The LEOcode Project: A computational approach to enhancing, measuring, comparing, and matching the papers of Leonardo da Vinci through the detailed encoding and visualization of their internal manufactured patterns including watermarks, chain line intervals, and laid line densities.

http://leocode.org is a working compendium of watermarks in the Codex Arundel, Codex Leicester, and other papers of Leonardo da Vinci and is intended to be a research tool for art historians, conservators, and paper/book historians. The website presents the results of an innovative computational approach to enhance, measure, compare, and match pre-machine-made papers through the detailed encoding and visualization of their internal manufactured patterns including watermarks, chain line intervals, and laid line densities. In addition to identifying papers formed from the exact same mold (moldmates) among Leonardo’s papers, LEOcode provides enhanced photographic images of every available watermarked sheet in the Codex Arundel and the Codex Leicester, as well as free downloadable software for coding and visualizing handmade laid papers.

Please visit LEOcode.org and share any feedback: contact@leocode.org

After more than twenty-five years, the Städel Museum is once again dedicating an exhibition to American art on paper from 1945 to the present. Some fifty outstanding prints, drawings, and multiples by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Chuck Close, Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Bruce Nauman, Jackson Pollock, Larry Rivers, Kiki Smith, or Kara Walker will be presented, all of which deal with the theme of being human.

American art of the past eighty years is full of boundary crossings and contradictions. It is as unconventional as it is multifaceted: Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Concept Art, Minimal and Performance Art. In a relatively short period of time after 1945, various and at times contradictory aesthetic concepts developed in New York and (later) on the West Coast. Artists chose their media and materials freely and strategically – depending on the message they wanted to convey. Printmaking played a key role in this context. As a laboratory for experimentation in form and content alike, it offered artists new possibilities. From the 1960s onward, this went hand in hand with the founding of new printing and paper workshops. Artists collaborated closely with these workshops to produce technically sophisticated prints and objects (multiples), often in self-confidently large formats. This printmaking revolution went down in art history as the ‘Graphic Boom’.

Under the influence of ever-new political, economic, and societal upheavals and crises, many of the works revolve around human existence itself. Naturalistic depictions of the human figure now give way to the sign-like and abstract, the incomplete, the imprint, the blank space. Artists reflect on human perception and experience as fragmentary and question language as an instrument for describing the world.

Attraverso le stampe: scambi artistici tra Fiamminghi e Italiani nel XVI secolo/ Prints as Agents of Artistic Exchanges between Fiamminghi and Italiani in the 16th Century

PROGRAM

Thursday, April 7 2022

14.00 Sabine van Sprang (Academia Belgica): Welcome
Dominique Allart & Antonio Geremicca (Université de Liège): Introduction

Moderator: Sabine van Sprang
14.20 Joris Van Grieken (KBR, Royal Library of Belgium): Between Rome and Antwerp. Rome and the Rise of Professional Printmaking in the Low Countries, 1530-1550

14.50 Dominique Allart (Université de Liège): Once Again on the Triumph of Bacchus Engraved by Cornelis Bos, Its Sources and Reception

15.20 Discussion
15.40 Coffee Break

Moderator: Anna Cerboni Baiardi
16.10 Alessia Alberti (Milano, Castello Sforzesco, Raccolta delle stampe ‘A.
Bertarelli’): Il Sogno di Raffaello di Giorgio Ghisi tra Italia e Fiandre

16.40 Antonio Geremicca (Université de Liège): Tra Giorgio Ghisi e Hieronymus Cock. Sul fortuito successo anversese di Bronzino nell’incisione

17.10 Anne-Sophie Laruelle (Université de Liège): L’utilisation de modèles gravés dans les
tapisseries réalisées dans les anciens Pays-Bas au XVIe siècle. Etudes de cas

17.40 Discussion

Friday, April 8 2022

Moderator: Elena Rossoni
09.30 Laura Aldovini (Pavia, Musei Civici del Castello Visconteo): Tiziano, la xilografia e il Trionfo nei Paesi Bassi
10.00 Giorgio Marini (Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali): Cornelis Cort, Titian, the Carraccis: Reproductive Printmaking as ‘Critical Interpretation’ of Venetian 16th Century Painting

10.30 Discussion
10.50 Coffee Break

Moderator: Giorgio Marini
11.20 Elena Rossoni (Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna): Due Crocifissioni a confronto: Jacob Bos, il milieu internazionale romano, e le reciproche influenze tra cultura italiana e fiamminga

11.50 Anna Cerboni Baiardi (Università degli Studi di Urbino ‘Carlo Bo’): Francesco Barocci e Cornelis Cort: un incontro decisivo

12.20 Discussion

12.40 Dominique Allart, Antonio Geremicca & Sabine van Sprang: Conclusion

Conception and Organization:
Prof. Dominique Allart (Université de Liège)
Dr. Antonio Geremicca (Université de Liège)
Dr. Sabine van Sprang (Academia Belgica)

Information and Registration:
D.Allart@uliege.be
antonio.geremicca@uliege.be

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Martin Barooshian Art Trust are pleased to announce that the MFA has added 35 additional pieces by Martin Barooshian (1929-2022), to its collection. The acquisition includes important woodcuts and etchings as well as one monotype and three preparatory drawings. The MFA acquired its first work by Barooshian in 1950.

Barooshian, a Boston native, was an American surrealist painter and an exceptionally accomplished printmaker. Barooshian rose to prominence during the 1950s and 60s, but his fame waned over time. There has been resurgent interest in his artistic contributions, including the publication of a biography and catalogue in 2020, and the MFA’s acquisition represents a substantial step in his rediscovery.

In a New York City art world insistent on non-figurative conformity, Barooshian struck out on his own path. The resulting abstract surrealist prints and paintings, which fuse art historical, modern, and contemporary influences, are unique, singular, and increasingly considered by many to be ahead of their time. With a printmaking output spanning 60 years, Barooshian’s oeuvre incorporates a broad variety of media: woodcuts, lithographs, etchings, and monotypes. His colleague and friend Willem de Kooning called Barooshian “a printing magician.”

Barooshian garnered his earliest national recognition when “discovered” by John Taylor Arms for his woodcuts, which fused traditional techniques and content with modern form and color to convey the paranoia and loss of innocence of the Atomic Age—perhaps tinged with hopefulness. Soon thereafter in 1952, the Library of Congress acquired his first major woodcut portfolio. Perhaps Barooshian’s greatest contribution to printmaking was with a method known as color viscosity printing, which dominated his output starting about 1956. During his stay at Atelier 17 in Paris, Barooshian evolved the technique, pushing its limits in order to reach his artistic vision of imagined realities and dreamscapes. By incorporating various methods including hard ground, soft ground, mezzotint, and aquatint on a single zinc plate, Barooshian created complex, polychromatic images solidifying his reputation as one of viscosity printmaking’s most important masters.

Patrick Murphy, Lia and William Poorvu Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings at the MFA, called Barooshian “a consummate printmaker, whose intriguing and oddly overlooked body of work deserves to be celebrated alongside that of mid-century contemporaries like Hayter, Helen Phillips, Fred Becker, and Gabor Peterdi.”

“This extraordinary gift includes a number of compositions in multiple impressions—state proofs showing the evolution of work on the plate, or variant inkings demonstrating the artist’s characteristic experimentation with color, as well as preparatory drawings, and will make the MFA a destination for the study of Barooshian’s prints,” said Murphy.

American modernism in the visual arts has garnered sustained interest among scholars and general audiences in recent years, though typically with a focus on modernist painting. This exhibition seeks to expand that narrow emphasis, highlighting an array of techniques and a range of artists who explored modernism’s myriad forms through paper-based media.

“Graphic Eloquence” consists of approximately 150 works by 70 artists selected from a single private collection, many of which are promised gifts to the museum. Artists working in modernist modes shared challenges regardless of location, and the exhibition brings out these commonalities as it focuses on regional centers that embraced and supported modernist trends. The exhibition will examine the impact of influential associations and artist groups, including Atelier 17, American Abstract Artists and the short-lived Vanguard. The exhibition considers the role of museums and contemporary critics in shaping the fledgling approaches to modernist abstraction among American artists and cites inspiration for these works in a wealth of sources, ranging from music to movies, literature, popular publications, theater, art history and philosophy. Many of the works in the exhibition also employ lesser-known artistic media, some of them new technical discoveries and others reimaginings of old approaches, from casein and cellocut to pastel and pochoir. Unlike more exclusive accounts of modernist painting, the story of modernist works on paper provides a broader, more democratic view of American modernism that highlights the contributions of many lesser-known artists to this important 20th-century history.