Designs for an Exhibit

For those who haven’t been paying attention, I’ve been teasing about an art exhibit. This project is linked to my Resorts at Sea study. I’ve mentioned I’ve been in contact with a few of the artists who created art for American-built passenger ships. I’ve also said it’s been hard not to delve into the other works of these artists: the non-commercial art, the art for art’s sake; not the art for hire.

Bernard Perlin is 94 years old. He entered a national design competition sponsored by the Section of Fine Arts and the U.S. Maritime Commission in the spring of 1940. During the summer of that year, he was notified he won two commissions for the President Hayes, the third ship in the President Jackson-class of American President Lines.

Last summer, after I had found a good number of the artists involved in this study, I started gathering biographical material. I was stunned to find Mr. Perlin was still alive. (I shouldn’t have been, one grandma passed six months shy of 100, the other is still going strong, about to turn 93.) I wrote him, sending along a couple articles to jog his memory. A few weeks later, he wrote back!

I called him, but there was one heck of a thunderstorm blowing on his end, then his phone died. After several tries to get him back, I gave up. I reached his machine the next day, and that weekend, he called me back. If I live to be his age, I hope to be half as sharp as he is. Stories flowed as if they happened yesterday, and I am truly touched he took the time to share them with me.

He gave me the name of a man in Chicago who’s been working on his life story for further details, admitting he may have missed some things. And that’s how Michael Schreiber and I became acquainted. Michael has taken on the Herculean task of giving Mr. Perlin’s career a second look. After diving into a Flickr page with hundreds of shots of a wide variety of works, I was blown away. An exhibit had to be organized. Over the holidays, Michael and I decided "to do this thing."

Michael has also been shopping around a Perlin biography, and has been given many excuses as to why it’s a bad idea. Most publishers would do it, but it'd have to be in conjunction with an exhibit, which wasn’t happening because institutions wouldn’t take it on for this, that, and the other reasons.

Frequent readers know I do a lot of work for the Kirksville Arts Association. Kirksville is in Missouri. Actor and art aficionado Vincent Price was born in St. Louis and later in life was a frequent speaker in the Lyceum Series at what is now Truman State University in Kirksville. Price met Perlin at the 1938 Kosciusko Foundation Ball in New York. They struck up a friendship, with Price giving Perlin a commission: a mural in his tiny apartment. Price spoke highly of Perlin in his 1959 book I Like What I Know.

Perlin was also great friends with Missouri natives Edna Fischel Gellhorn, a St. Louis civic leader and a founder and the first vice president of the National League of Women Voters, and her daughter, Martha Gellhorn, one of the first female war correspondents, and third wife of Ernest Hemingway.

I could go on and on, and still not do Mr. Perlin any justice. So let’s focus on the exhibit.

Trying to arrange an artist’s career output – in this case, a 75-year career – with a handful of pieces is harder than I could’ve imagined. It’s akin to waking up one morning and deciding to take up cliff diving, and twenty feet before you hit the water, you’re trying to remember if you know how to swim.

Playing with groupings.

 

I started with the works at a 1/4 inch scale, moving them around, seeing what groups worked and those that didn't. Then Michael and I sat down on the phone to winnow the list down. And here’s the arrangement so far …

 Pages from the planning docs showing wall elevations. 

Along with arranging the pieces, the exhibit needs to be publicized. I chose a self portrait from 1937, when he was 19. (Image top right at the beginning of this post.) It scales pretty well for most poster and ad sizes with minor cropping required.

And every exhibit needs a catalogue with essays and loads of images. If I told you who I’m talking with in arranging the printing, you wouldn’t believe me, so we’ll wait until it’s done.

Front cover and sample pages for exhibit catalogue. (I told you the poster graphic scales and crops nicely.) 

But above all else, in order to make this go, we need funding. Options are being explored.

This is a fun project, and I hope Michael and I can bring it to fruition.