Joseph Pennell: More Than a Teacher

Joseph Pennell Working at a 
Printing Press in 1922

"In the beginning of teaching at the Art Students' League, Joseph Pennell was handicapped by the poorly equipped classroom. He knew that students were no less, or perhaps rather more dependent, than artists upon proper technical equipment. He overhauled the studio properties and added to them. One copper-plate press awaited him at the start. Before his second term, he had seven presses. He had asked his friends in Philadelphia and New York for aid in obtaining the right presses and tools. They knew him, knew this thoroughness as craftsman, knew the unselfishness of his enthusiasm, and they had responded generously.

From the first he foresaw the impossibility of managing alone both etching and lithography classes, of hurrying from the student drawing with a needle on a copper plate to the student drawing with chalk on a lithographic stone. The mediums were too distinct, each called for the master's undivided attention. So he applied to the Mechanics' Ohio Institute in Cincinnati, the one American school visited on his travels where he thought lithography was intelligently taught, and in answer to his request Mr. Charles Locke came to the League, first as his assistant, then taking entire charge of the lithographers. Pennell could not have found a more congenial man to work with. Locke, besides being an accomplished technician, shared his enthusiasms, understood his aims and objectives.

As the school prospered with the passing of the months and years, he was full of fresh schemes to perfect it. It was not sufficient to supply proper tools. They must be used in proper surroundings. He had the two classrooms painted black on floor and high dado, white on the upper walls and ceiling, not solely for decorative effect but for concentration of the light. On the black dado he hung enlarged photographs of Rembrandts and Whistlers. In his rooms the greatest masters of the greatest periods must prevail, theirs the tradition it was the duty of his students to carry on. 

No fine exhibition of prints could open at the Met or the Grolier Club that he did not visit it with his class, talking to them in free and easy fashion of the work, its merit, its shortcomings. 'There were heated debates,' Miss Reinthaler says, 'violent discussions as to how this artist got his effect or how he probably did that, which continued on the street cars and sidewalks.' He brought his students to the rooftop of our hotel that they might share his joy in the beauty of New York, and regaled them with chicken salad and ice cream before they went home. He sought and obtained commissions for them, introduced them to museum directors and to art dealers. He himself bought many of their prints without their knowing who was their patron."

To be continued

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

 

Joseph Pennell: Teacher, Art Students League

"Waldorf Astoria Hotel, Thirty-Fourth Street
and Fifth Avenue" by Joseph Pennell

"Mr. Gifford Beal, President of the Art Students' League, had asked Joseph Pennell to take charge of the Etching Class and to start a Lithography Class, beginning with the October term, 1922. His time was limited to one morning a week. 'The most important happening to me,' as he described it. Though hitherto his experience as teacher had been small, his ideas as to the right way of teaching were simple and definite. He would tell his students he could not make artists of them for, as Whistler said, only God Almighty could do that. But he could teach them the craft of etching if they were intelligent and persevering enough to learn. The one thing he forbade them to do was to turn out 'Pennells.' Once the craft was mastered, they were to say on copper what they themselves wanted to say, and to say it in their own way. In the exhibitions of their work, nothing was so striking as the variety in the subjects selected and the manner of treating them.

The truth is he had a genius for teaching, though it might be the last thing expected of a man impatient by nature, compelled by the spirit within to speak the truth, and rich in his supply of invectives. His students, perhaps startled in the beginning, quickly got to understand him and, once understood, he was adored. They realized that, if he was impatient, the fault was theirs; that, if he spoke the truth, it was for their good; that, if his language was picturesque, it served as a goad to drive them on to better work and more intelligent study.

A story they liked to tell at the League was of the young girl from the south, who stood before him trembling, clasping the drawings demanded as test for admission, stammering and stuttering over and over again, 'I am sure you won't like them, Mr. Pennell, I am sure you won't like them,' until he interrupted abruptly, 'I probably won't, but anyway let me see them.' She was stunned into silence as he looked at each in turn, very carefully, told her which were good, which were bad and why, and she had not recovered her speech when he said she could stay. Inevitably, she became one of the most promising and devoted in the class. 

He not only taught his students, but worked out fresh technical problems with them. 'He works with his class as a co-students' one of his pupils wrote of him, 'is as much excited about a discovery, a new way of doing things, an experiment, as we are, and much more so than most of us. He is filled with the spirit of adventure, and is the least conceited, the least opinionated, the most open-minded man I have every met. That is one of the things that contribute to his greatness as a teacher.'" 

To be continued

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

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.)