Prints from the Permanent Collection: Jerome Kaplan, Hulda D. Robbins, Benton Spruance

Jerome Kaplan was a respected Philadelphia artist who contributed to the recognition of printmaking as
a fine art. Following World War II, he was hired by Benton Spruance to teach lithography at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Benton Murdoch Spruance  was one of the most influential and prolific color lithographers in the history of twentieth-century modernism – his advances in color lithography almost single-handedly revived a near-dead medium that had not flourished since the turn of the century. Spruance’s eyes were first opened to the expressive power of this print medium, when he saw lithographic studies of gritty urban life by Ashcan School Realist George Bellows at a memorial exhibition for the artist in 1925. His body of work primarily consists of lithographs of social, religious and mythological subjects.

Born in 1910, Hulda Robbins attended the Philadelphia Museum’s School of Industrial Arts from 1928-1929. Robbins became a prolific printmaker producing many series of serigraphs, lithographs and woodcut prints.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.