(By Albert Christ-Janer - with chapters by Arnold Blanch &...)
By Albert Christ-Janer - with chapters by Arnold Blanch & Adolf Dehn - Large 9.5x12.5" 132 pages of text 126 plates mostly black and white and a few single color. Copyright 1946 thus a First Edition, published by University Chicago Press.
Boardman Robinson was a Canadian-American artist, books illustrator and political cartoonist born on September 6, 1876
Background
Boardman Robinson was born in Somerset, Nova Scotia, Canada on 06. 09. 1876. He was the son of John Henry Robinson, a sea captain, and Lydia Jane Parker. In 1885 his family moved to Penarth, near Cardiff, Wales, where Robinson attended private schools before returning to Nova Scotia after his father's death in 1890.
Education
At the age of eighteen he enrolled at the Massachusetts Normal Art School in Boston; he supported himself by working as an elevator operator. In 1898 he went to Paris and spent two years at the cole des Beaux-Arts and the Academie Colarossi. He then studied independently in Italy. In March 1900 he went to San Francisco, where with Arthur Putnam he attempted to establish the San Francisco Art Students' League. The following year he returned to Paris
Career
In 1904 he settled in New York. Unable at first to sell his work, Robinson worked as an investigator for the Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor. After a while he began to find a market in magazines for his strong black-and-white drawings, and this work led him in due course to newspapers. From 1907 to 1910 he was cartoonist for the Morning Telegraph. By the outbreak of World War I he had become one of the strongest cartoonists on contemporary political and social themes. In 1915 he and the radical journalist John Reed toured the Balkans and Russia for the Metropolitan Magazine, and Robinson illustrated Reed's book The War in Eastern Europe (1916). He was staff cartoonist of the Masses (1916 - 1917) and Liberator (1918 - 1922), and contributed to the London Outlook and the Baltimore Sun. In his political cartoons Robinson broke with the pen-and-ink tradition and developed a style based on Michelangelo and Daumier, and the French satirists Forain and Steinlen. His work influenced a school of illustration and became a major element in American graphic art. Robinson was also in demand as a book illustrator, especially in the 1920's and 1930's; he is best remembered for The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, Spoon River Anthology, Moby Dick, and Leaves of Grass. In the mid-1920's he became increasingly interested in mural painting. He was the first to break with the mythological subjects of the Beaux-Arts school (traditionally considered the only ones suitable for public buildings). Robinson's murals include A History of Commerce (1929), a group of ten murals in Kaufmann's Department Store, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. ; Man and His Toys (1932), in the R. K. O. (now American Metal Climax) Building, in New York City; and Great Figures in the History of the Law (1937), eighteen fresco panels in the Department of Justice Building, Washington, D. C. They are marked by directness and vigor. With Thomas Hart Benton, he was a major force in the regionalist, social-commentary school that dominated American art during the Great Depression, a school that particularly influenced the mural art of the period, as seen in many WPA-sponsored works. This was in some measure due to his teaching at the Art Students League of New York (1919-1922, 1924 - 1930). When, in 1936, the Colorado Springs, Colorado, Fine Arts Center opened, Robinson became its first director. He served in that post for ten years. A large-scale exhibition of his work was presented there in 1943. Robinson received the Gold Medal of Honor of the New York Architectural League in 1930. The American Academy of Arts and Letters, of which he was also a member, held a major retrospective exhibition of his works soon after his death in Stamford, Connecticut Robinson's drawings and paintings are now held by a number of prominent institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Harrison Gallery, Los Angeles, California; the Denver Art Museum; and the Detroit Institute of Art.
Awarded gold medal, Architectural League of New York, 1930, for murals, Kaufmann’s Store, Pittsburgh, also for mural in Radio-Keith-Orpheum Building, Rockefeller Center, New York, 1932, Department of Justice, Washington, District of Columbia, 1937.
Awarded gold medal, Architectural League of New York, 1930, for murals, Kaufmann’s Store, Pittsburgh, also for mural in Radio-Keith-Orpheum Building, Rockefeller Center, New York, 1932, Department of Justice, Washington, District of Columbia, 1937.
Robinson received the Gold Medal of Honor of the New York Architectural League in 1930.