Made in Newark: Cultivating Industrial Arts and Civic Identity in the Progressive Era

Plates

P L AT E S 140 1. Hugo B. Froehlich Memorial Art Education Window, 1927, Newark Museum. Manufactured by J. and R. Lamb Studios, designed by Katharine Lamb Tait, New York, N.Y. Glass, lead; 64 × 35 in. Gift of the Manual Training Teachers of Newark, 1927. Collection of the Newark Museum (27.1451). Originally located in the stairwell of the 1926 building, the window was restored recently and now is currently installed in the 1989 extension. Not a portrait of Froehlich, it is a symbolic representation celebrating the common aims in vocational education upheld by the public school system and the museum. Roundels idealized students actively engaged in sewing, shop work, ceramics, textiles, modeling, painting, drawing, and manual training. Curiously, the initial watercolor sketch emphasized personifications of the fine arts, an indication that the clients in Newark were involved in finalizing the design. The window was covered with plywood for several decades in the late twentieth century when the museum disavowed such evangelical messages as well as the ideal of manual training. 141 142 2. “#23 Half-Tones” in Newark Public Library’s The Printed Book exhibition, 1909. Collection of the New York Public Library. The exhibition dramatically embodied Dana’s notion that cheaper printing costs would bring about the democratization of art, and the terms were shocking to many connoisseurs who held onto notions that commercialism inherently degraded art. 143 3. “Little Nemo,” detail of “#25 Block Printing” in Newark Public Library’s The Printed Book exhibition, 1909, originally published in the New York Herald and created by Winsor McCay. Collection of the New York Public Library. “Little Nemo” is an example of Newark’s ecumenical vision of printing, and Dana’s ability to juxtapose two-penny and two-hundred-dollar examples. It is also indicative of his pleasure in testing the boundaries of respectability. 144 5. John Cotton Dana, design for print plate (“Ex incises japonicis J. C. Dana”), undated. Color blockprint, 5 × 3 in. Collection of Special Collections Division, Newark Public Library. Like his contemporary Frank Lloyd Wright, Dana used his connoisseurship of ukiyo-e to impress the world, and his gifts bearing this label, which translates “from the Japanese prints of J. C. Dana,” were intended to make a memorable impression. Exhibitions of Japanese prints from Dana’s own collection were educational but also smack of exhibitionism. He inscribed this one with a warning that the image was not a self-portrait. 4. John Cotton Dana, cover design of the first issue of The Newarker 1, no. 1 (October 1912). Collection of the author. In its name and scope, the public library’s house organ ambitiously tried to represent the interests of the entire city. The magazine’s weakness was also its strength: aggrandizing Newark. Note that Dana was too proud of his handiwork not to sign the map, and so eager to assert Newark’s importance that he relegated Manhattan to the margin. 145 6. Stein, 1910–1912. Manufactured by Reinhold Merkelbach, Grenzhausen, Germany, designed by Paul Wynand. Stoneware; pewter; 6 × 3½ × 5½ in. Purchase by 1913 Jenkinson Fund. Collection of the Newark Museum (13.205). The Newark Museum acquired this and other beer drinking vessels from its 1912 exhibition of German Applied Arts, sponsored by the Deutscher Werkbund. The revival of the German stoneware industry as an artistic heritage was a new phenomenon in the early twentieth century. The traditional form of the stein complicates characterizations of the Werkbund as a “pioneer of Modernism.” 7. Toby jug cream pitcher, 1904–1910. Manufactured E. & C. L. Poillon Pottery, Woodbridge, New Jersey, designed by Clara Louise Poillon. Glazed earthenware; 4¼ × 4½ in. Purchase 1974 by the Members’ Fund. Collection of the Newark Museum (74.76). Clara Poillon, a granddaughter of the owner of the Salamander Pottery in Woodbridge, New Jersey, made this vessel in the shop she inherited. Poillon exhibited in the Newark Museum Association’s 1915 exhibition of Clay Industries and her recuperation of Anglo forms has received little attention in part because of their obvious historical references. The tendency to sentimental ornament in this American Toby mirrors that in the German tankard and illuminates the romantic dimensions and the complex social messages of artistic expressions categorized as Colonial Revival. 146 8. Cover illustration, Sanitary Pottery 7, no. 3...