美国蚀刻《Monday Morning in Charleston》by Alfred Hutty 1922 -6parkbbs.com

Monday Morning in Charleston. Etching on zinc. 1922. Alfred Hutty. 6park.com

One of his earliest etchings, “Monday Morning” depicts an African American slum neighborhood likely in Bedon’s Alley in Charleston (there is another etching titled ‘Bedon’s Alley’ made by Hutty in 1921). It is a typical example of Hutty’s rendering of relics of a grand past, often in ruin or disrepair and now inhabited by African Americans. Such a practice captures the essence and irony of Charleston’s post-Civil War history in a single graphic image. The grand mansions built by slave-owning aristocrats were now the homes of the descendants of chattel slavery, a complicated irony rendered intelligibly and instantly. 6park.com

Before 1923 Hutty often waited to transfer his drawings to plates until he returned to Woodstock where he had easier access to a printing press. With only a few exceptions of prints made in the mid-1920s when he used a New York City printer, Hutty prepared his own plates and printed all editions of his etchings himself. Beginning in 1921 Hutty followed his signature on his prints with a snail symbol; he claimed that, having entered the "etching game" late in life, "I use the snail as my mark on the etchings, because I was so long getting at it!" 6park.com

Hutty first visited Charleston in 1920 and according to one of the main legends of the Charleston Renaissance he excitedly wired his wife back in Woodstock: "Come quickly, have found heaven." Hutty began dividing his time seasonally between homes and studios in Charleston and Woodstock, teaching art classes for the Carolina Art Association at what is now the Gibbes Museum of Art. In Charleston, Hutty was inspired to try his hand at printmaking for the first time, and it is this artistic medium for which he is best known. His skillful prints depicting the city's surviving colonial and antebellum architecture, its rural environs, and its African American population drew unprecedented national attention to both Hutty and to Charleston. 6park.com