IDA – Page 10 – Index of Names & Places

About Polly Van Leer

Posted on November 30, 2020 | by IDA

Polly Van Leer, 1894–1974, philanthropist, founder of the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem.

Pauline Henriette Josephine Reubens was born in Amsterdam, the youngest daughter of a securities broker. She married industrialist, philanthropist and circus owner Bernard Van Leer in 1912 and had two sons in 1913 and 1914 respectively. She and her older son Oscar settled in Jerusalem.

Polly Van Leer established the Reubeni Foundation and, in 1959, The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, which today continues her vision of a multi-disciplinary, pluralistic approach to addressing cultural and political issues.

“Awareness of the triple truth—the inseparable connection between all human beings, their inevitable interdependence and the equality of value of their diverse contributions—is a solid foundation and perhaps the only reliable foundation on which a true human brotherhood on earth can be built.¹”

Ismar David created personal and business graphics for Polly Van Leer. In 1954, he sent her his Genesis page from Liber Librorum. She responded:

Ismar David papers, box 4, folder 90, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, RIT.

Dear Mr. David,

I have been abroad for vacation and coming back I find your beautiful present for which I thank you wholeheartedly. I learned from the few personal words printed on it that you live and are well established in America now. I must say I often wondered where you might be in the world and whether you ever will come back to Israel. Many times I needed you for printed matter. Your help and advice.-

Your lettering is very very beautiful. I wish I could hang it, so that I see it before my eyes when I am at my desk. It is really beautiful. We still are in בראשית [the beginning] here in the country and I try my best to do my share that it will be a beginning toward something worthwhile.

My dear Mr. David, I always remember your kind collaboration. Whenever I needed you. I hope you are well and if you have time let me hear from you.

Thanks again your P. van Leer

About Harry Abrams

Posted on November 30, 2020 | by IDA

Harry N. Abrams, 1905–1979, publisher.

Harry Nathan Abrams was born in London and emigrated to the U.S. as a child. His father opened a shoe store in Brownsville, Brooklyn, where the family lived. When he opened a second, fourteen-year-old Harry left school to manage it. Despite his age, he was very adept as a salesman and an object of admiration for his customers as well as himself. Nevertheless, his father went bankrupt two years later and the family lost the stores. Encouraged by his mother, he attended the National Academy of Art and then the Art Students League, studying with painter John Steuart Curry. After first working for an art service, Abrams got a job with an advertising agency, where he began working with publishers, including the Book-of-the-Month Club. In 1936, he went to work for Book-of-the-Month Club and stayed until he started his own publishing company in 1949.

Harry Abrams was agressive and innovative. He used direct marketing. He made inexpensive paperback art books which sold well. Early on, he had imported books from Europe and had them translated into English. A few years later, his own original publications sold widely in Europe. The company became the largest publisher of art and illustrated books in America. Abrams retired from the firm in 1977 and began Abbeville Press with one of his sons.

Harry Abrams had started his eponymous firm with just $100,000 in capital. In the those first few rocky years, he gave Ismar David the work that would validate David’s employability to U.S. Immigration officials.

About Clare Leighton

Posted on November 30, 2020 | by IDA

Clare Leighton, 1898–1989, illustrator, author.

Clare Leighton belonged to the generation devastated by the Great War. She was just seventeen when her brother Roland, fell at Hébuterne, France in 1915.

Leighton grew up in St. John’s Wood, London, the daughter of successful writers of popular adventure books. Her father and and Uncle Jack, an artist and illustrator, encouraged her drawing and painting. She studied at the Brighton School of Art, the Slade School of Fine Art and the Central School of Arts and Crafts, where she got hands on experience with commercial printing. In 1939, after the dissolution of a long relationship with journalist Henry N. Brailsford, she left England for the United States.

Leighton is most famous for depictions of British agricultural life and the natural world. Her work appeared in literary and progressive journals, as well as books, written by herself and others.

About Ruth and Jim McCrea

Posted on November 28, 2020 | by IDA

James C. McCrea, 1920–2013, graphic artist, typographer.

Ruth Pirman McCrea, 1921–2016, graphic artist, illustrator, author.

Ruth Pirman, born in Jersey City, New Jersey, met James McCrea, born in Peoria, Illinois, at the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida. They married on the Fourth of July, 1943. After James returned from military service, the couple moved to New York City, then settling in Bayport, Long Island in 1956. They worked both independently and together for many of the major publishing houses in New York. Collaborations included the Hemingway jackets for Scribner Library and four childrens’ books that Ruth wrote and illustrated. The AIGA named one of them, The King’s Process, to its 50 best books of the year list. Jim taught typography at Cooper Union for a decade. In 1980 they retired to East Hampton, where Ruth fell victim to a dollhouse obsession, enabled by Jim and often benefitting the Ladies Village Improvement Society.

Their yearly Christmas greetings are gems of artistry, professionalism and humaneness.

A Christmas greeting from Jim and Ruth McCrea, 1949.

A Christmas greeting from Jim and Ruth McCrea, 1952.

McCrea greeting 1968 — A Christmas greeting from Jim and Ruth McCrea, 1968, featuring one of her doll houses.

The Art and Science of Typography

Posted on November 27, 2020 | by IDA

In April of 1958, the Type Directors Club of New York and the World Affairs Center, New York organized a one day conference, The Art and Science of Typography: An International Seminar of Typographic Design, at the Silvermine Artists Guild in New Canaan, Connecticut. More that 500 attendees from around the world, including Willem Sandberg (Netherlands), Herbert Spencer, Yusaka Kamekure, Otl Aicher and Cipes Pineles participated.

Ismar David and Hortense Mendel attended some of the functions. Hortense described her involvement in the whirlwind of events:

In the “extra-curricular” department I’m just finishing with whatever little help I’ve been on the Type Directors seminar. In addition to the day at Silvermine, and the following one there too for a panel, there was the following evening in New York and the one after that with more panels and speakers. There was a Type Directors lunch on Tuesday and the A.I.G.A Book Clinic lunch on Wednesday. There was a C.R. boat ride for the foreign guests and some designers they wanted to meet on Friday. More meetings with artists on Friday evening. Sunday (yesterday) a trek to the beautiful home and studio of Lester Beall in Brookfield Center, Conn. How our distinguished guests from Japan, England, Holland and Italy stood up under it, I don’t know. We did because we’re used to it, but I think they now feel that all Americans are slightly crazy and most designers here (judging by Paul Rand’s and Lester Beall’s places) are fabulously wealthy.¹

Place card for the Silvermine Conference — Place card for the Art and Science of Typography International Seminar, April, 1958.

About the Eichenbergs

Posted on November 14, 2020 | by IDA

Fritz Eichenberg, 1901–1990, illustrator, word engraver, teacher, social activist.

Antonie Eichenberg, 1924–1995, graphic artist, book designer.

As a young teenager, Fritz Eichenberg endured the privations of World War I in Cologne, where he was born. He knew even then that he wanted to express his social concerns through caricature and art. After an apprenticeship at a print shop, where he learned lithography, he attended the Academy of Graphic Arts in Leipzig, studying with Hugo Steiner-Prag, an prominent book illustrator of the era.

Eichenberg lived and worked in Berlin for 10 years, where he did satirical illustrations for newspapers and magazines. He and his family emigrated to the United State, settling in New York City. He taught at the New School for Social Research and Pratt Institute while continuing his prolific career as a book illustrator. Best known for his woodcuts of dark psychological literary works, like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and the Brontës, he also illustrated childrens’s books. He joined the Religious Society of Friends in 1940 and met Dorothy Day at a conference in 1949. He deeply admired her work and frequently contributed illustrations to The Catholic Worker. In 1966, he moved to Rhode Island and chaired the the art department at the University of Rhode Island at Kingston.

Antonie Schulze-Forster Eichenberg was born in Berlin. She designed several of her husband’s books and was known for her graphic posters.

Eichenberg invitation — Invitation to a preview reception, Fritz Eichenberg, The Wood and the Graver: Fifty Years of Wood Engraving, 1979.

Animal Proverbs, illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg

Animal Proverbs, illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg, designed and printed by Robert Gutchen at the Biscuit City Press.

About Xanti Schawinsky

Posted on November 11, 2020 | by IDA

Alexander Schawinsky, 1904–1979, multi-genre, multi-media, Bauhaus-influenced artist-dynamo.

Xanti Schawinsky was born in Basel, Switzerland. After a short time, studying in Berlin, he enrolled in the Bauhaus in Weimar where Albers, Gropius, Kandinsky, Klee and Moholy-Nagy were among his teachers. In addition to drawing and painting, his pursuits included those of a performer, musician and stage designer. Schwawinsky left Germany for Italy in 1933, where he founded an advertising studio and created what we today consider classic posters and product designs of the 1930s. In 1935 he left Italy for London and in 1936, London for the United States. Interestingly, he worked on the 1939 World’s Fair (North Carolina and Pennsylvania pavilions). He lived, work and taught in New York during the 1940s and 50s, spending more and more time in Europe after 1961.

Schawinsky was featured in the April 1937 edition of PM Magazine and during his time in New York, surely had typesetting done at The Composing Room. This print, The Lovers, is presumably a wedding gift.

The Lovers by Xanti Schawinsky, 1951. Inscribed to Hortense and Ismar, 1953.

About Bob Boyajian

Posted on November 11, 2020 | by IDA

Robert Boyajian, 1928–2019, graphic designer, calligrapher, art director.

Rhode Island born Bob Boyajian entered the Navy upon his graduation from High School. After his discharge, he studied at the School of Practical Art (later the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University), one of the first private studio schools in the country. Graduating with honors, he spent 40 years as a commercial artist in New York, beginning as a lettering artist for the Norcross Greeting Card Company and moving to J. Walter Thompson, where he eventually became an art director. He freelanced for many years for clients such as Cartier, Macy’s, Tiffany and the New York Public Library. He conducted many workshops in calligraphy. Left-handed himself, he was especially helpful guiding other left-handers. In 1996, he retired to Rhode Island, where he stayed creatively active.

About John Depol

Posted on November 11, 2020 | by IDA

John DePol, 1913–2004, wood engraver, illustrator.

Upon the early death of his father, John DePol left high school and went to work to help support his mother and two younger siblings. He had always been a keen sketcher and became fascinated by etching he saw in a shop window near where he worked. He taught himself etching and printing and in the Spring of 1935 made his own first print using a manually operated clothes wringer. He learned lithography nights at the Art Students League of New York and studied briefly at the College of Art in Belfast while he was stationed there during WWII, but he remained largely self-taught. After his return to civilian life, he married Thelma Rotha and worked on Wall Street and then for a commercial printing firm. However he continued making prints and refining his skills, to become one of the premier wood engravers of his time. His prolific output includes innumerable independent works as well as collaborations with The Allen Press, The Pickering Press, Hammer Creek Press and the Typophiles, whose meetings he attended with his wife Thelma. In old age, he looked as noble as any American monument and as finely-chiseled as one of his own engravings.

Greeting card from Joh DePol — Greeting card from John DePol, 1988.

About Graphos Stationery

Posted on November 1, 2020 | by IDA

Graphos Stationery, shop on Julian’s Way (later, 1 Kind David Street), Jerusalem

According to his immigration documents, Heinz Freudenthal, “merchant.”, was born in 1909 in Breslau and arrived in Palestine on June 4, 1936. He founded Graphos, which was for many years the best shop for artist and draughting supplies in Jerusalem. Saul Bellow recounts how, after the sidewalk on King David Street had been narrowed, a traffic light was installed directly in front of the store. Old Mr. Freudenthatl comlained and Teddy Kolleck personally intervened to get it removed.¹

In 1943, Ismar David designed the interior of the shop. On December 7, 1952, Heinz Freudenthal registered the trademark that Ismar David designed for him. Rosa David had Freudenthal cousins, but we don’t, as yet, know if Heiz was one of them.

Letter from Heinz Freudenthal, Graphos Stationery, Jerusalem. Ismar David papers, box 1, folder 2, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, RIT.

May 30, 1958

Dear Imi,

Although you are some kilometers away from me, I want to ask your advice: my store is still almost unchanged [from] how you set it up just 15 years ago. Since I now work almost completely alone, I need a sales table in which, as I envision it, there are English characteristics, where the customer can see a larger selection by looking over the sales table, and at the same time, I can sell a larger variety of articles from this sales table.
I am looking now for a drawing of a sales table and wanted to ask you whether and how you can help me and if you want to. Store furnishings that I often see pictured in our industry newspapers are meant for larger and wider stores. I would be very grateful to you if you would send me an answer soon, because I would like to use the summer months for construction, if possible.

Many heartfelt thanks
and best regards, also to your wife,

Heinz