BLANCHE GRAMBS (1916-2010)
Widely respected as a printmaker, Blanche Grambs (Born 1916)
made intaglios, relief prints, and lithographs, in a very small timeframe, from 1934 to 1939. Starting in the 1940s and into the following decades, she worked in illustration under the name Grambs Miller. In very early drawings of the local scene in her native China, she displayed a social conscience and a loving attention to detail - both remained throughout her career.
In 1934 when Blanche Grambs came to New York to attend the Art Students League, she was seventeen and an accomplished draftsman with numerous exhibitions behind her. The dynamic Harry Sternberg taught her printmaking class. Fellow students included Riva Helfond, Edward Deyo Jacobs, Winifred Milius, and Hugh Miller, whom Grambs married in 1939. They had a studio on East 14th Street near Union Square. In 1936 Grambs joined the Works Progress Administration Printmaking Project. A member of the Artists Union, she was among the infamous 219 artists arrested for protesting at the WPA offices on December 1, 1936.
At the League Grambs printed her own etchings and Will Barnet the lithographs. She also worked with the master lithographer George Miller (no relation). More than half of her prints were made while on the WPA and were printed under their auspices.
Grambs and Miller made an ill-timed trip to France in 1939. Miller served in World War II and they divorced soon after his return. In 1952 Grambs married James Aronson (1915-1988), one of the founders of the National Guardian (renamed The Guardian in 1967).
From the 1940s until the 1980s Grambs made a career in illustration. Under the name Grambs Miller she worked on over thirty books, covering themes as diverse as Chinese cooking, Central Park, and the poetry of Yuri Suhl. With dedication and precision she would compose a botanically-correct wild flower or an angry crow.
Recently work by Blanche Grambs was shown in Paths to the Press, Printmaking and American Women Artists, 1910-1960, a traveling exhibition organized by the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Kansas State University, 2005, and The American Scene, Prints from Hopper to Pollock, at the British Museum, 2008. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, the Newark Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, all hold significant archives of her work.
The exhibition, Blanche Grambs & Her Fellow Artists, was held at the Susan Teller Gallery, October 28 through November 28, 2009.
Reference: Wechsler refers to the listing compiled in an article by James Wechsler, The Great Depression and the Prints of Blanche Grambs, The Print Quarterly, December, 1996.
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