During its most recent Collections Committee meeting, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) announced a relationship with the Paulson Fontaine Press to be the only East Coast repository for all of its prints by African American artists. The museum also added nearly 40 historic, modern and contemporary works to its permanent collection of American art at the quarterly meeting.

"With the acquisition of these prints, PAFA is positioned to become the East Coast archive of works on paper by African American artists from that press," said Jodi Throckmorton, PAFA Curator of Contemporary Art. The West coast repository is the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.

"This collection of prints represents some of the most important artists working today," Throckmorton said. "The Paulson Fontaine Press is one of the most experimental presses and that is evident in the quality of the 129 prints we acquired." Featured artists include Radcliffe Bailey, McArthur Binion, Kerry James Marshall, and Gary Simmons, among others.

"Paulson Fontaine Press is honored to place a powerful collection of prints by African American artists with PAFA," said Pam Paulson, the Press' Founder and Master Printer. "The leadership at PAFA shares our commitment to diversity in the arts as well a passion for printmaking, highlighted by their recent acquisition of the Brodsky Center. We are delighted to have an opportunity to share our program with Philadelphia's vibrant community for years to come."

Assembled over several decades by artist, collector and master printer James Reed, the collection, which will be given in its entirety, consists of over 1,500 prints spanning the 16ththrough the early 21stcenturies. The great strength of the Reed collection is 19th-century French etching and lithography. Géricault, Delacroix, Daumier, Manet, Redon, and Fantin-Latour are among the major artists of the period represented. Over 30 old master prints dating from the 16th-18thcenturies are also included.

The second concentration of the collection is a significant group of over 50 German Expressionist prints, including woodcuts and lithographs by Emil Nolde, Ernst Kirchner, and Max Beckmann among others. James Reed has also collected modern prints by iconic names including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, and Jim Dine, as well as lithographs, etchings and woodcuts by established contemporary printmakers, many of whom he has collaborated with as master printer at Milestone Graphics, the fine printmaking studio he owns and directs and which is an important institution for artists working in Connecticut and the Northeast. This part of the collection includes examples of Mr. Reed’s own work as an artist and printmaker, which is represented in more than 20 public collections around the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library. The modern and contemporary prints in the James M. Reed Print Collection are promised to the museum as a bequest.

Linda Wolk-Simon, Frank and Clara Meditz Director and Chief Curator of the Fairfield University Art Museum, called the gift of the James Reed Print Collection “truly transformative.” Explaining its significance for the museum she noted, “Unlike our peer institutions, whose foundational holdings typically comprise rich collections of prints—long an important resource in the teaching of art history in addition to being artworks to display on the walls—Fairfield has lacked a collection of works on paper. Though we have made small strides to rectify this, acquiring a handful of old master and contemporary British prints since our founding seven years ago, this lacuna seemed hopelessly insurmountable. The situation has changed, literally overnight, with the glorious gift of the James M. Reed Collection, which provides an endlessly rich font of marvelous works on paper for both display in the museum and for teaching across multiple disciplines. We are profoundly indebted to James Reed for this truly historic gift, and for the extraordinary generosity of spirit it represents.”

An exhibition celebrating the gift of the James M. Reed Print Collection and featuring some 50 highlights drawn from the full range of old master, 19th-century, German Expressionist, and modern and contemporary prints will open in the museum’s Walsh Gallery on March 14, 2019 and remain on view through June 8. Several programs will be organized in conjunction with the exhibition, including a conversation and printing demonstration with James Reed, and an exhibition publication will be produced. The exhibition and programs are free and open to the public; dates and other information will be posted on the museum’s website in the coming months (fairfield.edu/museum). As a long-term project, the museum plans to catalogue the entire collection as part of the online collections database.

Seattle art collector Albert Feldmann has gifted the Henry with 204 European prints including, Dürer, Callot, Goya, Hogarth, and Piranesi. With this generous gift of prints dating from the 15th to 18th centuries, the Henry’s collection, which already had strong holdings in the 19th and 20th centuries, now offers a complete timeline of the history of printmaking.

“This is a truly transformative gift,” says Sylvia Wolf, John S. Behnke Director of the Henry Art Gallery. “For over fifty years, Mr. Feldmann collected works of the highest quality and finest condition. We are deeply grateful to him for the gift of this extraordinary collection, which will serve as a resource and inspiration for artists, scholars, students, and enthusiasts of the art of printmaking for generations to come.”

Albert Feldmann, a long-time resident of Seattle, was a mechanical engineer of some renown. He built the first laser and was instrumental in the development of the atomic clock. He later worked as a senior engineer at Boeing. In parallel, he amassed an exquisite collection of European master prints and an impressive library of books on the subject. He chose the Henry as the recipient of this gift as he wished the collection to remain local and accessible to students.

The Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts has recently launched a new interactive website featuring extensive research into its founding collection donated by Fred Grunwald. In addition to digitized archival documents about the Grunwald family and the Grunwald Center's early history, the website features essays putting Grunwald's collection -- its seizure by the Nazis and reconstitution in America -- into focus.

The website includes a selection of more than 1,500 of the roughly 3,500 works donated by Fred Grunwald and his heirs that are currently housed at the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at the Hammer Museum, as well as archival materials related to Fred Grunwald's personal and collecting history. The extensive documentation assembled here includes newspaper articles, exhibition catalogues, postwar restitution claims, personal correspondence, probate documents, and dealer records drawn from multiple sources in the United States and Europe. This resource offers print scholars new avenues for conducting otherwise difficult provenance research, and presents the most authoritative exploration to date of the history and development of one of UCLA's most treasured collections.

The Milwaukee Art Museum today announced the promised gift of an extensive collection of work by French graphic master Jules Chéret. This unparalleled group of more than 500 Chéret artworks, one of the largest and most comprehensive of its kind, has been generously promised by Milwaukeeans Susee and James Wiechmann. The gift encompasses the full range of Chéret’s innovative output from his bold, expressive posters advertising theatrical events, social gatherings and a myriad of products; to designs for book covers and menus; to intimate lithographic studies of his models. Often referred to as the “father of the modern poster,” Chéret inspired many other important artists of his time including Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre Bonnard.

“Susee and I are thrilled to add our Jules Chéret poster collection to the Museum’s treasures where it can be shared by all,” said James Wiechmann. “These posters that lit up the streets of Paris in the late 1800s will now shine in the galleries of our Milwaukee Art Museum and those of other Museums as they are exhibited around the country.”

The Wiechmanns were lenders to the Museum’s popular 2012 exhibition, Posters of Paris: Toulouse-Lautrec and His Contemporaries, and from there began an important relationship with the institution. In addition to the promised gift of their Chéret collection, the Wiechmanns have underscored their commitment by underwriting a curatorial position. Thanks to their generosity Britany L. Salsbury will join the Museum in February as associate curator of prints and drawings.

Salsbury comes from the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design where she has been the Andrew W. Mellon curatorial fellow in the Prints, Drawings and Photographs department since 2015. During her tenure she worked on a major exhibition scheduled to open in June 2017 entitled Altered States: Etching in Late 19th Century Paris, which has an accompanying publication. She also developed a number of exhibitions including Inventing Impressionism (2016), and regularly instructed classes from RISD and Brown University on the history of works on paper in the museum’s print study room. Salsbury’s experience includes positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library & Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Cincinnati Art Museum has acquired an extraordinary collection of 800 rare 17th–20th century Japanese prints from the late Joel Weisman and his wife Bernice Weisman. Announced at a museum donor event on Jan. 11, the Weisman gift is one of the largest permanent collection additions in the museum’s history.

The Weisman acquisition further strengthens the museum’s Japanese holdings and represents a broad spectrum of artists across the history of Japanese printmaking. The collection spans four centuries and includes colorful Edo and Osaka ukiyo-e woodcuts, shin hanga (new prints) and sōsaku hanga (creative prints). Thematically, the prints represent fine examples of bijinga or beautiful women, theatrical prints of actors, literature and legend, landscape, bird prints and surimono (privately printed prints).

Selections from the Weisman collection will be featured in the upcoming special exhibition "Dressed to Kill: Japanese Arms & Armor". In 2006, the Weismans donated 82 prints, which were featured in the exhibition "Public Spectacles, Personal Pleasures: Four Centuries of Japanese Prints from a Cincinnati Collection."

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has recently completed a year-long project to conserve, stabilize, and digitize 60 works on paper from the Ludwig and Rosy Fischer Collection of German Expressionist Art. The conservation efforts were made possible by a grant from the Bank of America Art Conservation Project.

Works by key German Expressionists—Max Beckmann, Peter August Böckstiegel, Otto Dix, Conrad Felixmüller, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Emil Nolde—have received complete restoration as part of the project. The first selection of newly restored pieces—seven works on paper by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner—have recently opened in the museum’s European Modernism Galleries.

The British Museum has acquired sixteen important lithograph prints and three aquatint prints by Pablo Picasso covering the post-war period from the late 1940s to the late 1950s. This acquisition closes the last major gap in the British Museum’s representation of Picasso’s achievements as a printmaker.

The prints will go on public display early next year from the last week in January to the first week of March 2017 and are available to study upon appointment at the Prints & Drawings Study Room at the British Museum.

University Museums at University of Delaware has received a gift of more than 50 prints from the Experimental Printmaking Institute (EPI) at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.

Including 48 prints and one print portfolio, the donation significantly expands and strengthens the University Museums’ holdings in graphic art, most notably in African American art but more comprehensively in contemporary art.

Among the artists represented are David Driskell, Faith Ringgold, Sam Gilliam, William T. Williams, Melvin Edwards, Robin Holder, Allison Saar, Kay WalkingStick, Wayne Crothers and Richard Anuszkiewicz.

The Getty Research Institute announced the acquisition and partial donation of a major collection of works on paper accumulated by internationally renowned collector Dr. Richard A. Simms. This collection, assembled over 40 years, was built around Simms’ abiding interest in German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) and includes artists in her orbit – Max Klinger (1857-1920), Emil Nolde (1857-1956), Otto Greiner (1869-1916), Ludwig Meidner (1884-1996), and George Grosz (1893-1959).

Comprising more than 650 works on paper, including prints, working proofs, and drawings, as well as books, portfolios, and artists' letters, the collection is in part a generous donation from Simms, who is the founding chair of the Getty Research Institute Council. The gift portion of this collection represents the largest donation of graphic art received by the J. Paul Getty Trust.