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"EVERY MAN A REMBRANDT"
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THE UNFINISHED WORK OF PAINT BY NUMBER, 1960-2001
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Levittown Levittown, New York. 1948. NMAH Division of Social History/Domestic Life Collection. Gift of Dr. Theodore and Ruth Finestone.


The New Leisure

DEPARTMENT STORE The decade of the 1950s was one of prosperity. Rising incomes and shorter workweeks gave Americans more leisure and more money to spend. Business was happy to supply this market with leisure-time products-from television sets to barbecue grills to paint-by-number kits. A new mass culture based on consumerism took shape. Writing in Life magazine in the late 1950s, cultural critic Russell Lynes set out to describe the popular pastimes of the "new leisure." He observed that the usual markers of class-education, wealth, and breeding-no longer applied. The one thing that mattered was something that everyone had. That something, Lynes explained, was free time. In postwar America, class had become a matter of how one spent his or her free time.

Department Store The simulation of creative experience was a key selling point for paint by number. In this trade-show demonstration, the exhibitor emphasized the point with this "believe it or not" notice: "The lady painting this picture is not a painter." Among its harshest critics, the hobby seemed less a simulation than a violation of art, an attack on the last vestige of personal expression in an increasingly impersonal consumer society.

TRADE SHOW DEMONSTRATOR While critics complained that "number filler inners" were experts at wasting time, the hobby did introduce many people to the tools of art and the process of painting. For their part, retailers welcomed the paint-by-number kit as a "transition item," estimating that ten percent of paint-by-number hobbyists went on to purchase traditional art supplies for their own compositions.

Old Mission At the height of its popularity, paint by number touched every level of American society. The hobby's ultimate display took place not in a department store or a trade fair but in the Eisenhower White House, where presidential appointment secretary Thomas Edwin Stephens mounted a gallery of paint-by-number and amateur paintings by administration officials and acquaintances.

Swiss Village In 1954, Stephens distributed Picture Craft kits to cabinet secretaries and Oval Office visitors. More than a few assumed that the president himself expected that they paint them, and the puckish Stephens did little to dispel that impression. He eventually installed the completed paintings in a West Wing corridor. The Stephens Collection also included works by the administration's amateur painters, who chose to bypass the preplanned canvas route.

NMAH
Introduction | Every Man A Rembrandt | The New Leisure | The Picture's Place
The Unfinished Work | Post-a-Reminiscence | Bibliography, Links & Credits