page_title: Mabel Dwight
section_title: Mature style
hierarchical_section_title: Mabel Dwight / Mature style
caption_attribution_description: English: Mabel Dwight, Backyard, lithograph on stone, 35.7 x 25.1 cm, edition of 25 printed by the Federal Art Project
context_page_description: Mabel Dwight was an American artist whose lithographs showed scenes of ordinary life with humor and compassion. Between the mid-1920s and the early 1940s she achieved both popularity and critical success. In 1936 Prints magazine named her one of the best living printmakers and a critic said she was one of the foremost lithographers in the United States.
context_section_description: Dwight reached the age of 50 in 1925. Having been exposed to lithography when studying in San Francisco, she met the New York art print dealer Carl Zigrosser some time before the outbreak of World War I, and, with his encouragement, traveled to Paris, France in 1926 to spend two years studying lithographic art in the Atelier Duchatel. While in Paris, she made surreptitious sketches showing people engaged in everyday activities—watching puppet shows, sitting in cafés, worshiping at church, browsing stalls by the Seine—and worked up the sketches into lithographic prints. In their posture and gestures as much as their facial expressions, the characters she depicted show their personalities and individual foibles. This aspect of Dwight's mature style is clearly seen in Boulevard des Italiens of 1927 where the temperament of each person is made distinct.
  From her earliest efforts onward, her pictures were artful celebrations of ordinariness. In them, Dwight's empathy for her subjects is apparent as well as her droll sense of humor. When she gave her monkey house print the title The Brothers she was not making fun of the apes or the workmen spectators, but rather the priest who, shown turning his back on the scene, makes the picture into a gentle Darwinian joke. While most of her prints were black and white, a few, including Guignolette (1927), were enhanced by muted colors. As she pulled them off the lithographic stone, she would send proofs to Zigrosser for his critical review and after she returned to New York in 1927 he put her in touch with printmaker George Miller, whose expertise was the equal of the master printers at the Atelier Duchatel.
  Within a year of her return, the Paris prints and the ones she began to make in New York established her as one of America's best lithographic artists. In 1928, Zigrosser gave her a first solo exhibit at the Weyhe Gallery. Reviewing this show, a critic acknowledged Dwight's growing reputation, noted that her prints showed aspects of the humor of city life, and praised her for a style that was "quite without manner or a self-imposed technique." She would later say that she chose print making so as to make her art available to a broad audience at reasonable cost.
  In 1929 the Print Club of Philadelphia gave her a retrospective solo exhibition including all the prints she had made in Paris, Chartres, and New York through the end of the previous year. In a lengthy review, Margaret Breuning of the New York Evening Post wrote that the show contained "gay happy lithographs accomplished by a true artist, whose affectionate pulse is nicely attuned to the heart beats of those she so faithfully depicts."
  Dwight liked to portray New Yorkers in public places and frequently worked in theaters. She would conceal her pencil and paper behind a large handbag in order to sketch performers and members of the audience. In 1928 she worked in Minsky's National Winter Garden, a burlesque theater in the Lower East Side to make a series of lithographs and also illustrated an article, "The Last Days of Burlesque", for the August 1929, issue of Vanity Fair.
  She made drawings of circus performances for an article in the April 1930 issue of Fortune magazine and two years later was given a second solo exhibition at the Weyhe Gallery. In the latter she showed watercolors and drawings as well as lithographic prints. Her subjects were dark ones—old, decrepit houses on Staten Island, a stalking black cat, and graveyards in New Mexico and Paris—as well as the more festive scenes of parties and circus acts for which she had become known. Her lithograph Night Work (1931) is literally dark, but the composition is pleasing rather than jarring and the tone is rather serene than despairing.
  She maintained radical political views throughout her adult life. During the 1930s, she joined one of the Marxist John Reed Clubs and supported another Popular Front organization, the American Artists' Congress. Nonetheless, not wishing to become a propagandist and fearing she would lose sales that she needed to support her precarious exis
caption: Mabel Dwight, Backyard, 1938, lithograph on stone, 35.7 × 25.1 cm, edition of 25 printed by the Federal Art Project
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