Adding to a sizable first gift of etchings by Rembrandt in 2007, the Berne-based collector Eberhard W. Kornfeld has donated an additional thirty-one works to the Kunstmuseum Basel. The exhibition Rembrandt’s Etchings, held in the Hauptbau’s mezzanine galleries concurrently with the grand special exhibition Rembrandt’s Orient, now showcases around sixty works from both donations.

Even in his lifetime, Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669) was widely acclaimed not only for his paintings, but also for his extraordinary gifts as a printmaker. Many art lovers even thought that the etchings were the genuine sensation: Rembrandt’s singular handling of this printmaking process—his use of a variety of techniques and his repeated revisions of his plates, which yielded virtually inexhaustible potentials for variation—makes each print a unique item coveted by collectors. The earliest collections of his etchings are in fact documented for the seventeenth century, and high-quality and rare prints still fetch large sums in the art market.

The Berne-based auctioneer and collector Eberhard W. Kornfeld is an experienced connoisseur of Rembrandt’s oeuvre. He became devoted to the artist early on in his career, in the late 1940s, when he worked at Gutekunst and Klipstein Auctioneers, and started building his own collection of Rembrandt’s etchings. In 2007, he made a donation of most of these treasures to the Kunstmuseum Basel’s Kupferstichkabinett (Department of Prints and Drawings), followed by a second gift in 2019. Not a single week passes in which he does not take out the etchings to study them, Kornfeld, who retains a lifelong right to the enjoyment of the works, remarks. Paying tribute to these acts of civic-minded generosity benefiting the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, the public art collection of Basel, the exhibition offers our visitors a first opportunity to examine the thirty-one works of the second donation. The display is rounded out by etchings from the first donation and our own holdings, illustrating how neatly the different divisions of the collection complement each other.

The altogether around seventy prints chosen for the exhibition represent a florilegium that lets our visitors experience Rembrandt’s prodigious artistry as an etcher in all its facets. Selected examples bring into focus the watermarks of the new accessions, which are now considered a key piece of evidence in the appraisal and dating of the prints. Other works are presented with their provenance; some were formerly in famous collections.

This focused exhibition, drawn from the Whitney’s collection, will look at the creative and irreverent ways that seven artists—Ruth Asawa, Sari Dienes, Pati Hill, Kahlil Robert Irving, Virginia Overton, Julia Phillips, and Zarina—have employed the everyday objects around them to make prints. Nothing Is So Humble takes its title from an evocative proposition by Dienes that recognized aesthetic possibilities in the most mundane of subjects: “Bones, lint, Styrofoam, banana skins, the squishes and squashes found on the street: nothing is so humble that it cannot be made into art.”

The artists in this exhibition share an unconventional approach to printmaking. Rather than mark a metal plate or carve into a block of wood, they have worked directly with the stuff of their environments: making a rubbing from a maintenance hole cover, photocopying a hairbrush, running nylon stockings through an etching press, or even pressing a slice of prosciutto onto a printing plate.

The resulting surface impressions—at once precise and abstracted—capture intimate views of their commonplace subjects that teeter between recognizable and elusive. By making visible what might otherwise be overlooked, these works transform ordinary encounters into poetic and poignant accounts of our world.

Note: Currently, the exhibition is described as closing in "Spring 2021" according to the Whitney's website. Please visit the 'External Link' below for updates.

Master Printer Robert Blackburn (1920–2003) made a tremendous impact on printmaking in the United States. Over a career that spanned six decades, his avant-garde ideas propelled American modernism forward and affirmed printmaking as fine art.

An heir to the Harlem Renaissance, an influential teacher, celebrated collaborator, and pioneering artist, Blackburn embraced democracy in terms of the creative process and access to art. In 1947, he founded a printmaking workshop as a welcoming and inclusive space where artists of all levels could learn and create together.

Robert Blackburn & Modern American Printmaking situates Blackburn beside his teachers, friends, and collaborators with whom he engaged throughout his life. It features approximately 60 prints and related materials by Blackburn and the artists with whom he collaborated, including Grace Hartigan, Robert Rauschenberg, Elizabeth Catlett, and Romare Bearden, among others.

In the late 1960s, Japanese artist Noda Tetsuya began a series of prints that continues to this day, over 50 years later. The prints, each titled Diary followed by a date, capture the large and small moments of the artist’s life, from the intimate and personal—his Israeli-born wife and their children and simple gifts from friends—to the public and far-reaching, such as young environmental activists in 1970s New York or the devastation that followed the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Each of these moments Noda depicts in prints are created through a unique and multilayered method he himself developed. He begins by selecting a photograph, taken on the day of the title, that he manipulates in various ways. First he adds drawn elements—such as lines or shading—and whites out other aspects of the image. The altered photo is then scanned in an old-fashioned mimeograph machine, a process that creates a stencil of the image. Next Noda takes a sheet of handmade Japanese paper which he uses for all of his prints and applies subtle color through traditional woodblock technique. Finally he silkscreens his manipulated photo over the top and adds his signature, his name along with an inked thumbprint. The resulting images feel both eerily familiar and hauntingly distant, seemingly capturing the impermanence of time and the faultiness of memory.

Today Noda’s Diary images number well over 500, and he has become renowned as one of the most innovative Japanese print artists working today. This exhibition—the largest presentation of the artist’s work in North America—brings together key works from across his career: recent acquisitions to the Art Institute’s collection as well as those lent by the artist and local collectors.

Geographically situated between France and Germany, Belgium was ravaged in the First World War. In the War’s aftermath, avant-garde artists, writers, and musicians developed new forms appropriate to an irrevocably altered world. Artistic activity flourished throughout the country with particular concentration in Brussels (Brussel; Bruxelles) and in Antwerp (Antwerpen; Anvers). In largely Francophone Brussels, the nation’s capital, avant-garde artists who gathered around galleries such as l’Époque and Le Centaur and journals such as Variétés (1928-1930) tended to orient themselves toward French culture and, in the late 1920s, toward Parisian Surrealism. Artists active in the predominantly Flemish/Dutch-speaking port city of Antwerp to the north, by contrast, were more inclined toward Holland and Germany and the abstract, constructivist tendencies emerging there. It is this lesser-known development of abstraction in Antwerp in the early 1920s that is the focus of this collection.

In Antwerp, the Kring Moderne Kunst (Modern Art Circle) was founded in 1918 with Jozef Peeters as Secretary. Peeters pioneered a striking form of abstraction in print, as exemplified by his portfolios and his so-called “constructive graphics,” in which abstract, geometric forms compete with the communicative function of language. In 1922, when Peeters joined the editorial board of the Flemish-language journal Het Overzicht (The Overview; Antwerp; 1921-1925) he transformed its appearance with his own dazzling covers and those of his colleagues. The poignantly-titled Ça Ira (It will be fine), was an Antwerp-based, French-language literary journal (1920-1923), but also a publishing house for contemporary prose and poetry and an organizing society for exhibitions, lectures, and performances. Its exhibitions featured leading members of Antwerp’s artistic avant-garde such as Jan Cockx, Paul Joostens, Peeters, and Victor Servranckx, together with international counterparts including Willi Baumeister, Sándor (Alexander) Bortnyik, Max Burchartz, Walter Dexel, Lajos Kassák, El Lissitzky, László Moholy-Nagy, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Karl-Peter Röhl. Ça Ira’s concert program presented experimental music by modern composers such as Georges Auric, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Erik Satie, frequently performed by the avant-garde Belgian singer Evelyne Brélia.

If Antwerp’s artistic accomplishments of the early 1920s have attracted less attention than the subsequent achievements of Belgian Surrealist painters such as Paul Delvaux and René Magritte in the late 1920s, this may in part reflect the complexities of Belgian history. Many of the figures featured here promoted Flemish language and culture, but when nationalism became a polarizing force in the late 1920s, only some found common cause with Germany and followed the trajectory toward collaboration.

Note: Due to the COVID-19 crisis, this online exhibition was prepared without physical access to the works themselves or to reference libraries. Until updates are possible, uncertain or missing information appears here in [square brackets].

This exhibition will consist of a selection of German as well as Austrian graphic art drawn primarily from the permanent collection but also featuring several works from private Canadian collections.

The exhibition will also include several important recent acquisitions. The selection ranges from great early engravings by Van Meckenem and Schongauer to masterworks by Dürer and 16th-century printmakers, from Schnorr von Carolsfeld to Klinger and Makart, from Klimt (including studies of Adele Bloch-Bauer, his celebrated “Woman in Gold”) and Schiele to a wide range of German Expressionist and modern artists, including Nolde, Kirchner, Heckel, Dix, Beckmann, Pechstein, Schmidt-Rottluff, Moeller, Grosz, Kandinsky and Baselitz.

This survey exhibition will include 63 works produced by artist Emma Amos over the course of her career. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Emma Amos (March 16, 1937 — May 20, 2020) was a distinguished painter and printmaker. She is best known for her bold and colorful mixed-media paintings that create visual tapestries in which she examines the intersection of race, class, gender and privilege in both the art world and society at large.

Leo Steinberg was the rare art historian who turned his inquisitive eye and captivating prose to both Renaissance and modern art. His astonishingly wide-ranging scholarship addresses such canonical artists as Michelangelo Buonarroti, Leonardo da Vinci, Peter Paul Rubens, Pablo Picasso, and Jasper Johns. While Steinberg’s significance to the field of art history is widely acknowledged, his activity as a print collector is less well-known. Beginning in the early 1960s with only the meager budget of a part-time art history professor, Steinberg amassed a collection that comprehensively illustrates the history of European printmaking. Akin to books on a shelf, Steinberg’s prints formed a visual library that shaped his scholarship in fundamental ways. Selections from his over 3500 prints will illuminate Steinberg’s insight that prints are the “circulating lifeblood of ideas,” disseminating compositions, motifs, and styles across geographic, material and temporal boundaries, while also presenting highlights of the European printmaking tradition.

Helen Hardin (Santa Clara, 1943–1984) emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a trailblazer for Native American women artists wishing to break from tradition. Although influenced by time-honored pueblo imagery as well as the work of her mother, renowned Santa Clara artist Pablita Velarde (1918–2006), Hardin strove to create a style all her own.

In high school, a drafting class introduced Hardin to architectural tools and processes that she then incorporated into her work. Repeating complex geometric forms based on the imagery she found in petroglyphs and ancient potsherds, she became recognized for her use of increasingly bold, vibrant colors and her affinity for iridescent paint.

In 1980, Hardin began using the copper-plate etching process, a printing technique that allowed her precise lines and detailed compositions to reach a broader audience. Spirit Lines consists of the entire first edition set of Hardin’s 23 copper-plate etchings, which at the Crocker will be accompanied by original paintings by Hardin, Pablita Velarde, and Margarete Bagshaw (1964–2015).

Relying primarily on rarely-displayed Works Progress Administration/Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP) prints in KAM’s strong collection of twentieth century works on paper, the exhibition will include approximately 40 works organized into themes of labor unrest (exploitation, economic disparity, and gender inequalities), discrimination and racial violence, and reactions to the rise of fascism. Pressing Issues is especially timely in that it connects this past to the present, as the current political climate in the United States is revisiting similar themes of isolationism and nationalism, populism and fascism, and racial violence.

Pressing Issues will be on view leading up to the 2020 presidential election. Given the social and economic upheaval experienced in the United States in the last decade, including the revival of fascist ideologies and the refugee crisis in America, this exhibition provides a visceral and much needed reminder of how visual artists call attention to and combat various forms of oppression.

The exhibition primarily presents works from the KAM collection as well as significant loans. Artists proposed for inclusion in the exhibition are: Ida Abelman, Carlos Andreson, Phil Bard, Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, Leroy Flint, Michael Gallagher, Minetta Good, Boris Gorelick, Harry Gottlieb, Riva Helfond, Jacob Kainen, Florence Kent, Chet La More, Joseph Leboit, Nan Lurie, Kyra Markham, Hugh Miller, Charles Ramus, Lillian Richter, Bernard Schardt, Herman Volz, Albert Webb, and Hale Woodruff.