Barbara Latham Prints and Multiples
American, 1896-1989
Beginning her career as a commercial artist, Barbara Latham travelled to Taos in 1925 seeking material for a greeting card. Serendipitously, she also found her life partner, Howard Cook, who was similarly looking for ideas for illustrations. Perhaps both were fueled in their quest by the tales of their mutual teacher, Andrew Dasburg, who knew of the energy and stimulation of this artist community. Observing local people and customs, Latham created genre scenes that offer a window into this now-vanished time and place. Her lively illustrations for numerous children’s books are a significant contribution to that graphic art in the mid-20th century.
Born in Walpole, Massachusetts, Latham’s student days included Norwich Art School and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn; but it was contact with the charismatic Dasburg at the Art Students League in Woodstock that opened her world and her view of art. Getting work with companies like Norcross Publishing and Forum magazine, she eventually made her way to Taos. Among all the spirited young artists gathered there, she met Howard Cook, who was designing illustrations for Willa Cather’s Death Comes to the Archbishop. The two married in Santa Fe and began a nomadic life together. The young couple made their way to Paris, a likely destination for modernist artists. Upon receiving a Guggenheim to study fresco painting in 1932, Cook, along with Latham, took an alternative direction and headed to Taxco, Mexico. At this time, Mexican muralists, such as Diego Rivera, were capturing the attention of progressive artists. During the Depression, both Cook and Latham aligned themselves with a populist ideal. Latham contributed work, such as Fording the Stream and Bear Family, to the American Artists Group, which was founded to produce original prints at affordable prices. When Latham settled in Taos, she was committed to an art of and for the people. Rather than a romanticized re-creation, her choice of subjects was based in common everyday activities, favoring those which brought people together. Providing a livelihood, Latham’s illustrations for children’s books reflected her heartfelt belief in the availability of art for all, and her style of open brushwork contributed to a modernist transformation of this graphic art.
After World War II, Latham experimented with Surrealism and abstraction. Many of her painted genre scenes of the fifties simplify forms in order to intensify the interplay of color and shapes. With minimal background, figures are elegantly drawn to an essence, which seems to both capture their actions and take them out of time. Riders on horses have the same linear classicism of Parthenon sculptures, and the brilliance of figure groupings separate them from the background like a frieze.
Latham and Cook had a long-lived marriage, which was grounded in keeping their creative life separate. Latham even confessed that she did not recognize some of her husband’s work upon exhibition. In 1976, the couple moved to Santa Fe, which became their final home.
©David Cook Galleries, LLCto
1
Overall Width
to
Overall Height
to
1
1
1,162
899
842
802
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
Artist: Barbara Latham
Saturday Morning Market, Taos Plaza, New Mexico, 1950s Figural Linocut Print
By Barbara Latham
Located in Denver, CO
"Saturday Morning (Market, Taos Plaza, New Mexico)" is a striking 1950s modernist linocut print by renowned New Mexican artist Barbara Latham. This vivid print captures a bustling Sa...
Category
Mid-20th Century American Modern Barbara Latham Prints and Multiples
Materials
Linocut
Related Items
The Spire -- New York
By Lawrence Wilbur
Located in Storrs, CT
The Spire -- New York. 1985. Etching and drypoint. 14 1/2 x 11 (sheet 22 1/2 x 18). Trial proof of the second third, prior to the edition of 100. Printed on Rives cream wove paper, on the full sheet with deckle edges. A rich impression in pristine condition, housed in an archival sleeve. This etching has never been matted. Provenance: the artist's estate. Titled, annotated 'third state - trial proof' and signed in pencil. A dramatic view of the Chrysler Building.
Painter and printmaker Lawrence Nelson...
Category
20th Century American Modern Barbara Latham Prints and Multiples
Materials
Drypoint, Etching
Prodigal Son
By Thomas Hart Benton
Located in London, GB
A man raises his hand to his chin, his neck tilted and face turned to look at a dilapidated farmhouse, barely held together by planks of wood and exposed to the elements. Behind him ...
Category
1930s American Modern Barbara Latham Prints and Multiples
Materials
Lithograph
Low Country (South Carolina)
By Elizabeth Verner
Located in Middletown, NY
An enchanting Southern landscape by the mother of the Charleston Renaissance.
A native of Charleston, South Carolina, and educated under the tutelage of Thomas Anshutz at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, O'Neill Verner was a teacher, a mother, an artist, an ardent preservationist, and a skilled autodidact. Having previously focused on painting, in the early 1920s she found herself deeply moved by printmaking as a media, and especially so by the simple, peaceful themes and tableaus she discovered in Japanese art. She embarked on a effort to teach herself Japanese printmaking techniques, and in the process, produced the charming images of every day life in Charleston and its environs that earned her recognition as a cultural icon in her day, and in more modern times, as the mother of the Charleston Renaissance, which flourished well into the 1930s. In 1923 she opened a studio in Charleston where she focused on documenting the local color and the architecture and landscape that distinguishes Charleston as one of the South's most beautiful cities, all the while applying the gentle and poetic thematic sensibilities of Japanese printmaking. O'Neill Verner soon found herself in high demand when municipalities and institutions throughout the country sought commissions from her to document the beauty of their grounds and historic buildings. She worked as far north as the campuses of Harvard and Princeton, and extensively across the South, including in Savannah, Georgia, where through sweeping commissions she was able to marry her love of southern preservation and art. O'Neill Verner was a lifelong learner, and continued a path of edification that led her to study etching at the Central School of Art in London, to travel extensively through Europe, and to visit Japan in 1937, where she studied sumi (brush and ink) painting. She was a founding member of the Charleston Etchers Club, and the Southern States Art League. Her works are represented in the permanent collections of leading museums across the American south, and in major national institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Boston's Museum of Fine Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. O'Neil Verner...
Category
Early 20th Century American Modern Barbara Latham Prints and Multiples
Materials
Archival Paper, Drypoint, Etching
Down the River
By Thomas Hart Benton
Located in London, GB
In this sentimental work from 1939, Benton expresses his admiration for the rural lifestyle of the Midwest. He highlights the connection between man and the land by depicting two fig...
Category
1930s American Modern Barbara Latham Prints and Multiples
Materials
Lithograph
Harold E. Keeler, Water Fall
Located in New York, NY
Harold E. Keeler worked in Hollywood as a set designer. That seems especially important here because the Water Fall looks a little as though it could be a w...
Category
1930s American Modern Barbara Latham Prints and Multiples
Materials
Linocut
Original Americans will Always Fight for Liberty vintage WWII (1943) poster
Located in Spokane, WA
Title: Original 1943 WWII Propaganda Poster - "Americans Will Always Fight for Liberty" - Authentic U.S. Government Issue. Archival linen-backed with the original US Government-issue...
Category
1940s American Modern Barbara Latham Prints and Multiples
Materials
Offset
$850
H 40 in W 28 in D 0.3 in
Evelyn G. Schultz, Typhoon
Located in New York, NY
The only mention I can find of Evelyn G. Schultz is that she was a charter member of the San Diego Watercolor Society. But the medium of the linocut (here on tan paper) was frequentl...
Category
1940s American Modern Barbara Latham Prints and Multiples
Materials
Linocut
Original Southwest Amtrak vintage American travel by train vintage poster
By David Klein
Located in Spokane, WA
Original Amtrak Southwest Amtrak … Takes You Clear Across America vintage travel poster. Amtrack … Takes You Clear Across America tr...
Category
1970s American Modern Barbara Latham Prints and Multiples
Materials
Offset
$680 Sale Price
20% Off
H 40 in W 25 in D 0.05 in
Notre Dame de Paris
By John Taylor Arms
Located in Middletown, NY
A superb, dark impression of a well known scene by Arms.
Etching with aquatint on watermarked handmade F.J. Head & Co. laid paper, 12 3/8 x 13 15/16 inches (315 x 354 mm), full marg...
Category
1920s American Modern Barbara Latham Prints and Multiples
Materials
Handmade Paper, Laid Paper, Etching, Aquatint
Maurice Robert Dey, Rainbow on the Hudson
Located in New York, NY
Biographical information on Maurice Robert Dey is hard to find. He was born on 1899 (or maybe 1900), in Switzerland. As an adult he lived and worked in Woodstock, the NY artists' c...
Category
1930s American Modern Barbara Latham Prints and Multiples
Materials
Linocut
Somewhere in France
By John Taylor Arms
Located in Middletown, NY
Etching on antique cream laid paper with a partial watermark (likely Arches), 12 1/8 x 6 1/8 inches (308 x 156 mm), full margins. Signed and dated in pencil in the lower right margin...
Category
Mid-20th Century American Modern Barbara Latham Prints and Multiples
Materials
Laid Paper, Handmade Paper, Etching
Colosseum (First State)
By Armin Landeck
Located in Middletown, NY
Copper plate engraving on cream wove paper, 18 1/4 x 13 3/8 (462 x 338 mm), full margins. Signed in pencil, lower right. Edition of 20. First state (of 2). Minor uniform toning, and ...
Category
Mid-20th Century American Modern Barbara Latham Prints and Multiples
Materials
Handmade Paper, Engraving
Previously Available Items
Our Mexican Kitchen
By Barbara Latham
Located in New Orleans, LA
Barbara Latham created this wood engraving of the kitchen in the Taxco, Mexico home she shared with her husband, artist Howard Cook. The house that Barbara and Howard Cook rented from John Evans, the son of Mabel Dodge Luhan, is shown with the Mexican cook who worked for them. It also shows the lemon tree outside their window.
Painter, print maker, and children's book illustrator Barbara Latham was born in Walpole, Massachusetts, in 1896. She was raised in Norwich, Connecticut, and studied at the Norwich Free Academy and then attended Pratt Institute from 1915 to her graduation in 1919. She then studied with Andrew Dasburg at the Art Students League's summer school in Woodstock, New York.
She spent the early part of her career in New York, where she worked for the Norcross Publishing Company and did illustrations for Forum magazine and the New York Times Sunday magazine.
In 1925, Latham went to Taos, New Mexico, for the first time to seek material for illustrations for a greeting card company. She met artist Howard Cook, who was in the process of developing illustrations for Willa Cather's Death Comes to the Archbishop. The couple married in 1927. From 1928 to 1935, they traveled widely including to Mexico; Springfield, Massachusetts; Paris; and Connecticut. In 1933, the couple made their home near Taos. In 1976, they settled in Santa Fe.
Latham created prints and paintings of New Mexico subjects: the Taos landscape, views of the town and genre scenes depicting the seasons of rural life including that of the Taos Indians. She also illustrated children's books and did pencil drawings. Latham's illustrations for children's books included those for Pedro, Nina and Perrito, 1939, and Maggie, which was chosen as one of the best books from the period of 1945 to 1950 by the American Institute of Graphic Arts. One of her paintings, Approaching Storm, c. 1930, is an expressive painting emphasizing the orange of the earth and green of trees against the dark, stormy sky. In style, the painting is a blend of the characteristics of the New Mexico landscape, the colorful approach to landscape developed by the original Taos painters...
Category
1930s American Modern Barbara Latham Prints and Multiples
Materials
Wood, Engraving
Bear Family
By Barbara Latham
Located in New York, NY
Barbara Latham (1896-1988), Bear Family, 1937, wood engraving, unsigned [signed and dated in the block]. Published by American Artists Group. In excellent condition, on an ivory wove paper, the full sheet with full margins, 10 x 8, the sheet 13 x 18 inches. Window matting, with archival board, unattached mylar hinging.
A fine impression of this charming image.
The American Artists Group was formed in 1934, during the Great Depression, with the express purpose of providing unsigned inexpensive prints which were to be widely distributed. AAG published prints by Ganso, Spruance, Meissner, Ruzicka and Lankes, among many other noted artists. Although the prices of these prints was minimal, sales were sluggish in that economy and editions werenot sold out; most printingswere under 200...
Category
1930s American Realist Barbara Latham Prints and Multiples
Materials
Woodcut
Barbara Latham prints and multiples for sale on 1stDibs.
Find a wide variety of authentic Barbara Latham prints and multiples available for sale on 1stDibs. You can also browse by medium to find art by Barbara Latham in linocut and more. Much of the original work by this artist or collective was created during the 20th century and is mostly associated with the modern style. Not every interior allows for large Barbara Latham prints and multiples, so small editions measuring 18 inches across are available. Customers who are interested in this artist might also find the work of Lawrence Wilbur, Louis Conrad Rosenberg, and Samuel Chamberlain. Barbara Latham prints and multiples prices can differ depending upon medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $795 and tops out at $795, while the average work can sell for $795.