Mable Dwight’s Lithography at the Whitney Museum: Magic and Reality
By J. Taylor Basker
Lithography is a magical art medium. Carefully drawing on a stone or a metal plate, with oil, crayon or liquid, the artist creates a REVERSE image of their composition. The artist can paint uniform dark areas or use repeated lines or crosshatching to create delicate shading. After hours or days of drawing the perfect image, the artist then covers it with a water glue. The glue penetrates everything except the oil pigments drawn on the stone, since oil and water do not mix. Next, the artist takes a leap of faith and uses a solvent to erase their perfect drawing! It is a quiet moment of terror but the artist believes in the technology and next reapplies oil ink with a roller to restore the drawing. The magic then happens, and the drawing, with its all strengths and delicate details, reappears and is ready to be rolled into a press and onto paper.
Mable Dwight fell in love with this magic and was one of the most important American woman printmakers. She was fascinated with human reality. Dwight was an active member of the Whitney Studio Club, a precursor to the Whitney Museum, participating in their life drawing class that permitted women artists. After traveling to the Middle East, Asia and the U.K. with friends, she moved to live with her parents in Greenwich Village near Washington Square Park. She created art from what she observed in real life.
After gaining attention for her work as an illustrator and after her divorce in her 50s, she went to Paris and discovered lithography in the Atelier Duchatel printshop. She fell under its spell and went on to produce a series of lithographs that stunned the art world and the public during the Great Depression as world democracies struggled with the rise of fascism. Using the George Miller Printshop on E. 14th Street, she printed her work derived from her travels around NYC with a hidden sketchbook, drawing faces and scenes of people on subways, buses, beaches, ferries and the streets.
She used her talents to create both compassionate and satirical images of humanity, most with either overt or subtle political messages. A socialist since WWI, Dwight held strong negative views of capitalism and the rich. Her art demonstrated sympathy for the struggling proletariat and the underdog. Her sympathy and sense of humor over the foibles of humanity enabled her to avoid propaganda and create imagery in the spirit of Goya and Daumier whom she said were able to resolve aesthetic demands with the satiric wish to show “the inevitable defects inherent in life.” She rejected the social realist art of her time as too vehement and lacking sympathy for flawed humans, as well as artists who just enjoyed transgressive, banal subjects for their own sake. Her approach reminds one of Diane Arbus, who photographed the fringes of society with compassion. Dwight’s prints Derelicts, 1931, shows dark figures huddled in front of restaurants. Two men look through garbage in Buried Treasure, 1935. Both were printed during the depression and demonstrated her solidarity with the poor and out. She also experienced poverty during much of her career, despite her recognition as an artist. She worked for the WPA to survive.
Mable Dwight. “Buried Treasure.” Lithograph, 1935.
Her exhibit at the Whitney is the result of the insight of Dan Nadel, curator of drawings and prints. While looking through the collection, he became fascinated with her work and realized she never had an exhibit at the Whitney and he believed that her time had come. Dwight’s socialist vision of the dignity of people despite the socio-economic divides during the Depression resonates with today’s struggle to preserve a democracy of disparate and often conflicting citizens. Her modest sized images speak to the many viewers who spend much time examining the details in the prints; some had people waiting on a line to view them. It was extraordinary to see how a woman printmaker of the 30s could fascinate mostly young viewers nearly 100 years later!
The exhibit’s title comes from her advice about how to make art that would be a “living influence on the world.” It was to keep “a cool head and a warm heart.” Her art was published widely, from mainstream newspapers and magazines such as Fortune and Vanity Fair to leftist journals such as The New Masses.
Mable Dwight. “The Ferry.” Lithograph, 1930.
One of her most famous prints The Ferry shows two ample middle-aged matrons suspiciously regarding a serene young nun, praying, as she sat next to them. Dwight was a master of satirical expression, that went beyond caricature due to her use of subtle shading and line with suburb portrait skills. Her Self Portrait is a tour de force of lithographical precision.
Most of the prints reveal her radical socialist mindset, if only in the details. This is what makes viewing her work so fascinating – decoding the imagery and finding the strange things that appear in seemingly innocuous subjects. A dense audience at the circus depicts faces of all types of people, all ages, captivated by the show ─ and by vendors selling macabre dolls (which seem to threaten the viewer) and flying ropes (one seems ready to strangle a spectator).This audience seems actually to be held captive by the commercial circus event.
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Another interesting detail that is ambiguous is found in In the Crowd. It may suggest a Civil Rights statement by Dwight in 1931. The main figure is a Caucasian woman in a large cloche hat, shading half of her face. There are other faces, tightly packed, male and female, looking on somberly, perhaps standing on a line. But right behind her head, is a tilted head, with dark skin, wearing a bandana, suggesting an African American woman. She seems to be waiting her turn.
Looking closely at the 1928 print Stick ‘em Up produced just before the Great Depression of 1929, we can see its irony. Dwight portrays a fascinated movie audience, willingly hypnotized by the screen, and enjoying a huge image of a cowboy who is shooting directly at them, perhaps a statement about capitalism’s destructive hold on the public.
Overtly political statements are also found. Her awareness of the dangers of fascism produced the powerful Dance Macabre, 1933. In a theatrical theme, we have an audience of one in a gas mask and helmet carrying bayonet. It is watching puppets who caricature the rise of fascism in the U.K., Mussolini, Hitler, France, China and Japan with Uncle Sam passively trying to distance himself.
There even is a print that evokes the Epstein scandal. In Hudson Street Burlesque, 1929, a curvaceous dancer performs for a leering male audience, salaciously salivating over her with a multitude of facial expressions.
Mable Dwight. “Merchants of Death.” Lithograph, 1935.
In Merchants of Death, Dwight presents clearly her view of capitalism. A line of top hatted well-dressed men are led in a march by a baton-wielding skeleton. Each unique face and body is dramatically evil. And the last figures morph into vultures.
Yet there is a sympathy for most people, just caught up in life, trying to survive. In Abstract Thinking, 1932, Dwight turns three men of different ages and conditions, into philosophers, as they sit on a subway, lost in their thoughts, evoking a sense of ‘everyman’ facing their lives and uncertain futures.
Dwight’s work was passionate; her technique was clinically flawless. Thus, she is the epitome of her advice to make art “with a cool head and a warm heart.” Kudos to Dan Nadel for curating this fascinating exhibit that is open through the end of August.
