12. Emma Bormann
(1877-1974)

New York Aquarium

(click on image to print)
Bormann: New York Aquarium

New York Aquarium

Hand-colored woodcut, ca. 1940, 240 x 335 mm. Good, roughly-printed (obviously intentional) impression on laid japan paper with full margins, hand colored in green, pink, red, yellow, brown and pale grey-violet, signed and titled in pencil. The scene is an interior view of the old New York City Aquarium at Battery Park, gone now for many years and missed. Bormann was born in Vienna, Austria, studied at the Vienna Academy and produced her first woodcuts around 1917. She was a peripatetic traveler and America, though she was here for some years, was apparently a stopping point for her between Europe and Asia Minor, in her earlier years, and Japan and the Far East in her later ones. Though classified by some sources as an American artist, it seems doubtful that she stayed long enough in any one place to change her citizenship.