Whitman in Art: The Case of Paul Peter Piech

Over thirty years ago, I readily accepted an invitation from Paul Piech (1920-1996) and duly made my way to a small bungalow on an estate on the outskirts of Porthcawl. His interest in Whitman, he explained, dated all the way back to his youth, and originally owed something to the fact that he himself was not only a New Yorker but a Brooklyn boy, whose working-class background chimed with that of Whitman, as did the values he had imbibed from that background broadly correspond to those he felt he encountered in the poet’s work. As an artist, his specialty was linocuts and, realizing that 1992 would mark the centenary of Whitman’s death, he was engaged in an ambitious project to produce a series of images to mark that occasion. Since Piech’s aims as an artist were, like Whitman’s, crusading ones, his only concern was that his images reach as wide an audience as possible, so that they could do their work. To this end, he insisted that should his prints be framed, those should be cheap to maximize circulation. When I happened to  mention I was due to return to Harvard as Visiting Professor in the autumn of 1991, his eyes immediately lit up. “I’ll give you a set of my Whitman prints for distribution over there,” he exclaimed. “But what should I charge for them?” I cautiously asked. “Nothing,” he replied. “Just give them to the kids.” He was as good as his word. When I did duly arrive in Harvard, I found a generous selection of his prints awaiting me—sent entirely at his own expense. And give them to the kids of course I did, little realizing that some of Piech’s prints were so highly valued that they were held at the prestigious Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The eminent Victoria and Albert Museum in London owns 2,000 of his prints and in 2016 it published a fascinating monograph of him. Today a print fetches some $600:  Paul Piech would be at once amused and appalled.