Founded in 1797 under the Directory, the Louvre Chalcographie holds over 14,000 engraved copperplates, used to make prints, and has the mission of disseminating the image of the museum’s masterpieces through the art of engraving.

This institution, which is part of the Musée du Louvre, arose from the merging of three collections of engraved plates, established from the second half of the 18th century: the Cabinet du Roi, including nearly 1,000 plates commissioned by Colbert to illustrate the greatness of Louis XIV’s reign; the Menus-Plaisirs collections, which spread the image of great court ceremonies and public festivities of the 18th century; and the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture’s collection, comprising pieces submitted by engravers upon their admission, and engraved plates acquired by the institution in the second half of the 18th century to develop its editorial collection.

This exhibition presents preparatory drawings, engraved copperplates, and prints made from them. It aims to trace the history of the three royal collections that each contributed in their own way to the dissemination of the king’s image. It also showcases the copperplates which, regarded until recently as mere tools for printing, are at the core of an engraver’s profession.

Graver pour le roi. Collection de la Chalcographie du Louvre is organized in a particular context: starting in 2020, the Chalcographie will not be allowed to print from plates dated prior to 1848, matrices that played a fundamental role in the circulation of the King Louis XIV's image.

Michelangelo’s sculptures, paintings, and architectural projects have been the subject of artistic admiration for more than 500 years. As a companion to Michelangelo: Mind of the Master, on view in the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Hall from September 22, 2019, to January 5, 2020, Master/Apprentice: Imitation and Inspiration in the Renaissance surveys the impact of Michelangelo—his practice, his projects, and his biography—on artists working in the Renaissance and beyond. The works on view examine how Florentine artists modeled their approach to the human form and their working methods on those of Michelangelo, as well as how artists further afield emulated and reinterpreted his work. The exhibition features prints reproducing and quoting Michelangelo’s major projects alongside works that document his architectural impact on the city of Rome. Drawn entirely from the Cleveland Museum of Art’s collection, the prints, drawings, and sculpted plaques on view explore a range of responses to Michelangelo and his work.

Organized in collaboration with graduate students in the course After Michelangelo, taught by Dr. Emily Peters and Climo Assistant Professor Erin Benay in the CMA-CWRU Joint Program.

Inaugurated in 2010, the annual Harvard-Yale Graduate Conference in Book History draws graduate students from across disciplines into a mutual dialogue concerning the History of the Book. All sessions are chaired by relevant faculty from regional institution

9:30–10:00: Coffee & Refreshments, Robinson Lower Library

10:00–10:05: Welcome and Acknowledgments, Robinson Lower Library

10:10–12:10: Panel 1
Religion and the Book (Chair: Peter Stallybrass)
Ievgeniia (Zhenya) Sakal, “The Council of Florence Revisited: Bibliographical Strategies of the Learned Churchmen”
Madeline McMahon, “From Print in the Archive to Printed Archive: Making Sense of Carlo Borromeo’s Acta ecclesiae Mediolanensis (1582)”
Khalil Andani, “The Qur’ān: From Revelation to Book”
Annika Schmeding, “Transcending Books: Publishing and Book Culture among Afghan Sufi Communities”

Modern (Im)Materialities (Chair: Katharina Piechocki)
Pooja Sen, “Oral Histories: Valeria Luiselli, Contemporary Art, and the Writers of Teeth”
Brandon Menke, “Ephemeral Objects: The Author, the Artist, and Sensuous Reaading in the Wake of AIDS”
Emily Kanner, “Marina Tsvetaeva’s Magic Lantern”
Geordie Kenyon Sinclair, “AB+VM: The Love Story in Verse of Two Women in the Gulag”

12:15–13:15: Lunch, Robinson Lower Library

13:15–14:15: Panel 2
Digital Approaches (Chair: Doug Duhaime)
Shiva Mihan, “Digitally Reconstructing a Medieval Persian Manuscript: Bāysunghur’s Rasāyil, Victim of a Dealer’s Greed”
Nicholas Frisch, “A Book of Books: Digitally Mapping Anthologies in Late Ming China (1600– 1644)”

Premodern Information (Chair: Alan Niles)
Alessia Bellusci, “Medieval and Early Modern Hebrew Books of Magic”
Hayley Cotter, “The Admiralty Jurisdiction Debates and Legal Authority in Seventeenth-Century England”

14:15–14:30: Break

14:30–16:00: Panel 3
The Book as Idea (Chair: Rachel Love)
Kyle Conrau-Lewis, “Conrad von Waldhausen and Antiquity: Commentary, Book, Booklet?”
Selin Unluonen, “A Composite Thing: The case of the Khamsa of Shah Tahmasp”
Miriam Kamil, “Ovid’s Invidia and Prudentius’ Vices: Classical Poetry in a Medieval Florilegium”

Manuscript and/or Print (Chair: David Stern)
Loren Waller, “Textual Genealogies and Adoption: Rethinking the Concepts of Manuscript, Authorship, and Legitimacy in Early Modern Japan”
Dana Key, “‘But what is writ by hand we reverence more’: Reconstructing the Education and Moral Life of William Hill, a Leicestershire Yeoman (1574–1658)”
Ishai Alon Mishory, “Threshold of Empire(s): The Soncino Colophon to Elijah Mizrahi’s Sefer Ha-mispar”

16:00–16:30: Closing Remarks and Group Discussion, Robinson Lower Library

This exhibition, a collaboration between the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC-USP), and the Terra Foundation for American Art, explores the influence of artist and printmaker Stanley William Hayter (1901–1988) on the evolution of printmaking in the United States and Brazil during the first half of the 20th century. Assembled around a never-before exhibited group of prints gifted in 1951 to MAC-USP by American philanthropist Nelson Rockefeller (1908–1979) and another smaller group gifted by Lessing Roswenwald, the exhibition highlights the impact that Hayter, well known as an experimental printmaker and teacher, had on a vast group of established and emerging artists. Centered on key prints by Hayter, the exhibition also includes an array of works by artists who printed alongside him in his workshop, Atelier 17, as well as a selection of prints that help to contextualize the practice of printmaking in the United States from 1900 through 1950.

Born in 1901 in London, England, Stanley William Hayter moved to Paris in 1926 and began his studies at the Académie Julian, but left the school soon after and discovered copper engraving, a medium he quickly became invested in for its expressiveness. The smooth, metallic surface of copper allowed lines to be drawn directly onto the copper plate with a freedom that aligned with Hayter’s artistic interest in automatic drawing and amorphous, organic shapes, or biomorphism.

In 1927 Hayter established the print studio Atelier 17 in Paris, which he relocated to New York City in 1940. The studio became renowned in both cities for Hayter’s generosity, energy, creative expression, and embrace of established and emerging artists. His practice impacted artists as varied as Americans Sue Fuller, Jackson Pollock, and Louise Nevelson, and Brazilians Geraldo de Barros, Fayga Ostrower, and Livio Abramo.

Printmaker, engraver, sculptor, and publisher, Leonard Baskin (1922 – 2000) imbued his work with his love of literature, mythology, and notions of human mortality. In connection with the exhibition A Passionate Muse: The Art of Leonard Baskin, exhibition curator William Breazeale will be joined by the artist’s son, Hosea Baskin, a noted rare-book collector and dealer to discuss Baskin – who collaborated with writers such as Ted Hughes and James Baldwin – and the intersection of art and literature.

About the Exhibition: A Passionate Muse: The Art of Leonard Baskin
Sculptor, printmaker, and illustrator, Leonard Baskin (1922-2000) was well known for his spirited visual fantasy and storytelling. He also cast his eye on the modern world, with sometimes-biting commentary on the ills of society, woven into religious or mythological scenes. This exhibition focuses on his independent prints, many of them monumental, that examine his often cynical, often hopeful view of human nature.

Throughout their careers, visual artist and filmmaker Titus Kaphar and memoirist, poet, and attorney Reginald Dwayne Betts have used their varied mediums to confront the abuses of the criminal justice system. The Redaction presents more than 30 new prints and a series of public programs that examine the issue of money bail, the condition of the state and federal court system by which those arrested, but unable to afford bail, remain incarcerated even though they have been neither tried nor convicted.

Drawing inspiration and source material from lawsuits filed by the Civil Rights Corps (CRC) on behalf of people incarcerated because of an inability to pay court fines and fees, The Redaction features poetry by Betts in combination with Kaphar’s etched portraits of incarcerated individuals. Betts utilizes the legal strategy of redaction to craft verse out of legal documents, capturing the complicated and pervasive effects of time spent incarcerated. These poems have been screenprinted by Kaphar onto handmade paper using the Redaction font, a new open-source typeface created for the project. Together, Betts’s poems and Kaphar’s printed portraits blend the voices of poet and artist with those of the plaintiffs and prosecutors, reclaiming these lost narratives and drawing attention to some of the many individuals whose lives have been impacted by mass incarceration.

Taking place at MoMA PS1 throughout the month of April, the exhibition marks the first-ever public installation of The Redaction, and seeks to create a platform for a multiplicity of conversations—about art, poetry, and practical legal questions—that can influence outcomes and reflect current conversations around the issue of criminal justice reform.

As part of The Redaction project, Titus Kaphar and Reginald Dwayne Betts collaborated with designers Jeremy Mickel and Forest Young to create a new open-source typeface. The Redaction font features throughout the artist's collaborative print portfolio and is also available to download as part of the project, in hopes that individuals looking to communicate within the U.S. legal system have recourse to communicate not just through their own distinct language and voice, but also through design as a form of protest.

Pablo Picasso is considered the quintessential modern artistic genius. With apparent ease, he availed himself of a wide variety of genres, techniques and materials. Especially printmaking offered him a medium for experimentation and ever-new manifestations of the pleasure he took in inventing. The exhibition examines Picasso's innovative use of relief, intaglio and planographic printing methods from his early Paris years to his late period.

The Städel Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings devotes an exhibition titled “Picasso. Printmaking as Experiment” specifically to Pablo Picassos (1881–1973) graphic oeuvre. Featuring more than sixty etchings, lithographs and linoleum cuts, the exhibition presents a selection from the holdings of the Städel Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings, enhanced by a small number of loans from the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and a private collection. The selection vividly illustrates the full range and development of Picasso’s graphic oeuvre from the early years in Paris to his late work.

Whether etching, drypoint, lithography, or linocut, with never-dwindling curiosity and virtuosity, Picasso gained expertise in a wide variety of printmaking techniques, always questioning what he had found in new and experimental ways. The exhibition is structured according to the various printing techniques, which are always closely linked to the artist’s biography. The print series “Suite Vollard”, which Picasso created between 1930 and 1937 and with which he made full artistic use of the diversity of intaglio printing techniques, has its own section within the exhibition.

Connoisseurship is an avenue of art historical inquiry shared by scholars, collectors, and other specialists that relies on close examination to assess a work of art. When it comes to ukiyo-e, or pictures of the floating world, differences in color intensity, design, line definition, and condition among prints of the same design can provide valuable insight into a given print’s origin, authenticity, and quality. Often, assessing a print requires comparing it to another example of the same work to identify fading, repairs, or additional elements not present in other versions.

This exhibition brings together works by Hokusai, Utamaro, Sharaku, and other ukiyo-e printmakers to explore questions of connoisseurship, asking the viewer to closely compare multiple editions of the same design and observe the differences between them. Although The Great Wave was traditionally printed with a bright pink sky, surviving prints most often feature a sky of pale beige, the result of fading from light exposure. All three of the Art Institute’s Great Wave prints—one of which retains its pink color—are presented together in this exhibition. Each was made after the first state of the design, a fact evidenced in distinct ways, such as the broken lines of the title cartouche in the upper left corner, the most obvious sign that these prints were not made when the blocks were new and unworn.

While the earliest state of a print is considered to be the closest approximation of the artist’s original intent, later states, many of which were produced by a publisher rather than the artist, are not necessarily less aesthetically appealing or less valid. From time to time, blocks were recut to insert a different detail, modify text, or even add or remove a feature of nature, such as a cloud or a tree. The different shapes of light blue on the waves of one of the Great Wave prints, for example, are the result of a new block that was added later on. In other instances, a print may have deteriorated from fading, paper loss, and other ravages of time before being carefully repaired in ways only detectable when the work is compared to a print in pristine condition.

By identifying and closely examining differences in works of the same design, viewers can gain insight into the intricacies of the dating, authentication, repair, and commercial production of Japanese woodblock prints—and learn to draw their own informed conclusions.

Discover the brilliant colors and spirited lines of Yoshitoshi, the last great master of the traditional Japanese woodblock print. Ever inventive in his art, he responded to Japan’s rapid modernization of the late 1800s with greater expressiveness than seen before. His vivid, dynamic imagery served as inspiration for modern-day manga and anime.

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi came of age as an artist as Japan opened to the West after two hundred years of isolation. Navigating both cultural traditions and the upheavals of the modern world, he tackled a wide range of themes: the heroism of samurai warriors, poetic images of figures in nature, female beauty, historic accounts, ghost stories, and the horrors of the battlefield.

This exhibition showcases some seventy works from the Museum’s extraordinary collection of Yoshitoshi prints, the largest repository of his work outside Japan.

Artists of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries devised unusual ways to integrate writing into their works. Fascinated by the shapes of the letters, they create figure alphabets in which the contorted bodies of humans and animals stand in for the strokes of the pen. Dialogues, legends, and titles on banderoles bring images to life and help the beholder make sense of them. Verbose captions take up a great deal of room. These elements appear in portraits and depictions of biblical scenes, but also in illustrations of historic events. In chronicles, cityscapes, and world maps, writing is the central organizing device. This exhibition showcases selected eminent works from the Kupferstichkabinett to shed light on the multifaceted interplay between writing and image.