In 1919, 39 posters came to the Art Institute of Chicago, courtesy of the Underground Electric Railways London. The posters, full of brilliant colors and innovative designs, were part of an effort to encourage Londoners to use this commercial transportation system: to visit the city’s cultural attractions, go shopping, attend sporting events, and even venture into the countryside—all by taking Underground trains and buses, of course. Installed outside Underground stations on public streets and on the front of buses that traversed the city, these posters formed a vibrant civic art presence—a public gallery available to all.

Over the next 20 years more posters arrived at the museum, coming at irregular intervals and eventually forming a collection of almost 350 artworks—an extraordinary sample from the golden age of this remarkable poster campaign, one that continues to this day. Until now, however, the story of how and why these posters came to Chicago has not been known. The architect of the poster campaign, from its inception in 1908 until 1939, was Frank Pick, an executive with London’s Underground. Pick’s enthusiasm for art education led him to commission poster designs from many young artists. Indeed, it is likely that the close relationship between the Art Institute of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute was one reason that Pick chose the museum as the eventual keeper of this poster archive.

This exhibition, the first at the museum to showcase this unique collection, begins with a chronological sampling of the posters. Thematic sections feature popular subjects, such as the zoo, museums, and Hampton Court, the royal palace southwest of London on the Thames, while focused displays are devoted to three of the greatest artists who worked for the Underground: Charles Paine, Frederick Herrick, and one of the most illustrious poster artists of the 20th century, Edward McKnight Kauffer, who studied briefly at the School of the Art Institute on his way to Europe.

Among the show’s highlights is Charles Paine’s clever take on King Henry the VIII, depicting him with large shears trimming the heads off his topiary queens in Hampton Court by Tram (1922). Others include Mary Koop’s Summer Sales (1925), which invites viewers to follow a riot of brightly colored umbrellas toward their shopping destination; a modernist depiction of time by Clive Gardiner from 1928 urging riders to buy a season Underground ticket; and Harold Sandys Williamson’s Cheap Tickets to Town, Shop between 10 and 4 (1939), an almost surrealistic view of the London cityscape, its sky a sea of floating barrage balloons as protection from German bombs.

A century after the initial posters arrived at the museum, this exhibition features 100 posters—a celebration of the gift, Frank Pick’s inventive campaign, and the beautiful artworks it produced.

The Museum of Modern Art announces the appointment of Lanka Tattersall as curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints. Her responsibilities will include participating in the Museum’s acquisitions program, the installation of the collection galleries, and the development of special exhibitions and catalogues. Tattersall will join the Museum on July 1, 2019.

Please visit the 'External Link' below to read the full press release from MoMA.

Pablo Picasso innovated in almost all art media, from painting and sculpture to book arts and printmaking. Mia recently acquired a rare group of prints that show his exploration into a novel printmaking technique: the reduction linocut. In collaboration with master printer Hidalgo Arnéra, he pioneered this way of making multicolor prints from a single printing matrix. On display is Mia’s series of working proofs from Arnéra’s archive showing each step of the process. The subject of the prints? Bullfighting—a subject near and dear to Picasso’s heart.

Meant to stop people in their tracks with bold colors and seductive imagery, French advertising posters of the turn of the 20th century ultimately became highly collectible works of art. L’Affichomania: The Passion for French Posters presents the work of five innovative artists: Jules Chéret, Eugène Grasset, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, Alphonse Mucha, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The relaxed printing and posting guidelines granted in 1881 by the Freedom of the Press Law, along with new developments in commercial printing, resulted in tens of thousands of posters being plastered in the streets of Paris every year. These large, colorful prints were displayed on walls, kiosks, public urinals, and advertising carts throughout the city. The craze for posters, known as affichomanie, had begun. Depicting various products, inventions, events, and the famed performers of Montmartre—the emerging Bohemian center of Paris—posters brought art to the streets and into the home.

L’Affichomania: The Passion for French Posters includes nearly 60 vibrant works from the turn of the century. Organized by the Richard H. Driehaus Museum in Chicago, the exhibition will premiere at the Taft Museum of Art, its first stop on a nationwide tour.

From its first issue, in 1884, the weekly journal Le Courrier français championed advertising. Jules Chéret (1836–1932), considered the father of the poster, held a prominent place in its pages. The paper publicized and reproduced Chéret’s poster designs, and in return, the artist created advertisements for companies that financed it. Drawn from Susee and James Wiechmann’s promised gift of nearly six hundred Chéret works, the posters featured explore this reciprocal relationship, which proved mutually beneficial.

The Association of Print Scholars is excited to announce its selection for the APS-sponsored session at the CAA conference to be held in Chicago, February 12–15, 2020.

Title:
Registering the Matrix: Printing Matrices as Sites of Artistic Mediation

Session Chair:
Jun Nakamura, University of Michigan

Session Abstract:
Printing matrices often have storied pasts. Rembrandt’s plates were reprinted, reworked, otherwise altered, and sent under the roller until little of the artist’s hand remained. One eighteenth-century printer etched over a Rembrandt plate in the name of restoration before cutting it down into smaller plates; another printed Rembrandt’s plates with masks, plate tone, and in combination with other plates in order to create new compositions; and Rembrandt himself repurposed a plate by Hercules Segers. Beyond Rembrandt, Gauguin’s woodblocks were printed in editions by himself, by printer Louis Roy, and posthumously by Pola Gauguin. The resulting editions vary widely in inking, coloring, and support. Contemporary artists’ prints produced by publishers like Gemini G.E.L or Crown Point Press are often as much a product of collaboration with the printers as of the artist’s singular hand. While the Blocks, Plates, and Stones conference held at the Courtauld in 2017 did much to shed light on the matrix itself, examining the contributions of printers and publishers adds complexity to notions of authorship and illuminates processes particular to the medium; and looking at the afterlife and reuse of matrices provides evidence of artistic encounters, exchanges, and processes. This session seeks papers that address the printing matrix as site of mediation, across time and geography.

Papers topics might include:
- Reuse, restoration, or defacement of printing matrices
- The contributions of printers in printing other artists’ matrices
- Creative processes manifest in the printing of matrices, rather than in their making
- Collaboration via the matrix

A formal Call for Papers will be circulated with CAA's larger CFP with all sessions soliciting papers later this summer. Stay tuned!

Japanese woodblock-print artists produced numerous rich engagements with culturally resonant narratives that were often loosely based on historical events, then subsequently embellished in textual sources and their theatrical adaptations. The artists featured in this exhibition explore a wide and often gendered range of responses to those narratives’ emotionally charged moral and ethical dilemmas.

This exhibition features the Birger Sandzén Memorial Gallery's complete set of 44 Woodcut Society presentation prints in original letterpress folders. Stemming from an interest in collecting hand-printed bookplates, in 1932 Kansas City grain merchant
Alfred Fowler (1889–1959) established the Woodcut Society with the sole aim of increasing “interest in
fine woodcuts as a medium of artistic expression.” He planned to commission and publish two new
woodcut prints each year, proposing a subscription-based organization limited to 200 members who, for
$10 in dues per year, would receive the woodcuts mounted in a presentation folder printed by the Torch
Press of Cedar Rapids. As the Woodcut Society was primarily geared toward print collectors, and
“intended to be savored in the intimate setting of one’s private library,” the folders each opened to the
print facing a page essay by a noted print authority or penned by the artist.

Please visit the 'External Link' below for more information.

The best way to find out what holds the world together at its very core is to cut it open. Cathedrals, skulls, the hulls of ships, the circles of hell, volcanoes, blossoms, caterpillars or even entire mountain chains – nothing and nobody can escape the exploring cut. Be it a cross section or a longitudinal section, the most important thing is that it runs right through the middle. The world opened up in this way is presented as images, models or at the object of curiosity itself.

The exhibition shows how the cross section functions as a visual principle of insight. It is presented as a versatile and effective method of visual communication, be it in medicine, architecture, biology or geology. The works in the exhibition tell an exemplary story of the symbiotic relationship between art and science. While scientific researchers adopt many of the established methods, techniques and compositional strategies of art in order to visualize their findings, artists, in turn, appropriate the specific visual syntax of the sciences in a way that at times seems to verge on expropriation.

The method of obtaining certainty about invisible inner worlds by cutting clearly through it, not only connects art and science, but also very different epochs. The exhibition shows cross-sections from the 15th century to the present. Not all of them come from the Graphische Sammlung: important loans from a total of eight different ETH collections and archives enter into a dialogue with them.

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) was captivated by Europe’s popular fascination with Japanese culture. He collected and copied Japanese woodblock prints, as well as took artistic inspiration from their vibrant colors and innovative compositions. In an 1888 letter from Van Gogh to his brother Theo, the artist wrote, “all my work is based to some extent on Japanese art.” This focused exhibition will explore the influence of Japanese art on Van Gogh’s oeuvre by comparing reproductions of the artist’s paintings to authentic Japanese prints from the internationally renowned Raymond A. Bidwell Collection at the D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts.