence of their Board of Governors, Funders, etc. Radical content in these settings is generally less likely to see public exposure and be awarded resources for cataloging and preservation. It is never overt, but many institutions are happy to accept a radical collection but, without specific support for technical services, may let the posters languish un-catalogued for years or even decades. And items for display can suffer as well. Recently, OMCA hosted a fantastic exhibition on the Black Panther Party which used posters from Rossman’s AOUON collection there as well as loans from Lisbet Tellefsen—but a 2003 exhibition on Vietnam generated so much controversy from parts of the exile community that key features were changed, including the promise to omit any image of Ho Chi Minh. Carol Wells adds: I don’t think they would have funded the “Boycott” or “Police Abuse” exhibitions that CSPG has generated. Posters are classified as “ephemeral” documents, and anyone who handles them knows how fragile they can be. At best, we cringe when we hear paper ripping or see a folded corner; at worst, we hear of whole collections lost to mildew, fire, flood, or simple carelessness (Figure 12.4). The lower a collection is on the institutional food chain, the more likely posters will be at risk. That is probably the strongest argument for collections aggregating and moving to larger settings. But the perceived compromises are legitimate. Unquestionably, the biggest risk is loss of control over access and messaging. Once a community-based collection goes into a more established institution there is the strong likelihood it will lose its political punch. There are exceptions—one example is the Joseph A. Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan, run by Julie Herrada, an archival activist who collects and manages their holdings of international social protest movements; she also curates exhibitions, and is committed to providing universal access to hidden histories. Lisbet Tellefsen highlights similar issues while reflecting on the evolution of her practices of collecting Black and LGBT posters, and her remarks offer insight into her decisions about the place of curated political content within institutions: As the founding publisher of a Black lesbian journal in the late 80’s, Ache: A Journal for Lesbians of African Descent, I amassed a substantial archive of Black LGBT material—including posters. Several posters in that collection were used in diverse exhibits at San Francisco’s GLBT History Museum. The archive of the Aché journal was acquired in 2016 by Yale University in a deal brokered by Bolerium. It was a major eye-opener when I realized that it was possible to find a good permanent

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Figure 12.4  Resist Oppression: Refuse the Draft!, 1968, from a set of posters burned in a privately held collection, photo by Lincoln Cushing from Docs Populi Archive. home for the collection where it would be well cared for, more accessible, and better utilized—while getting paid for the privilege of doing so. Every collector knows it is a very expensive endeavor to create and maintain a poster collection. Never blessed with “deep pockets,” I have been very resourceful in finding ways to keep it all going. One of my main vehicles has been the Swann Galleries institutional auctions. In general, I do not sell items from my collection unless they are duplicates, or their theme or production source places them outside my subject specialty. Yet there have been a few pieces that I have felt guilty about holding onto, since they belong in a museum rather than in my storage closet. While you cannot ever guarantee that the buyer will indeed be a museum, through the Swann auctions I have successfully moved items to both the Schomburg



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Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. I also have sold to the Smithsonian directly specific items that I wanted to ensure made it into their hands rather than into a private collection.

Proposed Best Practices Given my experiences based on the Cuba Poster Project and other archival adventures, I would like to suggest some ways for the commercial art market world to play well with the nonprofit world. As I point out above, no collection scenario is perfect. As Lisbet points out, “while all collectors have dreams for the future of their collections, rarely do they come to pass. Rarely are collections kept intact, rarely are they ever utilized to their full potential—most will never even find a permanent home.” So, here are some suggestions: For collectors:

1. If possible, get good digital images of work in your collection. The images will

2.

3.

4. 5. 6.

help to share your content with others and serve as a record for appraisal and deaccession purposes. It is also smart to embed basic metadata into the file information, so that it stays with the image. Build a simple electronic catalog. For posters, the ideal tool is called a “digital asset management” (DAM) application. There are several contenders for this that can be run on a personal computer. Linking basic metadata to the image is enormously helpful in building knowledge about your collection. A good DAM will let you find, select, and reformat images to smaller sizes for sharing. Note that once materials are sold to an institution, they usually have no further responsibility to credit you; when materials are donated, they generally do extend credit when displayed and reproduced. If you care about this, be clear about the contractual details. Consider distributing duplicates (thankfully, a common occurrence with posters) to different institutions. This increases the likelihood that they will survive and be exposed to the public. Carefully curated collections may be broken up for curatorial or commercial reasons; if your intent is that the posters remain together you should define that contractually. Negotiate the specific terms with the acquiring institution: secure a commitment, if possible, as to how, when, and how often the works will be used.

For art dealers:

1. Allow subject-expert scholars access to your inventory and let them take reference photos.

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2. Encourage sales and donations that benefit the local independent art and archival community. For larger institutions:

1. Consider erring on the side of digitizing content for access, not for conservation.

This means photographing posters at a reasonably high technical standard but not so high that the cost is prohibitive. When the AOUON collection went to OMCA, they paid me to shoot all 24,000 posters while they were at my studio before the collection was turned over. As a result, the collection could move online for public view. 2. Do not wait for a complete or perfect record before making the item available in a catalogue. With the AOUON donation to OMCA, a crew of initial staff entered basic obvious information about each item as they were physically processing each poster—size, medium, full text, and so forth. My job involved pulling up those records and correcting/amplifying them—when was it made, who made it, explaining why one should care about the ten-year community struggle for the International Hotel—all without handling an actual poster. This was a process that went a lot faster without large and fragile sheets of paper all over one’s desk. 3. Loosen up access to images for educational and research purposes. Low and moderate resolution images go a long way toward helping teachers and scholars, and many images can be safely shared under the Fair Use provision of the US Copyright Act. The thousands of AOUON images online through OMCA—neatly displayed at high resolution, but not copyable—have helped fulfill collector Michael Rossman’s vision of sharing these with the public. Many current artists refer to these posters for inspiration. Finally, honor the commons. Political posters were made to be public—let us all work together to feed the life cycle of those artifacts.

Notes 1 http:​//www​.docs​popul​i.org​/Cuba​WebCa​t/gal​lery-​01.ht​ml 2 Email interview with Lisbet Tellefsen, September 20, 2017. 3 http:​//auc​tions​.bids​quare​.com/​view-​aucti​ons/c​atalo​g/id/​1191/​lot/4​14796​/nati​onal-​ book-​aucti​ons-2​pc-bl​ack-p​anthe​rs-vi​ntage​-prot​est-p​oster​s-c19​69-hu​ey-ne​wton-​seize​ -the-​time-​socia​l-act​ivism​-comp​uter-​paper​-fort​ran 4 http:​//www​.gett​yimag​es.ca​/lice​nse/2​67340​9 5 https://www.loc.gov/item/2015648092/ 6 Email correspondence with Bombing Science, July 18, 2007. 7 Los Angeles artist Mark Vallen has meticulously documented similar examples in his 2007 essay “Obey Plagiarist Shepard Fairey.” http://www.art-for-a-change.com/Obey/.



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8 For an excellent exposition of this, see Katherine L. Kelley, “The Complications of ‘Bridgeman’ and Copyright (Mis)use,” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 30, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 38–42. 9 Email correspondence with Lorne Bair, November 28, 2018.

Selected Bibliography Cushing, Lincoln. “Adventures in Copyright Violation: The Curious Case of Utopian Constructions.” Docs Populi, 2013. http:​//www​.docs​popul​i.org​/arti​cles/​Nanya​ng.ht​ml. Cushing, Lincoln, with Timothy W. Drescher. Agitate! Educate! Organize! American Labor Posters. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 2009. Cushing, Lincoln. All Of Us or None: Social Justice Posters of the San Francisco Bay Area. Berkeley, CA: Heyday. 2012. Cushing, Lincoln (image provision) 11/26/2016. “Castro’s Revolution, Illustrated.” New York Times, obituary. https​://ww​w.nyt​imes.​com/i​ntera​ctive​/2016​/11/2​6/wor​ld/am​ericas/ fid​el-ca​stro-​cuban​-post​ers.h​tml. Cushing, Lincoln. “Cataloging as Political Practice.” The Stansbury Forum. 4/4/2015. https://stansburyforum.com/2015/04/04/cataloging-as-political-practice.​ Cushing, Lincoln. “Interview by Interference Archive about Radical Archives, Including Discussion of Evidence-based Politics and the Life Cycle of a Cultural Object,” 2016. https​://so​undcl​oud.c​om/in​terfe​rence​-arch​ive-n​yc/li​ncoln​-cush​ing-f​i nal.​ Cushing, Lincoln. “Privatizing the Commons: The Commodification of New Deal Public Art.” American Institute of Graphic Art, 2009. https://www.aiga.org/aiga/content/ inspiration/voice/privatizing-the-commons-the-commodification-of-new-deal-publicart/ Cushing, Lincoln. Revolución! Cuban Poster Art. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2003. Cushing, Lincoln. “Suggested ‘Best Practices’ for Using the Graphic Artwork of Others.” Docs Populi. 11/30/2007. http:​//www​.docs​popul​i.org​/arti​cles/​Recyc​lingA​rt.ht​ml. Hearn, Skyla S. “Excavating Our History: What Does It Mean to Be a Social Justice Archivist?” Praxis Center, Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership, Kalamazoo College. http:​//www​.kzoo​.edu/​praxi​s/soc​ial-j​ustic​e-arc​hivis​t/ Il manifesto della OSPAAAL: arte della solidarietà = El cartel de la OSPAAAL: arte de la solidaridad = OSPAAAL’s poster: art of solidarity, Italy, TRIcontinental: Havana, 1997. Krayna, Philip. “The Cuban Poster Crisis.” Communication Arts (September–October 1994): 40–49. “Principles of ‘Radical Archiving.’” (Describes the principles of New York’s Lesbian Herstory Archives). Archives and Identities, University College London in the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies. July 14, 2008. https​://ar​chive​sandi​denti​ ties.​wordp​ress.​com/2​008/0​7/14/​princ​iples​-of-r​adica​l-arc​hivin​g/. Springer, Kimberly. “Radical Archives and the New Cycles of Contention.” Viewpoint Magazine. (Online only) Issue #5, posted 10/31/2015. https​://ww​w.vie​wpoin​tmag.​ com/2​015/1​0/31/​radic​al-ar​chive​s-and​-the-​new-c​ycles​-of-c​onten​tion/​ Vallen, Mark. “Obey Plagiarist Shepard Fairey: Critique on the Occasion of Fairey’s Los Angeles Solo Exhibition.” December 2007. http://www.art-for-a-change.com/ Obey/

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Archives and collections Center for the Study of Political Graphics 3916 Sepulveda Blvd, Suite 103 Culver City, CA 90230 http://www.politicalgraphics.org/

Bolerium Books

2141 Mission Street #300 San Francisco, CA 94110 https://www.bolerium.com/

Interference Archive

314 7th St. Brooklyn, NY 11215 http://interferencearchive.org/

Joseph A. Labadie Collection

Special Collections Library, Hatcher Graduate Library, University of Michigan 913 S. University Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1190 https​://ww​w.lib​.umic​h.edu​/laba​die-c​ollec​tion

13

Collecting Pre- and Post-Revolution Iranian Movie Posters in the United States and in Iran Hamid Naficy

This chapter discusses several case studies of Iranians who collect movie posters both inside and outside of Iran, including my own collecting, in order to elucidate the complexity and diversity of these various routes to collecting movie posters. By focusing on collectors from both inside and outside of Iran, larger issues of national aspiration for form, taste, culture, and identity formation in an increasingly globalized and diasporized world will also be discussed. Collecting movie posters is often a by-product of involvement in the film industry, such as in film production, distribution, and exhibition. It can also result from involvement either in academic scholarship and publishing about cinema or in reviewing and critiquing of films for the mass media. Likewise, engagement in curating and programming of film festivals or the mere love of film, cinema, movie stars, and the poster art (cinephilia), may all drive film poster collecting. Movie poster collecting can be part and parcel of a business enterprise that buys and sells posters, books, movies, music, and other film and cinema memorabilia. Finally, film and media archives, too, engage in collecting movie posters for the purpose of preserving and safeguarding the material culture of cinema and film industry and for making these available to researchers, historians, critics, film industry people, mass media, fans, and the public.

Film Poster Collecting inside Iran: Private Collections This chapter focuses on individual, private collectors of movie posters. It should be mentioned that in Iran there are several government-run film archives, which collect and archive movie posters, including the National Film Archive of Iran, Iran Cinema Museum, Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, Iran’s Graphics Museum, and the archives of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. These are not discussed here, as it is beyond the scope and the length of this chapter. When I asked Ali Bakhtiari, an art collector and curator, how he came to collect movie posters, music record albums, movie soundtracks, and film memorabilia he

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cited a line from Ali Hatami’s film Broken-Hearted (Suteh Delan, 1977), in which a mentally handicapped, down-and-out male character states with great sarcasm that “all these possessions did not just come to me out of the blue, like delicious sliced peaches sliding down my throat; they’re here because of a lifetime of my scrounging around in the gutters.”1 There is sarcasm in Bakhtiari’s statement, too, because his is one of the largest privately held movie poster and movie-related music and graphic arts collections in Iran. Similar to other cinephiles, Bakhtiari (born in 1985) fell in love with cinema as a child, but an educational turning point for him occurred when in the 1990s the cinematheque of Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art exposed him to many masterpieces of world cinema. A series of screenings there under the rubric of “visual arts in cinema,” widened his cinephilia to encompass the allied arts. Out of this love, he purchased the nucleus of what became his collection in 2006, but like the Broken-Hearted character, he has since scrounged around far and wide to find and to acquire more rare movie posters, flyers, albums, billboards, stills, brochures, and memorabilia. He purchased some of the movie posters from dealers; others were donated by the designers themselves, such as by Farshid Mesghali, Ebrahim Haghighi, and Farah Ossouli. His collection currently consists of over 1,000 movie posters and brochures, 500 vinyl records of movie music and songs, and 100 hand-painted billboards. An example from his collection is the poster for Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cow (Gav, 1969), which Mesghali designed (Figure 13.1). The film graphically condensed the psychological story, penned by famed writer-psychiatrist Gholam Hussein Saedi, about the owner of the only milk-producing cow in a village who, traumatized by the unexplained loss of his animal, begins to psychologically identify with it to the point of embodying it, with tragic personal and social consequences. Mesghali’s vertical poster graphically and starkly presents this drama of transmogrification of man and animal: if read from top to bottom, the man is becoming a cow; if read in reverse direction, it is the cow that is transmogrifying into its owner. Bakhtiari’s cinephilia and collecting led to other public engagements involving art exhibitions, publications, and outreach. His career as a curator began in 2008 with a retrospective of Faramarz Pilaram’s works at Gallery 66 in Tehran, a career that has involved numerous exhibitions at renowned spaces worldwide, such as Saatchi Gallery in London; Shirin NY and Leila Heller galleries in New York City; and the Salsali Private Museum and Lawrie Shabibi Gallery in Dubai. In addition to these curatorial and exhibition activities, Bakhtiari established a book publishing project, ABBookness, which has published, among other works, two richly illustrated books that Bakhtiari himself compiled and edited, containing materials from his own collection. Iran: RPM, Vol. I (2012) centers on Iranian vinyl record discography, and contains a selection of vinyl covers from 1965 to 1974. His Iran: RPM Vol. II (2014) surveys the activities and productions of the various divisions of the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (affectionately called Kanoon, which means Center), including its book publishing, filmmaking, libraries, theater, and music divisions. In 2016, Bakhtiari co-curated (with Peyman Pourhosein and Yashar Samimi Mofakham) an archive-driven exhibition, “Karnameh, Visual Culture of Iranian



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Children, 1950–1980” for Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. The term “karnameh” means “report card,” and the exhibition acted like a national report card, offering a complete presentation of Kanoon’s movie posters and children’s books produced in the three referenced decades. He also curated an ambitious accompanying screening program, involving filmfarsi movies. “I wore steel shoes,” said Bakhtiari, “and went to get permission to screen the films that many of us had only heard about, but not seen.”2 Some of the films were thought lost, some in disrepair, others banned. The screening program included all the animation that Nosratollah Karimi had made for the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Art in the 1960s–70s, some “lost” movies such as Amir Naderi’s short, The Winner a.k.a. Search 1 (Jostoju Yek, 1980); Shapur Gharib’s Three Months of Holiday (Seh Mah-e Ta’tili, 1977); and many of Kanoon’s productions banned since the revolution. One felicitous outcome of this screening program was that many of the films were restored and digitized, using state-of-the-art technology (Figure 13.1). Massoud Mehrabi wrote his BA thesis on Iranian cinema, which was published three years later in 1984 as the book History of Iranian Cinema (Tarikh-e Sinema-ye Iran),

Figure 13.1  Farshid Mesghali, The Cow (Gav), directed by Dariush Mehrjui, offset lithograph, 1969, photo © Ali Bakhtiari Movie Poster Collection, Tehran, Iran.

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and became a veritable bestseller, resulting in eleven editions. His continued research and scholarship resulted in other important reference books, such as The Filmography of Iranian Documentary Films, From the Beginning to the Year 1996 (Farhang-e Filmha-ye Mostanad-e Sinema-ye Iran, Az Aqaz ta Sal-e 1375) and The Bibliography of Iranian Cinema, From the Beginning to 2000 (Ketabshenasi-ye Sinema-ye Iran, Az Aqaz ta 1379), none of which have been translated into English. He began collecting posters in 1976, but these were mostly event posters designed by Sadeq Barirani for the famed performance venue in Tehran, Rudaki Hall, and tourism posters designed by Hushang Kazemi for the Iran Tourism Organization. His movie poster collecting began a little later, after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, when he visited the famed Pars Film Studio facilities, which he found was in ruins. It was “an empire after the fall,” he said in an interview. Masses of movie posters were piled high everywhere, “500 to 600 copies of each posters were piled up ready to be taken to the incinerator. I began collecting posters right there, picking up two, three, four, and an armload of posters.” When Mahmud Kushan, son of the studio founder, Esmail, asked him, “What are you going to do with these Iranian movie posters?” He responded, “For documentation.”3 His collecting, begun so modestly, expanded and intensified due to Mehrabi’s involvement since the early 1980s in publishing Iran’s premiere Persian and English film periodicals, Mahnameh-ye Sinemai-ye Film (Film and Cinema Monthly, since 1982) and the quarterly Film International (in English, since 1993). Publishing put him in contact with the film industry people, from whom he collected more posters. And document he did, with his massive and lavishly illustrated book Sad Sal E’lan va Poster-e Film dar Iran (Hundred Years of Adverts and Film Posters in Iran), which was published in Iran in 2010, and updated five years later (and another update is in the works). Verifying the posters’ information, such as the titles of the films, the exhibitors’ names, and the location of the cinemas took much subsequent effort. Of some 2,600 posters in Mehrabi’s collection, 1,200 are movie posters, 600 of which are published in the 2010 edition of his book. Publishing more posters would have increased the size, weight, and price of the book (already it is reputed to be the most expensive book in Iran). There is a dearth of the flamboyant and dynamic filmfarsi movie posters in the book, which is due to the official Islamist ideology and attendant cultural values that restrict and censor women’s presence in public spaces, including in movies, movie posters, movie houses, and books about movie posters. Figure 13.2 is an example of an early, rare, multilingual movie poster from Mehrabi’s collection. It advertises in five languages—Persian, Russian, French, English, and Armenian—the screening of a program of actualities, the short film Terror of Anger, and the feature movie Life of Christ, in Tehran’s Grand Hotel Cinema, c. 1926. Each language, boxed in its own panel, offers something new and different to the reader, thus favoring those who are multilingual. This might be a unique example in the world—of multilingualism in movie poster design (Figure 13.2). Collecting for the purpose of documentation is a disease, which other researchers and collectors, such as Bakhtiari, Mehrabi, and myself, understand and appreciate. Mehrabi states that he collects not just movie posters but also posters about the Islamic Revolution, Iraq-Iran War, revolution’s martyrs, literacy campaign, revolutionary



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Figure 13.2  Multilingual poster in five languages, c. 1926, photo © Massoud Mehrabi Movie Poster Collection, Tehran, Iran. committees, Reconstruction Crusade, theater productions, and adding, “any poster that was sold along Revolution Avenue.”4 As he told me, he is working on another book, this one devoted to his non-cinema posters.5

Film Poster Collecting outside of Iran: Poster Collecting Tied to Film Exhibition and Distribution Exhibiting Iranian pre-revolution movies in the United States after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 reconnected the recently displaced Iranians to their homeland and its culture as well as to their memories of moviegoing in the old country. As a result, scores of theatrical features were screened in the commercial movie houses of Los Angeles and New York City in the first decade after the revolution and the resulting massive emigration. The films and their posters traveled circuitous routes from Iran onto American screens, much as the exiles themselves had done. Many were smuggled out of the country. Some arrived in the possession of producers who emigrated. Still others were obtained from distributors, particularly in the Persian Gulf states. For years, the former film producer and publisher, Ali Mortazavi, and his company, Khaneh-ye Film-e Iran (Film House of Iran, FHI), was the most active organization in exhibiting popular B-movies, called filmfarsi movies, in Los Angles. He was a well-known figure with deep connections in popular commercial cinema in Iran who, in addition to producing filmfarsi movies, had had a hand in creating

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the Tehran International Film Festival in 1973, and had published and edited two popular Persian language movie magazines in Iran, Setareh Sinema (Movie Star) and Film va Honar (Film and Art), from the 1950s to the 1970s (he died in Los Angeles in June 2004). Mortazavi’s varied experiences and involvements in film production, magazine publication, and film distribution and exhibition provided him with natural and multiple avenues into collecting movie posters. Unlike the private movie poster collectors inside Iran, his collecting was not for the purpose of archiving or research and publication but for the purpose of publicizing his exhibition of the movies. In June 1985, he gave me a list of FHI’s collection of ninety mostly filmfarsi films, consisting of stewpot comedies and melodramas (filmha-ye abgushti) and tough-guy movies (filmha-ye jaheli). In the early 1980s, he screened these mostly un-subtitled Persian language movies, once a week, in the commercial Los Angeles movie houses. He rented three cinemas in the Los Angeles area for one night a week, where he screened these movies: Four Star Cinema, near Beverly Hills; Monica Cinema, in Santa Monica; and Sherman Cinema, in the San Fernando Valley. The small poster for Masud Kimiai’s classic tough-guy movie Qaisar (1969) is one that Mortazavi created for his screening of the film in Los Angeles, using one of the film’s original posters from pre-revolutionary Iran. Like many exilic art and cultural productions, this poster is a hybrid artifact in which home and exile compete and negotiate. The top half of the poster, containing the key graphic motif of the original color poster from Iran, and showing a tough-guy fedora hat and a blood-soaked knife with the credits below, was designed by the famed filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, who had studied graphic design. The one-line banner above the Kiarostami poster as well as the lower half texts below that poster, consisting of hyperbolic descriptions of the film, and the names and locations of the movie houses screening the film, are designed to bring Iranian exiles into the commercial cinemas. The banner at the top of the poster declares, “A Film That Shook Iran,” and in a box near the bottom of the poster, we read, “Because of its extraordinariness and in order to prevent overcrowding, Qaisar, the eternal product of Iranian cinema, will be screened in two consecutive weeks.” At the very bottom, the screening venues and times are noted: Sherman Cinema (Tuesdays, March 8 and 15) and Four Star Cinema (Thursdays, March 10 and 17). Although entirely in Persian and addressing an Iranian audience, the poster, nevertheless, inscribes the hybridity and biculturalism of its displaced audience and of the exhibition sites. If the original image in the poster invokes the Iran and Iranian movies of the past, mobilizing nostalgia, the textual portion below it assuages that nostalgia by channeling it into watching homeland’s movies in exile (Figure 13.3). I attended many of Mortazavi’s screenings and interviewed him several times. Based on these, I estimate the size of the audiences for FHI screenings to range between fifty and 200 in each venue. Mortazavi was a low-key person, and he usually did not introduce the movies himself, nor did he generally invite directors or stars to appear with their movies and to interact with the spectators, although some of the movie stars, who were plentiful in Los Angeles, such as Behrouz Vossoughi, showed up at some screenings.



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Figure 13.3  Ali Mortazavi, based on original design by Abbas Kiarostami, Qaisar, directed and screenwriting by Masud Kimiai, 1969, photo © Hamid Naficy Iranian Movie Posters Collection, Northwestern University Archives. Over the years of his involvement in movie production, criticism, and exhibition in Iran and Los Angeles, Mortazavi had accumulated scores of filmfarsi movie posters from the pre-revolution era, which he posted in the display cases of the movie houses that he rented for his film series. He also regularly printed and distributed flyers containing his monthly film program, which were illustrated with movie posters of the Pahlavi era. Figure 13.3 is one such poster/flyer. These were both posted in the display cases of the movie houses and made available as flyers in Iranian bookstores and grocery stores in West Los Angeles. In all likelihood, these simple, somewhat crude flyers were designed either by Mortazavi himself or by anonymous staff in his company. He tried various schemes to attract customers to the cinemas. He offered a discount to students who attended ($5 general admission, $3 student admission), and

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he published other flyers, such as one in the early 1980s, quoted below, titled “We Are Not Strangers to You,” which addresses its Iranian spectators in a flowery and folksy language in an attempt to convince them of the benefits of Iranian movie screening in the diaspora. The poster plays on the dynamics of Iranian exiles’ split subjectivity, torn between an original home to which they cannot return and a new country that is yet to become their home. In the meantime, the flyer presents the movie houses that are screening the pre-revolution movies as a substitute home. Now that each of us has left the homeland and is saying farewell to our fine pasts, why not spend a few hours a week on this night with Iran, watch an Iranian movie, familiarize our children with our mother tongue, revive our cultural customs and rituals, and renew memories, memories that envelope many years of our lives and we can never abandon. We have spared no expense to gather fine Iranian movies so that you will not sever your contact with the past, so that you will forget that you are in exile, so that you will create a small, cozy, and friendly gathering of fellow countrymen and women, and keep the fire of Iranianness warm and alive. . . . Consider us one of yours. . . . We wish to remain Iranian and we would also like to have you share that great feeling with us.6

Within a decade, FHI ceased its commercial screenings. Mortazavi transformed his Film House into a music and video store, called Sound City, on Westwood Boulevard in Los Angeles near UCLA, an area that has variously been dubbed “Irangeles” or “Tehrangeles.” Spectators gradually dwindled for Pahlavi-era films, as the exhibitors, such as Mortazavi, ran out of new movies and as the cost of operating exceeded the box-office sales. The quality of the prints in circulation began to deteriorate, for the exhibitors in the United States did not have the negatives from which to strike new prints. At the same time, competition from the videocassette industry, chiefly by Pars Video in Los Angeles, whose printed catalog listed hundreds of Iranian films on video for purchase or rent, kept the film fans watching movies at home. Even though the quality of these videos deteriorated with use, the FHI could not compete with the ready availability and cheap prices of so many films on video. Appropriately, the publicity for these old films on video shifted from printed posters and flyers to filmed commercials that were aired on the Iranian television shows originating from Los Angeles. The owner of Pars Video, Manuchehr Bibian, started his own weekly television program in the early 1980s, Televizion-e Jam-e Jam (Bowl of Jamshid TV), on which he ran the ads for his own Pars Video films on videocassette, providing an early example of vertical integration among Iranian media outlets in the diaspora—conjoining cinema, television, and music industries (he also distributed music CDs). The era of watching the old movies from the old country in the cinemas was about over. In his flyers, Mortazavi had urged his audience to come to his theater to create “a small, cozy, and friendly gathering of fellow countrymen and women . . . to keep the fire of Iranianness warm and alive.” Many had done this for a while but now, in addition to film, Iranians wanted something else to feed the flame of national and cultural identity: the synesthesia and intimacy of watching homeland videos in their own homes among



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friends and family, while sharing Persian meals. Movie houses could not provide that synesthetic pleasure. Finally, as exile evolved into diaspora and immigration, as more Iranians returned home for visits, and as new generations were born and bred abroad, the sights and sounds of the home of decades earlier lost their hold. For the spectators, the lure of the permanent, of there and then—the former homeland—was giving way to the allure and necessity of creating a new home, here and now. Bahman Maghsoudlou was another film exhibitor of Iranian movies, who acquired a small movie poster collection. He was the first to screen Iranian movies in the United States on a regular, commercial basis but, unlike Mortazavi, he specialized in new wave films and documentaries. He began in September 1980 to screen the films he had acquired from the Iranian government at the Bombay Cinema in Manhattan, New York. His programs, which ran on Thursday evenings in that cinema, were in English and Persian and, unlike the reticent Mortazavi, an outgoing Maghsoudlou took up the task of introducing most of the films. Sometimes, he invited a director, such as Amir Naderi, and sometimes a star, such as Behrouz Vossoughi, to attend the screenings and to engage with spectators after the movie. He shrewdly placed bilingual advertisements in Iranian-American newspapers such as the Iran Times, a widely read weekly, published in Washington, DC. As he told me, the number of spectators for his screenings in Bombay Cinema ranged between ten and 600, with Nosrat Karimi’s Carriage Driver (Doroshgehchi, 1971) and Shaollah Nazerian’s An Isfahani in New York (Yek Esfahi dar Nuyork, 1972) proving to be the most popular, drawing more than a thousand spectators.7 In the course of his involvement in exhibiting Iranian movies and distributing their videos through his company, International Film and Video Center, he acquired some 200 movie posters, some of which he displayed in the movie houses which screened his films or used for the cover art of the videocassettes of the films, which he sold and rented in his store. Unlike Mortazavi, who concentrated primarily on exhibiting movies in the Los Angeles area, Maghsoudlou soon established a tour of twenty-one cities for the screening of his movies, eighteen of which were in the United States and three in Canada. The tour stops show the geographical dispersion and concentration of Iranians in North America as well as the role of films in sustaining an imagined, if not national, at least, cultural identity for the displaced population. These new wave films and documentaries about Iranian arts and crafts also helped to counter the negative American media-work about Iran and Iranians in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution and the taking of American diplomats as hostages by Iran. This was part of the many reversals that occurred in exile, including in the exiles’ semiotic system: when signs cross-cultural borders, they often shift or reverse meanings. The filmfarsi movies were not very popular in 1970s Iran with the educated Westernized population, but they gained interest in the diaspora with the same demography now residing in the United States. In this new place and time, filmfarsi movies were no longer viewed by this population with disdain, as cheap products of crafty businessmen making a fast buck. Rather, they became cherished souvenirs of an inaccessible homeland—an irretrievable childhood, a former lifestyle of prosperity, and a centered sense of self. The former derided films had become dear. That these movies continued to be rented

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and purchased long after their exhibition in the movie houses, often on poor-quality videos, further underscores these points.8

Poster Collecting Tied to Film Scholarship I began interviewing film exhibitors, filmmakers, television producers, and movie poster collectors as well as attending Iranian film screenings in Los Angeles as part of my dissertation research on the Iranian popular culture and television in the late 1980s, which was published as a book, The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles (1993). My contacts with these figures continued and expanded in the next three decades, as I refocused my research on the Iranian cinema at home and abroad, which resulted in two major works. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (2001) theorized the emergence of a new “accented cinema,” created by the recent exilic, diasporic, émigré, and refugee filmmakers from around the world, including Iranians, while my four-volume book A Social History of Iranian Cinema (2011–12) offered a theoretical and critical history of the Iranian cinema since its inception. My own collecting of Iranian movie posters began as an aid to, and an offshoot of, these scholarly research projects and publications. It did not involve the commercial and market sides of poster collecting. During these years, I attended not only the many screenings of the commercial exhibitors in Los Angles, but also those of the Iranian student groups in Southern California universities, and those of Iranian political organizations (both pro and against the Islamic Republic regime), and I obtained their film flyers and posters, which were either published in newspapers, posted in cinemas or in other public spaces, such as in university campuses, or handed out to passersby and audiences in the streets. I used much of this ephemera, which amount to a visual culture archive of Iranian diaspora, as illustrations in my A Social History of Iranian Cinema volumes. A major windfall for me occurred when, in the late 1980s, Ali Mortazavi gave me most of the scores of posters of the filmfarsi movies that he had collected over the years and displayed in the movie houses that served as venues for his Iranian movie screenings in Los Angeles. Many of these posters were in great condition, although some had minor tears because of use or abuse, such as being tacked or taped multiple times to display cases. Some of the posters bore the stamps of approval from the Persian Gulf countries, as they had been circulated in tandem with the screening of the films in the region. The most interesting of these were two posters of stewpot movies, made before the Islamic Revolution in Iran, which had been censored outside Iran after the revolution, with the marks of censorship clearly visible on the posters. One was the poster for Kamran Qadakchian’s film Bandari (1973), the other for Iraj Qaderi’s film Veil-less (Bihejab, 1973). Designed and produced at a time that the display of female sexuality and nudity was a de-rigueur part of the poetics and politics of both the movies and their posters, these two posters had become outdated and outlawed in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, which had ushered in political Islam as a new social force to the Middle East and North African region.



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Figure 13.4 shows the crude attempt at censoring the poster for Bandari. Originally designed by an artist who used only one name, Khorraminejad, it features some of the aesthetics of the stewpot movies, such as female display of sexuality and nudity and male-on-male violence. In the original poster, the woman wears a very short mini-skirt, resulting in bare legs above a pair of high stem boots. The censors applied a black Magic Marker to lengthen the skirt sufficiently to suit the new, emerging ethos of Islamism in the region. The poster carries two seals stamped by Abu Dhabi and by Qatar’s Office of Mass Media and Publication, indicating their approval of the screening of this film and of its posters in their countries. In the Veil-less poster, likewise, the censors drew with the Magic Marker a brassiere cup on the image of the female character who was showing too much skin.

Figure 13.4  Khorraminejad, Bandari, directed by Kamran Qadakchian, 1973, offset lithograph, photo © Hamid Naficy Iranian Movie Posters Collection, Northwestern University Archives.

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This sort of detailed and obsessive censorship of women’s bodies was part of the larger post-revolutionary politics and practices of gender segregation and gender regulation in Iran, which curbed the display of women’s bodies, hair, gaze, comportment, and relationships, from public spaces and the arts, including from the movies and movie houses. In fact, in the early post-revolution days, the Magic Marker was applied as a micromanaging tool of censorship, not just to the prerevolution posters but also to the pre-revolution movies themselves, in order to paint over the naked legs and exposed body parts of women in each successive film frame. Both Bandari and Veil-less posters show signs of wear and tear around the edges, indicating not only the age of the posters (over fifteen years by the time I received them), but also their popularity with the exhibitors and, perhaps, the exhibitors’ carelessness (Figure 13.4). The next phase in my poster collecting came as a result of my involvement in curating and launching of what turned out to be two long-lasting annual festivals of Iranian films in the United States. I worked with Geoff Gilmore, then film programmer for the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s public screening program (later, director of Sundance Film Festival and Tribeca Film Festival), to inaugurate in 1990 “A Decade of Iranian Cinema, 1980–1990.” This became one of the first and longest-running annual festivals of Iranian cinema in the United States and still continues. A few years later, in Houston, I worked with Marian Luntz, film curator of Museum of Fine Art, and Charles Dove, director of Rice Cinema at Rice University, to curate and organize a festival of Iranian cinema. Starting in 1992, this festival, too, became an annual event that continues to this day. Programming and curating these festivals, as well as other film events at universities where I taught, provided me with important venues and opportunities for further research, film viewing, interviewing, promoting Iranian cinema, and finally poster collecting. For these festivals, I worked with officials of the Farabi Cinema Foundation in Iran as well as with commercial distributors, such as Sheherazad Media International, to obtain press kits, which contained information about the films, their production personnel, and cast as well as still images from production and bilingual posters. The kits also contained “screeners,” copies of the relevant films on video, which were helpful in curating film festivals that offered both outstanding and representative examples of the current Iranian film output. I spent much time viewing these screeners and taking notes. For example, in curating UCLA’s “A Decade of Iranian Cinema, 1980–1990,” I viewed over forty-four features and a dozen short films made in that decade, to select the twenty-five films that constituted our festival. The posters obtained from these sources were both posted in the display cases of the cinemas that showed the films and printed in the catalogues and film programs that accompanied these festivals. In the contentious politics of Iranian diaspora, curating, programming, and organizing film festivals that featured Iranian films from inside Iran and in the diaspora, became objects of opposition and critique, condemned by those who opposed the Islamic Republic’s regime and celebrated by those who saw in the films powerful expressions of Iranian life, culture, and even political opposition. I myself



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became target of these contentious politics, but as I wrote in the preface to my A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Looking back at the past four decades, it seems clear that making, teaching, curating, and writing about films, cinema, television, and exile gave me an understanding of and helped express my own agonized and agonistic life both at home (wherever that is) and in the world. These modernist acts of selfing—self-definition, selfexpression, and self-fashioning—partly a gift of cinema and partly of exile, helped me attenuate and counter years of spectatorial passivity, self-othering, and hailing. They helped me come into individuality and self-representation and to become whole.9

My poster collecting was part of the dynamic process by which I was othered by the Western media and cultural forms (I was “hailed,” in Louis Althusser’s term), while simultaneously creating a stronger sense of myself by resisting (or “haggling with”) the dominant othering forces. In addition, curating and programming films served important public education and outreach functions in the multicultural and multiethnic cities in which I taught, lived, and worked. They also provided invaluable resources for the students and scholars of films and media, and they influenced my own teaching. In fall 2008, I combined programming with pedagogy in a direct way, when I served as the Inaugural Virginia Film Festival Fellow in Charlottesville. There I worked with then-festival-programmer, Richard Herskowitz (now at University of Oregon), to curate the festival’s films, and I taught a week-long one-credit master class at University of Virginia, and interviewed several international directors on the stage and moderated the post-film Q&A sessions with them. As part of curating film festivals, organizing film conferences and film seminars, and conducting my own research and publications, I invited numerous key Iranian filmmakers from both inside and outside Iran as well as many other filmmakers from around the world to my events. Among the Iranian filmmakers I invited were Jamsheed Akrami, Bahram Baizai, Rakhshan Banietemad, Pouran Derakhshandeh, Ebrahim Golestan, Abbas Kiarostami, Ahmad Kiarostami, Dariush Mehrjui, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Amir Naderi, Shirin Neshat, Hamid Rahmanian, Persheng Sadeq Vaziri, Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, Kamran Shirdel, Caveh Zahedi, and Nureddin Zarrinkelk. Hosting these filmmakers deepened my understanding and engagement with the Iranian cinema and filmmakers, directly feeding into my research and publications. Occasionally, it also led to acquisition of more film posters. The press kits that distributors sent also contributed to my poster collection, and I used some of them as illustrations in my publications. In addition, I organized two exhibitions of Iranian movie posters, which I curated from my own growing collection. The first was simply called “Posters of Iranian Films Before and After the Revolution.” I co-curated this exhibition displayed during the Iranian Film Festival in Houston, which was celebrating its eleventh annual iteration in 2004. Charles Dove, Rice Cinema film programmer, and Nahal Naficy, an anthropology PhD student of mine at Rice, were co-curators of this month-long festival. Held in the

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lobby of Rice University Media Center, “Posters of Iranian Films Before and After the Revolution” was, as far as I know, the first exhibition in the United States of dozens of exciting movie posters from before and after the revolution. The opening-night reception of the “11th Iranian Film Festival,” on January 23, 2004, took place in the Media Center lobby, where the capacity audience milled around, commented upon, and discussed the colorful movie posters that adorned the high walls of the lobby and the adjoining photography gallery. The second day of the festival began with a roundtable on “Iranian Cinema and the Politics of Cultural Exchange with the United States,” in which three Iranian-American filmmakers participated: Jamsheed Akrami, Persheng Sadegh-Vaziri, and Caveh Zahedi. Both the poster exhibition opening and the roundtable discussion were followed by new, controversial films from Iran. Each of these events offered something unique about the poetics and politics of the Iranian movie poster design and movie production. At the same time, by resonating with, and against, each other, these three components offered something generalizable about Iranian posters and films and about their national and transnational production and reception. The second Iranian movie poster exhibition that I spearheaded was more elaborate, and occurred more than a decade later at Northwestern University in Evanston and involved several important new developments. Chief among these were that, in 2015, I donated my entire movie poster collection, numbering nearly 300 posters of pre- and post-revolution posters to Northwestern University Archive, where they formed the “Hamid Naficy Iranian Movie Poster Collection.” The university library and specialized archive staff carefully examined and, wherever necessary, restored the damaged posters, after which all of them were scanned into high-resolution digital images and placed on a website available for study by scholars.10 Two of my PhD students, Azadeh Safaeian and Simran Bhalla were hired by the library to aid with tracking down the posters’ metadata to facilitate the cataloguing of the posters. In the meantime, I began a tripartite project for the late fall of 2016. Embraced by Northwestern’s Block Museum of Art director, Lisa Corrin, and her professional staff, and funded by numerous units, programs, departments, and institutes within the university, I spearheaded an exhibition of the Iranian movie posters for the museum, a film series, and a film symposium on the art of filmmaking and poster production in Iran covering the pre- and post-revolution periods. Including film posters from the 1960s to the present, the poster exhibition “Salaam Cinema! 50 Years of Iranian Movie Posters” offered a range of posters that documented the social history of cinema in Iran and over a half a century of dramatic political change. The posters also documented an overarching theme of the three events: the love of cinema and movies—cinephilia. In the winter of 2016, in preparation for the exhibition, I incorporated in an organic manner the research and curatorial phases of the exhibition into my teaching an undergraduate course, “National Cinemas: Iranian Cinema.” Students were divided into six groups, assigned to one of the main film genres and movements of Iranian cinema and given access to the digitized posters in the collection, as well as to the archive’s staff and facilities as they conducted additional historical and bibliographic research. Their final, felicitous products were six papers on



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the history and art of poster design and production accompanied by six PowerPoint presentations containing selected key posters to a class of enthusiastic participants. Based on the student findings, and working with Michelle Puetz, then curator of film programs at Block Museum of Art, as well as with other professional museum staff, and my graduate students Azadeh and Simran as assistant curators, we put together the poster exhibition, showcasing over fifty rare pre- and post-revolution posters for popular and art house movies. Organized into five categories, representing significant film genres, styles, movements, and auteur directors, the exhibition went on view in the museum’s Alsdorf Gallery: ●● ●● ●● ●● ●●

Tough Guy and Stewpot Filmfarsi genres (pre-revolution) New Wave Authorial Cinema (pre-revolution) Art House Authorial Cinema (post-revolution) War Movies (post-revolution) Women’s Authorial Cinema (post-revolution)

The exhibition included the art of the following poster designers: Morteza Momayyez (1946–2008), Mohammad Ali Heddat (b. 1948), Reza Abedini (b. 1967), Ebrahim Haghighi (b. 1949), Farhad Farsi (1950–2011), and Siamak Valipour (1945–96). The second part of this tripartite event was a film series, “Iranian Cinephilia: from Filmfarsi to Art House Cinema,” which ran from October 6 through Friday, November 18, 2016, as a part of the “Block Cinema” screening program.11. The series was pitched as one of the unique ways that love for cinema exhibits itself in the style and narrative of Iranian movies. This is evident particularly in the self-reflexivity—the ways in which the films frequently incorporate the apparatus and process of filmmaking, genre conventions, film spectatorship, and cinephilia into the film’s narrative—ways that are specific, even unique, to Iran. The film series featured ten discrete programs of art house films from pre- and postrevolution. Many of the films highlighted the cinephilic culture and cinema inside Iran. Five important filmmakers, based in Iran and the United States—Rakhshan Banietemad, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Nureddin Zarrinkelk, Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, and Ahmad Kiarostami—were invited to present their films in person and to engage with Northwestern University students, faculty, visiting scholars, and the community at large. With the aid of Abbas Kiarostami’s son, Ahmad, a tribute was offered to the memory and legacy of the great film author, Abbas, who made “camera pen” films, which were at once both deeply personal and eloquently universal. The third event, a symposium called “Lucid Figurations: Iranian Movie Poster and Film Art,” took place at the Block Museum of Art on November 17 and 18.12 It comprised of two panels of scholars and filmmakers from Iran, Australia, Israel, and the United States. One panel, featuring Ruth E. Iskin, Shiva Balaghi, and Rambod Vala, focused on the art of movie poster design and graphic arts in Iran and elsewhere; the second panel, on the art and industry of Iranian films, featured Kaveh Askari, Michelle Langford, Negar Mottahedeh, and Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa.

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These tripartite events at Northwestern University were the culmination of my own decades’ long effort at collecting movie posters as an integral component of my academic research and publication, as well as of curating and programming film festivals and film conferences. All of them were instrumental in my own identity formation.

Notes 1 Hamid Naficy. Email correspondence with Ali Bakhtiari, Tehran, Iran (September 10–14, 2017). 2 Ibid. 3 Sahar Rokninejad. “Ba Massoud Mehrabi beh Bahaneh Enteshar-e Akharin va Motafavettarin Asarash,” Mahnameh Eqtesad va Zendegi no. 88, Noruz 1391 issue, 1391 (2012). http:​//www​.mass​oudme​hrabi​.com/​weblo​g/?id​=6118​78368​. 4 Sophia Nasrollahi. “Goftogu ba Massoud Mehrabi,” Tehran-e Emruz, no. 773 new series (9 Azar), 1390 (2011). http:​//www​.mass​oudme​hrabi​.com/​weblo​g/?id​=-102​ 37502​13. 5 Hamid Naficy. Email correspondence with Massoud Mehrabi, Tehran, Iran (September 10–14, 2017). 6 Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, vol. 4, The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 386. 7 Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, vol. 4, The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010, 387. 8 Ibid., 388. 9 Hamid Naficy. “Preface: How It All Began,” A Social History of Iranian Cinema, vol. 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897–1941 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), XXIX–LXIV. 10 See https​://im​ages.​libra​ry.no​rthwe​stern​.edu/​catal​og?f%​5Bins​titut​ional​_coll​ectio​n_tit​ le_fa​cet%5​D%5B%​5D=Ha​mid+N​aficy​+Iran​ian+M​ovie+​Poste​rs+Co​llect​ion. 11 See http:​//www​.bloc​kmuse​um.no​rthwe​stern​.edu/​view/​cinem​a/pas​t-cin​ema/2​016/ Irania​nCine​phili​a.htm​l. 12 See https​://ww​w.fac​ebook​.com/​event​s/117​59814​62462​945/.​

Selected Bibliography Bakhtiari, Ali. Iran: RPM Vol. I: A Collection of Persian Soundtrack Vinyl Sleeves. London: ABBookness & Magic of Persia, 2012. Bakhtiari, Ali. Iran: RPM Vol. II: Collection of Kanoon’s Vinyl Record Productions. London: ABBookness & Magic of Persia, 2014. Mehrabi, Massoud. Sad Sal E’lan va Poster-e Film dar Iran (A Hundred Years of Adverts and Film Posters in Iran). Tehran: Nazar Publishers, 1389 (2010). Naficy, Hamid. The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.



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Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Naficy, Hamid. A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897– 1941. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Naficy, Hamid. A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941–1978. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Naficy, Hamid. A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 4: The Globalizing Era Years, 1984–2010. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.

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The Challenge of Collecting Digital Posters and Graphics from the Web: A Roundtable Discussion Anisa Hawes

Introduction This roundtable is a conversation between a designer/activist, a digital conservator, a software developer, and myself, a curatorial researcher. It took place online, around a virtual table, where we “met” despite the geographical distance between us. I brought us together to discuss digital posters, and some of the challenges of collecting them in museums and archives. Among the immediate obstacles to collecting digital objects is the obvious challenge of their materiality. Digital posters are created using software tools, devised and constructed on-screen (increasingly) for dissemination online rather than on paper. For this reason, digital graphics cannot be texturally examined nor physically stabilized and conserved using traditional techniques. To handle, describe, and preserve them requires curators to adapt their skills, develop alternative vocabularies, and new understandings. Investigating graphics on the web, we realize that digital culture has done more than change the poster’s material attributes: it has fundamentally shifted its ontology. Online spaces have expanded the territory of circulation, transforming the way we encounter design, and augmenting the possibilities for interaction. Social media platforms, in particular, have influenced the evolution of the poster, popularizing appropriation, initiating new gestures of participation, and redefining etiquettes of image re-use. As such, this roundtable explores the challenges of capturing the technical and social context, in which the poster now thrives. We discuss some of the corollary issues raised through our experiences of collecting from the web, considering the digital poster’s mutability, multiplicity, and embeddedness in the online environment. We also consider the curator’s newly complex tasks of attribution, aggregation, and deciding where to stop collecting.



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The Participants Noel Douglas is one of the designer/activist members of Occupy Design1, and a senior lecturer and program leader for graphic design at the University of Bedfordshire, Luton, Bedfordshire, UK. Dragan Espenschied is preservation director at Rhizome, a nonprofit arts organization affiliated with the New Museum in New York City, United States. Rhizome provides a platform for born-digital art and culture through a program of exhibitions, commissions and symposia, while also developing free, open-source software, including Webrecorder,2 to support digital preservation. Anisa Hawes is a researcher based in the prints section of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK, where she is leading the collaborative project, Collecting and Curating Digital Posters,3 which investigates how institutional collections can adapt to the changing cultural and technical nature of poster material. Ed Summers is a software developer at the Maryland Institute for Technology and the Humanities, University of Maryland, College Park, United States, as well as the technical lead for Documenting the Now4, a civic archiving project focused on Twitter.

Roundtable AH As we consider the development of the poster within the interactive platforms of Web 2.0,5 it seems that what becomes interesting is not the individual image, but something we could think of as a “graphic event”—how a graphic is shared, commented on, and adapted by multiple users. It is a new kind of democratic creation that raises many questions for us as collectors. ND One of the key differences between the digital poster and the physical poster is that the digital one can be manipulated. It can be altered by people, and changed. A physical poster may get graffitied over, but one of the exciting things about the digital poster is its innate mutability. Posters around a particular topic are adapted—an “original” can be taken through various stages, very quickly becoming a meme. AH The Beer and Bingo posters (Figure 14.1) are a good example of how that happens. They circulated on Twitter in 2014, as parodies of an official Conservative Party poster which had been Tweeted by the then party chairman, Grant Shapps, ahead of the Coalition Government’s spring budget.6 The original poster’s message celebrated a planned reduction of alcohol duty and gambling tax, controversially claiming that these concessions would “help hardworking people do more of the things they enjoy”—a message that was broadly viewed as classist and patronizing. In digital form, the simple graphic components of the poster were easily broken apart, and the design became a template for a deluge of sardonic re-makes which used alternative wordings to rebuke and ridicule the original. As appropriations proliferated on social media,

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Figure 14.1  Various, Beer and Bingo, screenshot by author, 2017, Google Images™ search service results preserved using Webrecorder this reactive campaign gained momentum. In terms of design, no single example is particularly interesting, but in aggregate these visual responses vividly reveal how spaces like Twitter are changing the nature of graphic communication. DE One of the things I find interesting is that social media platforms used to be tools for circulation only, while the actual graphic production would happen elsewhere. Now, they have started to incorporate graphic design tools into their tool sets, so you can add emojis on Twitter, or put stickers on a Facebook post. What I think is striking about the participatory nature of these items or “graphic events” is that they indeed invite you to participate. They aesthetically signify that they have been created by someone just like you. They are a call to participate: this is something which you can take part in. AH Given this mutable and participatory kind of creation perhaps it becomes less important to focus on the originator of a digitally shared poster—and much more important for us as collectors to try to understand and capture its journey through the intermediate agents who have encountered it and modified it along the way? This goes against the traditional tendency in art and design museums to ascribe things to an individual. ND I wonder whether the authorship thing matters that much? In the sense that we’ve had appropriation for a long time, throughout twentieth-century art. I was having an argument with someone recently about the American artist Richard Prince, who is well-known for re-photographing photographs taken by others and re-presenting them as new works. Someone had put something up online about him stealing photographs on Instagram for his New Portraits exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in New York in



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2014. In an interview, Prince recalls talking to his daughter who is using Tumblr, and he says to her, “Whose image is that?” And she says, “What do you mean whose image is that?” A bit like how tribal cultures don’t have word for property—the images are not thought of in that way. DE I really like that example. Actual appropriation as mass culture is happening every day, by people who have never even heard of the concept. What was once an avantgarde tactic against power in the arts is now a power move by powerful artists—if you’re a nice artist you’re supposed to not appropriate, but if you want to stir up trouble then you do it like Prince. ND The internet has created a space, and given people the ability to make this happen with images, in a way that is immediate and almost like a call and response. It would have happened in the past, people might have appropriated an image, graffitied over it, or whatever, but you wouldn’t necessarily have been aware that that had happened. Whereas now, it’s almost like the alteration and the answering back is part of the work itself. It’s actually the thing that makes it very interesting. What intrigues me is the intelligence of it. The people who are doing it are not experts in image theory, or in Photoshop, but it’s very clever. The hacking of corporate symbols, or the image and text combinations, they are the kind of thing that, as Dragan said, would have been thought of as avant-garde art in the 70s! Now people are doing it just with the Impact font on a meme (Figure 14.2). I think that’s quite fascinating actually. AH It is as though we are all being initiated into this process of combining text and image that used to be the province of the poster designer. Sometimes it can be as simple as re-captioning an image within the body of a Tweet or through an Instagram comment. People are using the logic of photomontage—combining two images to create a new meaning—simply by juxtaposing two photographs on Facebook. DE Looking at appropriation of graphics, the context in which an image is presented might have a bigger effect on how it is perceived than any intention the creator may have had. An interesting example is the appropriation of Pepe the Frog7 by the Alt-Right movement, who took an innocent counter-culture frog cartoon, and adopted this as their own secret code, which then even became declared an official symbol of hate speech. In response, the original author of Pepe drew the frog lying in a coffin, and presented that image at a comic convention as a statement, to say: this is not my figure anymore; I have no control over my creation anymore. AH What becomes apparent is that both the way in which these posters/memes are created, and the way in which they achieve meaning is absolutely bound up with the contexts of social media. It is essential for us as curators and archivists to address that embeddedness. To understand the “graphic event,” we need to be able to explain—and capture—how a poster develops in the course of exchange, and how it unfolds across platforms. This is a new challenge to curators and institutional collecting.

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Figure 14.2  Occupy Design UK, Bombing Yeman, JPEG image, 2017, http:​//gra​phics​ .occu​pydes​ign.o​rg.uk​/3171​/bomb​ing-y​emen ND Yes, I think that the digital context and the story become much larger than they do around physical objects. As a meme, the poster becomes a body of images—or a constellation of images. And it is by knowing how that has come together that we can make sense of it. ES A big part of the context worth thinking about, for me, is the platforms, and the ways that media is being shared, created, and modified within them. The platforms and the media are bound up in each other. My particular context, because of the project that I’m working on, is Twitter. If archivists are archiving Twitter, what does that mean? So much of it is bound up in the ways that Twitter will make data available, or the ways that they don’t. Twitter has made those choices from the point of view of their own business interests, but also in conjunction with their users, and over time the platform



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has evolved. In fact, it’s always changing. The act of trying to collect stuff from social media is bound up with this notion of the platform. DE What is interesting for curators is exactly this role of the platform as a transparent actor—or something that seems transparent, but actually structures the production and circulation of all of these images. AH Somehow, the printed poster allowed us to de-contextualize it—because a piece of paper has an edge. So we could pick it up and collect it, while it still purports to be whole. Whereas if we extract an image file from an online platform, and ingest it into our catalogue system, we lose too much to be able to make sense of the thing that we have collected. It tells nothing of the environment in which it circulated, bares no marks of its making. We have a far less satisfying acquisition than we had when we took a poster off the wall—a tactile, material object that we could put into an archival box or hang in the museum. Perhaps it makes us reflect back on our historical practice, and realize that we haven’t done enough to collect context—we’ve too readily de-contextualized objects in order to keep them in institutional permanent collections. Perhaps the idea of the complete object has always been an illusion. What is different with digital collecting is that we have the possibility to collect at least some of the context and metadata in which the object is embedded in a way that we couldn’t with the physical poster—we couldn’t collect the street or the factory wall. Capturing context used to be a separate exercise in documenting something. ES It’s really interesting. The idea of capturing the complete context is impossible, but in physical archives we’re not often confronted with that realization. When we’re looking at a poster that was taken down from a wall in a factory, we don’t necessarily run up against the things that are not available anymore. But the experience of interacting with the digital object in a web archive reveals that it is incomplete because we encounter its edges as broken links—the activity of interaction makes the object’s incompleteness known. DE I think this is very interesting. We can observe how museums that see their field of activity as within the digital realm would prefer to collect apps instead of websites— because an app on a phone or on a tablet has edges. They are simulated edges, but it seems as though this thing is collectible: carry it through the museum door and then it’s yours. But this is just a simulation. An app gives curators the impression that it is something that can be owned, while technically most apps are just as complex as any website—they are in fact websites that you access through a customized browser. I think this is really a very important point to make—if something tells you “my boundaries are here,” then you will continue to act in that way, and collecting institutions will continue to structure their holdings around these visible things. Apps seem less scary because they don’t ask you to deal with all of the world at once. AH A digital poster might exist as a post on Twitter, an image on a blog, be available as a download, and a printed sheet—all at once. These multiple manifestations can be thought of as integral parts of a distributed object. The curator’s challenges are how to

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decide which parts constitute a reasonable whole—which components, contexts, and traces are key inclusions, and then collecting that group of elements together. Tools such as Webrecorder8 allow us to capture slices of the online experience. Our “object” can be expressed through an assemblage of digital elements and web recordings. But this means that the onus is on us to determine the boundaries—to decide how far we go. We can’t collect the whole web (and what would be the point in doing that?). I am reminded of a story by Jorge Luis Borges, On Exactitude in Science, in which cartographers keep adding to the detail of their map until it covers the same area as the land they are describing. ES Yes, one challenge we've had is translating the archival idea of appraisal—the process of assessing objects, the moment of deciding “these things are in and these things are out”—into Twitter and web content generally. With the web it is different: boxes don’t arrive on our doorstep, for us to decide that these are the things we’re going to keep, and these are the things we’re going to throw away. With Webrecorder, for example, we can actually just go out and get it. We can point Webrecorder at the website and start collecting. So the collection that’s being appraised is the entire thing. . . . It’s like, “Oh! the web arrived on my doorstep and I have to decide what’s in or out.” AH In this way, digital acquisitions require curators to take a more active role. Our decisions constitute a larger part in defining what the object or archive is. We participate in composing what we capture and we have to recognize that subjectivity. DE Yes, as I see it, as a curator, or an archivist, I am also part of the creation process. Using a web archiving tool such as Webrecorder, I am creating a physical representation of that “graphic event” by going around the web and picking the posters wherever I find them. Only because I create this record of my activity can this object be acquired for the collection. So, in a sense, I can say “I created it,” because I set in motion all of these complicated processes that made these images pop up on my browser and recorded them in the web archive. I think it’s fantastic if practitioners start acknowledging that an object from the web represents the perspective of the person who collected it, within the technical system through which it was accessed. That is already a huge leap. Even web archiving hasn’t understood that, I mean, the field of web archiving, it’s not there yet. The idea of a neutral point of view is technically impossible anyway. While of course before I begin archiving, I could clear all my cookies, and start a new browsing session—but that doesn’t make it more objective, in fact that would emphasize my position as an “outsider.” It is futile to think that there would be a means to generate an objective view of an event, because on the web nothing exists until you look at it. There is some data somewhere on an Amazon server, but it doesn’t exist as an image until you look at it. It’s not laid there prepared for you, but rather it is made in the moment of looking. So it has to be different for everyone.



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ES This idea that “nothing exists until you look at it” is a really nice concept. Who you are when you’re interacting on the web is defined by your past behaviors, your settings, all these things conspire to shape what you see. AH Recognizing our curatorial “subjectivity” seems very important. It seems also to raise some additional questions about how we navigate the material we are interested in—what is made visible to us or left hidden, and how does our perspective thereby become embedded in what we collect. ND In 2010, I was designing a chapter of the Verso book Springtime9 about the student movement in Britain and my idea was to tell the story visually, through Tweets. It was at a time when Twitter was fairly new, and it had been used a lot to organize the protest. I thought it could also be a nice way to tie together a story about what happened. When I came up with the concept, I didn’t realize how difficult it was going to be! The process made me realize that in order to describe certain events, I had to know which hashtags had been live during the protest. It took me hours to construct the design—I looked through thousands of Tweets, thousands of images. You’re limited as to how you can search, but because I had been there, I could remember certain things that were said, I knew the time of day that events took place. I’d even remembered certain Tweets that I wanted to make sure I found. AH A curator is, generally, more likely to be an outsider who is seeking to find the hashtag that will enable them to hone in on the material and find a path through it in order to create a snapshot. In my experiments in collecting from Twitter, I’ve tried to familiarize myself with the platforms’ advance search functions, developing an agility to find the first Tweet that I’m interested in, using several techniques for varying my filters. But maybe what we need is a handful of people to collect the same thing, so that we can capture something that better represents what took place? DE I think the acknowledgement that you have personally created this thing is the success. I don’t think there is a lack of completeness if we don’t have a certain number of perspectives on the same event, because one of the main issues that has been holding up the integration of these kinds of things into permanent collections and memory institutions is this idea that the object has to be complete. ND Or maybe it’s a case of finding people who are involved and bringing them into the collecting process. We’re living in an era of mass democratic culture, and while it is absolutely impossible to capture everything, the task is to capture the key things, or what people consider to be the key things. That is where, for me, the subjectivity comes in. I am still trying to work out the relationship between images and how successful they are as virals. What defines their virality? There is something interesting about the popularity of images. I’ve looked at Google Analytics graphs that show massive spikes in people searching or looking at a particular image, describing how one image contributed to turning public opinion at that point.10 But collecting it comes down to judgment—not all popularity is worth archiving or saving.

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ES That question of how or why things go viral informs a tool that the Documenting the Now team are building at the moment. The aim is to provide a way to see what’s trending right now, and which hashtags are significant. This is another reason why I have focused on the idea of the platform, because at the moment we’re dependent on Twitter to tell us “what’s trending,” and their algorithm for doing so is a total black box—we do not understand it at all. We found that the thing which provided unity around Black Lives Matter as a movement was the hashtag itself. The hashtag has a story: its genesis, its incubation over years, and its eruption in 2014, when Ferguson happened, causing this thing to really blow out. So, while we’re interested in images, it is the hashtags themselves which add a dimensionality to the data, and provide a gateway into it. The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag cuts across platforms too; it is also used on Instagram, Flickr, and Facebook, where it really started, as image tags.11 Virality is a significant thing, but it’s also a political thing, it’s embroiled in political maneuvers. Hashtags are being manipulated through bots, with actors of all stripes really convoluting the space. So it’s actually challenging to find a way into what’s happening on Twitter right now. And interpreting content is very difficult. The issue of perspective is really important, because you can’t escape it. As a participant, there are different degrees of participation, even when you’re in the middle of it, you’re still you. I’m involved in archiving around Ferguson and Black Lives Matter. I’m not black, I’m not African American, I am by definition an outsider. One of the things that have been really tough for me, as a software developer, is that in helping to build tools with this group, I realize I am making technical decisions that will them empower them in particular ways. There’s a lot to unpack there, in how you empower people to archive themselves. Even within the technical aspects of collecting, we need to engage with the difficulty of figuring out our position on the continuum of participation. AH What is evident from our discussion is that, while presenting new challenges, digital collecting complicates and thereby foregrounds many issues that are latent in traditional methods of museum collecting, such as the bias of voices represented within collections. Confronting digital collecting is crucial for museums to keep engaging with contemporary culture—it is not something we can ignore because it is difficult to do. At the same time, perhaps these challenges prompt us to rethink the museum more generally and not to be satisfied with established approaches and understandings. DE There is a central drive in the museum world for the monumental, for the unique, for the thing that is an object rather than an activity. I think the biggest challenge for institutions like museums, that are built around ideas of value and uniqueness, is to capture the kind of memory that is transferred not by objects, but by something like rituals. How can common knowledge be transported by other means than a representative object? It is now time to explore this field and to try different things. Museums themselves need to expand their roles. They must see where it takes them, without being discouraged if something goes wrong. For now, digital collecting



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is a speculative thing and museums need to grow into this mode of curating and collecting.

Notes Special thanks to Catherine Flood, Curator of Prints, Victoria and Albert Museum. 1 Occupy Design UK is a grassroots collective of designers and activists affiliated with the international Occupy movement. Established in 2011, during the occupation of the London Stock Exchange, they use the language of graphic design to voice resistance against capitalism, austerity, and social injustice. Members create and disseminate posters in print and online, making their designs available for download and re-use under a Creative Commons License. Their other activities include producing a monthly newspaper, The Occupied Times, facilitating community design events, school poster competitions, and printmaking workshops to educate, enable, and inspire others to use visual tools as expressions of protest. http://occupydesign. org.uk 2 Webrecorder is a free and open-source web archiving tool developed by Rhizome. It works by making interactive captures of web pages as users see them while browsing. Webrecorder is directly operated by the curator/user: this human-scale collecting makes it possible to capture the kind of complex, dynamic content found on social media sites, which eludes traditional web archiving tools because it requires direct interaction (for instance, scrolling to load a Twitter feed, or clicking to play a YouTube video). The Webrecorder initiative is primarily supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, while the Knight Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services support supplementary outreach and research. https://webrecorder.io 3 Collecting and Curating Digital Posters is a collaborative project activated by the Posters Subject Specialist Network and supported by Arts Council England. https:// ccdgp.co.uk/ 4 Documenting the Now is a social media archiving initiative. It was established by the University of Maryland in partnership with University of California at Riverside, and Washington University in St. Louis. During the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, the team observed how social media, especially Twitter, was being used by communities to document and respond to events in real time—often countering narratives reported by traditional media. Documenting the Now seeks ways to collect and preserve this digital social memory content for future scholars, archivists, and activists. Their work is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. http:// www.docnow.io 5 The term Web 2.0 became common in the mid-2000s, and describes a web which is designed to facilitate participation and user interaction. Unlike earlier websites that were read or viewed passively, Web 2.0 platforms encourage users to be active. Blogging sites, video-sharing channels and, eventually, social networks allow users to create and upload their own content, and prompts others to engage with what they see. “web, n.,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, January 2018, http:​//www​.oed.​com/ view/E​ntry/​22669​5?red​irect​edFro​m=web​+2.0.

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​“Web 2.0,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, February 16, 2018, https​://en​.wiki​ pedia​.org/​w/ind​ex.ph​p?tit​le=We​b_2.0​&oldi​d=825​96102​8. 6 A Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition governed in the UK between May 2010 and May 2015. Each spring and autumn, Her Majesty’s Treasury publishes their economic forecasts and the chancellor of the exchequer makes a statement in the House of Commons. The spring Budget of 2014 was delivered to Parliament on March 19, 2014 by the Conservative chancellor George Osborne. Grant Shapps was co-chairman of the Conservative Party at the time (appointed in September 2012, serving until May 2015). His Tweet in support of the chancellor’s announcements attracted national headlines, and a surge of response on social media. “Key points of Budget 2014: At-a-glance,” BBC News, March 19, 2014, http:​//www​ .bbc.​co.uk​/news​/uk-p​oliti​cs-26​62628​0. Grant Shapps (@grantshapps), “#budget2014 cuts bingo & beer tax helping hardworking people do more of the things they enjoy. RT to spread the word,” Twitter post, March 19, 2014, https​://tw​itter​.com/​grant​shapp​s/sta​tus/4​46363​61197​ 25342​72. Conal Urquhart, “Scorn for ‘patronising’ beer and bingo tweet from Tory chair Grant Shapps,” The Guardian, March 19, 2014, https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/uk​-news​/2014​ /mar/​19/gr​ant-s​happs​-bing​o-and​-beer​-joke​-caus​es-tw​itter​-stor​m. Owen Bennett, “‘Patronising and Downright Disrespectful’ Express Readers React to Tory Bingo and Beer Ad,” Express, March 20, 2014, http:​//www​.expr​ess.c​o.uk/​news/​ uk/46​5877/​Expre​ss-re​aders​-reac​t-to-​Grant​-Shap​ps-Bi​ngo-a​nd-Be​er-Tw​itter​-ad-p​ osted​-afte​r-the​-Budg​et. Matt Chorley, “‘Strap on Your Clogs and Grab Your Whippets’: Spoof Ads Mock Tories’ Pitch to Working Class Voters after Claiming Cheap Bingo and Beer Is What ‘They’ Enjoy,” The Mail Online, March 20, 2014, http:​//www​.dail​ymail​.co.u​k/new​s/art​ icle-​25847​00/Le​t-pla​y-bin​go-To​ries-​fire-​conde​scend​ing-a​dvert​-high​light​ing-B​udget​ -beer​-bing​o-tax​-cuts​-thin​gs-en​joy.h​tml. Marie Le Conte, “Grant Shapps’ #ToryBingo Car Crash Is All a Bit of a Nightmare for Tories on Twitter,” Metro, March 20, 2014, http:​//met​ro.co​.uk/2​014/0​3/20/​grant​ -shap​ps-to​rybin​go-ca​r-cra​sh-is​-all-​a-bit​-of-a​-nigh​tmare​-for-​torie​s-on-​twitt​er-46​ 66322​/?ito​=cbsh​are. Isabel Hardman, “Tories: There Never Was a Bingo Poster,” The Spectator, March 20, 2014, https​://bl​ogs.s​pecta​tor.c​o.uk/​2014/​03/to​ries-​there​-neve​r-was​-a-bi​ngo-p​oster​/. 7 Pepe the Frog is a comic book character created by American cartoonist Matt Furie. Pepe was originally drawn for a 2005 issue of the online zine Boy’s Club. Shared on social networking site Myspace and image-board site 4chan, Pepe evolved into a meme. Users appropriated Furie’s drawing, variously adapting the frog’s pose, catchphrase, or expression. By 2015, the memes had also begun circulating among a racist and antisemitic subgroup of users on 4chan whose re-makes transformed Pepe into a symbol of the Alt-Right movement. These depictions gained traction as the 2016 US Presidential campaign became increasingly divisive. In September 2016 the Anti-Defamation League categorized Pepe the Frog as an official Hate Symbol. Furie distanced himself from the cartoon’s distorted symbolism, first launching an online



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campaign to #SavePepe and eventually deciding to “kill” the cartoon, by drawing a comic strip which tells the story of Pepe’s funeral. “Hate Symbols Database: Pepe the Frog,” Anti-Defamation League, September 2016, https​://ww​w.adl​.org/​educa​tion/​refer​ences​/hate​-symb​ols/p​epe-t​he-fr​og?re​ferre​r=​ https%3A​//www​.goog​le.co​m/#.V​-r8LJ​MrJGM​. “Pepe the Frog Meme Branded a ‘Hate Symbol,’” BBC News, September 28, 2016, http:​//www​.bbc.​co.uk​/news​/worl​d-us-​canad​a-374​93165​. Emanuella Grinberg, “Pepe the Frog Designated a Hate Symbol by ADL,” CNN, September 28, 2016, https​://ed​ition​.cnn.​com/2​016/0​9/28/​us/pe​pe-th​e-fro​g-hat​e-sym​ bol-t​rnd/i​ndex.​html.​ Matt Miller, “Exclusive: The Creator of Pepe the Frog Is Voting for Hillary,” Esquire, September 28, 2016, https​://ww​w.esq​uire.​com/n​ews-p​oliti​cs/ne​ws/a4​9057/​pepe-​frog-​ creat​or-vo​ting-​hilla​ry/. Oren Segal, “Pepe the Frog: Yes, a Harmless Cartoon Can Become an Alt-right Mascot,” The Guardian, September 29, 2016, https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/co​mment​ isfre​e/201​6/sep​/29/p​epe-t​he-fr​og-al​t-rig​ht-ma​scot-​racis​t-ant​i-sem​itic.​ “The Truth about Pepe the Frog,” Fantagraphics, October 6, 2016, http:​//fan​tagra​ phics​.com/​flog/​truth​about​pepe/​. Matt Furie, “Pepe the Frog’s Creator: I’m Reclaiming Him. He Was Never about Hate,” Time, October 13, 2016, http:​//tim​e.com​/4530​128/p​epe-t​he-fr​og-cr​eator​-hate​ -symb​ol/. “ADL Joins With “Pepe” Creator Matt Furie in Social Media Campaign to #SavePepe,” Anti-Defamation League, October 14, 2016, https​://ww​w.adl​.org/​news/​ press​-rele​ases/​adl-j​oins-​with-​pepe-​creat​or-ma​tt-fu​rie-i​n-soc​ial-m​edia-​campa​ign-tosav​epepe​#.WAT​lUJMr​LdR. Shaun Manning, “Pepe the Frog Is Dead: Creator Kills the White SupremacistHijacked Icon,” CBR, May 6, 2017, https​://ww​w.cbr​.com/​pepe-​frog-​creat​or-ki​llswhite-​supre​macis​t-ico​n/. A. J. Willingham, “Pepe, the Sometimes-racist Internet Frog, Is Dead,” CNN, May 8, 2017, http:​//edi​tion.​cnn.c​om/20​17/05​/08/u​s/pep​e-fro​g-mem​e-dea​d-trn​d/ind​ex.ht​ml. Aja Romano, “Pepe the Frog Was Killed By His Creator: But His Alt-right Legacy Lives On,” Vox, May 9, 2017, https​://ww​w.vox​.com/​cultu​re/20​17/5/​9/155​83312​/matt​ -furi​e-kil​ls-pe​pe-fr​og-al​t-rig​ht-me​me. Matt Furie, “Pepe the Frog: To Sleep, Perchance to Meme,” The Nib, October 17, 2016, https​://th​enib.​com/p​epe-t​he-fr​og-to​-slee​p-per​chanc​e-to-​meme.​ 8 See endnote 2. 9 Noel Douglas, “We Will March,” in Springtime: The New Student Rebellions, eds. Tania Palmieri and Clare Solomon (London, New York: Verso, 2011), 49–64. 10 “Aylan Kurdi: How a single image transformed the debate on immigration,” Visual Social Media Lab at The University of Sheffield, December 14, 2015, https​://ww​w.she​ ffiel​d.ac.​uk/ne​ws/nr​/ayla​n-kur​di-so​cial-​media​-repo​rt-1.​53395​1.

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Collecting Prints, Posters, and Ephemera “The Iconic Image on Social Media: A Rapid Research Response to the Death of Aylan Kurdi,” Visual Social Media Lab at Goldsmiths, University of London, December 2015 https​://re​searc​h.gol​d.ac.​uk/14​624/1​/KURD​I%20R​EPORT​.pdf.​ Craig Silverman, “How the Photos of Alan Kurdi Changed the Conversation from ‘Migrants’ to ‘Refugees,’” December 14, 2015, https​://ww​w.buz​zfeed​.com/​craig​silve​ rman/​how-t​he-ph​otos-​of-al​an-ku​rdi-s​pread​-onli​ne?ut​m_ter​m=.ff​BAgGw​rJ#.j​xza3e​ O5V. Mac Scott, “Obama Hope Poster––Shepard Fairey (2008),” October 15, 2017, https​ ://me​dium.​com/f​gd1-t​he-ar​chive​/obam​a-hop​e-pos​ter-b​y-she​pard-​faire​y-130​7a8b6​ c7be.​

11 The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was initiated in 2014 by the African American activists Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi.

Author Biographies Kathleen Chapman is Assistant Professor of Art History at Virginia Commonwealth University. She holds a PhD in art history and a PhD in German language and literature from the University of Southern California. She specializes in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century German art and culture, combining the perspectives of both her disciplinary backgrounds in her work. She has published articles about German Expressionist art, early-twentieth-century German poster design, and the relationships between Expressionist art and art historical discourse. Liliana Chávez Díaz is a postdoctoral fellow in Latin American literature and culture at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana and a member of the National System of Researchers in Mexico. She holds a PhD in Spanish from University of Cambridge and a Master’s in Latin American studies from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Her academic work explores nonfiction, women’s writing, and popular culture in contemporary Latin America. She has published articles about late twentieth-century art in Argentina, documentary narrative and photography in contemporary Mexico, and the relationship between journalism and literature. She has been a journalist in for over ten years, focusing on art, culture, and science. Lincoln Cushing has at various times been a printer, artist, archivist, author, and academic librarian at the University of California. He is committed to documenting, cataloging, and disseminating oppositional political culture of the late twentieth century. His books include Revolucion! Cuban Poster Art (2003), Visions of Peace & Justice: 30 Years of Political Posters from the Archives of Inkworks Press (2007), Chinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (2007), and Agitate! Educate! Organize!—American Labor Posters (2009). He curated the 2012 exhibition “All Of Us Or None”—Poster Art of the San Francisco Bay Area at the Oakland Museum of California and was the author of its catalog. Elizabeth Emery is Professor of French in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Montclair State University (NJ). She teaches medieval and nineteenthcentury French literature and culture. Emery is the author of books, articles, and essay anthologies related to the reception of medieval art and architecture in nineteenthcentury France and America, and to the links between early photography, journalism, and celebrity culture. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2016–17) to write a book entitled Reframing Japonisme: Women and the Asian Art Market in Nineteenth-Century France (1853–1914), forthcoming with Bloomsbury Visual Arts.

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Sofia Gurevich is a PhD candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art and Tate Modern. She received her graduate diploma and MA from the Courtauld in 2012 and 2015, respectively. Her MA dissertation, supervised by Dr. Maria Mileeva, looked into the critical reception and state acquisition of Italian neoclassical art in the Soviet Union over the 1920s and 1930s, and its contribution to the development of the Socialist Realist style. Her AHRC-funded PhD research, supervised by Dr. Klara Kemp-Welch (Courtauld) and Dr. Matthew Gale (Tate Modern), is on Soviet book design of the 1920s and 1930s, with a focus on the post-revolutionary activity of the Mir iskusstva circle. She contributed to the research for the 2017 Red Star over Russia exhibition at Tate Modern, focused around the David King collection of printed media and photography, acquired by the museum in 2016. Before receiving her MA, she worked as a junior Russian art cataloger at a London-based auction house. Anisa Hawes is researching digital posters at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Her work investigates how digital tools and software environments have altered design practice and how the web and social media have produced new, participatory poster forms—such as memes which are appropriated as they circulate. Collaborating with Rhizome and British Library/UK Web Archive, she has tested web archiving technologies to capture digital posters in the context of the platforms where they are created and encountered, while developing a framework of curatorial principles to support digital collecting. Her current position is funded by Arts Council England. Ruth E. Iskin is Professor (Emerita), Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Department of the Arts, and currently lectures in Israel and abroad. Her book The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s–1900s was published in 2014 (Dartmouth Press) and her Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting in 2007 (Chinese edition in 2010). She is the editor of Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon: Perspectives in a Global World (Routledge, January, 2017). Iskin obtained her PhD from UCLA and her articles appeared in journals such as the Art Bulletin, Visual Resources, Nineteenth-Century Art World Wide, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, The Women’s Art Journal, and in anthologies and museum catalogues, most recently in a catalogue by the Guggenheim Bilbau. Her work has been supported among others by CASVA—the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Her writing has been translated into Chinese, Czech, Hebrew, Danish, Spanish, the Basque language, and Portuguese. Rachel Kaplan is Assistant Curator of Latin American Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She received her PhD from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, where she specialized in modern Latin American art with additional interests in histories of collecting and display. Her dissertation, “Mexican Modernism at Home and Abroad: The Legacy of Inés Amor and the Galería de Arte Mexicano,” traced the reception and promotion of Mexican art in the United States throughout the 1940s. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Curatorial Studies and a volume on Mexican exhibitions published by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.



Author Biographies

277

Stefan Landsberger is Olfert Dapper Chair of Contemporary Chinese Culture (Emeritus) at the University of Amsterdam and Associate Professor of Contemporary Chinese History and Social Developments at the Leiden University Institute of Area Studies. Landsberger has one of the largest private collections of Chinese propaganda posters in the world. He has published widely on topics related to Chinese propaganda, and maintains an extensive website exclusively devoted to this genre of political communications. Hamid Naficy is Professor of Radio-Television-Film and the Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in Communication at Northwestern University, where he also is an affiliate faculty in the Department of Art History and is a core faculty in the Middle East and North African Studies Program. Naficy is a leading authority in cultural studies of diaspora, exile, and postcolonial cinemas and media and of Iranian and Middle Eastern cinemas. Naficy has published and lectured extensively, nationally and internationally, on these and allied topics. His English-language books are An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking; Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place; The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles; Otherness and the Media: the Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged (co-edited); and Iran Media Index. His latest work is the award-winning four-volume book A Social History of Iranian Cinema, published in 2011–12. Shigeru Oikawa is Professor (Emeritus) of Japan Women’s University. He graduated from the International Christian University, Tokyo University in Tokyo, and Dijon University in France. His main publications include Kyōsai no giga (Caricatures by Kyôsai) with Yamaguchi Seiichi, Tôkyô shoseki, 1992; Comic genius: Kawanabe Kyôsai (ed.), Tokyo Shimbun, 1996; Saigo no ukiyo-eshi : Kawanabe Kyoôsai to hankotsu no bigaku (The last ukiyo-e artist: the rebellious esthetics of Kawanabe Kyôsai), Nihon hôsô shuppan kyôkai, 1998; A Japanese Menagerie—Animal Pictures by Kawanabe Kyôsai (ed., with R. Buckland and T. Clark) 2006; Furansu no ukiyo-eshi Bigô: Bigô to Epinaru hanga (A French ukiyo-e artist, Bigot: Bigot and Epinal prints), Kodamasha, 1998. Britany Salsbury is Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Cleveland Museum of Art and a specialist in nineteenth-century European works on paper. Previously, she held curatorial and fellowship positions in the prints and drawings departments of the Milwaukee Art Museum, RISD Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Morgan Library and Museum. She is a co-founder and president emerita of the Association of Print Scholars, an international organization that encourages innovative print scholarship. Her dissertation on print portfolios in fin-de-siècle Paris, completed at the CUNY Graduate Center, was supported by funding from the Getty Research Institute and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Michael Twyman is director of the Centre for Ephemera Studies, University of Reading, where he oversees the Rickards Collection, among others. He is Professor

278

Author Biographies

(Emeritus) of the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading. Twyman is the author of numerous books on lithography, including Lithography: 1800–1850 (1970), Breaking the Mould: The First Hundred Years of Lithography (2000), and he completed and edited Maurice Rickards’ The Encyclopedia of Ephemera (2000) following the author’s death. He serves as the vice president of the Printing Historical Society, chair of the National Printing Heritage Trust, and council member of the Ephemera Society. Madeleine C. Viljoen is Curator of Prints and the Spencer Collection at the New York Public Library. At the Library, she has curated several exhibitions, including Daring Methods: The Prints of Mary Cassatt, Printing Women: Three Centuries of Female Printmakers, Love in Venice and A Curious Hand: The Prints of Henri-Charles Guérard. Madeleine has published extensively on early modern European prints. The catalog for the exhibition The Early Modern Painter-Etcher (with Michael W. Cole) won a 2007 Choice Outstanding Academic Titles Award. Her articles have appeared in Print Quarterly, The Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, Renaissance Quarterly, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, Oxford Art Journal, and The Art Bulletin.

Index Afficheurs  135, 141 Ainsworth, Mary A.  3, 61, 62, 70, 71, 72–3 American National Committee of Engraving (ANCE)  100–6 appropriation  234–52, 264–5 Arbeitskreis Graphik  21 archivists  4, 5, 114, 117, 130–4, 138, 200–1, 232, 233, 265, 266, 268 Arms, John Taylor  99, 100–6 Arte gráfico del hemisferio occidental (exhibition)  96, 98, 100–6 Art Institute of Chicago  18, 81 art market  20–2, 223–4 art fairs  21 auctions  48, 233–4 online sales  21 Ashmolean Museum  13 Association of Print Scholars (APS)  22 Association of Red Collectors  222, 223 Avery, Samuel Putnam  38–9 Bakhtiari, Ali  245–9 Barajas, Rafael  181, 183, 185 Bartsch, Adam  19, 34, 36, 49, 119 Beer and Bingo poster  263–4 Belle épreuve  50–1, 54 Benjamin, Walter  117–18, 123, 139, 179, 192, 215 Beraldi, Henri  50, 118–19, 120 Les Graveurs du XIXe Siècle  19, 49, 119 On Ernest Maindron  138–9 Biblioteca Nacional de España  16 Bibliothèque Nationale de France  16, 17, 45, 56, 67, 113, 121 Bing, Siegfried  61, 64, 65, 69, 71, 72, 83, 85 Black Lives Matter  270 Blanc, Charles  12 Blas, Camilo  102

Block Museum of Art  2, 258–60 Bos, Mme Charles Du, see Siry, Juliette Bouchot, Henri  113, 128 Bourcard, Gustave  20, 50 British Museum  16–17, 27, 79, 88, 220 Bull, Richard  11 Cadbury, Dr. William W. and Catherine J.  219 camp  187–8, 188–91, 192 Carderera, Valentin  15 Cassatt, Mary  39, 51, 52, 69, 70, 72 Cassirer, Paul  15 Centre for Ephemera Studies  2, 4, 149, 158–61 Chase, William Merritt  67, 69 Chausson, Mme Ernest, see Escudier, Jeanne Chéret, Jules  13, 119, 130–4, 138, 139, 140, 141–2, 168 China  1, 5, 81, 116, 199, 212–27 Chodowiecki, Nicolaus  30 Cleveland Museum of Art  17–18 commune  1, 3–4, 129–48 Corot, Camille  49, 52 corporate collecting  2, 95–110 history of  96–7 Covarrubias, Miguel  181–2, 185 Cuba Poster Project  228–44 curators  232–3, 239, 241, 245–7 collecting through curating  256–60 and digital posters  262, 265, 267–9, 270–1 private collectors as curators  18 professional organizations for  21 Curtis, Louise  3, 62, 66–7, 69, 70 Darly, Mary  32–3 Das Plakat  4, 121, 164, 165, 169–71, 173 Daumier, Honoré  45, 51, 52, 53–4, 55, 131–2, 138, 139

280 Index dealers  10, 45–57, 83–5, 238 Delteil, Loys  1, 2–3, 19, 44–60, 117 Le Peintre-graveur illustré  48–9 Delvau, Alfred  120, 137 Dessolliers, Constant  121, 130 Digital posters and graphics  123–5, 235, 262–74 Dong, Zhongchao  222 Duchess of Northumberland  29 Dufau, Clémentine-Hélène  62, 68–9 Dutailly, Gutave  121, 139 Editora Politica  231, 232 Encyclopedia of Ephemera  4, 152, 158 Ensor, James  51, 54 Enthoven, Gabrielle  13 Ephemera collecting  113–25, 149–63 digital ephemera  123–5, 262–74 in the nineteenth century  116–20, 179–96 Ephemera Society  4, 152, 159 The Ephemerist  4, 149, 152, 158 Escudier, Jeanne  62, 69, 70 Estanquillo Museum  179–81, 184, 185, 191–2 etching club  12–13 etching revival  12–13, 45 Expositions des estampes japonaises  3, 61–78 Facebook  264, 265, 270 Fairey, Shepard  234–5 Fan, Jianchuan  222–3 Filmfarsi movies  247, 248, 249–54 Film House of Iran, see Mortazavi, Ali Film scholarship  254–60 Fischer, Otto  167 Fogg Museum  16 Fould, Mademoiselle Georges Achille  27 Garrec, Maurice Le  52, 139 Gillot, Louise-Marcelle  3, 62, 64–5, 70 Gillot, Marie  64–5 Girod, Suzanne Poirson  62, 69, 71 Gittings, John  219–20 Goebbels, Joseph  121, 171–2 Goldman, John L. and Roslyn Bakst  16

Goncourt, Edmond de  48, 65, 67, 69, 72, 85 Gonse, Anna  65, 70, 71, 72 Goya, Francisco de  51, 52 Gray, Francis Calley  16 Harunobu  62, 80, 81, 86, 93 Harvard Art Museums, see Fogg Museum Havemeyer, Louisine  69, 71, 72 Hayashi, Tadamasa  65, 69, 72, 84–5, 86, 88, 93 hemispheric unity  98–100 Henriot, Alexandre  139–40 Hiatt, Charles  120, 140, 141–2 Hokusai  62, 80, 93 Huo, Lei  222 IBM  2, 3, 95–110 permanent collection of company  96–100 Imprimerie Nationale  135 International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA)  21–2 Iranian movie posters  2, 114, 245–261 collectors outside of Iran  249–54 Iranian collectors  245–9 Ivins, William M.  18 Japonisme  61–78, 79–94 Johnson, John  149, 151–2 Kawanabe, Kyôsai  80, 82, 93 Kay, John  30 Kellen, Johan Philip van der Kellen  18, 27, 34–5 Keppel, Frederick  14 King, David  2, 4, 13, 197–211 Klinger, Max  13 Kobayashi, Bunshichi  85, 86, 88, 92 Koechlin, Hélène  65–6, 67 Koechlin, Raymond  61–78 Koehler, Sylvester Rosa  12, 18 Koenen, Henrietta Louisa  1, 2, 18, 27–43 Kuh, Katharine  18 Kunichika  80, 86 Kurth, Julius  81, 86, 87, 92

Index Ladd, William Mead and Mary Andrews  14 Lalanne, Maxime  12 Lancaster, Percy  14 Langweil, Florine  3, 62, 70–1 Lasansky, Mauricio  102–3 Latin America  95–110 Lépine, Jean-Baptiste  141, 142 Lewis, John  152 Lucas, George  38, 52 Lugt, Frits  19–20, 27, 66 M+ Museum  223 Maberly, Joseph  20 Maghsoudlou, Bahman  253–4 Maindron, Ernest  2, 3–4, 13, 115, 117, 129–48 Maîtres de l’affiche  140 Manet, Édouard  12, 51, 52–3, 81 Manggha-Jasieński  18 Mao, Zedong  199, 212, 214, 217, 221, 222–3 Marolles, Michel de  16 Marsh, George Perkins  14 Marx, Roger  52, 56, 113, 121, 130 Meade, Constance (collection)  151–2 Mehrabi, Massoud  247–9 Mellerio, André  113 Mesghali, Farshid  246 Metropolitan Museum of Art  18, 69, 81, 88, 98, 121 Mexico  15, 18, 100–2, 179–96 Migeon, Gaston  61, 63 Millennium Collection of Ephemera  160–1 Monsiváis, Carlos  1–2, 4, 179–96 Writing of  182, 183, 189 Mortazavi, Ali  249–54 Muller, Frederik  34–6 Musée Carnavalet  121, 143 Musée de l’Affiche, see Musée des Arts Décoratifs Musée de la Publicité, see Musée des Arts Décoratifs Musée des Arts Décoratifs  3, 61–78, 86 121

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museum collections  16–19, 121–3, 219–23, 238–41 of digital posters  270–1 inclusiveness and expanded narratives in  201–2 storage  16–17 study rooms  17–18 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston  16, 18, 79, 80, 88 Koehler, Sylvester Rosa as curator of  18 Museum of Modern Art, New York  15, 98, 201 National Gallery of Art, Washington DC  18 National Museum, Krakow  18 Nazis  164–5, 171–5, 199, 236 Seizure of posters  171–5 New Year prints  214, 215 New York Public Library  27, 29, 36, 38–9, 241 Northwestern University, see Block Museum of Art Oakland Museum of California  233, 235, 238–9 Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America  229–32, 235 Orozco, José Clemente  18, 101–2 Ôta, Nanpo  80–1, 92 Pace Prints  21 Patina, Carola Catharina  29–30 Le Peintre-graveur, see Bartsch, Adam Pétrovitch, Alexis  20 Pochet-Deroches, Georges  121, 137, 139, 142 Portfolios  14, 30, 46–7, 117, 131–3 The Poster  117, 129 poster collecting artistic posters  116–19 best practices  241–2 digital posters  262–74 memoirs about  165–9 movie posters  245–61 political posters  134–40, 212–27, 228–44

282 Index Price, William  10 Prince, Richard  264–5 print collecting collectors’ marks  37–8 collectors of contemporary prints  12–16, 55–6 guides for collectors  20 historiography of print collecting  19–20 history of print collecting  10–11 journals for collectors  20, 47 of Japanese prints  61–78, 79–94 and rarity  50–1, 52–3 Print Council of America  21 Print Council of Australia  21 print shops  15–16, 114 Crown Point Press  15–16 Gemini G.E.L.  114 Tamarind Institute  15, 114 Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE)  15 propaganda  1, 4–5, 121, 122, 125, 171, 203, 212–27, 231, 233 Prouté, Victor and Paul  45, 52, 55 queer culture  179–82, 187, 188, 239–41 Rademacher, Hellmut  173–5 Raoul-Duval, Georgina  62, 69 Rickards, Maurice  2, 4, 117, 149–63 Rijksmuseum  18, 33, 38 Rivera, Diego  15, 181, 184, 185 Rockefeller, Abby Aldrich  15 Rodchenko, Alexander  202, 203, 205–6 Rosenwald, Lessing J.  18, 21 Russia  1, 4, 13, 20, 114, 169, 197–211, 248 Sachs, Hans  2, 4, 116, 164–78 Sachs, Peter  164, 175 Sagot, Edmond  13, 46, 49–50, 52, 53, 121, 139–40 Schapire, Rosa  19 Schiefler, Gustav  20 Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl  19 Schnitzer, Jordan  18–19 Schreiber, Charlotte Elisabeth  27

Scott, Jeannette  70 Seure, Louise-Marcelle, see Gillot, LouiseMarcelle Seventy-Five Latin American Prints (exhibition)  96, 98, 100–6 Sharaku  80, 81, 86, 87, 88 Sichel, Philippe  83, 85, 92 Sigurdson, Jon  219 Siry, Juliette  69 Sloane, Sir Hans  16 Smithsonian Museum  14, 18, 67, 72, 122, 238 social class  10–11, 49–51 social media  262–74 Society of the Friends of the Poster  164, 169–71 Solander boxes  17 Sontag, Susan  187, 191 Straus-Negbaur, Toni  13 The Sunday Times  2, 197–98 Takeda, Taijirô  80 Talbot, Gwenoch David  13 Tate Modern  2, 4, 197–211 Red Star over Russia exhibition  201, 204, 206 Tellefsen, Lisbet  229–31, 239–41 Thayer, Sallie Casey  70 Thrussell, Lil (Lilian Rosa Thrussell)  151–2 Timmerman, Aegidius  14 Tompkins, Ann  219 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de  14, 52, 55, 113, 119, 130, 138, 142, 168, 172 Trotsky, Leon  197–8, 206 Twitter  263–4, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270 Ukiyo-e prints  3, 61–78, 79–94 foreign collectors of  81–5 history  79–80 Japanese collectors of  79–94 process of making  79 scholarship about  86–7 Union Centrale des arts décoratifs  3 Universal exhibitions  81–2, 84–5, 97, 99

Index Urteaga, José Alfonso Sánchez, see Blas, Camilo Utamaro  62, 69, 80, 88, 93 Uzanne, Octave  119–20, 129, 141 Victoria and Albert Museum  13, 200 Vollard, Ambroise  13, 140 Watson, Thomas J., Sr.  95, 97, 98–100, 107 Webrecorder  268

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women collectors  5–6, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 27–43, 61–78, 129, 189 early modern women collectors  29–30 Xinhua bookstores  213, 215, 216–18, 221 Yang, Peiming  221 Yoshitoshi  80 Zorn, Anders  54

Plate 1  Jan Toorop, The Print Lover (Dr. Aegidius Timmerman), 1898–1900, oil on canvas, 66.5 × 76 cm, Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.

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Plate 2  Clémentine-Hélène Dufau (French, 1869–1937), Portrait of a Woman in a Kimono, c. 1910, oil on canvas, 158.4 × 110.5 cm (62 3/8 × 43 1/2 in.), Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Gift of Herbert D. and Ruth Schimmel, 85.048.001, photo by Peter Jacobs.

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Plate 3  Hokkei, Seal of Kyosai, Kyosai shu, collection of the author.

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Plate 4  Jules Chéret, Ernest Maindron, cover illustration for Les hommes d’aujourd’hui 6, no. 277 [1887], author’s collection.

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Plate 5  Otto Fischer, Exhibition of Saxonian Arts and Crafts. “The Old Town” Dresden, 1896 (Ausstellung des saechsischen Handwerks und Kunstgewerbes Dresden 1896 Die alte Stadt), lithograph printed in yellow, red, brown, blue, and black on wove paper mounted on muslin, Gift of the Robert Gore Rifkind Collection, Beverly Hills, CA.

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Plate 6  Designer unknown, Little guests in the Moon Palace (Yuegong xiao keren), published by Renmin meishu chubanshe (Beijing), c. 1972, IISH/Stefan R. Landsberger Collection, photo © International Institute of Social History.

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Plate 7 Heriberto Echeverria, March 8—International Women’s Day, for Editora Politica, Cuba, 1972, photo by Lincoln Cushing from Docs Populi Archive.

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Plate 8 Khorraminejad, Bandari, directed by Kamran Qadakchian, 1973, offset lithograph, photo © Hamid Naficy Iranian Movie Posters Collection, Northwestern University Archives.

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