Fritz Eichenberg: Artist of the Book
When: Through Feb. 27
Where: Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery
With its envelope-pushing Difficult Art exhibition still warming the gallery walls, Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery returns to safer — but no less compelling — ground with this series of 40 illustrations by German artist Fritz Eichenberg.
Cutting his teeth as an American immigrant in the dark years of Weimar Europe, Eichenberg's illustrations of books by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Poe and the Brontë sisters match the ominous tone of the times. Accompanying the illustrations is a self-portrait of Eichenberg with many of the authors in the exhibition, and the original woodblock for the cover of The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of Dorothy Day, along with the book itself.
From the press release:
Fritz Eichenberg’s life was shaped by his firsthand experience of World War I in Cologne, Germany, and his immigration to the United States in 1933 as Germany was preparing for another war. Eichenberg was a highly sensitive person with a quick eye, a sharp wit, a passionate love of literature, and an equally intense commitment to the truth. He combined these qualities to produce several careers’ worth of work as a political cartoonist, book illustrator, religious radical (he was a major contributor to the newspaper of the Catholic Worker, a left-leaning movement founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Marin in 1933), and distinguished educator. His images, published in newspapers, magazines, portfolios, and more than one hundred books, have reached countless numbers of people. He was, in the best sense of the word, a popular artist, one who communicated to a wide audience his unique vision while maintaining the highest technical and ethical standards.
More images of Eichenberg's Jane Eyre illustrations are after the jump.
