Charles Quest: Visions in Copper and Wood

Introduction

Charles Quest, a successful artist and fine art instructor, worked in a diverse array of media including mosaic, stained glass, mural painting, and sculpture, but is perhaps best known as a printmaker. Born in 1904 in Troy, New York, his talent was evident when as a teenager he began copying the works of masters such as Michelangelo on his bedroom walls. Quest grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and studied at the Washington University School of Fine Arts where he later taught from 1944 to 1971. He spent some time in Europe after his graduation in 1929, studying at La Grande Chaumière and Academie Colarossi, and drew great inspiration from the works of the Old Masters. After returning to St. Louis, Quest received a number of commissions to paint murals in public buildings, schools, and churches, including one from Joseph Cardinal Ritter to paint a replica of Velasquez’s Crucifixion over the main altar of the Old Cathedral in St. Louis.

Quest soon became interested in the woodcut medium which he seemingly learned through his study of J. J. Lankes’s book, A Woodcut Manual (1932) and Paul Landacre’s articles in American Artist magazine of 1941. Copies of his letters to these two great printmakers in the Library’s Special Collections Division credit them with his success, “since no artists in St. Louis were working in wood” at that time. Quest also revealed that for him wood cutting and engraving were “more enjoyable than any other means of expression.” In the late 1940s his graphic works began attracting a lot of critical attention with several of his woodcuts winning prizes and being acquired by major American and European museums. A wood engraving entitled Lovers was included in the American Federation of Art’s traveling print exhibition in 1947. Two years later Quest’s two prize winning prints, Still Life with Grindstone and Break Forth into Singing were exhibited in major American museums in a traveling show organized by the Philadelphia Print Club. His work was included in the Art Institute of Chicago’s exhibition Woodcut Through Six Centuries, and the print Still Life with Vise, which The St. Louis Post-Dispatch described as “a low, horizontal panel in which file, funnel, brace and bit are arranged in a square-cut design,” was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. All the above-mentioned prints are included in the present exhibition.

In 1951 he was invited by artist-Curator Jacob Kainen to exhibit thirty wood engravings and color woodcuts in the Graphic Arts Division of the Smithsonian’s National Museum (now known as the American History Museum). This one-man exhibition was a remarkable achievement for Quest, who had been working in the medium for only about ten years. In the press release for the show, Kainen praised the “technical refinement” of Quest’s work:

“He obtains a great variety of textural effects through the use of the graver, and these dense or transparent grays are set off against whites or blacks to achieve sparkling results. His work has the handsome qualities characteristic of the craftsman and designer.”

At the time of the Smithsonian exhibition, Quest’s work was represented by three New York galleries in addition to one in his home town. He had also won 38 prizes, and his prints were in the collections of the Library of Congress, the Chicago Art Institute, the Metropolitan Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others. In cooperation with the Art in Embassies program, his color woodcuts were displayed at the American Embassy in Paris in 1951. Recognition at home came in 1955 with his first solo exhibition in St. Louis. Press coverage of the show heralded the “growth of graphic arts toward rivaling painting and sculpture as a major independent medium” as prints were becoming elevated into the realm of fine art, in contrast to a lingering notion of prints as a commercial tool for copying or reproducing well known works of art.

Charles Quest retired from teaching in 1971 and made relatively few prints in his later years, as the rigors of the medium were too demanding. He moved to Tryon, North Carolina, with his wife Dorothy, an artist and portrait painter, and remained active as a painter until his death in 1993. An exhibition of his prints at the Bethesda Art Gallery in 1983 attracted the interest of Curator Emeritus Joseph A. Haller, S.J., who began purchasing his work for the University’s collection.

In 1990 Georgetown University Library’s Special Collections Division became the grateful recipient of a large body of Quest’s work including prints, drawings, paintings, sculpture and stained glass, as well as his archive of correspondence and professional memorabilia.¹ These extensive holdings, including some 260 of his fine prints from which this exhibition was mounted, provide a rich opportunity for further study and appreciation of this versatile and not-to-be-forgotten mid-Western American artist of the twentieth century.

LuLen Walker
Art Collection Curator

Notes

1. We wish to thank long-time volunteer Joyce O’Brien for cataloging the Quest archive and creating the invaluable finding aid for the use of Special Collections staff and visitors.