Getting the Picture: Fine Prints at the Library

M. C. Escher, The Dream. Woodcut, 1935. Gift of Eric F. Menke.

For more than a decade regular exhibits in the Gunlocke Room have exposed Georgetown students and faculty as well as members of the Washington art community to some of the riches of the library's growing collections in the field of graphic arts. Although Lauinger houses sizable collections of posters, original editorial cartoons, and artists' original drawings and watercolors, the true heart of the graphic arts material at Georgetown is the dozen or so collections which now contain approximately 5,000 fine prints, the great majority the work of American printmakers of the twentieth century.

Ably curated by Father Joseph A. Haller, S.J., the collections are truly strong in several specific aspects of printmaking: the artist's self portrait, richly covered in the hundreds of prints in the Elder Collection; the realist printmaking of the middle of the century, documented in more than 1,500 images in the Jesuit and Murphy collections; and the art of the woodengraver, shown most strongly perhaps in the named Lynd Ward and Isac Friedlander collections but richly represented in other holdings as well.

The list of artists represented in strength in the collections is long, and includes printmakers as diverse as Werner Drewes, Norman Kent, William E. C. Morgan, Charles Quest, Prentiss Taylor, and Grant Wood. One goal of the library's collection development policy in graphic arts is building print collections for research as well as for display, and having extended runs of the work of certain artists helps to achieve this end. In a number of cases the library is fortunate in being able to acquire the papers of printmakers, having important records of the Boyer family and John DePol as well as those of Isac Friedlander, Lynd Ward, and Charles Quest.

Funds for acquisitions come primarily from the endowment created by Mrs. Charles M. Fairchild in honor of her late husband. But the most fruitful source of acquisitions are the donations made by the artist themselves, their families, or other friends of the library. In the past year, for example, the widows of artist Don Freeman and Philip Riesman have given significant samples of their husbands' work, the Riesman gift including, in fact, copies of all but four of the artist's known prints. Planning for proper exhibit space and enhanced space for storage and conservation activities is high on the library's list of priorities for future growth, to be funded in part by a portion of the Fairchild endowment.