Mabel Dwight: Cool Head, Warm Heart

On view
Floor 3

Mabel Dwight (1876–1955) wrote that keeping “a cool head and a warm heart” was essential to making art that would be a “living influence on the world.” Dwight came to New York at the turn of the century as an illustrator and later fell in with the downtown artists who frequented the Whitney Studio Club, a precursor to the Museum. She ultimately found her voice in the swooping lines and seamless gradients of lithography. This democratic print medium became her primary vehicle for portraying her constant subject: the people and places of New York. 

Dwight’s self-described “socialist” vision of the world was of dignity across the socio-economic divides. Her crowd scenes depict individuals—usually rendered with a gently curving stroke, dramatic lighting, and delicate highlights— each taking part in a greater whole. Her intimate portraits offer uniquely expressive faces, and her overtly political images are as theatrical as her vision of the stage. All her subjects, whether selling balloons, strolling home, or waiting for the day to pass, possess the inner glow of what Dwight called “the stuff of life.” The life in Dwight’s prints came from her own—she spent her free time roaming the city, from Harlem to Staten Island, sketching in a notebook hidden inside her jacket. Back at her apartment, Dwight would revise her images and then carefully transfer them to a stone or a zinc plate, from which multiple impressions could be printed and inexpensively made available to the public.

Mabel Dwight: Cool Head, Warm Heart is curated by Dan Nadel, Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints, Whitney Museum of American Art, with Eli Harrison, Curatorial Fellow, Whitney Museum of American Art.