Joseph Pennell: Election to the Academy

"Landwehr Canal, Berlin" by Joseph Pennell

"On November 18, 2021 Joseph Pennell received the announcement of his election to the Academy of Arts and Letters. He was gratified, the more so because he knew that sculptor Paul Bartlett was his Academic sponsor. Bartlett had been saying ever since his return to America, 'You ought to be in the Academy, Pennell; who else can represent the Graphic Arts as well?' And so it was brought about. He wrote a friend, 'It will be news to you that I have been made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and I had to run round trying on my robes, crown and wings...'

Pennell believed that honours carry their responsibilities, also that the Academy should not make everything of literature and nothing of art - this was six years before Mr. Huntington's gift of a hundred thousand dollars provided an income to meet the expenses of art exhibitions. Pennell suggested that a show of American etchers, from Whistler to the present school be held in March. He selected the prints, arranged them in the old Academy Building on West 81st Street, and lectured on the evening of the opening day.  

Afterwards, in the midst of his innumerable engagements, he was suddenly asked to drop everything and go to Brussels. The Royal Belgian Academy was celebrating its hundred and fiftieth anniversary and Paul Bartlett had planned to represent the American Academy of Arts and Letters. But at the last moment, he could not go, and Pennell, at the Academy's request, agreed to go in his place. He grumbled over the loss of time but, in the end, the meeting with old friends and return to old haunts, the opportunity to see what artists had been doing in his absence and visits to once familiar galleries and schools of art, more than repaid him, saddened though he was by the traces everywhere of war and its baleful influence."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell, Volume Two" by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.)  

Joseph Pennell: American War Posters

"Lest Liberty Perish" by Joseph Pennell

"Whatever Joseph Pennell's private engagements and commissions, everything gave way to his work for the Government. He was among the many artists who made the war posters which the Government scattered broadcast through the country. For his first he chose the lithograph 'Ready to Start,' enlarged it and changed the title to 'Provide the Sinews of War. Buy Liberty Bonds.' He supervised the printing of one million copies, and in three different sizes. It was to be seen everywhere, from one end of the land to the other. 

His second war poster came in response to a competition. He explained: 

'As for the second, the idea came into my head on my way back from New York, where I had attended a meeting of the Committee on Public Information, at which posters were asked for. I made the sketch on the train, carried it out on transfer paper when I got to Philadelphia, and put it on zinc plates, printed it, and went West. It was not till months after that I heard it had passed both the  juries in New York and Washington, and was to be used as one of the posters.

The subject was 'New York City bombed, shot down, burning, blown up by an enemy. A fleet of aeroplanes fly over Lower Manhattan, flames and smoke envelop the burning skyscrapers, in the foreground Liberty, from a pile of ruins, rises headless on her pedestal, her torch shattered.' His title was 'Buy Liberty Bonds or You Will See This.' But the committee, like all committees, knew better and printed instead: 'That Liberty Shall Not Perish from the Earth. Buy Liberty Bonds.' The Government ordered so huge an edition of his second Liberty Poster that the printing had to be divided between several printing houses.

The excitement of printing it in colour was new for him. The printers were also enthusiastic, Mr. Heywood of the New York firm offered him every facility, encouraged every experiment. Pennell wrote, 'Technically it was in the printing one of the most interesting of the experiments and experiences of my life.' So interesting in fact, that he wrote a book on it, 'Joseph Pennell's Liberty-Loan Poster," which described the lithographic process in detail.

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell" by Elizabeth Robins Pennell and "Joseph Pennell's Liberty-Loan Poster" by Joseph Pennell.)  

 

 

Joseph Pennell: War Work in America

"The Keel" by Joseph Pennell

"Pennell's return from his attempted work in France was complicated. His passports and permits did not allow him a fourth voyage across the Channel in so short a period. He could get back to England only by way of Bordeaux and America, and so to America he sailed. New York was no great improvement, except for the fact that war was more remote. But there was a place for him, as I knew there would be. 

A letter ten days later brought me the news I was waiting for: 'Well they will give me a chance at Washington, and I go there tomorrow. I hope that may not be a fiasco.' He had a good friend at headquarters in Dr. Frederick Keppel, the Third Assistant Secretary of War. When the work Pennell was asked to do was done and he was making acknowledgments, he said 'And finally I wish to thank above all the man who made it all possible. He knows - and I know - I never shall be able to repay him. He is working, and I am trying to work, for our country.'

He had gotten into his stride again, nerves forgotten. He obtained permission to visit every industrial establishment he wished. In every plant, camp, yard, work, fields, in which he worked he was treated with courtesy, and his thirty-six pictures illustrated 'Joseph Pennell's Pictures of War Work in America.' Again his drawings were not done with any idea of helping to win the war, but 'because for years I have been at work trying to record The Wonder of Work, and work never was so wonderful as it is today.' 

There was another source of healing for his frayed nerves. That summer, at the end of a long day's work, he knew he would be welcome at Paul Bartlett's studio, and he would go late in the afternoon, in time for the moon flower in the Bartletts' garden to burst into its nightly blooming and fill the place with its fragrance. 'I have come to see the miracle,' he would say to Mrs. Bartlett, and they would keep him to dinner, and to be with friends rested him after his hours of drawing and went far to complete the cure begun in the munitions works and docks."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell, Volume Two" and "Joseph Pennel's Picture of War Work in America.") 

Joseph Pennell: "I Could Do Nothing"

"Submarines in Dry Dock" by Joseph Pennell

"M. Henry Davray had come to Joseph Pennell's exhibition of war work in England, and, being a Frenchman, was determined that Pennell should go to France, anywhere he chose. It was arranged for him to work at Verdun, and for Verdun he was kept waiting. He had to sit patiently in Paris till arrangements could be completed. Paris depressed him beyond endurance. It was full of memories of etching with Whistler; of gay days in the Salons with the group of artists and art critics from London; of talk and more talk in the café with a long list of old friends, of evenings at the Chat Noir. The contrast was unbearable. Now it was Paris in wartime - dark, friendless, men unspeakably crippled everywhere, our old hotel gone to pieces, bombs falling. He could not stand it.

He was sent on excursions, with journalists mostly, as near the Front as possible, excursions that interested him, but this was not his way of working. His daily letters were reports of daily disappointments. On June fifteenth he wrote: 'I have been kicking my heels at the office but not a thing has happened. It was the greatest mistake to come and I have no idea of the result. Davray doesn't even seem to have written them.' On the eighteenth: 'The complications and the heat are awful. I wish I was back for nothing gets done.' On the twenty-first: 'The deep waters are going over me - I don't see any way to do the work.' On the twenty-third it was promising: 'At last I am to start on Monday,' and on Monday, he got off to Verdun.

In England, away from the Front, he could draw; in France at the Front, he could not. It was impossible to make anything of the abomination of desolation which war is. Besides, in his case, the Quaker was to be reckoned with, the man of peace to whom war was the supreme evil, also the man of nerves so sensitive that he shrank from the sight of blood. He had known Verdun in its serene days, and is heart sank within him to see it reduced to ruins and rubbish - everything desecrated, destroyed.

No one disturbed him as he sat drawing in the bomb-broken streets or the Cathedral wreck. But it was no good trying, he could not draw what he hated. He could not stay out his allotted week. 'I am back,' he wrote me from Paris, 'and the stuff's no good - mine I mean. I could do nothing.' He lamented' I have chucked up the great work offered me and I don't know why. The future is a blank.'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell, Volume Two" by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.)  

 

Joseph Pennell: War Work

"Within the Furnaces" by Joseph Pennell

"In London, at the end of January, 1916, a year and a half into World War I, Joseph Pennell was as convinced as ever that 'the place for an American at the present time is at home.' Our lease had thirteen years to run and we tried to find someone to take it off our hands. Muirhead Bone, lured by our windows, wanted the flat, but a Red Cross Duchess, seeking an occasional refuge from her hospital in the North of France, applied before him. It did not suit her, but she stopped on her way downstairs to see Sir James Barrie in the flat below, and he was up the same morning to ask for the first refusal.

Having got so far on the road home, Pennell changed his mind almost overnight. He had decided that the great munition works were made 'for him to draw. He explained in the preface of his resulting book: 

'I did not make these drawings, etchings, lithographs with any idea of helping on the war, or what artists for some reason are mostly asked to do, help the victims or victors of the war, for I do not believe in war. But as we are in the midst of war, though some of us are not of it - and as war has developed the most incredible industrial energy all over the world - there is no reason why some artistic record should not be made, and my record is in this book.'

He applied to Lloyd George, Minister of Munitions for permission to make pictures of the work, but it was not until July that he got his permits. Although he came with an artist's spirit, viewing the ''Land of Iron and Steel' as all mist and mystery in the morning, glitter and glare at noon, fire and fury at night - a land where work never ceases,' he was viewed suspiciously by the workers. At Leeds, munition workers at the lunch hour took him for the enemy brazenly making notes for all the world to see and he 'learned how it must feel to be a condemned murderer or a captured spy.' But the biggest shadow that fell over the Pageant of Work was that 'it fascinates, but is intolerable, when you think that all this is done to kill people.'

He had no doubt about the merit of his drawings. The surprise was their immediate and generous recognition. Officials from the Munitions Department came to see them, were impressed, must show them to Lloyd George, who caught the excitement, must exhibit them for propaganda, not merely in England but in France, in Spain, in the United States. The series must be exhibited in the Guildhall Art Gallery, the Exhibition opened by the Lord Mayor after a lunch in Pennell's honour at the Mansion House. A new volume must be made of the drawings - "Joseph Pennell's Pictures of War Work in England."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell, Volume Two" by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.)  

 

Joseph Pennell: The Belgian Artists

"Sunset Over the Thames" by Emil Claus

"No idea of London in 1914-1915 can be given without mention of the Belgians who invaded it in their flight from the invaders of their country. Joseph Pennell's sympathy was great for the artists who had flown with the crowd - horror, sadness was in all their eyes. Pennell felt they would have been wiser to stay at home, but now they were in London, what he could do to lighten their exile, he did. He opened his doors wide to them, advised them, put them up at clubs, introduced them to dealers and colour men, was their guide to the beauty of London, which his studio windows first revealed to them.

They would stand staring out, as the twilight deepened and the searchlights played, all très émotionale, they would say. Later on, Emil Claus, asked by someone what impressed him most in London, the Tower? St. Paul's? Westminster? No, was his answer, he had seen nothing in London more wonderful than 'l'atelier de M. Joseph Pennell.' He treated them not as refugees to be kind to, but as friends, fellow artists with whom it was good to talk over his dinner table, as in France or Italy or their own Belgium he might have talked with them over coffee at the café. 

Gradually, they became interested in lithography, and the talk was of stone and paper, chalk and stump, transferring and printing. It led them back to work, and they his practical help. The only two artists who had done things for them as friends were Sargent and Pennell."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell, Volume Two" by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.)  

Joseph Pennell: Our Philadelphia

"Joseph Pennell's success with the Panama prints encouraged him to use lithography for the one hundred five illustrations in 'Our Philadelphia," upon which he now set to work. No artist's eyes have been keener for the picturesqueness of the modern world than Pennell's and he was stirred by the arrangement of the tall skyscrapers rising, story after story, above the little red brick and white marble streets. He did not waste his time lamenting the past. He drew what survived of it and got what he could out of the present.

His reputation as a lithographer was strengthened by this book, an unrivalled presentment of his native town as it was at the beginning of the twentieth century
. He wished to have the prints safely preserved in the archives of the Pennsylvania Historical Society and offered them for an absurdly small sum. The Society refused - only to change its mind in more recent years and buy them for a high price from a dealer.

Socially, Philadephia amused him so inclined was it then, though not later, to accept us as the prophets usually unrecognized in their own country. We were offered a steady course of dinners, luncheons, receptions, visits, ceremonies. Pennell went when they did not interfere with his work. When they interfered, I went without him. Those were the days when to be asked to meet Doctor Weir Mitchell 'placed' one, and we were asked; when to figure in Peggy Shippen's 'Ledger' column was a social certificate, and we figured; when Mr. and Mrs. Talcott Williams were expected to give an evening in their Clinton Street house to every distinguished guest, and they conferred this distinction upon us; when to be invited to the Penn Club was to have the Philadelphia seal set upon one's fame, and the Club not merely invited us but held a reception in our honour. 

The climax came when all Philadelphia was again invited to meet us, this time at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and a hero was made of the once unpopular student. It was an unhoped-for olive branch and Pennell was pleased."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell, Volume Two" by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.)