Kurz & Allison
| Status | Defunct |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1880 |
| Founder | Louis Kurz and Alexander Allison |
| Country of origin |
 United States
|
| Headquarters location | Chicago, IL |
| Distribution | national |
| Publication types | Prints |
Kurz and Allison were a major publisher of chromolithographs in the late 19th century. Based at 267-269 Wabash Avenue in Chicago, they built their reputation on large prints published in the mid-1880s depicting battles of the American Civil War. This was a period of recollection among veterans, and the company was trying to capitalise of this sentiment. In all, a set of thirty-six battle scenes were published from designs by Louis Kurz (1835–1921), himself a veteran of the war. Kurz, a native of Salzburg, Austria, had emigrated to the United States in 1848. While the prints were highly inaccurate and considered naive fantasies like Currier and Ives prints, they were still sought after. They did not pretend to mirror the actual events but rather attempted to tap people's patriotic emotions. When the Spanish–American War broke out in 1898, the company created several large prints of the major battles and of the subsequent campaign of the Philippine–American War. Later conflicts such as the Russo-Japanese War were also illustrated by the company.
Louis Kurz first worked as a lithographer in Milwaukee, together with Henry Sifert. After the Civil War, he was one of the founders of the Chicago Lithographing Company. He worked there until the company was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. He then returned to Milwaukee, and started the American Oleograph Company. He moved back to Chicago in 1878, where in 1880 he became a partner in the newly founded firm of Kurz and Allison. Alexander Allison probably provided financial backing.
In 1884 Kurz and Allison published a single print of the battle of Gettysburg inspired by Paul Philippoteaux's popular cyclorama on the same subject, and probably intended to profit by the popularity of the cyclorama. (The cyclorama was first exhibited in Chicago in 1883, where Kurz then was living.) According to Neely and Holzeer (2000) "The influence of the Gettysburg cyclorama on the Kurz and Alison print is readily recognizable. … The print openly copied vignettes from the painting and in at least one instance perpetuated a historical error ..."
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Wikipedia