ARTS & CULTURE
From bottom left clockwise, artwork can be found on pages 98, 178, 194 and 128 of Wildlife: The Life and Work of Charles Harper. P H OTO : C O U RT E SY O F CHARLEY HARPER ART ST U D I O, W I L D L I F E , G E S TA LT E N , 2 0 2 2
Midcentury Discoveries A new book revisits Charley Harper’s impressive catalog of work with a glimpse into his international impact. BY ST E V E N RO S E N
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s new generations continue to rediscover Midcentury Modernism as a beloved art, architectural and design style, the following for Cincinnati-based Charley Harper seemingly is on an indefinite spike. Harper, who eventually landed in Cincinnati but was raised in West Virginia, created paintings, prints and
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illustrations that frequently stylized their nature-related subjects by deemphasizing depth and accentuating colorfulness and geometric characteristics, a common motif around the middle of the 20th century. He died in 2007 at age 84, just as Mad Men began and Todd Oldham’s celebrated Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life was being published.
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Interest isn’t cooling off yet in this centenary year of Harper’s birth – including internationally – helped by the recent publication of the clothbound monograph Wild Life: The Life and Work of Charley Harper by Brett Harper (son and only child of Harper and his artist wife Edie), Margaret Rhodes and publisher gestalten. The Germany-based publishing house proposed the book to Brett, who directs the Charley Harper Art Studio. Publisher gestalten will distribute the Englishlanguage book internationally. As the book’s title indicates, this isn’t just a collection of images; it also has a biographical narrative written by Rhodes, an editor at New York
Magazine with a background in design stories. She spent time in Cincinnati last fall researching Harper’s life – including his time as a gifted Art Academy of Cincinnati student – as well as his flowering as a modernist artist drawn to nature as a subject. “One of the attractions was that I wanted a larger appreciation of Charley’s work in Europe,” Harper’s son tells CityBeat. “Knowing that there were customers in Europe of his prints and posters, I thought it would be a good thing to do it. And also, one of the attractions was that I felt they would have a portion of the book allocated to my mother, Edie, and her work.” (The book includes some of Edie Harper’s work.)
