Benton Spruance, Schilli Maier and Gerorge Harding Exhibit at Lehigh University Art Gallery

 

Quirk’s 1959 major exhibition at Lehigh included works by George Harding, Schilli Maier and Benton Spruance. Earlier we had written about Harding in a post about benefactor Philip Berman’s donation of a Harding painting. (See Harding Berman post here.) This post will focus on Benton Spruance.

Benton Spruance "The Artist as Model" Self Portrait Lithograph

Spruance was born in Philadelphia in 1904 and was educated in local schools.  He studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Graphic Sketch Club.

In both his junior and his senior year at the Academy, he won the William Emlen Cresson Travelling Scholarship, which enabled him to go to France in 1928.  In Paris he studied lithography at the studio of Jacques and Edmond Desjobert.  That same year, he married Winnifred Glover, a source of strength and inspiration throughout his life.

In the 1920’s and 1930’s, when Spruance was on the threshold of his career in art, the preferred medium in print making was etching.  Very small gemlike prints in very large cream colored mats were the fashion, and they appeared frequently on the walls of collectors. 

Benton Spruance, concentrated on lithographs and experimented to develop new techniques that pioneered the use of color.

His gifts as an artist were well-recognized.  His paintings were exhibited widely, and his prize winning prints were shown in New York and other cities.  He also received commissions to paint murals and to illustrate books.

Throughout his career he received many honors, including the Philadelphia Art Alliance Medal of Achievement, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1950, and election to membership in the National Academy of Design and in the American Institute of Architects. In 1959, he would be part of a three man show organized by Francis Quirk at Lehigh University that displayed 46 of his lithographs.

Arrangement for Drums 1941 by Benton Spruance

Memorial 1951 by Benton Spruance

Soliloquay 1941 by Benton Spruance

In 1965 he began a set of prints that are generally regarded as his most masterful works.  These are the twenty six lithographs based on his reading of Moby Dick.  The prints were exhibited for the very first time in 1968.

Spruance was an active participant in the Philadelphia arts community. He was a founder of the Philadelphia chapter of Artists Equity, which helped to give to the individual artist a strong voice in community affairs.  The city of Philadelphia is indebted to Spruance for much of its “public” art, the sculptures in open spaces and works in public buildings, for after his appointment to the Philadelphia Art Commission in 1953, he was instrumental in securing the approval by the city council of an ordinance requiring one percent of the cost of public buildings to be allocated for works of art.

Spruance’s natural gifts as a teacher and administrator were signaled by awards, several honorary degrees, and appointments to administrative positions at various institutions of learning in the Philadelphia area.  Teaching, quite apart from its practical aspects, was to him an important function of the artist, and he brought to this profession a keen understanding of the learning process and a will to share his knowledge in as creative a manner as possible.

Along with his colleagues Jerome Kaplan and Samuel Maitin, he helped establish Prints in Progress, a program designed to bring printmaking directly to the young people of Philadelphia’s public schools through demonstrations in which they could participate.  Conceived by Walter L. Wolf, the program was then under the auspices of the Philadelphia Print Club.

Spruance died in December 1967.

A terrific web-site on Benton Spruance can be found here.