The Morgan Library & Museum will celebrate the 2014 holiday season with an entertaining exhibition of rarely-seen handmade cards created by twentieth-century artists for their friends and family. Drawn from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, the exhibition will include nearly sixty seasonal cards made by such important artists as Helen Frankenthaler, Milton Avery, Alexander Calder, Ad Reinhardt, Philip Guston, and Saul Steinberg. The exhibition will open on November 21 and will be on view through January 4, 2015.

Spanning the decades from the 1920s to the 2000s, the works in the exhibition are tangible reminders of meaningful relationships among friends and colleagues, many of whom formed bonds through the practice of making art. They succeed in evoking romance, peace, humor, and joy in the most personal of ways—directly from the hand of the artist.
As might be expected, the media represented are as varied as the artists’ individual styles, ranging from watercolors and pencil drawings to collage and stencil. Some of the cards reflect events or changes in the maker’s life. For example, a 1972 card by Philip Guston depicts an ordinary household scene during a period of his life when he had moved away from his celebrated Abstract Expressionist style to engage a more figurative approach.
Many of the cards in the exhibition are playful greetings between friends in the art world. Claes Oldenburg’s holiday sketch to art curator Samuel Wagstaff, dated ca. 1965,  features a prominent pig spouting some kind of gibberish, perhaps Oldenburg’s take on pig Latin.

For some artists, card making was an annual tradition. American painter Kay Sage met her husband, the French Surrealist Yves Tanguy, in Paris, and they moved to New York with the onset of World War II. Once in the States, they collaborated on creating annual holiday cards for close friends until Tanguy’s sudden death in 1955. Sage continued the practice in the following years and the exhibition includes an inventive card that she created in 1958 with the aid of a typewriter and different color ribbons. 

The exchange of holiday cards became a phenomenon in the United States in the late nineteenth century and continues today. Commercially produced in great quantities with recurring themes, cards became a forum for the expression of friendship and fellowship. Handmade: Artists’ Holiday Cards from the Archives of American Art explores these timeless sentiments with delightful and often startling originality. But the artists represented here eschewed the effortlessness of the mass-produced and turned instead to a more intimate form of expression—small-scale works of art created for particular friends and loved ones.

All of the items on view in the exhibition are from the collection of Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. Founded in 1954, the Archives fosters advanced research through the accumulation and dissemination of primary sources, unequaled in historical depth and breadth, that document more than two hundred years of our nation’s artists and art communities.

 
Online Engagement: Handmade Holiday Cards
 
Keeping with the spirit of the season, the Morgan encourages visitors to share their own handmade holiday card creations. The general public is invited to post their creations using #MorganHandmade to tag their works on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook. Participants will be eligible to win a copy of the exhibition catalogue, Handmade Holiday Cards from 20th-Century Artists.