LIMITED EDITION POSTER FOR THE 1972 WALKER EVANS EXHIBITION AT DARTMOUTH COLLEGE, INSCRIBED BY EVANS TO PAINTER IVAN ALBRIGHT

EVANS, Walker. Exhibition poster, inscribed. Walker Evans: Artist-in-Residence. (Hanover): Dartmouth College, 1972. Original photogravure poster, measuring 19 by 31 inches, closely framed. $2800.

Original signed limited edition exhibition poster, number 8 of only 100 copies, inscribed, “To Jo and Ivan Albright, affectionately, Walker Evans.” Albright is considered “one of the 20th century’s most original artists.”

“For how many of us has our imagination of what the United States looked like and felt like in the 1930s been determined not by a novel or a play or a poem or a painting or even by our own memories, but by the work of a single photographer, Walker Evans?” (Hilton Kramer). In 1972, Evans accepted the post of Artist-in-Residence at Dartmouth College. This poster with Evans’ image of a ticket-window announces a month-long campus exhibition of his work, by way of introducing him to students and faculty. Evans’ landmark exhibition in 1938 at MoMA’s temporary underground gallery in Rockefeller Center had “immediately established him as a major artist” (Roth, 98). At that time art historian John Szarkowski pondered, “It is difficult to know now with certainty whether Walker Evans recorded the America of his youth, or invented it.” The recipients of this particular poster are painter and lithographer Ivan Albright and his wife, Josephine Medill Patterson Reeve. Albright is known for his exagerated portraiture—“works of intricate detail and macabre realism [that] distinguish him as one of the 20th century’s most original artists” (MoMA). See Parr & Badger, 114.

Fine condition, inscribed.