Mabel Dwight: Cool Head, Warm Heart

Mabel Dwight (1876–1955) wrote that keeping “a cool head and a warm heart” was essential to making art that would be a “living influence on the world.” Dwight came to New York at the turn of the century as an illustrator and later fell in with the downtown artists who frequented the Whitney Studio Club, a precursor to the Museum. She ultimately found her voice in the swooping lines and seamless gradients of lithography. This democratic print medium became her primary vehicle for portraying her constant subject: the people and places of New York.

Dwight’s self-described “socialist” vision of the world was of dignity across the socio-economic divides. Her crowd scenes depict individuals—usually rendered with a gently curving stroke, dramatic lighting, and delicate highlights— each taking part in a greater whole. Her intimate portraits offer uniquely expressive faces, and her overtly political images are as theatrical as her vision of the stage. All her subjects, whether selling balloons, strolling home, or waiting for the day to pass, possess the inner glow of what Dwight called “the stuff of life.” The life in Dwight’s prints came from her own—she spent her free time roaming the city, from Harlem to Staten Island, sketching in a notebook hidden inside her jacket. Back at her apartment, Dwight would revise her images and then carefully transfer them to a stone or a zinc plate, from which multiple impressions could be printed and inexpensively made available to the public.

About the artist

One of the most notable American printmakers of the 1920s and 1930s, Mabel Dwight is best known for her satirical depictions of New York life. Deaf from birth, she first began producing prints in 1927, at the age of fifty-two, and rapidly rose to become a key member of the American Scene movement, which filled a growing demand for realistic art based on the everyday experiences of ordinary Americans. Unlike many of her contemporaries, however, Dwight limited herself exclusively to the medium of lithography, circulating her work to a broad national audience in publications such as Vanity Fair . An astute observer of the human comedy, she instilled her scenes of New Yorkers riding the subway, shopping, and visiting parks and other popular entertainments with biting humor as well as compassion.

Mabel Dwight (1875–1955) was an American artist whose lithographs showed scenes of ordinary life with humor and tolerance. Carl Zigrosser, who had studied it carefully, wrote that "Her work is imbued with pity and compassion, a sense of irony, and the understanding that comes of deep experience." Between the late 1920s and the early 1940s, she achieved both popularity and critical success. In 1936, Prints magazine named her one of the best living printmakers, and a critic at the time said she was one of the foremost lithographers in the United States.