Lynd Ward
Lynd Kendall Ward was an American artist and novelist, known for his series of wordless novels using wood engraving, and his illustrations for juvenile and adult books. His wordless novels have influenced the development of the graphic novel. Strongly associated with his wood engravings, he also worked in watercolor, oil, brush and ink, lithography and mezzotint. Ward was a son of Methodist minister and political organizer Harry F. Ward.
His most well known books are Gods' Man and his Caldecott-winning The Biggest Bear.
Early life
Lynd Kendall Ward was born on June 26, 1905, in Chicago, Illinois. His father, Harry F. Ward, was born in Chiswick, England, in 1873; the elder Ward was a Methodist who moved to the United States in 1891 after reading the progressive Social Aspects of Christianity by Richard T. Ely. He named his son after the rural town of Lyndhurst, located in the south coastal county of Hampshire, where he had lived for two years as a teenager prior to his emigration. Ward's mother, Harriet May "Daisy" Kendall Ward, was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1873. The couple met at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, and were married in 1899. Their first child, Gordon Hugh Ward, was born in June 1903, and a third, Muriel Ward, was born February 18, 1907.Soon after birth, Ward developed tuberculosis; his parents took him north of Sault Ste. Marie in Canada for several months to recover. He partly recovered, and continued to suffer from symptoms of the disease throughout his childhood, as well as from inner ear and mastoid infections. In the hope of improving his health, the family moved to Oak Park, Illinois, where his father became a pastor at the Euclid Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church.
Ward was early drawn to art, and decided to become an artist when his first-grade teacher told him that "Ward" spelled backward is "draw". Having skipped a grade, Ward graduated from grammar school a year early in 1918. The family moved to Englewood, New Jersey, and Ward entered Englewood High School, where he became art editor of the school newspaper and yearbook, and learned linoleum-block printing. In 1922, he graduated with honors in art, mathematics, and debate.
Ward studied fine arts at Columbia Teachers College in New York. He edited the Jester of Columbia, to which he contributed arts and crafts how-to articles. His roommate arranged a blind date for Ward and May Yonge McNeer in 1923; May had been the first female undergraduate at the University of Georgia in her freshman year. The two married on June 11, 1926, shortly after their graduation, and left for Europe for their honeymoon.
After four months in eastern Europe, the couple settled in Leipzig in Germany for a year, where Ward studied as a special one-year student at the. He learned etching from Alois Kolb, lithography from, and wood engraving from Hans Alexander "Theodore" Mueller; Ward was particularly influenced by Mueller. Ward chanced across a copy of Flemish artist Frans Masereel's wordless novel The Sun, a story told in sixty-three woodcuts without captions.
Career
Ward returned to the United States in September 1927, with a number of book publishers in his portfolio. In 1928, his first commissioned work illustrated Dorothy Rowe's The Begging Deer: Stories of Japanese Children with eight brush drawings. May helped with background research for the illustrations, and wrote another book of Japanese folk tales, Prince Bantam, with illustrations by Ward. Other work at the time included illustrations for the children's book by Hildegarde Swift, and an illustrated edition of Oscar Wilde's poem "Ballad of Reading Gaol".In 1929, Ward was inspired to create a wordless novel of his own after he came across German artist Otto Nückel's Destiny. The first American wordless novel, was published by Smith & Cape that October, the week before the Wall Street Crash of 1929; over the next four years, it sold more than 20,000 copies. He made five more such works: Madman's Drum, Wild Pilgrimage, Prelude to a Million Years, Song Without Words, and Vertigo.
In addition to woodcuts, Ward also worked in watercolor, oil, brush and ink, lithography and mezzotint. Ward illustrated over a hundred children's books, several of which were collaborations with his wife, May. Starting in 1938, Ward became a frequent illustrator of the Heritage Limited Editions Club's series of classic works. He was well known for the political themes of his artwork, often addressing labor and class issues. In 1932 he founded Equinox Cooperative Press. He was a member of the Society of Illustrators, a member and President of the Society of American Graphic Artists, and the National Academy of Design.
Ward lived with his wife in a home in Cresskill, New Jersey to which they added a studio for their work.
Death
Ward retired to his home in Reston, Virginia, in 1979. He died on June 28, 1985, two days after his 80th birthday, predeceasing his wife.Documentary
In celebration of the art and life of this American printmaker and illustrator, independent filmmaker Michael Maglaras of produced a film titled O Brother Man: The Art and Life of Lynd Ward. The documentary features an interview with the artist's daughter Robin Ward Savage, as well as more than 150 works from all periods of Ward's career. The 94-minute documentary, culled from over seven hours of film and narrated by Maglaras, premiered at Penn State University Library's, Foster Auditorium, on April 20, 2012, where it was warmly received. Penn State's Special Collections Library has also become the repository for much Lynd Ward material, and may continue to receive material from Ward family collections.Awards
He won a number of awards, including a Library of Congress Award for wood engraving, the Caldecott Medal for The Biggest Bear in 1953, and a Rutgers University award for Distinguished Contribution to Children's Literature. He also illustrated two Newbery Medal books and six runners-up. In 2011, Ward was listed as a Judges' Choice for The Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame.Novels in woodcuts
Ward is known for his wordless novels told entirely through dramatic wood engravings. Ward's first work, , uses a blend of Art Deco and Expressionist styles to tell the story of an artist's struggle with his craft, his seduction and subsequent abuse by money and power, his escape to innocence, and his unavoidable doom. Ward, in employing the concept of the wordless pictorial narrative, acknowledged as his predecessors the European artists Frans Masereel and Otto Nückel. Released the week of the 1929 stock market crash, would continue to exert influence well beyond the Depression era, becoming an important source of inspiration for Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg.Ward produced six wood engraving novels over the next eight years, including:
- Madman's Drum
- Wild Pilgrimage
- Prelude to a Million Years
- Song Without Words
- Vertigo
Other works
In 1930 Ward's wood engravings were used to illustrate Alec Waugh's travel book Hot Countries; in 1936 an edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was published with illustrations by Ward. Ward illustrated the 1942 children's book The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge, with text by Hildegarde Swift. His work on children's books also included his 1953 Caldecott Medal winning book The Biggest Bear, Nic of the Woods from 1965 which he wrote and illustrated, and his work on Esther Forbes' Johnny Tremain. He also produced a wordless story for children, The Silver Pony, which is told entirely in black, white and shades of gray painted illustrations; it was published in 1973.Ward's work included an awareness of the racial injustice to be found in the United States. This is first apparent in the lynching scenes from Wild Pilgrimage and appears again in his drawings for North Star Shining: A Pictorial History of the American Negro, by Hildegarde Hoyt Swift, published in 1947. Ward uses African American characters, as well as several different Native ones, in his book The Silver Pony.
Ward also illustrated Little Baptiste, My Friend Mac and The Wolf of Lamb's Lane which were all written by his wife, May McNeer.
In 1941 his illustrations were used in Great Ghost Stories of the World: The Haunted Omnibus, edited by Alexander Laing.
In 1974 Harry N. Abrams published Storyteller Without Words, a book that included Ward's six novels plus an assortment of his illustrations from other books. Ward himself broke his silence and wrote brief prologues to each of his works. In 2010, the Library of America published Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcuts, with a new chronology of Ward's life and an introduction by Art Spiegelman.
Influence
Ward's work had an important influence on the work of later graphic artists such as George Walker, Clifford Harper, Eric Drooker, Jarrett Heckbert, Steven McCabe and Megan Speers. His works have been praised by R. Crumb, filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro, and Alan Moore.Since 2011, Ward has been honored and his name has been attached to the prestigious annual Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize, which is sponsored by Penn State University Libraries and administered by the Pennsylvania Center for the Book, an affiliate of the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress. Previous winners of the Lynd Ward Prize have been Nick Sousanis, Jillian Tamaki, Mariko Tamaki, Jim Woodring, Chris Ware, Anders Nilsen, and Adam Hines.