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- Featured Artist
HARTWELL YEARGANS: MASTER PRINTMAKER
1915 - 2005
In February of 2007, Swann Galleries in New York mounted an exhibition and auction of prints by African-American printmakers inaugurating their new department devoted to the works of African-American artists. Among the artists in the show was Hartwell Yeargans who was an important figure of the American and European art scenes as well as the civil rights movement in the United States. He became a member of SAGA in 2005 and died later that year.
Hartwell Yeargans was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1915. His initial education in the arts was at Lincoln High School, where he majored in sign painting from 1930-1933. In 1936 he moved to New York to join his older brother, the artist James
Conroy Yeargans, who had studied with famed muralist, Aaron Douglas. James was working on the WPA murals in Harlem Hospital. He introduced Hartwell to many prominent African-American artists of the Harlem Renaissance and to younger artists who were becoming well-known such as Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Roy DeCarava, Robert Blackburn, and Norman Lewis.
During World War II, Hartwell worked at ship drafting for the defense industry. After the war he enrolled in the Art Students League in New York City, studying painting and drawing under Morris Kantor and anatomy with Robert Beverly Hale from 1948 to 1951. In the late 1960s, he took up printmaking, and made it the focus of his work through the 1970’s. He studied printmaking techniques with Tom Yamamoto at Goddard College, Vermont, from 1968 to1971 earning a B.A. in Fine Arts and Art Education. He also was Instructor of Printmaking at the Brooklyn Museum Art School from 1969 to 1971 and at Stuyvesant High School from 1969 to 1971.
He had his first solo exhibition at the Matrix Gallery in 1955 while leading the Lower Eastside Neighborhood Association’s Visual Committee and showing in the Village Art Center. During the following decades his art was included in group exhibitions in New York, Connecticut, Maine, Mexico City, San Miguel de Allende, and in exhibitions of African-American art at the Karamu Gallery, Cleveland (1969), Philadelphia Civic Center (1969), at the Whitney Museum, New York (1971, and in African-American Art on Paper from the Cochran Collection, Clark Atlanta University, Atlanta, Georgia (1991). In 1986 and in 2005 he had major solo exhibitions of his paintings and prints at Parsons School of Design and at Monique Goldstrom Gallery in New York.
Recently the writers of this article visited Hartwell’s wife, Pauline Roony Yeargans in her studio where she stores much of Hartwell’s works. She is an accomplished printmaker in her own right and a member of SAGA. She showed us many of Hartwell’s prints and told us about his career and techniques, and their life together. They met in the 1960’s at the Village Art Center sketch class on Grove Street in Greenwich Village. Hartwell was in charge of hiring the models, setting up and putting away the model stand and collecting a small fee from the artists who attended the sketch class. Hartwell would create two or three renderings of the same composition using completely different colors and adding various elements which created an environment and gave the viewer a feeling of being at home. He worked very spontaneously and quickly, primarily in watercolor and ink on paper and was interested in capturing the movement and the life of the sitter.
In the 1960’s, a group of master African-American artists formed a group called Spiral. It included Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Richard Mayhew, James Yeargans, Hale Woodruff, William Majors, Emma Amos, Reginald Gammon and Merton Simpson, among others. Hartwell attended exhibits and supported the activities of this group since his older brother was a member. Members of Spiral, as well as Pauline and Hartwell, participated in civil rights marches and as artists and activists they had similar goals and ideals.
Among the works that Pauline showed us were landscapes of Martha’s Vineyard painted in watercolor on paper, “en plein air” during a summer vacation in 1963. There are views of Menemsha with boats tied up at the piers, Lambert’s Cove and Gay Head. These compositions show his ability to view a complex scene and capture its essence in rhythmical brush strokes and strong ink lines. He liked to use light, airy watercolor washes to set a mood and to outline shapes with broad black strokes made with pen and ink. Often he would vary the width of the lines by using different types of pens, thin metal points or wide bamboo pens. As Pauline described it, he would play one medium against the other as counterpoint as when one listens to a delicate flute playing a melody and then introducing another instrument with a different timbre such as a guitar, which would play in a lower register.
The art of the woodcut became a primary focus for Hartwell during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Hartwell experimented with automatic drawing which influenced his use of fluid lines and free, cubistic figures that appeared in his woodcuts. He was influenced by Juan Gris in particular, Japanese art and jazz. The world of music and musicians played a large role in his art and many of his images are of musicians. In 1970 he collaborated with Duke Ellington and his orchestra in a performance of music and paintings at the Festival of the Arts, Long Island University, New York. In 1972, the Associated American Artists Gallery, New York, commissioned Music Makers, a multi-colored woodcut in an edition of 100. It was offered for distribution in Collector’s World, 1993.
Heartwell worked on his preparatory drawings quickly, often from imagination and used a double transfer for reversing the image on the block. He developed an expertise in multi-block color woodcuts using up to five blocks, each for a different color. He made a registration board for printing the blocks and allowed the prints to dry thoroughly between color impressions. He also used stencils to add extra colors in aquatint to his prints. He used the knots in the grain of the wood, and extender in the inks. He enjoyed the hands-on feeling of working in wood. He also made prints by using a jigsaw to cut tiny pieces of metal which were re-assembled after inking. Often a surface color was combined with black etched areas. In his etchings, he made extensive use of open biting as well as delicate aquatint done with feather-biting. He produced many color etchings using multiple plates and using ink extender to make some of the layers of color transparent.
In 1971, Hartwell and Pauline traveled to Europe. They had the names of many artists and traveled with a Eurail Pass from Paris, where they visited William Hayter’s print shop and then on to Southern France, Holland, Norway and Denmark. In Copenhagen there was a small community of expatriate African-American artists. There, they made the acquaintance of Walter Williams, who encouraged them to settle there, and in 1971 the Yeargans moved to Copenhagen where they lived and worked until returning to New York in 1981. They exhibited regularly in group and solo shows in Copenhagen with Danish artists and also in France with their American friend Thomas Frey who lived near Paris. From 1982 to 1990, Hartwell taught drawing and printmaking at Parsons School of Design.
Today, Hartwell’s prints and paintings are found in such permanent European collections as the Ballerup Raadhus, Denmark, Frederiksberg Skolen, Copenhagen, and the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. In the United States, his work is in the collections of Georgetown University, Washington, DC, the DuSable Museum, Chicago, Illinois, and Denison University in Granville, Ohio. In New York, Hartwell’s prints have been represented by the AAA galleries*, Ellen Sragow Gallery and Monique Goldstrom .
Pauline is cataloging his works in preparation for a show scheduled for July or August, 2007 at the Essie Green Galleries, in Harlem. At present, his etchings and woodcuts can be seen at the Ellen Sragow Gallery at 73 Spring Street, New York, New York.
Marion Lerner-Levine
Gerald Marcus
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