Peggy Bacon

Bacon initially thought of herself as a painter and built her reputation on her drawings and prints, which often satirized people around her in their natural habitats—artists in classes, at dances, and in social situations, or a throng of people in a museum, on a sidewalk, or a ship’s deck. She was sought after for her illustrations and topical verse in magazines including Dial, Delineator, The New Yorker, New Republic, Fortune, and Vanity Fair. She exhibited frequently both in New York and in major museum exhibitions nationally, showing prints, drawings, pastels, and watercolors. She taught extensively from the 1930s to the 1940s, but returned to painting in the 1950s. Her last prints were finished in 1955.

George Bellows

Even during his lifetime, American artists, critics, and collectors recognized that Bellows was a remarkable talent. He was part of an important moment in the history of American painting when painters there, principally in New York City, began to develop a uniquely American view of the beauty, violence, and velocity of the modern world, and bold new ways to represent them. To that end, he was a member of the Ashcan school, a loose but important grouping of artists active in New York City and the north-east of the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century. There, the artists who took the city as their landscape, flourished. Bellows (especially later in his career) depicted the seascapes of the New England coast.

Thomas Hart Benton

Benton’s art expressed his feelings about American life and history—about love, family, and religion. His work ranged from informal, intimate sketches to monumental mural cycles and noble nudes. Such works revealed him as a major recorder and interpreter of the American scene. He taught artists including Jackson Pollock during his time in New York and during the mid-twenties; he embarked on a series of sketching expeditions that led him to his subject: the life, people, and history of the American heartland. His work was at first both admired and reviled by the public, for he was described as a brilliant artist as well as a communist, a racist, a bigot, and a fascist.

Alexander A. Blum

Blum was an American painter, etcher, and illustrator. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and with the Art Students’ League of New York. During the 1920s and 1930s, his work was included in major exhibitions. His career can generally be divided into two categories: until 1930, most of his etchings were architectural views of major cities within the eastern US. Later, he turned towards figure studies and decorative compositions which inclined him to the illustrative arts.

Phillip Cheney

Cheney received a B.S. from Harvard University and studied at the American School in Fontainebleau, France. He is most well-known as a lithographer and he worked with the Associated American Artists (AAA) which was an art gallery in New York City that was established in 1934 that brought art to the middle and upper-middle class. Cheney’s work is found most notably at the Detroit Art Institute.

John E. Costigan

Costigan was a self-taught painter and trained printer who had an impressionistic style and affinity for bucolic scenes. He was orphaned in adolescence and taken in by his aunt and uncle who were vaudeville performers. He eventually moved to New York City and worked for the H.C. Miner Lithographing Company. The Miner Company produced posters for such theatrical works and he began as a pressroom helper. Costigan had a twenty-eight year employment with the company and applied his artistic talent professionally. He designed posters for the Ziegfeld Follies, as well as silent pictures for directors including D.W. Griffith. Costigan worked across oil, watercolor, etching, and lithography and extensively explored the pastoral even as he documented the realities of the artist’s rural life.

Churchill Ettinger

Ettinger was both an artist and an accomplished sportsman in the field. He began his career as a commercial artist, illustrating for leading publications and a variety of advertisers. He drew celebrity figures in the world of art and politics as a staff artist with the New York Sunday World. In the 1940s, he worked as art director for Pine Publications, a leading publisher of pulp magazines. He was commissioned by top sporting magazines to produce “covers” using oil paints. He illustrated Derrydale’s The Happy End (1939), written by the American novelist Ben Ames Williams, with nine sketches of fishing and hunting reminiscences.

Don Freeman

Freeman was an American painter, printmaker, illustrator, cartoonist, and illustrator of children’s books. He began life as an orphan. Freeman was a student of John Sloan and Harry Wickey, who were involved in the Ashcan School. Early on, he worked as a painter in New York City and his canvases depicted inner city life: show girls, bowery boys, drunk people, apple sellers, window washers, and citizens of the city that were often down on their luck. Freeman never depicted these models as discouraged or depressed. Rather, he would find the side of them that was warm, enterprising and often loving. As a dramatic illustrator, he also completed many lithographs, some of which focused on the theatrical world.

Gerald K. Geerlings

Geerlings began his career as an architectural draftsman. He served in World War I and then entered the School of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, earning an M.A. He established his own architectural practice and then began his printmaking practice with George Miller while studying etching at the Royal College of Art in London in 1932. His printmaking was limited to two periods: 1926‒33 and again after 1975. During World War II, he worked on aerial perspective drawings and maps for the US Air Corps, developing the Target Identification Unit for the Air Force.

Leon Gilmour

Gilmour was a printmaker, illustrator, teacher, and art director. He immigrated to the United States in 1916. He could not afford to complete his art education upon moving to the United States, so he sought employment in New York City as a construction worker. He also worked as a field hand in the Midwest, a gold miner in Colorado, and a truck driver in Los Angeles. In 1931, he enrolled at the Otis Art Institute where he worked with Paul Landacre. There, he was introduced to the art of wood engraving.

Albert Heckman

Heckman moved to New York City in 1915. He divided his time between there and Woodstock for the rest of his life, except for a period of study in Leipzig. He was a teacher at Hunter College, an author, and a painter who was a member of the Woodstock Art Association and the Works Progress Administration Federal Arts Program in New York City.

Edward Hopper

Hopper was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker who was known for his oil paintings. He also worked with watercolor and prints. His subjects included urban and rural scenes that included features of American life like gas stations, motels, theaters, railroads, and street scenes as well as landscapes. Hopper paid attention to geometrical design and placement of figures in balance with their environment. He often fully planned his work before executing it and created preparatory sketches.

Yasuo Kuniyoshi

Kuniyoshi was an American painter, photographer, and printmaker. He immigrated to America in 1906 and originally intended to return to Japan after studying in the United States. He enrolled at the Los Angeles School of Art and Design and later taught at the Art Students League of New York in New York City and in Woodstock, New York. He made about 45 intaglio prints between 1916 and 1918 and in 1922, he began creating zinc plate lithographs. He was also known for his still-life paintings which depicted common objects and figures including circus performers and nudes.

Clare Leighton

Leighton began painting early in life and studied formally as an artist at Brighton College of Art and later at the Slade School of Fine Art. She emigrated to the United States and became a naturalized citizen in 1945. She wrote and illustrated books that praised the virtues of the countryside and the people who worked the land. During the 1920s and 1930s, as the world became increasingly technological, industrial, and urban, Leighton portrayed rural working men and women. In the 1950s, she created designs for Steuben Glass, Wedgwood plates, stained glass windows for churches in New England, and for the windows of the Worcester cathedral in Massachusetts.

Martin Lewis

Lewis was a printmaker who specialized in etching and drypoint. He is known for his realistic urban scenes, many of which were night views. He relocated to New York City in 1909 and in 1920 he separated from his wife, Esta Varez, and moved to Japan. His intention was to live there permanently, but he couldn’t master Japanese or make a living, so after a few years, he moved back to New York City. After his return, he worked as a commercial artist, which he didn’t particularly enjoy. Over the next few years, he expanded his knowledge of Japanese art and culture and created work that was uniquely his own. He was considered one of the great chroniclers of urban life.

Louis Lozowick

Lozowick attended art school in Kiev for years and in 1906, he moved to New York with his family. He joined the army in 1918. In Berlin in 1920, he befriended Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitsky, and the avant-garde Russian artists affiliated with the November-gruppe. On his return to New York in1924, he joined the executive board of the New Masses and exhibited his machine drawings in the 1926 exhibition of Katherine Dreier’s Société Anonyme. A member of the American Artists Congress, Lozowick treated socially relevant themes during the 1920s, although he is known for his geometrically formulated lithographs of urban cityscapes. In his later work, a romantic impulse sometimes surfaces.

Luigi Lucioni

Lucioni lived and worked mainly in New York City, but also spent time in Vermont. His still lifes, landscapes, and portraits were known for their realism, precisely drawn forms, and smooth paint surface. Life many fellow Regionalists, his work was marketed through the Associated American Artists in New York. In 1915, he won a competition which allowed him to attend The Cooper Union.

William Maclean

Maclean was raised in New England and studied art in Boston. He is mostly known for his etchings, especially his mastery of aquatints. He settled in Pennsylvania where his love of rural life inspired his art, particularly the quiet seclusion of winter scenes. Many of his prints were published through the Associated American Artists.

Joseph Margulies

Margulies was a highly awarded painter, etcher, and lithographer. He emigrated to the United States from Austria at an early age. He studied under the great master of lithography and etching, Joseph Purnell (1857‒1926) at the Art Students’ League, New York from 1922 to 1925. Margulies then continued his education at the National Academy of Design at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris. Margulies excelled in etching, lithography, and painting. He established himself as one of the great portrait artists in America and was commission to paint portraits of presidents and other distinguished individuals.

Reginald Marsh

Marsh, a New York City painter, defied Victorian visions of a discord-free society in which one could hide from evil and practice ‘civilized’ repressions of natural instincts. He participated in a flux of irregular sensations and helped eliminate distinctions between high and low, elite and popular art at the expense of academic tradition.

J. Jay McVicker

McVicker produced black and white aquatints that depicted Oklahoma’s landscape as well as industrialscapes in a representational style. In the late 1940s and 1950s, he introduced color to his images in aquatint as well as silkscreen. It was during this time that he began shifting his style towards cubism and semi-abstraction. His later images display his talent with complex multi-media prints. During a period of intense exploration, McVicker called himself “a colorist.” In today’s vernacular, he may be called a Modernist and his prints and paintings referred to as Midcentury Moderne.

Joseph Pennell

Pennell is considered by many to be the dean of American printmaking. By 1882, he was illustrating for Scribner’s Magazine and The Century and he received a commission for illustrating a book on Tuscany. In 1884, he traveled to Europe and settled in London. He produced many books, both as author and illustrator, many of them in collaboration with his wife, author Elizabeth Robins Pennell. In 1912, he left London for Panama where he created a series of lithographs rendering the building of the Panama Canal. He voyaged via steamer along the Pacific Coast to San Francisco where he created numerous etchings of San Francisco from Chinatown to the Cliff House. He produced more than 900 etchings and mezzotints and more than 600 lithographs on architectural landscape subjects. He helped spur the revival of printmaking and print collecting during the first two decades of the twentieth century.

John Sloan

Sloan was raised in Philadelphia, a major publishing center where he learned the art of illustration. Sloan studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and under Robert Henri before relocating to New York in 1904. He soon befriended George Bellows and they found themselves in the same circle of artists who were committed to portraying urban scenes. Sloan worked as a painter and etcher and became recognized as a central figure in the Ashcan School. He used saturated colors and Socialism became a prominent part of his active political life.

Charles Surendorf

Surendorf was a painter, etcher, lithographer, and wood engraver. In 1935, he moved to the San Francisco Bay area and studied further at Mills College. He was active in the local art scene and served as Director of the first SF Art Festival. In 1946, he settled in the town of Columbia in the Sierra foothills. There he served as director of the short-lived Mother Lode Art School (1956) and produced works with an historic California theme until his death. His paintings and prints depict the rough-and-tumble life of the old mining country in a regionalist style similar to that of Thomas Hart Benton.

Grant Wood

Wood’s reputation has been one of extremes. Midwesterners lionize him as one of their premier painters; those in art circles tend to dismiss him for his illustrative style and antimodernist views; and the public at large enjoys his famous painting, American Gothic, but hardly recognizes the artist’s name. Wood is associated with Regionalism, a school that also included Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry. Regionalism is usually described as narrow in focus, descriptive and story-telling, conservative, and nationalistic. Wood not only painted the people and places around him, but he also lectured nationally on Regionalism and held teaching posts. Regionalism, as Wood practiced it, developed in the 1920s but won its audience over in the 1930s. It was preeminently a phenomenon of the Great Depression.