by John Orr
California’s Legacy
To be fair, California historians can hardly claim Currier and Ives lithographic prints as a significant part of their state’s Left Coast art legacy. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, Currier and Ives produced countless numbers of lithographic prints in its New York City headquarters on Spruce Street. Based largely on paintings and drawings purchased from well-known artists, Currier and Ives’s offered affordable images of everyday lives, historical events, landscapes, and political satire to hang on the walls of modest homes all over America. Nathaniel Currier and James Ives were not ashamed to describe their New York art factory as “the Grand Central Depot for Cheap and Popular Prints.”
Max Schmidt, an immigrant printmaker who brought lithographic skills from Germany to his new home in San Francisco, established Schmidt Lithograph Company in 1872. It was easy for him to see that a niche could be created for a homegrown version of Currier and Ives. For a while, he sold cheap lithographic prints of Northern California scenes that were virtually indistinguishable from those produced in New York by Currier and Ives. He quickly recognized, however, that his newly adopted state offered another, more promising opportunity—the need for crate labels in California’s expanding agricultural industry, especially for orange crate labels.
The Union Pacific Railroad and other transcontinental railroad companies were expanding their use of refrigerated boxcars that could guarantee the arrival at distant locations of fresh, beautiful, health-promoting oranges. Likewise, the newly created California Fruit Growers Association was pouring advertising funds into the production of brochures, billboards, posters, and especially orange crate labels that promoted tourism and the consumption of California’s signature navel oranges.
Schmidt Lithography did not stand alone in its efforts to profit from the growth of California’s orange industry by printing orange crate labels. Multiple lithography companies with similar interests could be found in New York, Boston, Detroit, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Fresno, St. Louis and in other urban centers. Lithography companies routinely acquired other lithography companies. The names of these companies often changed, reflecting changes in ownership and geographical location.
Orange crate label producers relied on stone lithography (and, later, on mechanical innovations in lithographic printmaking) to produce thousands of branded orange crate labels. These labels were made for fruit grower associations and packing houses all over the state, especially in California’s San Joaquin Valley, Southern California, Ventura County, and Santa Barbara County. The labels were glued to the ends of wooden orange crates, placed in refrigerated boxcars, and shipped to distant cities.
Orange crate labels were never intended to be fine art. They were not printed to be hung on walls. They were a straightforward form of commercial art. Artists never signed them. But many of the labels had a character and quality that transcended their commercial function. Some, for example, displayed beautifully crafted, romanticized images of a California in-the-making, whose exotic landscape, history, and lifestyles could and should not be resisted. Some recorded historical events, e.g., the Depression, World War II, the development of airplanes, the opening of the Los Angeles Coliseum.
Some extolled oranges as spiritualized symbols of a human desire to live healthy, energized lives. Some utilized images that were associated with the immigrant origins of orange grove owners and packers. Many were simply odd, even playful, e.g., the image of a unicorn running across grasslands, with foam falling from its mouth.
But orange crate labels, like Currier and Ives prints, effectively functioned as “cheap and popular prints” in places far beyond orange industry sites. During the first half of the twentieth century, they were incorporated into a wide variety of everyday life settings. In my own Fillmore and Long Beach, California neighborhoods during the 1930s’ Depression, for example, people were using orange crates (with their affixed labels) as dining room chairs, toy boxes, storage containers, coffee tables, end tables, and bookshelves. In grocery stores, oranges were often sold directly out of crates that were still adorned by glued-on labels. Orange crates were laughingly regarded as college dormitory furniture.
I have recently discovered that elderly friends from various parts of the United States had similar experiences. They fondly and nostalgically remember the orange labels that graced their childhood and adolescent lives. They did not hang these labels on their walls. They sat on them.
They even lugged orange crates off to college, and some even carried them into early adulthood apartments. Orange crate labels were not regarded as collectible until World War II’s labor and resource shortages forced packing houses to turn to cardboard crates, and until orange groves were bulldozed in Southern California to make way for postwar housing tracts and industrial parks.
By the mid-1950s, California’s great lithographic printmaking companies were closing. Thousands of unused orange crate labels were consigned to storage boxes in packing house closets, waiting to be rediscovered by collectors in the 1960s and 1970s, by antique stores, and by entrepreneurs who encased labels in plastic table mats. A few archives were established in California museums and public libraries to preserve the labels for a later artistic assessment.
Irony abounds! Lithographically-produced orange crate labels were a commercial phenomenon, designed to bring money into the pockets of agricultural entrepreneurs. In contrast, the 1960s’ revival of lithography-based cheap art printmaking in Southern California began as an anti- establishment, feminist protest against barriers that made it difficult for women to function successfully in the Los Angeles’ art scene.
June Wayne, a Los Angeles artist, wanted to create an institution that would mentor aspiring female artists, and she concluded that the best way to do this would be to revive the use of lithography in the fine arts printmaking. Lithography did not require that expensive materials be used by starving female artists. A lithography-based printmaking revival promised to grow new markets for new artists through an expanded supply of affordable prints.
Using a grant from the Ford Foundation, Wayne opened Tamarind Lithography Workshop in 1960, and Tamarind’s success led to Los Angeles’ printmaking renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s. A network of printmaking lithography centers prospered in Los Angeles. Galleries that specialized in affordable prints (e.g., the Upstairs Gallery) thrived in low-rent areas of Southern California. Auctions of affordable fine arts prints multiplied as fund raising events for churches, schools and other nonprofits.
The new era of affordable fine art prints was supported by a period of radical social/cultural change in America. Sister Corita Kent at Hollywood’s Immaculate Heart College, for example, used silk screen “cheap art” techniques for her text-dominated posters (“Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”) During San Francisco’s Summer of Love, affordably produced, artistically significant posters advertised events at places like the Fillmore Theater. They subsequently were granted exhibit space in California galleries and museums.
Sadly, the historic ties of today’s fine art prints to Currier and Ives’ cheap art and to orange crate labels have not been sufficiently explored. Although the prices of art prints produced in the 1960s and 1970s continue to rise, the fruits of California’s emotionally powerful cheap art legacy still provide at least a modest restraint on the exclusion of middle class art collectors from the extremes of our currently inflated art market. Middle class art lovers should acknowledge their debt to cheap art predecessors, warts and all.
