Renewal came in many forms at the Wharton Esherick Museum this past year. We explored Esherick’s artistic renewal through European travel in the 1930s; the Juried Woodworking exhibition brought about renewed materials and historical techniques; and our Artist-in-Residence Kelly Cobb renewed Letty Nofer Esherick’s art and legacy. One area of renewal we weren’t planning for was an interest in Esherick’s graphic prints. With the artist so readily recognized as a furniture-maker and only a few prints and woodblocks exhibited throughout his 1926 Studio, it’s easy to forget that Esherick worked as a printmaker for nearly 15 years. However, The Crafted World of Wharton Esherick began remediating this: the show brought 28 of Esherick’s prints out of storage to be framed and hung in museum galleries across the country. Just like they did a century ago, the artist’s prints garnered lots of attention!
WEM took the hint and we dove in. We day-tripped to the city for Wanda Gág: Art for Life’s Sake at the Philadelphia Museum of Art to explore the work of Esherick’s contemporaries and kept the story going at home, exploring the larger field of modern printmaking with materials pulled from WEM’s special collections and archives. We’re pleased to share some of the stories we explored from Esherick’s time as a printmaker.
An Informal Student:
Wharton Esherick’s library is home to a number of books and periodicals related to the graphic arts that he studied while beginning his printmaking practice. Esherick studied the illustrations of Audrey Beardsley and wood engravings by Gwendolen Raverat. Esherick also appears to have been exposed to a number of European and American printmakers working at the cutting edge through subscriptions to avante-garde periodicals like Broom: An International Magazine of Arts and Playboy: a portfolio of art and satire. Esherick studied the works of artists like Paul Gauguin, William Zorach, Max Weber, Félix Vallotton, and Rockwell Kent whose work was included in these magazines, and Esherick would go on to exhibit alongside many of these artists during the mid and late ‘20s.
Esherick particularly admired Rockwell Kent’s graphic work. In Esherick’s eyes, Kent’s work brought a much needed renewal to printmaking at the time. Correspondence between Esherick and Carl Zigrosser—a personal friend, print dealer, and manager of the contemporary print shop Weyhe Gallery in New York where Esherick sold and exhibited prints and sculpture in the ‘20s and ‘30s— gives us a glimpse into the way Esherick felt about his contemporary: “[Kent] has done what is certainly needed in art. He has opened its window and let the fresh air in…. His black and whites are strong emotional bids… full of drama.” Esherick acquired a copy of Kent’s graphic memoir Wilderness (1920) to study through his friend Carl Zigrosser, and the presence of Esherick’s bookplate inside marks this as a significant text. Zigrosser worked closely with Kent, often exhibiting and selling his work through the Weyhe Gallery, and he likely sent Wilderness to Esherick from the attached Weyhe bookstore.
Early Mentorship and Exhibitions:
Zigrosser was also an early champion of Esherick’s black and whites. The two met in Fairhope, Alabama during the early 1920s, and Zigrosser was instrumental in exhibiting Esherick’s work at the Weyhe Gallery in New York, connecting him with the other galleries and curators in the city, and in the process, the wider world of contemporary artists—like Rockwell Kent—working in the graphic arts. Zigrosser’s bread and butter was to promote the work of living artists, encourage artists to try their hand at printmaking, and change Americans’ taste from Old Masters and Victoriana to this new era of modern art. Zigrosser also encouraged Esherick to experiment in other printmaking techniques such as etching. While the Weyhe Gallery had been showing and selling Esherick’s prints from as early as 1924, Zigrosser only invited Esherick for a solo show of sculpture in 1927 rather than prints. Esherick made a print to illustrate the small exhibition pamphlet, highlighting and riffing on Weyhe’s tiled checkerboard facade done by his friend and fellow artist Henry Varnum Poor.
However, Esherick exhibited in dozens of print exhibitions around the United States and abroad during his decade-and-a-half as working at the press. In his first decade of printmaking, Esherick sent prints out for exhibitions in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Chicago, and the 1932 summer olympics in Los Angeles. Esherick’s print Barnyard, Pennsylvania took a trip in 1928 to be exhibited in the Exposition de la Gravure Moderne Américaine (translated as Contemporary American Prints) at the National Library in Paris. Over these years, Esherick carved and engraved hundreds of blocks and his prints also illustrated numerous books, periodicals, small publications, and advertisements.
Turning the Page on Printmaking:
Esherick’s printmaking practice began to dwindle by the mid-1930s as his interior design and furniture commissions began to take up more and more of his time. Esherick only carved a handful of blocks in the first half of the decade between commissions for Helene Fischer, the Hessian Hills School, Marjorie Content, the Hedgerow Theatre, and a Harness Room in Mt. Kisco, New York. Esherick would almost completely leave the press behind by 1935 as the massive renovation project for the Curtis Bok residence in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania got underway. Two years later, Esherick sent his latest print and only print made that year, The Concert Meister to his friend Carl Zigrosser, to show and sell through the Weyhe Gallery as he’d been doing for over a decade. By this point in time, Esherick was well aware that the press was getting less and less use. “If I ever get finished with furniture and ‘interior decorating?’ Wharton wrote to Zigrosser, “I will probably do some more prints.” It doesn’t appear that Esherick carved or engraved any new prints after this; he would however, restrike blocks for inclusion in retrospective exhibitions in the 1960s.
Regardless of his progressively dwindling print output during the 1930s, Wharton Esherick was recognized as a significant contemporary printmaker in America by the end of that decade. The print February was included in the 1937 American Block Print Calendar that the Works Progress Administration put together to support working American artists and bring their work into American homes. The calendar was designed so that weekly pages could be torn out and the prints matted and framed to hide the days and dates along the bottom of the page.
Diving into Esherick’s time as a printmaker highlights how robust print culture was in the United States at this particular moment. With a proliferation of arts magazines, small, avante garde publications, galleries, clubs, and museums working with the express purpose of supporting contemporary artists meant the opportunities to get artwork into the world was rather plentiful. Early opportunities to exhibit his prints at places like the Weyhe Gallery helped to get Esherick further established as an artist, and in part, led to his later success in other mediums like furniture and sculpture. While rather brief, this decade-and-a-half of printmaking were pivotal years that led to those burgeoning practices Esherick is so well known for today.
Post written by Public Programs & Collections Manager Ethan Snyder
December 2025