By Dorothy Shinn
Beacon Journal art and architecture critic
The Cleveland Museum of Art has many fine prints. In fact, its print collection boasts some of the best impressions owned by any museum anywhere.
So it might come as a surprise that for the opening of its new print galleries, Jane Glaubinger, museum curator of prints and drawings, has chosen to mount an exhibit of 20th century woodcuts by a heretofore little-known artist.
The decision has given Glaubinger the chance to do some research on Mabel Amelia Hewit (1903-1984), a Conneaut native who was raised in Youngstown and lived in Cleveland the last 50 years of her life.
This isn’t the first time Hewit’s work has been shown at the museum, however. Almost nine years ago to the day (July 7, 2002), I wrote a review about an exhibit of white-line woodcuts, or Provincetown prints, developed by Swedish-born printmaker Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt in Provincetown, Mass., which included works by both Hewit and her close associate, Blanche Lazzell.
Nordfeldt, like many printmakers of his day, was fascinated by Japanese woodblock printing. But he was impatient with the technique, which by tradition called for a separate woodblock
to be cut for each color in the print.
So he developed a method whereby a single block of wood was used for all the colors, which are kept separate by a thin groove carved around each color area.
Since the groove isn’t inked, the resulting white of the paper acts as an outline around the colored shapes, and the pressure from the printing process forces the paper into the grooves, which embosses the sheet and creates unprinted, slightly protruding white lines. This makes for a handsome, quite tactile image, giving the prints an immediacy and an impact quite surprising for their modest size.
While Nordfeldt was the primary exponent of this technique, the artist most noted for it is Lazzell, a West Virginia native who created more than 138 blocks from 1916 to the 1950s.
Printing by hand on Japanese paper using watercolor instead of ink, Lazzell took Nordfeldt’s innovation and developed it, experimenting with different colors for each impression.
The use of watercolor made it easier for the white-line printers to vary their compositions. They could simply wash off the colors from the previous printing session and begin with new ones.
Hewit credited Lazzell for teaching her the white-line technique for making color woodcuts, according to Glaubinger, who notes that Lazzell was well known for giving printmaking instruction in her studio on an old wharf overlooking the Provincetown harbor.
Hewit was in Cape Cod in July 1929 to attend a class in advanced out-of-doors painting sponsored by Teachers College. That same summer Lazzell exhibited three works at a Provincetown Art Association show. Works by Hewit’s instructor, Arthur R. Young, were in the same show.
If she didn’t make Lazzell’s acquaintance that year, she must have when she returned in the summer of 1933, for Hewit began exhibiting prints both locally and nationally in the fall of that year.
Some of her first white-line woodcuts from about 1933 are scenes of Provincetown that are amazingly close to similar scenes created by Lazzell in 1926. Not only is the point of view quite similar, but the use of solid-color geometry is also emulated, as is the palette.
Hewit adapted Lazzell’s methods to her style, producing scenes of the quaint buildings in Provincetown, landscapes from her travels, industrial vistas and scenes from everyday life.
Being familiar with the newest trends from Europe, she also occasionally updated compositions, by using the faceting of Cubism, the exactitude of Precisionism or the graphic sophistication of Art Deco.
Included in Midwest Modern: The Color Woodcuts of Mabel Hewit are examples of Hewit’s color woodcuts, as well as sketches, watercolors and the actual woodblocks, which amply illustrate her working methods.
As can be seen in the works on view, Hewit was always experimenting, often printing impressions of the same subject in different colors.
Like the exponents of the Bauhaus tradition, Hewit didn’t restrict herself to traditional printmaking, but expanded her repertoire into printing on lengths of fabric, which were meant to be used in interior decoration. Two of these are in the exhibit.
Some viewers may be annoyed by the dim lighting in the prints and drawings gallery. Normally, this is for a good reason, as prints will fade if subjected to more than the recommended dosages of light per year.
However, it does seem as though this exhibit is particularly dim in its lighting, which is a pity because one can only imagine the beauty of these prints shown in optimal conditions.
Besides the white-line woodcut prints, Hewit also worked in lithography, creating series of lithographs at the Summer School of Painting (Ox-Bow) in Saugatuck, Mich. Her work was shown locally and nationally, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
The current exhibit features 76 works by Hewit, both prints and woodblocks (which are beautiful objects in themselves), all of which are reproduced in a full-color catalog, written by Glaubinger and Moyna Stanton, Cleveland Museum of Art paper conservator. The 96-page catalog has 109 color illustrations and can be purchased at the museum bookstore for $14.95.
Many of the works have been given to the museum by Mr. and Mrs. William Jurey, Hewit’s relatives (he’s her nephew). It was their gift that initiated the research that resulted in this show. A New York private collector loaned the print by Lazzell.
Dorothy Shinn writes about art and architecture for the Akron Beacon Journal. Send information to her at the Akron Beacon Journal, P.O. Box 640, Akron, OH 44309-0640 or dtgshinn@neo.rr.com.
