Drawn with Spirit: Pennsylvania German Fraktur from the Joan and Victor Johnson Collection

One of the most admired forms of American folk art, fraktur are decorated Germanic documents featuring brilliant colors and often whimsical imagery. Transplanted to Pennsylvania by German-speaking immigrants in the 1700s, these hand-drawn or printed works on paper are distinguished by a broken (or “fractured”) style of lettering. Most were executed in ink and watercolor and embellished with hearts, flowers, birds, angels, and other lively motifs. The most common types of fraktur are birth and baptismal certificates, writing samples, house blessings, bookplates, rewards of merit, family records, valentines, New Year’s greetings, and religious subjects or texts. Philadelphians Joan and Victor Johnson have collected Pennsylvania German fraktur since the late 1950s. In 2012 they promised all their fraktur (about 230 works, dating between about 1750 and 1860 and mostly made in southeastern Pennsylvania) to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, thereby more than doubling the Museum’s fraktur collection and exponentially increasing its breadth, depth, and quality. In the exhibition, a selection of the Johnsons’ promised gift of fraktur will be shown with a variety of Pennsylvania German decorative arts from the Museum’s collection, including painted furniture, redware pottery, and metalwork.