Sunday, May 12, 2002
Artistry of early baseball cards on display at Toledo museum
By JOHN SEEWER
Associated Press Writer
TOLEDO, Ohio — Ruth and Rembrandt. DiMaggio and Degas. Mantle and Monet.
Just steps from the masterpieces inside the Toledo Museum of Art, a collection of treasured baseball cards explores the bonds between art and the national pastime.
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FACTS
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Facts about “Play Ball! Baseball Cards from The Metropolitan Museum of Art” at the Toledo Museum of Art.
— There are 145 cards dating from 1887 to 1959.
— The cards were selected from Jefferson Burdick's entire collection of 306,503 cards.
— Players on display include the famous: Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb. And the not-so famous: Spike Shannon and Lucky Wright.
— The exhibit is open through July 7. Admission is free.
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Some cards on display are simple black and white photographs from an era when players wore handlebar mustaches but no smiles. Then there are color lithographs revealing the scowls of baseball's mightiest sluggers.
“One of the attractions of art is that it's timeless. Baseball has no clock,” the exhibit's curator, Larry Nichols, said in explaining how baseball trading cards fit into the museum.
The cards come from the Jefferson Burdick Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Burdick acquired nearly every card made from 1887-1959 — 306,503 cards in all.
Burdick, a factory worker from Syracuse, N.Y., donated the entire lot to the museum just before his death in 1963.
It's one of the few times the collection has been outside New York because it's difficult to display in its pages and because of the cost of insuring it.
The cards were brought to Toledo to help celebrate April's opening of a new ballpark for the Mud Hens minor league team. The exhibit, “Play Ball! Baseball Cards from The Metropolitan Museum of Art,” is to run through July 7.
Nichols waded through hundreds of binders filled with baseball cards, selecting 145 for display in Toledo. He's the museum's curator of early European painting and sculpture but was put in charge of the card exhibit because he's a baseball fan.
A native New Yorker, Nichols admitted a little bias in choosing quite a few Yankees, Dodgers and Giants cards. He also made sure to include two of game's greatest left-handed pitchers — Warren Spahn and Sandy Koufax.
“I was a mediocre lefty pitcher in high school,” Nichols said. “One of the beauties of this show is you can respond to it in many ways. It takes you back.”
The cards are displayed in framed glass cases.
The oldest are the Gold Coin Tobacco Issue from 1887 that was part of a larger set that included actors, firefighters and athletes.
There are cards that came in cigarette packs and Cracker Jack boxes.
In some sets, the poses and faces of the players were obviously duplicated.
“They could get away with it because without television and photographs, people didn't know what the players looked like,” said Bob Lemke, an associate editor of Sports Collectors Digest.
Many cards are color lithographs that were copied from action and posed photos of the ballplayers — a rarity in an age of black and white.
“They reflect a high level of the state of commercial art in their eras,” said Lemke, who specializes in vintage trading cards.
Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig come to life in the 1933 Goudey Gum cards.
Ruth's rounded and weathered face shows the slugger near the end of his career. Gehrig's mighty swing reveals his steady strength.
An American Tobacco Company issue from 1909 is made up of black and white photos that look like family portraits — pictures of stoic men wearing white uniforms buttoned to their necks.
As the years passed, the cards grew in size and so did the pictures of the players. Their faces — sometimes murky in earlier versions — became brighter and more prominent as players became larger than life on the field and off.
Nearly all the faces in the exhibit are white. Black baseball players weren't in any releases until the Leaf card company produced a Jackie Robinson card in 1948.
Still, the exhibit includes black ballplayers such as Robinson, Satchel Paige, Ernie Banks and Willie Mays.
What's also absent is any reference to the value of the cards.
That was done intentionally so that visitors would appreciate the cards for what they are and not what they are worth, Nichols said.
School groups and older visitors mingle around the collection.
Alan Saxon spent a recent afternoon studying the 1959 Topps cards, lamenting a long ago decision to throw his collection away.
“The pictures are more honest,” Saxon said. “It's clean. It's minimalist.”
Sy Berger, the father of the modern baseball cards who designed the famed Topps cards in the 1950s, said he didn't set out to create cards that would be immortalized.
“I put out baseball cards. Today we put out works of art,” said Berger, of Rockville Centre, N.Y., who still does some consulting work for Topps.
“We wanted to make something attractive that would catch the eye. And we gave you six cards and a slice of gum for a nickel,” he said.
The vintage look is popular again.
Topps last year issued the first all-painted card set in decades, hiring artists to paint pictures of today's players that were transferred onto the cards.
“It turned out to be an amazing set,” said Clay Luraschi, a spokesman for Topps. Other vintage sets released in the past year include those that copy the design of the 1952 Topps set and T-206 sets from the early 1900s.
“It's a classic look,” Luraschi said. “There's a whole wanting to go back to simplicity in baseball.”
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Artistry of early baseball cards on display at Toledo museum
