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Charles Turzak's Abraham Lincoln Charles Turzak’s Abraham Lincoln: Biography in Woodcuts (1933) MARK B. POHLAD Visitors at Chicago’s Century of Progress exhibition in 1933 beheld an intriguing sight while strolling among the historically reconstructed buildings—Chicago artist Charles Turzak (1899–1986) sitting in the re-created Lincoln-Berry store carving wood blocks. He was creating images of Lincoln’s life, including ones of his birth cabin, self-education, law practice, political career, and assassination. Before the fair was over, Turzak had compiled the thirty-six black-and-white prints into a pri- vately printed book, Abraham Lincoln: Biography in Woodcuts (Chicago, 1933). In 2009 Dover Publications produced a version of it, bringing Turzak’s project to a wider public.1 Unfortunately, their addition of so much accompanying text, mostly biographical information about Lincoln and excerpts from his speeches, defeats the wordless, graphic biography Turzak originally intended. No other printmaker—indeed, no other artist—made such a sustained body of Lincoln imagery in the 1930s.2 And Turzak’s depiction of the life of the sixteenth president is visually the most modern and race-conscious imagining of the Lincoln saga up to that time. In its Depression-era populism and theatrical ex- pressivity Abraham Lincoln: Biography in Woodcuts dramatically reflects its civic and national cultural milieu. Abraham Lincoln: Biography in Woodcuts is also a visual expression of the Chicago Literary Renaissance, a flowering of writing, printing, and cultural activity from 1910 to 1950. Like the writing of Carl Sandburg, 1. An Abraham Lincoln Tribute: Featuring Woodcuts by Charles Turzak, ed. Bob Blaisdell (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2009). 2. Besides the woodcuts he made for his 1933 wordless biography, Turzak made six other woodcuts of Lincoln in the years that followed: Young Abe Lincoln Enters Coles County, Illinois and Lincoln in New Salem were created for the WPA-sponsored portfolio, History of Illinois in Woodcuts, 1935. These can be viewed at: http://www.library.eiu.edu/ artarch/searchArtist.asp?ArtistID=2871. Separate woodcuts include: Birth Cabin (based on the one that appears in Abraham Lincoln: Biography in Woodcuts), Lincoln Portrait, Prairie President, and Student Days, all of which appeared in editions of one hundred each. These can be viewed at: http://home.earthlink.net/~turzak1/page2.html. Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Vol. 34, No. 2, 2013 © 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 2 Turzak’s Abraham Lincoln Sherwood Anderson, or Edgar Lee Masters, Turzak’s pictures use vernacular forms to reveal the pathos of a regional subject. By his choices of what to depict and the sequencing of his images Turzak composed a Lincoln biography as distinctively as that of any writer. He recognized that, referring to himself as the “artist-author” of his book, limiting himself to neither one nor the other. He also claimed, accurately as it turns out, that his was the first ever such wordless bi- ography on any historical figure.3 Surprisingly, Turzak’s book has not been treated in the Lincoln literature or in the relatively new research about the graphic novel. Nor have art historians considered it. Turzak’s parents—coal miners who had immigrated from Czecho- slovakia—first settled in Streator, Illinois, then moved to Nokomis, Illinois, where Charles grew up.4 As a child, Charlie whittled monkey figures out of peach pits and as a teenager made violins. While still in high school, Turzak won a one-hundred-dollar prize in a Purina Mills drawing contest. Their art director suggested that he enroll at the Art Institute of Chicago, which he attended from 1920 to 1923. Industrious and entrepreneurial, Turzak freelanced in advertising, sold insurance, and taught printmaking at Chicago’s Academy of Fine Arts. A trip to Europe in 1929 exposed the young artist to avant-garde art and to the works of the pioneers of the graphic novel. Marriage followed in 1931, to Florence Cockerham (1902–1999), a journalism student at Northwestern University. She was passionately devoted to his career and helped him conquer his childhood stutter. Turzak borrowed fifty dollars from Florence’s wedding gift to pay for the high-quality paper on which he printed the Lincoln biography woodcuts.5 In turn, he dedicated the book “To Florence.” In the 1920s and early 1930s Turzak illustrated books and made prints of Chicago’s famous buildings and sites.6 He was one of the earliest artists to join the Works Progress Administration (WPA), 3. Charles Turzak, prospectus for Abraham Lincoln: Biography in Woodcuts, 1, Prospec- tuses for Books on Abraham Lincoln, 1887—[present], Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, Illinois. 4. Turzak’s only child, Joan Turzak Van Hees, maintains her father’s archives in her home in Orlando-Lake Como, Florida, and frequently discusses it in local talks and in schools. The online biography she maintains—http://home.earthlink.net/~turzak1/ index.html—is a major source of information on the artist in the absence of a scholarly biography. 5. “Carving Out Fame: Miner’s Son Abandons Coal to Work with Hands at Art,” Literary Digest, June 27, 1936, 22. 6. Turzak made four woodcut illustrations of Chicago buildings for John Ashenhurst and Ruth L. Ashenhurst, All About Chicago (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933). Mark B. Pohlad 3 in 1934, and in that capacity painted murals for the (Old) Chicago Main Post Office and the post office in Lemont, Illinois.7 He also produced a WPA-sponsored portfolio, History of Illinois in Woodcuts, in 1935.8 Turzak had parlayed his early gift for wood-carving into a budding career in art, one that was increasingly tied to local and historical subjects. When plans for the Century of Progress were an- nounced, the enterprising Turzak desperately wanted to be part of it.9 Organizers may have agreed to his request to carve his blocks in public view because such a sight would not have appeared anach- ronistic. After all, a man working on a piece of wood with hand tools was something one might have seen in Lincoln’s own time.10 But David A. Beronä has observed that: “The irony of this display was that Turzak was demonstrating the oldest graphic medium of reproducing images at a fair that had technological innovation as its theme. He demonstrated the use of the woodcut, considered to be the first medium for the dissemination of visual information to the masses.”11 Indeed, it is odd to think of Turzak sitting and working amidst faux-historical log buildings because he was a passionate devotee of modernist architecture and even a friend of Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1938 the progressive architect Bruce Goff (1904–1982) built a house for Turzak in Park Ridge, Illinois, that is now a Chicago Landmark. But the irony extends even further, for Turzak’s Lincoln woodcuts have a dual character. They are meant to look folksy and rustic, suggestive of the reconstructed environment of the Century of Progress’s Lincoln Village. But they are also undeniably avant-garde, both in their genre—the wordless graphic biography—and in their sources in modern art. Similarly, Lincoln is portrayed in Turzak’s woodcuts both as an American folk legend and as something of a contemporary actor who expresses the anguish of his story. This 7. The mural Canal Boats (1937–38) is based on a slightly earlier print, Turzak’s River and Canal Boats (1935). 8. These can be viewed on permanent display at the St. Charles (Illinois) Public Library and at its website, http://www.library.eiu.edu/artarch/displayAll.asp?LibraryID=819). 9. In 1931, with Henry Chapman, Turzak produced a large (57 x 95cm) illustrated tourist’s map of Chicago with all the sites noted, including the future site of the Century of Progress (Tudor Press: Boston). It is illustrated in Robert A. Holland, Chicago in Maps: 1612–2002 (New York: Rizzoli, 2005), 194–95. 10. It is worth noting that although Turzak was carving his blocks at the fair, he was not printing his woodcuts. Although the colophon in Turzak’s book is emphatic that the prints were actually made at the fair, photographs and first-hand testimony are still lacking. In any case, he was not dressed in period costume. Conversation with Joan Turzak Van Hees, September 14, 2011. 11. Beronä, preface to An Abraham Lincoln Tribute, xi. 4 Turzak’s Abraham Lincoln duality reflects the historical and progressive aims of the fair and more generally the conflicted socio-political atmosphere of the 1930s. Making his woodcuts in a public venue—essentially “performing” the art-making process—is unique in the history of Lincoln imagery. But Turzak had seen something like it before. While a student at the Art Institute of Chicago he undoubtedly saw professor Lorado Taft (1860–1936) deliver one of his well-known “Clay Talks.” Taft, while speaking to the audience about the history of sculpture, gradually transformed a clay bust of an attractive young woman into an old crone. Another example of an artist working directly in public view was Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (1886–1957). In 1932 he was com- missioned to paint images of the history of Detroit in the Garden Court of the Detroit Institute of Art.12 Turzak must certainly have known of Rivera’s high profile and well-publicized art performance, especially as it occurred at exactly the time of the fair. In any case, Turzak was not shy about working where people could see him. He was a familiar sight sketching on the street in Chicago, along the lakeshore, and in restaurants.13 At the nadir of the worst financial crisis in America’s history, Chi- cago mounted an ambitious world’s fair.
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