THE W.P.A. PRINTS OF
JOLAN GROSS BETTELHEIM
by Tony Fusco, Fusco & Four, Boston
Jolan Gross Bettelheim (Hungarian/American, 1900-1970) was widely acclaimed from the late 1920s through the 1940s for her prints of industrial scenes. A winner of numerous awards at the time, her work is now held by several museums. She created only about 40 prints in her lifetime, generally printed in very small editions. No catalog raisonne yet exists on her work.
Born in Hungary, she received some formal education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna, and the Academic fur bildende Kunst in Berlin. In 1925 she married a Hungarian/American and moved to Cleveland, Ohio where she studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art School.
"Transmission Line (Control)"
From 1928 through 1937 she submitted prints to the annual contest sponsored by the Cleveland Museum of Art, and won several prizes. During the 1930s, she also exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; and she would later exhibit at the National Academy of Design, the Library of Congress and numerous museums nationwide.
In the mid-1930s, Bettelheim was commissioned to create 12
prints for the Graphics Workshop of the W.P.A./Federal Arts Project.
The Workshop, headed by printmaker Kalman Kubinyi (1906-1973),
was funded in 1935, When funding ran out, Bettelheim, like other
artists in the program, was laid off in May, 1936. Thus, all of
her W.P.A. works date from 1935-1936, and represent some of her
most ground-breaking modernist interpretations of "A machine
age", as well as "ash can" subjects, with titles
such as
"Gates & Bridges", "Blast Furnace",
and"Dilapidated Section"
While exact edition sizes are unknown, these W.P.A. works were printed in very small editions: rarely more than 25. The Cleveland Museum of Art holds a complete collection of the artist's 12 W.P.A. commissions, on permanent loan from the federal government.
"Gates & Bridges"
She worked in several media, but her best imagery is in lithography, which she in fact learned from Kalman Kubinyi. Interestingly however, drypoint was the first media which she mastered. Even in her lithographs there is an exactness of line which often eludes lithographers. After funding ran out to commission artists, the Graphics Workshop continued to operate to some degree as an educational agency. In 1938, the year that Bettelheim moved to New York, the Workshop assembled a number of "Print Process Portfolios" to demonstrate printmaking techniques, and selected one of her drypoints, entitled "Industrial Section" as an example of that media.
In her best work, Bettelheim takes industrial and architectural structures such as bridges, factories, and power plants, and reinterprets their forms in a modernist style. Through simplifying shape and volume, and often working from a strongly angled perspective, the forms come to represent their own essences: industrial force, energy, power, or speed.
Because of this, it has been said that her style is derived from Futurism, the early 20th century Italian avant-garde design movement. However, there is also a decidedly Cubist element to her work, and its direct source may not have been the painters of Paris, but the architects of Prague. Czech Cubism, a short-lived and long-ignored pre-World War I design revolution, applied ideas from Cubist painting to architecture and furnishings with exaggerated angles and opposing shadows.
Though a staunch Communist, in her early works there are few political overtones apparent in her depictions of industrial subjects. Later works, however, including an early 1940s work entitled "Fascism", do indeed have strong political overtones.
She moved to the borough of Queens in New York City in 1938 and there is no evidence that she created or exhibited prints again until 1942. Her only one-woman show in New York was hosted by the Durand-Ruel Galleries in 1945, which mounted an exhibition of her pastels.
In 1956, the death of her husband, psychiatrist Frigyes Bettelheim, coupled with the anti-Communist political climate of McCarthyism, caused the artist to leave America and return to Hungary, taking all of her unsold works with her.
Her birthplace, which had changed hands between Czechoslovakia and Hungary, was Hungarian again, but she arrived just one month before an attempted overthrow of the Soviet system there. Her pro-Communist views made her an outsider in her own country, and she apparently lived the rest of her life disheartened and in semi-seclusion. There is no evidence that she ever made prints again, and she died in Budapest in 1972.
Today, prices on her prints range from just under $1,000 to more than $6,000.
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Acknowledgements and References:
We gratefully acknowledge information provided by the Department of Prints and Drawings, Museum of Fine Arts, Cleveland, Ohio.
Clinton Adams, American Lithographers: 1900-1960, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1983.
Karen F. Beall, American Prints in The Library of Congress, Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore: 1970.
The Federal Art Project: American Prints from the 1930s University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1985.
Reba and Dave Williams, Jolan Gross Bettelheim: a Hidden Life, Print Quarterly, Vol. 7,Number 3, 1990.
Tony Fusco is Director of Fusco & Four, Boston, specializing in 20th Century Works on Paper