The Medallion's Designer
With an international reputation, as wood engraver, illustrator, and designer, Rudolph Ruzicka is often called America's dean of graphic arts. This designer of Dartmouth's Bicentennial Medal now makes his home in Norwich with his daughter and son-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Alex Laing '25.
He was born in Bohemia 85 years ago and was brought to Chicago in 1894 when he was 11 years old. Because he didn't know English, he was placed in first grade, much to his embarrassment, but he went through the next seven grades in three years. Then he quit school and joined a Chicago commercial engraving firm as an apprentice wood engraver at the age of 14. At night he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1903 he moved to New York City, where he worked for an advertising agency and attended evening classes at the New York School of Art.
Some time in 1906 he again took up wood engraving at night. His work was first published two years later: a series of views of New York engraved in chiaroscuro to illustrate a magazine article. After that beginning, his wood engravings enhanced many articles and books. Whether he was illustrating TheFountains of Papal Rome for Scribner's (1915) or depicting scenes of Concord, Mass., for the Lakeside Press edition of Walden (1930), Mr. Ruzicka seemed to understand the locale so completely that a viewer assumed he must be a native of the area. He is particularly well-known for his wood engravings of scenes of Boston and vicinity, printed and sent out by Merrymount Press for their New Year's greetings from 1912 to 1941.
As a result of the excellence of his work, he was awarded the Alice McFadden Brinton Prize of the Philadelphia Print Club in 1924, the bronze medal at Philadelphia's Sesquicentennial Exposition in 1926, and the gold medal of the American Institute of Graphic Arts in 1935.
A few years later he was persuaded to try his hand at designing type. He was such a skilled craftsman who understood printing as thoroughly as designing, it seemed a natural next step. In 1939 his first type design, Fairfield, was cut by Linotype. Fairfield Medium followed in 1947, and Primer in 1949. The text of the widely heralded book Andrew Wyeth, published last October, is set in Ruzicka's Primer. He also designed the book's typographic layout and hand-lettered the initials and some of the display letters.
Last fall ten new type designs prepared by Mr. Ruzicka were introduced in a portfolio entitled Studies in Design: Alphabets with Random Quotations, published by The Friends of the Dartmouth Library. In discussing his new designs that ranged from crisp modern script to variations of classic serif types, he noted that once again he yielded to the irresistible "temptation to clothe the 26 leaden soldiers [of the alphabet] in new array."
Even at age 85 Mr. Ruzicka continues to be creative and to produce designs that seem current or perhaps, more accurately, timeless. Ray Nash, Professor of Art at the College, offers this explanation of the effectiveness of a Ruzicka design: "His fresh thought pulses through all the work, and what he produces is done to conform with inner patterns, no outward model. ... The designer of these things is no follower of fashions — no follower of anything or anyone except his own deeply informed, first-hand thinking."
Rudolph Ruzicka (r), dean of Americangraphic artists, and Edward C. Lathem'51 look at a portfolio of new Ruzickatype designs published by Baker Library.
