HUGH PEARCE BOTTS

I Live my Life

HUGH PEARCE BOTTS

by Rachael Baldanza

In January 2009, three etchings by Hugh Pearce Botts were hung in the space previously occupied by Robert Gwathmey’s Non-fiction painting. Botts’ “I Live My Life” grouping is rooted in non-fiction; a reportage of sorts from October 1935 on a street corner in New York.  The works on view picture an injured veteran, an oversized cardboard figure of Joan Crawford advertising her film I Live My Life, and throngs of people lined up at the movie theatre. These three prints are the first of seven rotations, displaying a total of 21 prints in the next year. It is my pleasure to be a part of the collaboration to bring the work of this artist out of storage.

To see the work of this American printmaker is to consider the etchings of a man who was a witty, distinctive and highly skilled artist. Hugh Botts was trained in the 1920s, and active as an artist in the midst of the Great Depression, the American “etching boom,” and the wartime years. His images -- ranging from views of a city under construction to quirky depictions of traveling salesmen-- connect in a multitude of ways with the paintings sharing the walls in the early 20^th century American gallery.

Hugh Pearce Botts was born April 1903 in Cranford, New Jersey, to Hugh Franklin Botts and Anita Pearce Botts. He attended Rutgers University but did not stay to earn a degree. Instead, he moved to New York City in the early 1920s at a moment when other aspiring artists from around the country were flocking to schools such as the Art Students League. At the Art Students League, Botts would have been one of hundreds of artists who took classes to sharpen their eyes and skills, who drew everything they saw, and who hotly debated the political, social, and artistic issues of the day (for more of the cultural history of the Art Students League, see the history section of their website http://www.theartstudentsleague.org/history.html ).

Botts seems to have been socially connected to a number of artists from the start of his career and successful enough to have never needed a “real job.” At age 26, in 1928, he was awarded a residency at Yaddo, an artist’s community in Saratoga Springs, NY. According to his application for admittance as an artist member of the Salmagundi Club in 1939, Botts had studied with painters Charles Webster Hawthorne (whose Spring painting in the MAG collection is available online), Charles Courtney Curran, William Auerbach-Levy, Ivan G. Olinsky (whose 1920 portrait A New Arrangement is also in the MAG collection) and William Von Schegell.  Botts also studied with the printmakers Eugene C. Fitsch and Harry Sternberg.

We may assume the younger Botts had some familiarity and experience with printing, as his father, Hugh F. Botts, was a vice president of the New York Typographical Society and had been long active as a printer of newspapers including the New York Sun.  It was as a printmaker that the younger Botts made his name. Hugh P. Botts was a member of the Print Club of Philadelphia, Northwest Printmakers, Southern Printmakers, New Haven Print and Clay Club, the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts, the Art Students League, and the Society of American Etchers.

From around 1933 on, Botts had a studio at 203 West 78th street in New York in apartments owned by the family of Myrtle A. Brown. According to Hugh Botts’ nephew, Larry G. Botts II, Hugh and Myrtle Brown held classes in printmaking and painting, pottery, and weaving during the 1940s.

While employed by the Federal Art Project for periods of time between 1935 and 1943, Botts created dozens of print editions, exhibited prints and paintings nationally, and was published in the WPA- produced New York City guidebook. During the World’s Fair in 1939, he demonstrated the etching process to fairgoers. His employment on the WPA continued for longer than many, and work in the WPA’s New York City Graphics Division, well known for high quality standards, was by its nature prestigious. WPA prints were distributed around the country, and many printmakers found their involvement in the project beneficial to their careers.

The Memorial Art Gallery’s large collection of Botts prints was primarily donated by Robert and Joan Brown. The artist also has prints in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library. In 1950 he had a solo show in the Division of Graphic Arts of the U.S. National Museum, Smithsonian Institution, from which 45 prints entered the collection of the Library of Congress.

Hugh Botts seems to have always been creative in his pursuits. He wrote and illustrated technical articles for journals such as Popular Mechanics. Somewhere along the line he became an inventor and patented several items, such as an attachment for vacuum coffee pots filed in 1943 (the drawings in the patents are lovely!).

In April 1964, Hugh Pearce Botts died in a nursing home in suburban New Jersey. He remains remembered fondly by his nephew and living relatives and by a yearly prize in his name for a print by an artist exhibiting at the Salmagundi Club in New York.

The prints by Botts in MAG’s permanent collection are inherently fragile; for that reason it is likely that after they are shown they will be off-view for years to come. They are however, fully digitized and available on our website. From an historical and social perspective, the Works Progress Administration’s success in developing the careers of artists and in producing a change in American culture is told through the story of artists like Hugh Botts.

*Rachael Baldanza is managing director of the Creative Workshop.