The Color Explosion

In the 19th century, color lithography created a communication revolution and brought art, literature, and music to the masses. The process had a dramatic impact on consumer culture, too, as colorful and appealing product labels began to influence advertising, branding, and customer choices. Everything from cigar boxes to children’s games suddenly exploded with color. “In short, color lithography transformed American culture,” says David Mihaly, curator of lithographic history and ephemera at The Huntington.

Mihaly organized a new exhibition that highlighted one of the largest collections of color lithography in the United States. “The Color Explosion: Nineteenth-Century American Lithography from the Jay T. Last Collection” opened Oct. 17 and continued through Feb. 22, 2010, in the MaryLou and George Boone Gallery.

The exhibition featured more than 250 objects, including advertising posters, art prints, calendars, children’s books, product labels, sales catalogs, sheet music, toys, and trade cards. An antique lithographic press was also on display.

The Jay T. Last collection—about 135,000 objects in all—had never before been on public view and is a gift in progress to The Huntington. For scholars, the material will serve as a significant resource in social history as well as the history of commercial advertising. “The collection opens a wide window onto the developing field of graphic arts in the 19th century as a means of expressing cultural ideas,” says David Zeidberg, Avery Director of the Library.

Last, a physicist and founder of Fairchild Semiconductor Corp., is also an independent scholar of the history of lithography. He is the author of the award-winning book The Color Explosion: Nineteenth-Century American Lithography (Hillcrest Press, 2005).

About Lithography

Lithography was invented in the late 1790s by Alois Senefelder, a young German playwright who sought a cheaper and faster way to publish his plays. Unlike copper engraving or woodblock printing, the newer printmaking process did not require any cutting into metal or wood. Instead, an image was drawn with a greasy crayon onto a flat block of limestone. The lithographer applied water to the stone and then a layer of ink. The ink adhered to the greasy surface, but nowhere else, as the lithographer then pressed paper against the stone to produce an image. Early lithographers used only black ink and recruited workers to hand-color illustrations for books.