Artists’ Collections in the Archives: Digitizing Cleveland’s Artistic History | by Cleveland Museum of Art | CMA Thinker | Sep, 2022

By Sara Kunkemueller, Digitization Intern, Ingalls Library and Museum Archives

This summer season, I joined the Ingalls Library and Museum Archives as a digitization intern. My work associated several initiatives, from updating metadata to scanning guides for the Web Archive, but a lot of my time was focused to digitizing artists’ collections in the archives. The initially materials I scanned were John Paul Miller’s sketchbooks.

Miller (1918–2013) was a renowned Cleveland jeweler. Acquiring graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art (CIA), he returned immediately after Army services in Earth War II to be part of the school’s employees as a professor. At the similar time, he started manufacturing parts for neighborhood jewelry shop Potter & Mellen. Though Miller was educated in industrial design and spent his profession targeted on jewelry, he also harbored a deep appreciate for watercolor and developed each photos of his travels and a selection of video clip resources. Throughout his tenure at the CIA, long lasting additional than 40 years, he taught all these topics. Miller’s function has been obtained by many non-public collectors as perfectly as by the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) and the Renwick Gallery, among other folks.

Miller is known for his use of granulation, a approach greatest identified from archaeological jewellery. By the granulation course of action, tiny beads of metal are affixed to a bigger variety without soldering. Miller employed granulation to produce highly difficult surface area textures and styles. Focusing on both geometric abstractions and practical animal and insect forms, Miller’s use of granulation lends his system of work an general stylistic coherence, weaving a modernist aesthetic into purely natural surfaces. His sketchbooks are stuffed with repetitive drawings, where by Miller performs with the kind of the granulation pattern. Simply because Miller’s sketches are relatively shut in measurement to his final merchandise, there are many items in the CMA’s selection, in the archives’ Might Show documents, and in other art galleries that can be matched pretty much accurately to these internet pages.

Miller’s sketchbooks augment his human body of work with comprehensive notes on building, which include experimental notes designed in the workshop. Numerous are filled with metallic dust, and even tiny scraps of discarded gold, suggesting that they lived on his workbench and that types had been subject to revision throughout output. In a single occasion, Miller wrote out directions for a brief film next the development of just one of his items, leaving behind a meticulous history of his procedure. Along with costs and other info, the within handles commonly have a record of names or titles indicating which will work of his ended up commissioned, created for a distinct show, or created in sequence. In just sketchbook 19, there is also a lengthy handwritten insurance coverage appraisal detailing the trivia of a piece’s building, from materials to techniques. All of this is relevant to long term collectors and conservators of Miller’s do the job, but it also preserves his intensive knowledge of metalworking and could possibly serve as a educating assist. Miller’s sketchbooks consist of a wealth of details about his pieces, his instructing methods, and his own and experienced interests.

All 32 of Miller’s sketchbooks are now offered on the CMA Archives’ electronic collections. Also out there to watch are specific renderings of his rings and pendants, images from his outings to California and Antarctica, and photographs of his will work from the Could Exhibit collection.

The remainder of my internship concentrated on the archives’ August F. Biehle Selection, composed mostly of sketch resources relating to numerous media and initiatives all through Biehle’s prolific vocation. A son of German immigrant and ornamental artist August Biehle Sr. (also represented in the electronic archives), Biehle (1885–1979) was a Clevelander who contributed immensely to the city’s booming inventive character in the early 20th century. Soon after finishing his art training in Germany, Biehle returned to Cleveland just as it was achieving its peak of creative innovation and started performing at the Otis Lithograph Organization. Over the training course of his occupation, he developed outstanding ads, murals, and paintings and turned one of the most well known Cleveland faculty artists.

Biehle was also a member of the city’s preeminent eclectic art corporation, the Kokoon Arts Club. He introduced with him both creative expertise and inspiration, obtaining considered an influential exhibition of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a German Expressionist team, in Munich in 1912. This knowledgeable Biehle’s possess modernist works and, in change, proved to be a stylistic affect for other club users. The archives’ collection has a number of Kokoon Club objects, which include posters for club situations, publication elements, and ticket patterns for the club’s famous and lascivious balls. The Kokoon Club permitted Biehle to experiment with his official creative training, and the conversation amongst the club’s flourishing modernists encouraged him to delve into a assortment of styles, which includes the producing Artwork Deco and Cubism movements.

Of individual take note in the Biehle assortment are sketch products relating to murals he generated for a number of infamous buildings across the town, including the Kokoon Club, the Hofbräuhaus, and Herman Pirchner’s Alpine Village Theatre Cafe. These mural sketches, normally rendered loosely in gouache on paper or board, are striking not only due to the fact of their natural beauty but also due to the fact quite few visual information of the murals keep on being. The Kokoon club, for case in point, highlighted several Biehle is effective on its walls for the duration of its heyday. However, soon after the club’s decrease and disbandment in 1956, Biehle’s murals had been demolished with the building. This is also correct of his extensive work in Pirchner’s Alpine Village, notably Biehle’s depictions of fantastical scenes and classic times from opera and theater. His affect extended to the Eldorado Club higher than the restaurant, where Pirchner hosted well known attendees. In 1996, however, that composition was razed as well. Though there are some photographic documents containing Biehle’s demolished mural functions, they are generally concentrated on modern society activities and the men and women who frequented the spaces somewhat than on the art by itself. The sketch renderings of Biehle’s murals are some of the best remaining documentation of his presence in the course of influential structures in the city.

Outside of Cleveland, Biehle represents a wonderful encapsulation of the explosion of artistic innovation in the early 20th century. Stylistically adventurous, Biehle’s pursuits shifted around the class of his vocation. He was a gifted decorative artist, possessing apprenticed below his father, and his lithographs were being in immediate discussion with other key advertisers of his age. Biehle’s industrial is effective involve fantastic reports of his peers’ creations, these types of as many layouts for the Arrow Collar adverts that designed American artist Joseph Christian Leyendecker (1874–1951) famous, as properly as many observational scientific tests that clearly show the depth of his formal schooling. Biehle’s prints had been at the forefront of the shift from Artwork Nouveau to Art Deco. In the later on elements of Biehle’s occupation, his paintings took on a hanging Cubist style and were being imbued with the dynamism of Futurism. His several talents make him an exceptional illustration of the power of Cleveland’s artistic scene at its peak.

Biehle’s other perform incorporates a wide variety of vibrant painted landscapes impressed by Cubism. The CMA holds in its selection a single these portray as effectively as functions on paper by the artist. To see the Biehle collection online, remember to take a look at https://digitalarchives.clevelandart.org/digital/assortment/p17142coll15.