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Stow Wengenroth
1906–1978
BirthplaceBrooklyn, New York, United States of America
Death placeRockport, Massachusetts, United States of America
BiographyStow Wengenroth was a master of lithographic printmaking who created city, country, and coastal views marked by exacting realism and haunting stillness. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Wengenroth grew up in Bayport, on the south shore of Long Island. In 1923, he enrolled in the progressive Art Students League in New York City, studying under figural artist and teacher George Bridgman (1865–1943). He then attended the Grand Central School of Art, where portrait painter Wayman Adams (1883–1959) was his primary instructor. At the Eastport Summer School of Art in Maine, where he studied with landscape and mural painter George Pearse Ennis (1884–1936) in 1929 and 1930, Wengenroth turned his attention to the ocean shoreline, which would become one of his most important sources of subjects.
In 1931, at Ennis's suggestion, Wengenroth made his first lithographs, which were presented in a solo exhibition at Macbeth Galleries in New York. That year, he moved to the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan to be closer to printer George Miller, forging a collaboration that established both men's reputations and lasted until Miller's retirement in 1960. Notwithstanding the dire economic conditions of the Great Depression, Wengenroth's quiet images of New England's harbors, lighthouses, and fishing villages immediately found favor with an art public seeking reassurance in the expression of timeless values. In 1933, his prints were included in the important inaugural biennial exhibition of American paintings, drawings, and prints at New York's Whitney Museum of Art, and later in that decade he was represented in exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and at the New York World's Fair of 1939. In 1938 he was elected to associate membership in the venerable National Academy of Design, with full membership following two years later.
Wengenroth perfected a tonal approach to lithography; eschewing color, he focused on evocative graduations of light and dark. He used specially ground lithographic stones to achieve subtle grainy textures, and in 1940 he pioneered a two-stone method of lithographic printmaking. In 1942, he moved to a studio once occupied by nineteenth-century realist master Winslow Homer in New York's Tenth Street Studio building and was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1949 he was awarded the Medal of Honor of the Audubon Artists, an artists' organization founded in 1940 in New York. Wengenroth moved to Rockport, on the coast of Massachusetts, in 1974, four years before his death at the age of seventy-two. In the course of his career he had created 369 lithographs, of which definitive collections are held at the Boston Public Library and the Brown University Library in Providence, Rhode Island.
In 1931, at Ennis's suggestion, Wengenroth made his first lithographs, which were presented in a solo exhibition at Macbeth Galleries in New York. That year, he moved to the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan to be closer to printer George Miller, forging a collaboration that established both men's reputations and lasted until Miller's retirement in 1960. Notwithstanding the dire economic conditions of the Great Depression, Wengenroth's quiet images of New England's harbors, lighthouses, and fishing villages immediately found favor with an art public seeking reassurance in the expression of timeless values. In 1933, his prints were included in the important inaugural biennial exhibition of American paintings, drawings, and prints at New York's Whitney Museum of Art, and later in that decade he was represented in exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and at the New York World's Fair of 1939. In 1938 he was elected to associate membership in the venerable National Academy of Design, with full membership following two years later.
Wengenroth perfected a tonal approach to lithography; eschewing color, he focused on evocative graduations of light and dark. He used specially ground lithographic stones to achieve subtle grainy textures, and in 1940 he pioneered a two-stone method of lithographic printmaking. In 1942, he moved to a studio once occupied by nineteenth-century realist master Winslow Homer in New York's Tenth Street Studio building and was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1949 he was awarded the Medal of Honor of the Audubon Artists, an artists' organization founded in 1940 in New York. Wengenroth moved to Rockport, on the coast of Massachusetts, in 1974, four years before his death at the age of seventy-two. In the course of his career he had created 369 lithographs, of which definitive collections are held at the Boston Public Library and the Brown University Library in Providence, Rhode Island.