"Reserves", "Everybody's War", and “Stowing the Jumbo” focus on personal struggle and labor that was characteristic of his prints before his war experience. Later years In 1943 Allen abandoned printmaking in order to study abstract painting with Hans Hofmann. In two series of paintings he experimented in a new dreamlike style depicting “arabesques of figures flatly painted on a flat background with stylized suggestions of mountains.” In 1944 and 1945, Kindred, MacLean & Co. commissioned two new lithographs, "Caribou" and "Elk", as Christmas promotionals. In 1946 he became an art teacher of printmaking at the National Academy of Design in New York City. He retired from illustration in the 1950s but continued to exhibit his prints and paintings at fine art galleries. Tragically, he later developed a degenerative brain disease, diagnosed as Huntington's chorea, and one of the consequences of his illness was that he destroyed many of the preparatory sketches for the prints. James E. Allen died in Larchmont, New York, at the age of seventy on September 9, 1964. Works James E. Allen produced numerous prints (lithographs and engravings), many commissioned as advertising art. A comprehensive exhibit in 1984 at the Mary Ryan Gallery in New York showed 91 of his prints. The catalog, and the corresponding "Ryan" numbering, has served as a catalog raisonné for his prints. A more comprehensive catalog of his works, including Allen's illustration art, is now available as part of an online exhibit about the artist at Stanford University. Significant collections of his prints can be found at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Allen was a prolific painter who prepared most of his illustrations in oil. A few paintings have shown up at auction and are known to be in private collections, but the fate of most his canvases are unknown. An example can be found at the Kelly Collection of American Illustration Art. Sources Bénézit, Emmanuel. The Benezit Dictionary of Artists. [Oxford] : Oxford University Press, 2011. <http://www.oxfordartonline.com/benezit> Castagno, John. Artists As Illustrators: An International Directory with Signatures and Monograms, 1800 -- the Present. Metuchen, N.J. : Scarecrow Press, 1989. Falk, Peter H. Dictionary of Signatures & Monograms of American Artists: From the Colonial Period to the Mid 20th Century. Madison, Conn: Sound View Press, 1988. Falk, Peter H, Audrey M. Lewis, Georgia Kuchen, and Veronika Roessler. Who Was Who in American Art, 1564-1975: 400 Years