Douglass Morse Howell Art

Douglass Morse Howell was born in 1906 in New York City. Howell stumbled into papermaking while seeking better paper for his own wood engravings in the 1930s. He set up his first paper mill in a cold-water flat on Grand Street in New York City and in 1950, set up a paper studio in Long Island, New York. Howell began producing paper for his own limited edition books, but his endeavor was not particularly well-received in conservative book arts circles, where he was accused of making baby blankets, not paper. Howell’s papers, made from pure linen or home-grown flax and local spring water, were indeed of an entirely different and original texture, color and weight than anything else being produced at the time. Artists, including Joan Mirò, Stanley William Hayter, Jasper Johns, Anne Ryan and most notably, Jackson Pollock, were delighted with this beautiful and novel substrate for printing, collage, drawing and watercolor. In the words of his student and chronicler, Alexandra Soteriou, “Howell emancipated paper from its role as a printing surface alone. He focused instead on the nature, aesthetics and creative possibilities of the paper itself.” Howell himself began creating paper art or papeteries, with inclusions of fiber, fabric and subtly placed filaments within the paper itself. He made his first pulp paintings by cutting out a design with wooden stencils and re-immersing the mold in different batches of colored pulp. Howell also experimented with three-dimensional paper works on wire molds. Howell had his first one-man show in New York at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1955 and had retrospectives at the American Craft Museum in 1982 and New York Public Library in 1986. His work is held in numerous public collections, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Public Library and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England. Howell became an American Craft Council Gold Medalist in 1993 and died in 1994 in New York.