AIC's 53rd Annual Meeting

In 1924, while looking into ways to utilize southern yellow pine sawmill waste, William H. Mason invented a process to create a new type of hardboard. Within a year, he established a plant in Laurel, Mississippi to manufacture his new material. By 1926, Mason applied for, and was awarded, several patents for this new engineered hardboard that would be known as Masonite. Developed at the beginning of the Great Depression, and over the next 100 years, its affordability made it a popular material for use in homes, design, and art.  Masonite even found a place in conservation, although later abandoned.

Soon after production began, Masonite was being used by artists.  An advertisement for Masonite in the June 1928 issue of Scientific American asked: “Where will this grainless wood be used next?” and “Did you know… that it is in daily service at the Chicago Art Institute as artist’s boards?“  It was in the paintings of Chicago-based Regionalist painters including Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton that we first find Masonite being widely used. It could be said that the rise of Masonite parallels the rise of American Regionalism and Social or Urban Realism painting in the 1930s, movements that represented a direct reaction against European Modernist painting. Rejecting not only traditional European subject matter but also traditional painting materials, Masonite was both affordable and readily available; it was also, at this time, a uniquely American material and a product of American ingenuity.  

However, American painters were not the only artists who reached for Masonite in their attempt to upend the traditional hierarchy of painting materials and subject matter. The Catalan painter, Joan Miro, famously used Masonite in a series of 27 paintings in his attempt to do just that –to “assassinate painting” -between the years of 1927 and 1937 By 1940, in order to ramp up hardboard production, Masonite had licensed manufacturing facilities in Australia, Canada, Italy and Sweden. Its use as a painting support quickly spread across the globe.

Scholars of art materials and techniques, including Ralph Mayer and Frederic Taubes, have written about the use of Masonite in making art. The subtle changes in their advice over subsequent editions reveal a changing understanding of the pros and cons of Masonite’s properties. Sorting out the history and details of Masonite production and how this has changed over time as well as the history of its use will help us more accurately understand the role of Masonite as an art material and why, at times, problems arise in its use.  

Though Masonite is a ubiquitous art material, it remains understudied and many aspects of its composition, manufacture, and use by artists remain to be explored. For example, Masonite appears to exist between the realm of paper and wood panels: how do its properties compare to these materials? Can we identify where a board of Masonite was produced?  And how does Masonite production affect what was painted on it and our treatment options?