Gerald Geerlings (1897-1998) Gerald Geerlings was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He initially was trained as an architect earning a Master of Arts from the School of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. He began working with an architectural firm in New York, but also began working with an etcher/architect, Louis C. Rosenberg. This generated an interest in printmaking leading him to study etching at the Royal College of Art in London. Despite this, he was primarily involved in architecture and had significant scholarly contributions to the field. After an initial period of printmaking in the 1920s and 30s, (that included a print that won a prestigious award from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts) he produced relatively little work until later in his life. Posthumously, his prints have been featured in several group exhibits including The Urban Scene: 1920–1950, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., America Is Hard to See, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Urban Vision: American Works on Paper, 1900-1950, Indianapolis Museum of Art. In addition to these, his works are held by many major collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Wisconsin Art (West Bend, WI), and the Chazen Museum of Art (Madison, WI).
Not surprisingly, his artistic work tended to focus on architecture. In his 80s and 90s, he became very interested in the effect of light on architecture and created a series of lithographs that he hand-colored with pastels to experiment with different colors and lighting, leading to the creation of unique images. His series, Cityscape Reflections has a lithograph of a city printed only on the top of the page. More than half the page was left empty and was subsequently filled with pastel imagery creating a variety of different impressions. Each lithograph was printed in an edition of 40, but the hand-coloring rendered each different and unique.