Back to Exhibitions

On View in West Bend

Franklin Boggs

The Art of Tanning

Past Exhibition

March 8–June 8

MOWA | West Bend

About the Exhibition

A gift to MOWA from the Katherine and Thomas Hauske Jr. Family, this is the first time in more than sixty years these paintings have been on public view.

March 15–June 8

West Bend

This exhibition celebrates the recent museum gift of nine exceptional artworks by Franklin Boggs (1914–2009), a Regionalist painter whose style has strong affinities with John Steuart Curry, Grant Wood, and Thomas Hart Benton. Initially trained as a scene painter of rural life and farm labor, Boggs gradually shifted his subject matter to heroicized depictions of industrial labor that epitomized the postwar-era business boom. Between 1945 and 1960, he won coveted commissions from national corporations and nonprofit entities such as Abbott Laboratories, Hiram Walker & Sons (Imperial Whiskey), Mayo Clinic, National City Bank, Standard Oil, and, in Milwaukee, Albert Trostel & Sons.

One of the world’s largest tanneries by the mid-twentieth century, Albert Trostel & Sons commissioned Boggs to “portray and interpret the strength and character of leather tanning” as part of the company’s centennial celebrations in 1958. In a series of nine paintings, Boggs commemorated the tanning process from the packing plant to the shoe store, documenting not only the backbreaking labor of workers but the early adoption of industrial machinery that helped put the company at the forefront of the leather industry. Boggs’s paintings poignantly capture the mid-century optimism that accompanied the American transition from skilled, labor-intensive craft to industrial production.

About the Artist