Regional Chapters > Southern California > Color Explosion
February 19, 2010
Curator's tour of Color Explosion:
Nineteenth Century American
Lithography from the Jay T. Last Collection
Huntington Library, Arts Collections, and Botanical Gardens
1151 Oxford Road,
San Marino, California 91108
On Friday, February 19th, 2010, an enthusiastic group of 14 gathered at the Huntington Library for an exhibition tour of Color Explosion: 19th-Century American Lithography from the Jay T. Last Collection. Led by the curator, David Mihaly, our members and their guests were able to see a portion of one of the largest collections of 19th-century color lithography in the United States. Jay T. Last, founder of Fairchild Semiconductor Corp., is also an independent scholar of the history of lithography. His interest in this field began in the 1970's when he first started collecting fruit crate labels, but quickly developed to a collection of over 135,000 objects. The exhibition, which closed the following Monday, featured more than 250 items that were on public view for the first time. The prints included advertising posters for items such as bath soap, flower seeds, railroads, hair tonic, and coffee; art prints, calendars, children's books, product labels, sales catalogs, some with ingenious methods of built-in displays, sheet music, maps, toys, and trade cards. The International Printing Museum in Carson, California, loaned out a 19th-century lithographic press as part of the exhibition. Mr. Mihaly also included photographs, showing the step-by-step process of preparing the lithography stone and transferring the image onto it, so visitors could appreciate what is involved in creating these mass-produced pieces of art.
The tour began with a background on Mr. Last, and how he became interested in collecting lithographic specimens. It began with a purchase of some orange-crate labels at a flea market and burgeoned into a remarkable collection. He continues to add to the collection, buying both the collection- and individual item level, much the same way as Henry Huntington. Remarkably, there are approximately 130,000 items and very few duplicates; about 40% of the collection comprises unique examples.
David Mihaly explained to us that the 300 items in the exhibition are arranged categorically and were chosen to show both the history and development of color lithography in the United States in the early half of the 19th-century. The exhibition has examples of works printed on the eastern seaboard, but quickly moves to examples printed on the West Coast and California. Color was first applied by hand to lithographic prints in 1821 with book illustrations and sheet music covers being the most common items. But in the span of twenty years, techniques were developed to create full color prints, and the industry exploded. 1860 was the first time a photo lithograph was used to illustrate an article in a newspaper, but the technique wasn’t picked up again until 1880. Another common practice was to recycle images that illustrated natural disasters and military battles. The Mexican American War was the first military action to be visually documented with color lithography, and when the Ohio River flooded in 1883, and again in 1884, the same image was used to show the destruction. As Mihaly pointed out, the print is of a chaotic street scene in Cincinnati, with people fleeing the high water and rescue boats picking up victims. The storefronts that line the street where all this action is taking place have billboards and signs advertising their products. These lithographic posters were most likely sponsored by actual merchants and, and in a clever advertising campaign, the depicted businesses were real.
In early posters and other lithographs, the name of the lithographer was printed on the item, with no mention of the artist or designer, but that changed in 1890 when well-known artists were commissioned to design advertising posters or create art prints. At that point, the name of the lithographer could no longer be found on the piece. Mihaly explained that research on these prints is made even more difficult by the fact that so many printshops, along with their records, were destroyed in fires – a common danger in 19th-century warehouses.
The collection is open to researchers who wish to study the techniques or history of these lithographs in more details. We are very grateful to David Mihaly and the Huntington Library for a fabulous and in-depth tour of these wonderful items.
—Nina M. Schneider, Program Chair
Left to right: David Mihaly (curator), Nina Schneider, Ethan Lipton, Mike Druyen, Vicke Selk, Kitty Maryatt, Pall Bohne, Barbara Hauser, Maurice Hauser.
The deadline for receipt of early bird registrations for the Oct. 15–16, 2010 APHA Conference at the Corcoran in Washington D.C. is September 15. Please make sure that you mail in your registrations to arrive in New York by September 15 to receive the APHA member discount. Details about Learning To Print, Teaching to Print are now available. Download the program and hotel information. Download the registration form.
The Summer 2010 issue of the Newsletter is comprised of a story about the revival of UCLA's Horn Press; the program of the upcoming 2010 annual conference; a reminder of the 2010 Lieberman Lecture; chapter activities from across the country; a review of the 2010 Hofer Lecture; and the bicentennial of George Phineas Gordon. Download it in PDF form here.