Philadelphia Museum of Art celebrates the "Curious and Commonplace: European Popular Prints of the 1800s"

Written by Johnny Lair Monday, 21 March 2011 23:58

Philadelphia, PA -  A magical machine transforms imperfect husbands into ideal spouses. A natural disaster competes with miraculous apparitions and serial murders to astonish the eye.  A two-and-a-half-foot-tall souvenir poster produced in the year of the Eiffel Tower’s construction serves as both a game board and a celebration of the world-famous landmark.  The Philadelphia Museum of Art has joined these memorable images with dozens of other prints culled from its vast collection for Curious and Commonplace: European Popular Prints of the 1800s . . On view through August 24, 2008.

Spanning the 19^th century, many of the 88 prints on view include narrative texts or folk ballads in French, Dutch, German and, in one case, fractured English. Among these often-humorous, always-intriguing images are the precursors to the tabloids, board games and Sunday comic strips of today.  In the 19^th century, such prints were sold in shops and on street corners, or distributed at large public events. While they were once ubiquitous in households, taverns and schoolrooms across Europe, the inexpensive, mass-produced images were rarely preserved, and are now difficult to find undamaged.  Several of the prints included in Curious and Commonplace are the only remaining examples of these valuable pieces of European history, and the majority of works have never before been on display at the Museum.

The range of prints mirrors the variety of subjects and styles that publishers included on their stock lists — from crudely cut black-and-white woodblock prints to colorful hand-colored stencils and chromolithography. The exhibition is arranged in 12 mini-sections devoted to various topics, including children’s activities, optical illusions, playing cards, and the age-old themes of love and marriage. One set of prints offers a lurid account of a mass murder, while another group chronicles the rise and fall of  Napoleon Bonaparte.

“We wanted to offer visitors a sampling of prints that reflects the astounding variety available at the time they were produced,” says exhibition curator Kevin Kriebel, the Dorothy J. del Bueno Curatorial Fellow in the Prints, Drawings and Photographs department. “It’s unusual for a museum to have as many of these prints as we do, especially in such wonderful condition, and they are so intriguing that it was hard not to feature them all.”

Several prints reveal much about the lives of 19^th-century children. Younger visitors to the exhibition will be drawn to The New Goose Game, which dates to the turn of the 20^th century, and The Big Eiffel Tower Game — a souvenir poster distributed at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair. With their snake-like design and illustrated squares, these board games resemble modern ones, such as “The Game of Life” or “Trouble.” And, just as in these present-day incarnations, 19^th-century players relied on a roll of the dice or luck of the draw rather than on skill or strategy.

Romantic relationships are held up for satirical examination in the exhibition’s “Love and Marriage” section. Eager women try desperately to reach eligible bachelors perched on high branches in The Tree of Love (c. 1852-58). In The Miraculous Distillery for Ridding Husbands of Their Bad Habits (1839), women face the opposite dilemma: they are married to woefully imperfect men plagued by various vices, including flirting, gambling and drinking. After their concerned wives feed them into the vat of a large and imposing distillery, these new and improved men emerge to rejoin their spouses for a second honeymoon in an enchanted country inn for happy households.

A handful of prints illustrate France’s enduring admiration for Napoleon Bonaparte. Published more than a decade after his death in 1821, The Battle of Waterloo (c. 1835-40) depicts Bonaparte as a valiant leader appearing to win the clash that in reality marked his final defeat. Saint Napoleon, The Patron Saint of Soldiers — produced and distributed in the 1860s — depicts an obscure early Christian martyr who was elevated to new prominence by Bonaparte’s fame.

Most of the prints on display came to the Museum as part of a two-part gift of nearly 2,800 European popular prints from Alice Newton Osborn in 1958 and 1961. Osborn and her husband, Frank, obtained the prints from the Émile van Heurck, a well-known Belgian collector of European popular prints and the co-author of two definitive reference works on the subject. Van Heurck’s collection focused on the 19th century, and included examples from Amsterdam, Brussels, Munich and other European cities. The majority of the prints on view in Curious and Commonplace were created in the celebrated print publishing center of Épinal, a town in northeastern France whose name is an essential component of the phrase by which French popular prints are best known today: Imagerie d’Épinal.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call (215) 763-8100, or visit the Museum's website at www.philamuseum.org.

---

Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~