Momma At MOMA by Lisa Duggan

"Three Women at the Spring" by Pablo Picasso

Today, in a rare act of self-indulgence, I went to NYC for breakfast and some cult-cha with my friend, KK, an art director. Among the many treasures we found was this painting by Picasso, above. K snapped a forbidden iPhoto. "I'm pretty sure the one in the middle is on her cell phone," she joked, as we sauntered through MOMA's fifth-floor galleries.

Along with this classic we stumbled upon the exhibition of Batiste Madalena's hand-lettered movie posters from the '20's. Madalena was hired by George Eastman to design and hand-paint film posters for his theater in Rochester, NY — at the time the third-largest cinema in the U.S.

Working alone over a four-year period and against deadlines that required as many as eight new posters a week for each change of bill, Madalena created over 1,400 unique works before the end of his tenure, when the theater changed management.

1,400 unique works! I pictured his mother's fridge buckling from the weight.

The posters were beautiful; strong, simple lines made with tempera paint, pastel and Conté crayons on poster board. In one, advertising a Harold Lloyd film, Madalena used colored construction paper to create Lloyd's face. I turned to K and snickered, "Well, that era is over. Should we bother teaching children to draw anymore?"

Graphic designers both, K and I stood contemplating the origin of our craft and the fact that most of the work we make with computers is reliant on images someone else painstakingly created by hand.

I thought, too, about the copious amounts of artwork my almost-six-year-old produces on a weekly basis. The most recent, best work covers the fridge and one wall in our kitchen. There is another drawer-full in the dining room. Then, there are the two portfolio cases in the attic, from her early years. (Art is recession proof in our house.) I know I will fill boxes and boxes with it as the years go by. I save her work so that she might someday look back at the origins of her expressive language and, maybe, gain some insight into her adult self.

I can't imagine this treasured rite of passage, this primal, visceral mode of expression, being lost.

But the reality is our generation of electronically-trained designers replaced all the craftsmen that created advertisements, newspapers, magazines, billboards, posters, signs — every single thing in print — once made by hand. I can only imagine who, or what, will replace us.

And if the mouse replaces the crayon in the hands of future generations, what will mothers proudly stick to the fridge, or use to fill those boxes?

Museum of Modern Art, 53 West 53rd Street: Batiste Madalena: Hand-Painted Film Posters for the Eastman Theatre, 1924–1928 through April 6, 2009.

COMING MONDAY

THE FIT PARENT by Tim Reynolds

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