1945.02.16 “Heavy, Heavy Hangs Overhead”
by Lucius Curtis “Lute” Pease, Jr. (1869 -1963)
16 x 18 in., photocopy on textured board
Coppola Collection
This is not original art, although it fooled me when it should not have. It came from a trusted dealer who has handled plenty of original art, including a ton of editorial cartoons from Pease during this era. Neither of us was paying attention to what, in retrospect, should have been so blatantly obvious.
Recently, a few years after I picked up the one I call 1939.10.14, I saw the same image for sale from a dealer on the opposite side of the US. Mine was stained, this one was not, but it was quite clearly a duplicate. And when I pulled mine out from the stack, it hit me that both of them were duplicates! The paper is the same weight as a standard Pease piece, it is exactly the same textured stuff used for the original art, and the size is about 90% of a standard original art piece. Once I was seriously looking at it, the complete monotone of the image pops out, whereas the originals show all the workings of a drawing (including blue pencil), and the backs of Pease pieces are cluttered with newspaper stamps, dates, and remarks.
The person selling the duplicate of the copy I had was selling two others, and a quick inquiry later (now that I had the right questions to ask), and they were all exactly the same production of some really excellent copies. At the right price, I like having the evidence for a swell mystery, so I have all of them (the other two are called 1948.09.16 and 1945.02.16)
In 2026, a Pease editorial cartoon is not worth any effort to counterfeit, so I am taking that off the board. I think these are period copies, perhaps from the late 1940s or early 1950s. I have checked in with all my usual contacts, and there is no production reason to have made these, particularly after the fact with all the marks in place. The best reason (so far) is a proposal based on someone knowing that Pease sometimes did public classes/lessons, and these might have been produced as materials for study. That fact that they all come from the same source is a fact of note.
Yes, you can imagine I immediately pawed through my collection. No other pieces are like this.
If this was an original, I would tell the story, so here it is.
Pease was a cartoonist for the Newark Evening News from 1914 to 1954 and received the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. He was a miner in Alaska for 5 years before beginning a career in art. He was an illustrator for the Oregonian and famously interviewed Mark Twain. From his retirement in 1954 until his death in 1963, he devoted himself to fostering his skills as a painter of portraits and landscapes.
Dresden (Feb 13–15, 1945): Catastrophic bombing causing high civilian casualties.
The cartoon responds to the shock of the Dresden firebombing and the culminating scale of Allied air power, when Germany’s destruction, and Hitler’s defeat, was portrayed as both inevitable and crushingly heavy. Just a few weeks later, Dortmund (March 12, 1945), saw the largest single-target raid of the war, with 4,851 tonnes dropped.
