Lew Alberts (born Albert Morton Kurzman, 1880 to 1954) was the New York Bowery tattooist who systematized the first commercially distributed printed flash sheets around 1905. A Hebrew Technical Institute graduate who worked as a wallpaper designer before serving in the Spanish-American War, he brought design-school discipline to the Bowery flash vocabulary, worked alongside Charlie Wagner at 11 Chatham Square, and signed Wagner's 1904 machine patent as a witness. His designs traveled nationally through Wagner's 208 Bowery supply business and are the documentary spine of the American traditional register.

Who was Lew Alberts?

Lew Alberts was an American tattoo artist, flash designer, and mail-order distributor, born Albert Morton Kurzman in New York City in 1880 and active in the trade from about 1902 until his death in 1954. The son of German Jewish immigrants, he worked under the openly chosen trade name "Lew the Jew." He is widely credited as the originator of the commercially distributed printed tattoo flash sheet as a trade form, and he is the second principal figure, with Charlie Wagner, of the Bowery and Chatham Square shop tradition of the early twentieth century. His first name is canonically "Lew," sometimes formalized as "Lewis"; the variant "Lou" is a transcription error.

What was Lew Alberts known for?

Alberts is known for systematizing the printed flash sheet around 1905: designing tattoo motifs once, printing them in volume, and distributing them by mail to working tattooists nationally, which turned American tattooing from a custom-and-recall practice into a network-distributed visual-vocabulary trade. He is also the documented author of bald-eagle and American-flag flash motifs that Americanized the maritime vocabulary, the witness signatory on Wagner's 1904 machine patent, and, through the 2017 Don Ed Hardy monograph and the 2018 to 2019 Contemporary Jewish Museum exhibition, the central figure in the recovery of the Jewish-founders history of American tattooing.

Biography and significance

Albert Morton Kurzman was born in New York City on December 13, 1880, the son of German Jewish immigrants Isaac and Hannah Kurzman, in the densely Jewish Lower East Side. As a young teen he entered the Hebrew Technical Institute, the Lower East Side trade school that taught drawing, metalwork, and engineering as a route into the skilled-labor economy. After technical high school he worked as a wallpaper designer. That pre-tattoo design career is the formative discipline scholars from Don Ed Hardy through the museum curatorial team identify behind his later flash output: bold outlines, careful composition, repeatable motifs, and the treatment of a design as a marketable asset rather than a one-off drawing.

In 1899 he enlisted in the U.S. Army and deployed to the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. The consistent biographical narrative is that during service he was tattooed and learned the rudiments of the trade, returning to the United States with basic skill and an ambition to upgrade the visual register of the trade he had encountered. The specific unit, length of service, and mechanism of learning have not been documented in primary records, so the fact of service and being tattooed is firmer than the "learned the trade in service" shorthand. By his return to New York around 1902 he had taken the working name Lew Alberts, built from his given first name Albert.

By the early 1900s Alberts had settled in the Chatham Square and Bowery area and begun working in close association with the older, dominant practitioner Charlie Wagner, whose 11 Chatham Square shop had grown up around the legacy of Samuel O'Reilly. On April 19, 1904, Alberts signed as witness, under his birth name Albert M. Kurzman, on Wagner's application for U.S. Patent No. 768,413, the vertical-coil tattoo machine, issued that August. The patent witness signature is the earliest contemporary documentary record of the Alberts and Wagner working relationship and the primary anchor for any claim about their shop association. Around 1905 the two posed for a series of cabinet-card publicity photographs showing them tattooing the young attraction performer "Painless" Jack Tryon beside a hand-painted sign reading "Tattooed by Wagner and Alberts, Chatham Sq.," the principal period photograph of Alberts at work.

The flash-sheet contribution

The contribution for which Alberts is most remembered is the systematic design and commercial distribution of printed tattoo flash sheets. Around 1905, drawing on his wallpaper-designer training, he was the first to design and market printed flash sheets commercially to other tattooists, distributing them across the country through Wagner's 208 Bowery machine-and-supply business and through his own correspondence channels.

The "first" claim needs careful framing. Tattoo designs were shared between practitioners long before Alberts, in the European maritime trade, the American sideshow tradition, and the Bowery shops he entered. What Alberts originated was the commercially distributed, printed, mail-order, repeat-sale design sheet as a trade form: a sheet designed once, printed in volume, distributed through a supply network, and used by other tattooists as their working menu. That is the flash sheet in its modern trade sense, and the form has remained continuous from about 1905 to the present.

His innovation was also a content innovation. Alongside the international maritime vocabulary of anchors, swallows, hearts, ships, and rocks of ages, he authored motifs aimed specifically at American sensibilities: the bald eagle, the American flag, exaggerated cartoon characters, and motto banners. This Americanization of the flash vocabulary is the iconographic substrate of the American traditional register as it later descended through Cap Coleman, Percy Waters, Bert Grimm, and Sailor Jerry. Many Alberts designs are still in active reproduction in American traditional shops today.

A common overstatement credits Alberts with inventing or co-developing the electric tattoo machine. The accurate framing is narrower: the first commercially successful electric machine was Samuel O'Reilly's 1891 device, and the vertical-coil configuration that became the coil-machine standard was Wagner's 1904 patent, on which Alberts was a witness rather than an inventor. His Hebrew Technical Institute metalwork training plausibly let him build machines to the Wagner pattern, but no primary record establishes him as an independent inventor.

Brooklyn, Newark, and the late-career circuit

After World War I, with the wartime expansion of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Alberts opened his own shop at 87 Sand Street, Brooklyn, on the thoroughfare leading to the western gate of the yard, the densest sailor-trade tattoo cluster in metropolitan New York. By the late 1920s, facing competition from Jack Red Cloud, Bill Donnelly, and Jim Wilson, he moved his shop to his home in Newark, New Jersey, and entered semi-retirement. From there until his death on October 8, 1954, he maintained a mail-order flash exchange and trade correspondence with "Brooklyn Joe" Lieber and C. J. "Pop" Eddy of the San Francisco Bay Area. That correspondence is one of the densest surviving records of the American tattoo trade as a national mail-order network and is the archival basis of the later museum exhibition.

Alberts's posthumous recovery was driven by Don Ed Hardy, who in 2017 published "Lew the Jew" Alberts: Early 20th Century Tattoo Drawings through Hardy Marks Publications, the principal flash compilation. It was the documentary basis of the 2018 to 2019 Contemporary Jewish Museum exhibition Lew the Jew and His Circle: Origins of American Tattoo, the first major museum retrospective of an American tattoo figure of his generation.

Lineage and influence

Alberts's principal working partner was Charlie Wagner, and his entry into the Bowery trade came in the generational wake of Samuel O'Reilly. His flash-sheet trade form descends downstream into the mid-century American traditional distribution networks of Cap Coleman, Percy Waters, Bert Grimm, and Sailor Jerry. He is also one of the central nodes of the Jewish-founders cohort of early New York tattooing alongside Wagner, William "Willie" Moskowitz, Brooklyn Joe Lieber, and Milton Zeis.

Cross-references

Sources

  • Eldridge, Chuck. "Lewis 'Lew the Jew' Alberts." Tattoo Archive (Winston-Salem, NC), practitioner biography. Principal source for the life dates, the Albert Morton Kurzman birth name, the Hebrew Technical Institute education, the wallpaper-designer career, the 1899 Spanish-American War service, the Wagner association, the 1904 patent witness signing, the c. 1905 flash-sheet originating role, the 87 Sand Street shop, the Newark relocation, and the 1954 death. Credits Carmen Nyssen of Buzzworthy Tattoo History as research collaborator.
  • Hardy, Don Ed. "Lew the Jew" Alberts: Early 20th Century Tattoo Drawings. Hardy Marks Publications, 2017. The principal published flash compilation drawn from Alberts's surviving original artwork.
  • U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Patent No. 768,413, "Tattooing device," issued to Charles Wagner, August 23, 1904 (filed April 19, 1904). Primary source on which Alberts's signature appears as a witness on the application.
  • The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco. Lew the Jew and His Circle: Origins of American Tattoo. Exhibition, July 26, 2018 to June 9, 2019, curated in collaboration with Don Ed Hardy.
  • Ingall, Marjorie. "Tattooing's Founding Fathers Were New York Jews, and Their Legacy Is Alive and Well." Tablet Magazine, 2015. Longform on the Wagner, Alberts, Lieber, Moskowitz, and Zeis cohort.
  • Brayco Auctioneers and Invaluable, "Cabinet Card of Charlie Wagner and Lew Alberts Tattooing Jack Tryon (New York, ca. 1905)." Period-photography record of the Wagner-Alberts-Tryon nexus at 11 Chatham Square.
  • White, Cliff. Flash from the Bowery: Classic American Tattoos, 1900 to 1950. Schiffer Publishing, 2011. Published flash compilation and primary visual evidence for the Bowery output, including Alberts and Wagner.
  • Brooklyn Public Library, "A Story of Sands Street," and Forgotten New York, "Sands Street, Navy Yard." Local-history sources for the Sand Street and Brooklyn Navy Yard tattoo district context.

Editorial

Researched and written by John J. Mayo III, Editor, Tattoo History Atlas. Confidence is held at VERIFIED tier. The 1880 New York birth as Albert Morton Kurzman, the Hebrew Technical Institute and wallpaper-designer background, the 1899 Spanish-American War service, the Wagner association at 11 Chatham Square, the 1904 patent witness role, the c. 1905 systematization of commercially distributed printed flash, the 87 Sand Street shop, the Newark semi-retirement, the Lieber and Eddy correspondence, and the October 8, 1954 death are corroborated across primary, museum, trade-press, and academic sources. The "first commercially distributed flash" claim is asserted at trade-form scope, not as a claim that Alberts invented tattoo designs; the "machine inventor" framing is treated as overstated; the Philippines tattoo-learning mechanism is framed as plausible but undocumented in precision; and the spelling "Lew," formally "Lewis," is canonical over the erroneous "Lou."

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