Collection Online as of August 14, 2022
The High Level Bridge, Cleveland
Rudolph Ruzicka
(American, born Bohemia, 1883-1978)
Color woodcut
Image: 17.9 x 12.9 cm (7 1/16 x 5 1/16 in.); Sheet: 26 x 19.4 cm (10 1/4 x 7 5/8 in.)
Gift of The Print Club of Cleveland 1926.308
Location
not on view
Description
Ruzicka produced this color woodcut, commissioned by the Print Club of Cleveland, from a pencil and crayon sketch. It depicts the “High Level” or Detroit-Superior Bridge, an engineering marvel completed in 1918, having an upper deck for vehicular traffic and a lower deck (now closed) for electric streetcars. The High Level Bridge was the first span across the Cuyahoga River tall enough to allow boats to pass without raising or lowering elements and stopping car traffic. Many artists were attracted by both the bridge’s modern structure and its symbolic meaning as the link between the city’s east and west sides.
Rudolph Ruzicka
Born in Bohemia, Rudolph Ruzicka immigrated with his family to Chicago in 1894. At the age of 14, he left school to become a wood-engraving apprentice at the Franklin Engraving Company in Chicago. He attended evening classes at the Art Institute of Chicago as well as weekend drawing classes at Hull House, 1897–1900. He moved to New York to work as a commericial printmaker in 1903. He had solo exhibitions in Cleveland at Korner & Wood Galleries (1913) and the Cleveland Museum of Art (1917). He traveled to Cleveland and sketched the city after receiving a commission to create work for the Cleveland Print Club in 1927. He moved to Boston during the late 1940s and over the subsequent decades added book illustration to his career achievements. Ruzicka died in Hanover, New Hampshire.
"Transformations in Cleveland Art" (CMA, 1996), p. 235
"Transformations in Cleveland Art" (CMA, 1996), p. 235