We would like to congratulate our print and works on paper colleagues for their outstanding work this year -- print scholars and print exhibitions were well represented in the CAA 2019 Awards for Distinction!

Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions -----------------
Andrew C. Weislogel and Andaleeb Badiee Banta, "Lines of Inquiry: Learning from Rembrandt's Etchings"
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 2017

Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award -------------------
FINALISTS
Christophe Cherix, "Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions 1965–2016"
Museum of Modern Art, 2018

Naoko Takahatake and Jonathan Bober, "The Chiaroscuro Woodcut in Renaissance Italy"
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2018

CAA/AIC Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation ------------------
Karl S. Buchberg
Jodi Hauptman

Congratulations to all of the winners! The full list of award recipients can be found by clicking on the 'External Link' below.

On the basis of her novel Vinterbørn (Winter’s Child) from 1976, Danish artist Dea Trier Mørch (1941-2001) created a series of linocut illustrations of everyday scenes which remain an important artistic contribution even today. Her subjects are so ordinary that it can be difficult to see what is special about them.

With her pictures of childbirths and pregnant women, Trier Mørch brought a whole new dimension to a visual culture where the story of this universal aspect of the human condition had hitherto remained surprisingly untold. While death is a widespread theme in visual art, the beginning of life is a subject which only attracted greater artistic attention with the advent of the feminism of the 70s.

Dea Trier Mørch’s works fully embrace the tactile and physical when it comes to the body as the starting point for the human being. Her pictures from the maternity ward show respect in giving the woman’s perspective centre stage. The same dignity is evident in her graphic works with their portrayals of the time, where the emphasis is on the social and the collective, and everyday life becomes the gateway to reflections on life itself – from birth to death.

Trier Mørch began as a visual artist – at the age of 16 she was admitted to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts – but she had her popular breakthrough as a writer with Vinterbørn. Moreover she was co-founder of the artist collective Røde Mor (Red Mother) in 1969.

The exhibition presents around 90 of the artist's works on paper.

Rembrandt lived and worked in Amsterdam during the Dutch Golden Age in the 17th century. Although most residents of Amsterdam during Rembrandt’s lifetime practiced Dutch Calvinism, the city was renowned for its welcoming spirit toward immigrants, especially the Sephardic Jews who had been expelled from Spain and Portugal during the Inquisition. Rembrandt never formally joined any church, but he was an astute student of the Bible. At times, he turned to Jewish theologians for insight into his depictions of Old Testament imagery. He also hired models from the Jewish community and received commissions from Jewish patrons.

This exhibition contains 21 etchings by Rembrandt and one drawing by Rembrandt’s teacher Pieter Lastman (Dutch, 1583-1633). These works highlight the artist’s nuanced relationship with Amsterdam’s citizens of the Jewish faith and the keen insights Rembrandt brought to interpretations of Old Testament Bible stories.

Rembrandt’s legacy as an etcher is characterized by the new and innovative techniques he introduced to printmaking. He broke with longstanding, traditional depictions of biblical narratives; instead, Rembrandt added emotional and psychological depth to his subjects through expressive faces, dramatic body language, and his bold use of shadow and light.

Rembrandt and the Jewish Experience is organized by Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California. The presentation of this exhibition at Telfair Museums is curated by Courtney McNeil, Chief Curator & Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs.

Between 1870 and 1914, the second wave of the Industrial Revolution brought changes that would have been difficult to imagine in earlier centuries. Cars, airplanes, and integrated electrical grids transformed urban environments. These advances in technology stimulated art production in new and exciting ways. This exhibition brings together prints and drawings by European artists, such as Fernand Léger, Kazimir Malevich, Lyonel Feininger, and El Lissitzy, who captured the impact of industrialization on urban life in the early 20th century. Subjects such as power lines, neon signs, and factories became emblems of the speed and dynamism associated with modern life. Working in a variety of innovative styles that range from representational to abstract, these artists underscored the modernity of their subjects by adopting unique artistic philosophies.

The Baroque was an intensely exciting period in human history. Its art reflects new discoveries and ways of thinking about mankind’s relation to the expanding world, now comprising the Americas, and new tendencies in religious, philosophical, scientific and political thought. This focused but wide-ranging exhibition demonstrates the role the graphic arts played in disseminating and shaping the seventeenth-century worldview. Eleven thematic sections examine how both well-known artists such as Rembrandt but also lesser-known but equally vital names depicted such major subjects as portraits, landscapes and cityscapes, subjects from contemporary history and antiquity, as well as pure creations of the human imagination.

Selected from the Frank Raysor Collection and the Harnett Print Study Center Collection, the exhibition features works by more than thirty artists, such as Jan Both (Dutch, 1618-1652), Jacques Callot (French, 1592-1635), Stefano della Bella (Italian, 1610-1664), Hendrick Goudt (Dutch, 1583-1648), Wenceslaus Hollar (Bohemian, 1607-1677), Claude Lorrain (French, 1604-1682), and Jacob van Ruisdael (Dutch, 1628-1682).

History, mythology, poetry, and portraiture provided a vast range of subject matter for French artists of the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries. Drawn from the peerless holdings of The Horvitz Collection—one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of early modern French art—this exhibition features paintings and drawings in all these genres by such celebrated artists as Charles Le Brun, Nicolas de Largillière, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Jean-Baptiste Oudry and Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy Trioson. The impressive selection of over 50 drawings, some exhibited with related prints, focuses on a particular category—designs for book illustration—thereby highlighting not only the creative inventiveness of the artists who formulated lavish visual imagery from the written word, but also the rich literary traditions of France and the vibrant book publishing industry they spawned.

The opening reception is Thursday, January 24th, beginning at 5:00 p.m. with a discussion between curator Alvin L. Clark Jr. and Jeffrey Horvitz. On Wednesday, March 6th at 5:00 p.m., Elizabeth Rudy, who co-authored the accompanying catalogue, will give a lecture on the exhibition.

Drawn primarily from a generous donation of prints by Gladys Engel Lang and Kurt Lang, No Man’s Land: Prints from the Front Lines of WWI features some fifty works on paper made by German, American, English, Scottish, and French artists. This installation commemorates the centennial of the end of the War, and offers insight into the changing perceptions of artists’ wartime experience.

Spirits were high in the summer of 1914. This was going to be a “Great War,” a fast war. Young men were eager to join up, donning their glimmering helmets, confident and full of purpose. The landscape of war, however, would dramatically change in four years’ time from soldiers in pressed trousers on horseback with rifles in lined formation, to zombie-like figures in trenches with portable machine guns, explosives, tanks, flamethrowers, air raids, and gas. By the end of this “Great” war in November of 1918 around 16 million military and civilians would perish.

The role of the war artist changed dramatically as well; it was no longer a matter of classically trained artists tasked with immortalizing the pageantry of battle after the fact. In this new era of the modernized citizen army, photographic accounts and entrenched artists would document the battle as it happened on the ground.

Some artists worked in propaganda, others as camouflagers, (artists who used their craft to disguise, obscure, and enhance war-sites). Still others protested against the war by publishing their visual critiques in magazines, newspapers, and pamphlets.

In the early days of war, many young artists joined the battle with great zeal and preconceived ideas regarding warfare as the artist’s highest Muse. As the English artist Christopher Nevinson remarked before the war: “No beauty except in strife, no masterpiece without aggressiveness.” His tone softened dramatically after his personal war experiences as an ambulance driver at the front.

Through the course of the war most of the artists who documented it were either killed or profoundly traumatized. The idealistically bellicose works that characterized the enthusiasm for the war at its outset would give way to images that disclose its dark reality. War-weary artists expose the starkly beautiful, apocalyptic landscapes and document the endless droves of faceless marching soldiers and lines of homeless, downtrodden civilians. Some found beauty in simple moments of repose and contemplation between attacks; others reflected on the distressed state of humanity with highly symbolic or emotive works.

Erwin Wurm has long numbered among the global stars of contemporary art. And now, this exceptional Austrian artist’s drawings from recent years—drawings that exhibit great thematic and technical diversity—are the focus of an exhibition at the Albertina Museum. Whether he’s at home or traveling: Erwin Wurm take time to draw nearly every day. He does so on whatever paper happens to be at hand and in various qualities and formats, using pencils, colored pencils, ballpoint pens, or even watercolors. These drawings represent reflections and commentaries on the world and serve to record the artist's ideas, thus encompassing his entire creative cosmos.

Thematically, they are not unlike a diary, with his self-portraits being interspersed above all with images of the people with whom Wurm comes into contact, including artist-friends as well as members of his family. Furthermore, his works on paper also deal with well-known personalities from politics, art history, and cultural history in general. But despite their great thematic and technical diversity, all of Erwin Wurm’s drawings have in common his bitingly humorous view of the world and its human inhabitants, complete with all their inadequacies, as well as his keen sense of situational comedy and precarious moments.

In partnership with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts is pleased to introduce "Romantic Prints on the Move." This symposium takes its lead from the 2013 PMA exhibition and corresponding collection catalogue, The Enchanted World of German Romantic Prints (Yale University Press, 2017). The series of public lectures in the afternoon is preceded by two object-based study sessions, which will enable students of various fields — from art history to German studies to studio arts — to gain first-hand knowledge of this remarkable era of printmaking (for the CFP, geared toward graduate and advanced undergraduate students, see here).

Inspired by recent debates about the circulation and pricing of contemporary art, “Romantic Prints On The Move” sets out to bridge the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries. To that end, the conference creates a stimulating conversation among academics, curators, and contemporary collectors. In particular, this conversation will focus on connecting nineteenth-century technologies with the current media revolution, thus bringing material history into the digital present. The goal is to shed more (and new) light on the economic, aesthetic, and geographical aspects of the production, dissemination, and collection of these prints in an era of burgeoning new printmaking technologies, while discussing their continuing appeal and marketability.

The public program will begin at 1:30 pm on February 1, 2019 in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts and will feature a keynote lecture by John Ittmann (Philadelphia Museum of Art). The program will continue at 1:00 pm on February 2, 2019 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and feature a keynote lecture by Jay A. Clarke (Art Institute, Chicago).

Speakers include:

Charles Booth-Clibborn (Paragon Press, London)
Fiona Chalom (Los Angeles)
Jay A. Clarke (Art Institute of Chicago)
Peter Fuhring (Fondation Custodia, Paris)
Johannes Grave (Universität Bielefeld)
John Ittmann (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
Michael Leja (University of Pennsylvania)
Carlo Schmid (C.G. Boerner, Düsseldorf)

Please visit the 'External Link' below for schedule announcements and registration information (FREE, but kindly requested).

The virtuosic works of the engraver Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617) represent a highpoint in sixteenth-century Netherlandish printmaking. As a peintre-graveur, Goltzius elevated the copperplate to new heights as an independent artistic medium. His works fascinate viewers with their masterly linework. To achieve this, he deployed the taille – a line typical of copperplate engraving which begins extremely fine, becomes heavier and then trails off – as an accentuated compositional technique. He depicted volume by way of intricate hatching, lending his figures a striking, sculptural quality. His skill was also highly respected by artists of later generations, including Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669).

For a long time though, Hendrick Goltzius received little attention in art-historical research, being written off as a mere imitator of the styles of others. But the works he created were no copies, but rather independent compositions which consciously referenced the characteristics of well-known artists. In doing so, he put the knowledge of his audience to the test. The art of his students was also often positioned on the margins between reproductions and original graphic works.

460 years after his birth, the Kupferstichkabinett is dedicating an exhibition to the artist from Haarlem and the students who issued from his workshop, held in the cabinet itself and in the Gemäldgalerie. Four large-format sheets from 1593/94 featuring scenes from the life of the Virgin – considered Goltzius’s Meisterstiche (master prints) – form the focus of the display: the Annunciation, the Adoration of the Shepherds, the Adoration of the Magi, and The Holy Family with the Infant John the Baptist. Gathered around them are works by his students Jakob Matham (1571–1631), Jan Saenredam (1565–1607) and Jan Muller (1571–1628), depicting scenes related to the Nativity.