Frederick Mershimer

Frederick Mershimer
Born	Frederick Mershimer (1958-01-19)January 19, 1958 Sharon, Pennsylvania, U.S.
🏳️ Nationality	American
🏫 Education	Carnegie Mellon University (BFA in painting and drawing, 1980), Pratt Graphics Center (1983-1985, printmaking), Manhattan Graphics Center (1986-1989, printmaking)
💼 Occupation	Artist, Teacher
📆 Years active	1978-
Known for	Printmaking, Painting

Frederick Mershimer is a painter, printmaker and teacher living and working in New York. His specialty is in intaglio, particularly mezzotint.

He was born in 1958 in Sharon, Pennsylvania, and lived there through his graduation from high school. He attended Carnegie Mellon University where he majored in painting and drawing and received a BFA in 1980. After moving to New York in 1983, he studied printmaking with David Finkbeiner at The New School, Pratt Graphics Center (1984–1987) and Manhattan Graphics Center (1988–1992). Mershimer followed Finkbeiner to study at Studio Camnitzer in Valdottavo, Italy near Lucca. He was initially drawn to the mezzotint process because it echoed his approach to drawing. In 2007, Stone and Press published a catalogue raisonné of his work, titled Frederick Mershimer Mezzotints 1984–2006.

Mershimer skillfully choreographs lighting and detail while altering perspective to draw the viewer's attention to the essence of the piece. Mershimer's mezzotints speak to both the grit and grandeur of the modern American city. His primary subject has been the architectural cityscapes of Manhattan and Brooklyn. After visiting friends and colleagues in New Orleans, he also created six images of the city, reflecting the pattern of encapsulating the spirit of the city he was depicting.

The Print Club Tradition

 Print Clubs have a long history in this country. Some like the Albany Print Club and the Cleveland Print Club have existed for decades.

A national organization with a local-sounding name, the Albany Print Club is a 90-year-old arts organization with a unique history in the world of fine-art. Since 1933, the Albany Print Club has commissioned a nationally known artist to produce a limited-edition fine-art Presentation Print for up to 100 members. Members pay dues and then receive a print that is often worth more than the annual dues. The Albany Club also holds a permanent collection of prints for exhibitions, events, education, and display.

Frederick Mershimer was an integral part in the beginnings of The Print Club of New York. In the club's first year, Frederick Mershimer was selected to create the inaugural Presentation Print, Passage. Depicting a scene on East 41st Street in Manhattan with a view of the New York Public Library. This piece embodies the essence of many of Mershimer's works. His inaugural print was a huge success that propelled the growth of the New York Club. Many of New York's Presentation Prints have been accepted into important Museum Collections. These pieces have been generously donated by our members and Print Club itself. It is a way to make our commissioned prints more accessible to a larger community. .

In 1919 the Cleveland Museum of Art print collection began to be formed when 16 men signed the articles of incorporation for the Print Club. The Cleveland Club not only serves its members but it helps build the vast print collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Mershimer was asked to create the 2018 presentation print for The Print Club of Cleveland. With this selection, Mershimer created the piece Pinnacle, which, like many of his pieces, encapsulates the energy of urban architecture.

New York Realism

Two works by Frederick Mershimer, Misty Canyon and Rooftops were selected for the exhibition, New York Realism - Past and Present that traveled throughout Japan in 1994. It opened in five museums: Odakyu Museum, Kagoshima City Museum of Art, Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, The Museum of Art, Kintetsu and the Fukushima Prefectural Museum of Art. The final exhibition was at the Tampa Museum of Art in early 1995. Douglas Dreishpoon, a curator at the Tampa Museum of Art, organized the exhibition and the bilingual catalog. The exhibition focuses on urban realism and is divided into three sections: "a humanistic realism that documents people, place and situations, a formal realism in which the city functions as a vehicle for more pristine and impersonal investigations and a poetic realism that throws shadows across documentarian and precisionist views.”

The first group of artists selected were from the Big 8 (Robert Henri, John Sloan, Everett Shin and William Glackens et al.) and the Art Students’ League.

Mershimer’s work is included in the poetic realism group that includes: Richard Haas, Red Grooms, Alex Katz, Jon Ahearn, Jacob Lawrence, Keith Haring and Richard Estes.

Teaching And Service

Mershimer has served as a Board Member of the Manhattan Graphics Center from 2009 to 2023. He has been a dedicated teacher for over twenty years. He taught at the Manhattan Graphics Center from 2001 to the present. He also taught at the New York Academy of Art from 2009 to 2023. In addition he has been Visiting Professor at the following institutions: Columbus College of Art and Design (1995), Rhode Island School of Design (1999), Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (2009) and Kent State university (2012). In 2009, Mershimer was granted a U.S. Government Patent for a rocking machine for preparing mezzotint grounds.

Interview with Carol Wax

In this 2006 interview, Carol Wax sits down with Frederick Mershimer to discuss his introduction to mezzotints, connection to depictions of New York City, and the start of his career.

Carol Wax: When we first met you were just beginning to work in mezzotint. What made you try your hand in the medium?

Frederick Mershimer: I got a job at Newmark Gallery, and they had prints by Armin] Landeck (1905-1984) and Stow Wengenroth (1906-1978). For the first time, I saw the connection between prints and New York City. While walking past Bryant Park one day, I saw the Empire State Building. It seemed to shoot up like this big grandfather building. With so much power, it looked as if it was standing guard over all its children. I decided then that I would take a printmaking class and many years later this experience eventually led to my mezzotint Empire State Building—Sentinel # 71.

CW: What classes did you take and where?

FM: I’d already had some lithography experience from a class I took in high school; I enrolled in The New School to take an etching class held at Parson’s School of Design. John Ross (1921-2017) and Herman Zaage (1927-2008) cotaught the class and showed me the basics of mezzotint. Then I took David Finkbeiner’s (b.1940) intaglio class at the Pratt Graphics Center, and later, when the Manhattan Graphics Center formed, I took Tony Kirk’s intaglio class.

CW:But why mezzotint? Why not aquatint? Traditionally, architectural imagery is associated more with aquatint and line etching than with mezzotint.

FM: I don’t like that printmaking is often caught up in process. In line etching and aquatint you have to melt your rosin, time your acid. ... With mezzotint, the mark making is totally controlled by your hand. The sensibility of the way I approached drawing is very similar.

CW: So you like the directness?

FM: Yes. In mezzotint my hand creates the black by rocking, and then I create the tones as I would with a pencil, but in mezzotint it’s different. In drawing, if I push really hard I get black. Working the same way in mezzotint, using a burnisher, it becomes white. But it’s the same exact sense that the pressure of my hand creates the tones. Also I like subtle gradations of tonality. And, the fact that mezzotint is a tonal process, but isn’t caught up in the process of stopping out [as it would be in aquatint] drew me in. At the time I first tried mezzotint, I’d done four or five line etchings; only one was released. I was mainly experimenting with different techniques, and mezzotint worked for me.

CW: When you’re working on a plate are you thinking abstractly?

FM: There probably is some of that element. One of my earliest influences was a painter named Neil Anderson at Bucknell University who was doing autumn images of leafy groundcovers. They were rendered photorealistically, but he’d do them all in muted tones with occasional sharply contrasting highlights that fell into abstract patterns, which I found incredibly visually stimulating. And while there probably still is an element of my being interested in abstract shapes within reality, once I began doing cityscapes, I stopped pushing that aspect and began working in a more naturalistic way. Those earlier influences were something I started from and built on, and they are now part of my vocabulary. In my unique way, I’ve woven them into the fabric of how I approach imagery. I’m always more interested in mood. Like in my print Still Night (# 29), I wanted the branches to look spooky like the apple trees in The Wizard of Oz … as if they might reach out and slap your hand. If an abstract, more angular shape will achieve that effect and enhance the mood, then I’ll use it, but not just for the sake of being abstract.

CW: I feel the essence of your work is the light and atmospheric effects.

FM: A lot of my work is about light. And light creates a lot of the mood. But again, it’s really more about mood, and I use lighting to create that mood.

CW: Because the mezzotint process is so time-consuming, it tends to isolate people who work in the medium. The people in your images seem isolated and disconnected from each other—even when depicted in groups in a city known for forcing people to live and work in close proximity. Do you think there’s a correlation there?

FM: Oh yeah. I think a theme that travels through my work is a sense of melancholy and isolation. It is strange that in a city like New York, where there are so many people, that you can feel very alone in it. At the same time, I find that walking around at night is a comforting time. By day, New York is a dirty big city, but at night it becomes magical place to me.

List of Museums Currently Holding Works by Frederick Mershimer

• Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts
• The British Museum
• The Brooklyn Museum of Art
• The Cleveland Museum of Art
• Detroit Institute of Arts
• The Flint Institute of Art
• Federal Reserve
• Fort Wayne Museum of Art
• Fogg Art Museum - Harvard University
• Georgetown University Art Collection
• The Historic New Orleans Collection
• Kalamazoo Institute of Arts
• Library of Congress
• National Gallery of Art
• McNay Art Museum
• Minneapolis Institute of the Arts
• Museum of the City of New York
• The National Gallery of Art
• New Orleans Museum of Art
• The New York Public Library
• Newark Public Library
• Purdue University Galleries
• Queens Museum of Art
• Rhode Island School of Design Museum
• Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska
• Smithsonian American Art Museum
• Spencer Museum of Art at The University of Kansas
• Springfield Art Museum
• Syracuse University
• Tampa Museum of Art
• University of Arizona
• University of New Mexico
• Wesleyan University Davison Art Center
• Wellesley College Davis Museum
• Wichita Falls Museum
• The Whitney Museum of American Art
• Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University

Further reading

• Wax, Carol and Retif, Earl, Mezzotint, Art of Darkness, an exhibition of classical and contemporary mezzotints at the New Orleans Museum of Art, April 27 – July 28, (1996)
• Associated American Artists, Frederick Mershimer, New York, New York, July 21, 1994
• Walker, Lulen, Collecting to Teach: The Extraordinary Legacy of Joseph A. Haller, S.J., Special Collections Research Center of Georgetown University (2010)
• Wax, Carol, The Mezzotint, History and Technique, Abrams (1990)
• McCann, Margaret, The Figure, Painting, Drawing and Sculpture, Skira/Rizzoli (2014)

References

This article "Frederick Mershimer" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Frederick Mershimer. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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