Scope and Content Note
The Alfred Bendiner Memorial Collection (Library of Congress) comprises about 1,900 items in two main components: almost 1,600 prints, watercolors, and drawings by Philadelphia-based architect and caricaturist Alfred Bendiner (1899-1964), and more than 400 prints, posters, and drawings by various European and American artists whose works Bendiner collected during his lifetime. These works range from seventeenth-century prints to twentieth-century drawings. The bulk of the material dates from 1943 to 1964, with additional material spanning 1706 to 1968.
The collection represents Bendiner's artistic achievements. His sketches, study drawings, paints, and prints offer insight into the education, development, and working methods of a professional sketch artist. Because the collection includes a large number of sketches, rather than more fully developed works, the value of the collection is best realized by looking at the images collectively. The collection does not contain architectural drawings by Bendiner or his colleagues.
Works by Alfred Bendiner
Bendiner's own work is in 22 LOTs based on his travels, interests, and achievements. Prints and drawings on the same subject are in the same LOT.
- Personal interests:
- LOT 13130 contains drawings and prints showing both the childlike whimsy of the circus and the Black laborers who worked behind the scenes.
- LOT 13131 illustrates Bendiner's love of sports. It includes drawings and prints of a wide variety of sporting events, with a strong focus on baseball and bullfighting.
- LOT 13146 contains portrait lithographs of famous classical musicians of the post-World War II world, as well as people playing and dancing to jazz, calypso, and big band music. Bendiner's images of musicians and dancers reflects his love of both classical and popular music.
- LOT 13133 includes images of Bendiner's home and family.
- Travels around the world, both before and after World War II:
- LOT 13147 includes scenes of American life made by Bendiner during his travels throughout the United States.
- LOT 13132 includes drawings of sailors and activities on board passenger ships.
- LOT 13140 contains images of Egypt and the Middle East, including several images drawn during the Tepe Gawre archeological dig in 1936 and 1937. The prints and drawings include humorous portrayals of men smoking, as well as images of Arab men removing objects from the archeological site.
- Other LOTs reflect Bendiner's travels to the West Indies (LOT 13136); Mexico (LOT 13137); Guatemala (LOT 13138); Greece, Turkey, Morocco, and Tunisia (LOT 13139); England and Ireland (LOT 13141); Spain, Portugal, and Gibraltar (LOT 13142); Paris (LOT 13143); and Italy (LOT 13144). Bendiner caricatures of people of these countries in a cheerful manner, reflecting the stereotypes Americans held about "foreigners" in the era between World War I and the Vietnamese Conflict, the two wars which span his career. Bendiner also portrays American tourists abroad, namely himself and his wife, humorously.
- Commercial work:
- LOT 13145 contains images created for two advertising campaigns (one for vanilla flavoring for ice cream, and the other for piston rings), which include drawings and galley proofs.
- LOT 13152 contains political caricature that Bendiner produced as a caricaturist for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin.
- LOT 13135 contains non-political caricatures, drawings and prints of national and international personalities passing through Philadelphia that Bendiner produced as a caricaturist for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin and Sunday Bulletin.
- World War II:
- LOT 13134 contains more than 200 drawings relating to Bendiner's World War II experience in the Aircraft Warning Center in 1943. He provides a humorous view of women working on the home front during World War II, as well as examples of post-war uses for one of the tools of their job, a long stick. Another example of his sense of humor is a print made during World War II, entitled The Home Front, showing soldiers and pregnant women walking along a Philadelphia sidewalk. He caught the post-war baby boom as it started.
- Student work:
- LOT 13148 includes his graduate student design drawings for two grotesques at the University of Pennsylvania. He experimented with architectural students holding t-squares, before settling on a portrait of his wife. Two of the gargoyles were made and remain on a building at the University of Pennsylvania campus.
- Miscellaneous:
Works Collected by Alfred Bendiner
Most of the works collected by Alfred Bendiner are in 10 LOTs and several curatorial filing series. The collection is strong in satirical prints.
- LOT 13151 contains ephemera collected by Alfred and Elizabeth Bendiner, includes menus, invitations, and an album of Jewish postcards.
- LOT 13153 is an album of cartoons about World War I and international relations that were clipped from Cartoons magazine.
- LOT 13154 is an album of 50 French satirical prints from La Caricature. The prints date from 1832 and 1833, during the reign of King Louis Philippe.
- LOT 13155 contains miscellaneous French language satirical prints, includes issues of the journals Le Grelot, Le Journal pour Rire, and Les Contemporains, as well as published images by Honoré Daumier and other French caricaturists.
- LOT 13159 contains English language satirical prints, includes works by Robert Seymour and George Cruikshank, as well as reproductions from Vanity Fair.
- LOT 13162 contains Castigat ridando mores, Alessandria elegante, is an album of lithographic caricatures, many of which contain animal shaped shadows.
- LOT 13156 contains Japanese woodcuts.
- LOT 13160 contains Indian and Japanese drawings.
- LOT 13157 contains miscellaneous prints collected by Alfred Bendiner that did not fit into the above categories. A few are duplicates of prints in the Library's Fine Prints series. Many of the prints are by Mid-Atlantic artists or are unattributed.
- LOT 13158 contains miscellaneous drawings collected by Alfred Bendiner that did not fit into the above categories. Many of the drawings are by Mid-Atlantic artists or are unattributed.
Works of exceptional nature that merited fuller item-level description are in several curatorial filing series:
- Cabinet of American Illustration (CAI): The drawings of Rose O'Neill, Robert Riggs, and Michael Angelo Woolf as well as Hugh Ferriss' rendering for a proposed reconstruction of King Solomon's temple for the Philadelphia Sesquicentennial Exposition of 1926.
- Cartoon Drawings filing series (CD 1): The drawings of Art Young, Caran d'Ache, Théophile Steinlen, Cham, Sancha Lengo, Adolf Dehn and other European and American cartoonists and caricaturists.
- Drawings (General non U.S.) filing series (DRWG 1): There are three nineteenth-century French drawings.
- Fine Prints (FP-XIX, FP-XVII, FP-XX) and Popular Graphic Art (PGA) filing series contain many prints that have been cataloged individually and placed with works by the same artists.
- Fine Print collection (FP): Prints by Sébastien Le Clerc, Frank Brangwyn, Jean Veber, Robert Riggs, Julius Bloch, Clarence Pitz, Benton Spruance and John Costigan. Some bear inscriptions to Bendiner and his wife, including birthday wishes from Federico Castellon.
- Popular Graphic Art (PGA): Works by Edward Williams Clay, W. Kohler and G. Rymer, as well as Oliver Herferd's elegy for Thomas Starling Sullivant.
- Political Cartoon Prints (British) filing series (PC 1): Works by British caricaturists George Cruikshank and James Gillray. A catalogue entry exists in the British Museum Catalogue.
- Political Cartoon Prints (British) - Undated; Title Series (PC 2): British prints which have not been recorded in the British Museum Catalogue and bear no date.
- Political Cartoons Prints (British) - Dated Series (PC 3: Dated satires which have not been recorded in the British Museum Catalogue, including the 1829 satire, Irish march of intellect; or The happy result of Emancipation.
- French Political Cartoon Prints filing series (PC 5): Thirty images dating from an anonymous anti-King Louis XIV cartoon created in 1706 to cartoons from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.
- Posters filing series (POS): Four posters, including an Italian propaganda work, Saluto al Duce.