Witness to Our Century: An Artistic Biography of Fritz Eichenberg opened at the Haggerty Museum of Art on Friday, July 24. The exhibition of over seventy-five works on paper chronicled the career of Fritz Eichenberg (1901-1990), world-renowned artist, printmaker, teacher, author, and social activist, whose life and art bore witness to the political, military, and social follies of our age. The exhibition was the first comprehensive exhibition of Eichenbergís work produced with the cooperation of the Fritz Eichenberg Trust. In addition to sketches, finished drawings, and prints, Witness to Our Century contained previously unexhibited works from the artistís personal collection, including childhood caricatures from 1912, advertising posters from 1920, and political cartoons from the twenties and thirties published in Berlin and New York. 

Witness to Our Century was organized by the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery. Three important phases of Eichenbergís life and career are represented in the exhibition: his early years as a student and commercial artist in Germany, his career as an illustrator in New York, and his tenure as an educator. His work is joined with a chronology of his life, excerpts from his unpublished autobiography, and relevant text concerning concurrent world events. This synthesis of materials gives viewers both a sense of the context from which Eichenbergís images emerged and an opportunity to reflect personally upon the political and social issues presented. 

Born in Germany in 1901, Fritz Eichenberg took his first art classes at the age of 12 and discovered a talent for caricature. The artist was deeply affected by the works of Goya and Daumier and resolved to become "an artist with a message." An apprenticeship with printers led to a career as a book illustrator and cartoonist where he created highly critical images of the German political and military elite. He was sent to New York by a publishing house to record his impressions of America and soon settled there to escape the Nazis. A teaching appointment at New Yorkís New School provided him entree to The Nation and the Federal Arts Project where he honed his craft as a political cartoonist. Eichenberg was commissioned at this time to illustrate the literary works of Dostoevsky, Swift, Poe, and the Brontë sisters. His friendship with Christian radical Dorothy Day inspired a forty-year parallel career producing religious images for The Catholic Worker. In 1956 Eichenberg became chair of the department of graphic arts at the Pratt Institute and was appointed chair of the art department at the University of Rhode Island in 1966. He died in 1990.