The best-represented artist in the group is Earl Horter, whose twenty-one city views offer glimpses of New York, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and more. Horter’s etchings from the 1910s provide a connection to street scenes of the previous century, showing the heavy influence of James McNeill Whistler, while his aquatints of the 1930s look much more of a piece with the work of his contemporaries.
John Steuart Curry, John Brown, 1939. All works: Princeton University Art Museum. Gift of Richard Reinis, Class of 1966, and Lois Reinis. Photos: Joseph HuAlso included are roughly two dozen works by American Regionalist artists, including Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry. Highlights among these are Benton’s Aaron (1941)—an intimate portrait of a Black sharecropper—and Curry’s iconic image of the abolitionist John Brown (1939), based on his murals for the Kansas State Capitol. Though the rural subject matter sets these artists apart from those discussed above, they were similarly motivated by populist interests. Other artists included in the Reinises’ gift, such as Howard Cook and Martin Lewis, bridged the gap between rural and urban subjects.
Together the prints represent a significant collection of American Scene, Social Realist, Regionalist, and other prints that highlight changes in the physical and political landscape of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century—a time that saw great upheaval: two world wars, the Great Depression, agrarian desperation, and urban expansion. The time was, as Reinis avers, a “creative crucible” in which the work of these artists was forged.
Jun Nakamura Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings