Oct 10 at 12:00 PM - Sale 2681 -

Sale 2681 - Lot 141

Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000

PERHAM NAHL (1869-1935)

PANAMA PACIFIC INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION / SAN FRANCISCO. 1915.

24¾x13¾ inches, 62¾x35 cm.
Condition B+: expert repaired tears, overpainting and restoration in margins and along horizontal fold lines in image and text; small replaced losses; repaired pin holes in margins.

Perham Nahl, born in San Francisco, was active in the art world of Northern California, first studying painting and drawing, then working in lithography and illustration art. In 1907, Perham became one of the founders of the School of the California Guild of Arts and Crafts, where he taught in addition to being a professor at U.C. Berkeley. His poster, which illustrates the "Thirteenth Labor of Hercules," was awarded first prize and made the official image of the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition - a world's fair held in San Francisco celebration of the engineering feats of the Panama Canal (while also flaunting California's own recovery from the 1906 earthquake). "Despite the fair's display of technological marvels [Nahl's poster] displays nothing technological. Instead it shows a muscled, naked, Michelangelesque hero forcing apart a pastoral Culebra Cut to create the canal . . . 'thrusting apart the continental barrier at Panama to let the world through to the Pacific incidentally to the . . . Exposition, whose fair domes and pinnacles rise mistily beyond'" (Imperialism p. 146). Nahl uses the powerful imagery of Hercules, Greek mythology's strongest mortal, to imply that Hercules' Thirteenth Labor is to hold back the landmasses of a man-made triumph - the valley of the Panama Canal. Rare.

Northern California pl. 6, Imperialism p. 147 & cover.
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