MICHAEL J. GALLAGHER (1898-1965)
Michael Joseph Gallagher was from a mining family of Scranton, Pennsylvania. He served in the US Army in the First World War. In 1919 he developed tuberculosis and went to the White Haven Sanitarium in Pennsylvania. It was there a doctor noticed him drawing and suggested that he apply for a government scholarship to the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art (later the Philadelphia College of Art). It was there he met the young artist Katharine McCollum; they were married in 1925, the same year he was graduated. He also studied with Earl Horter, in Philadelphia, and Carl Dufner, in New York.
In the 1920s Gallagher made book and magazine illustrations. His made prints for the very successful Epic of America, by James Truslow Adams, published in 1931. With the advent of the Depression of the 1930s, Gallagher directed the Philadelphia Works Progress Administration’s Printmaking Workshop. There, with Dox Thrash and Hugh Mesibov, he was instrumental in the development of a new intaglio process, the carborundum print. The shop closed in 1941.
His prints from this period are among the finest of their generation. They were shown at the time in the New York World’s Fair, 1939, and in WPA Exposicion de Trabajos del Program de Arte de Pennsylvania, Mexico, 1942. In 1961 they were included in The Federal Art Project, Twenty Years After, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and similar surveys at the Atwater Kent Society, 1980, and the Print Club of Philadelphia, 1981. In addition his work was featured in The Gallagher/Leech Family, October 11 through November 24, 2001, and Michael J. Gallagher and His Circle, 1994, both here, at the Susan Teller Gallery, in L’Amerique de la Depression, Artistes Engages des Annes 30, Musee Galerie, Paris, 1996, and Pressed in Time, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, 2007.
One-man shows of work by Gallagher were held at the Print Club of Philadelphia, 1949, the National Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 1950, Andrew Grant Gallery, Edinburgh, 1983, and Susan Teller Gallery, 1991, and a traveling show of prints and drawings went to the Penn State Altoona Museum and the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, 2006.
Work by Michael J. Gallagher is in numerous the permanent collections including the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Chicago Art Institution, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia a Public Library, the Everhart Museum, Scranton, and Princeton University, Museum, New Jersey. |
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