Contemporary Chinese artist Sun Xun uses woodblock printing, a centuries-old technique, to reimagine and transform the 21st century medium of digital animated film. In Time Spy (2016), Sun Xun has created a three-dimensional cinematic world that roams freely across time and cultures, following an enigmatic and visually driven narrative that draws its influences from both Eastern and Western traditions of art, history, myth, and imagination.

To produce Time Spy, the artist and his team carved more than 10,000 woodblocks, then inked and digitally scanned them to create the animation cells. A selection of the woodblocks that were used to create the film will be on view in the exhibition.

Sun Xun’s work is in constant dialogue with art history, and in recognition of this, four prints from the Museum’s collection by Albrecht Dürer will be on view in the exhibition. These works were selected by Sun Xun in recognition of this German Renaissance artist’s influence on his own practice.

Time Spy, Sun Xun’s first 3D film, was commissioned by Audemars Piguet, and premiered in 2016 at Art Basel in Miami, and subsequently was adapted to be shown on multiple screens in New York City’s Times Square. Sun Xun has screened his films at film festivals across the globe, and he has had numerous solo exhibitions, including at The Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai.

The Museum recommends entering the exhibition through Gallery 234 before viewing Time Spy in Gallery 235. The runtime is approximately 10 minutes.

Degas: A Passion for Perfection showcases prolific French artist Edgar Degas’ works from 1855 to 1906. More than 100 works consisting of paintings, drawings, pastels, etchings, monotypes, and sculptures in bronze are on view. The exhibition focuses on the most prominent and recurring themes throughout Degas’ 60-year career. These include his interest in learning from the art of the past and from that of his contemporaries, a lifelong fascination with the nude, a passion for horses, and his strong interest in opera and dance.

Well-known masterpieces are on view, and the exhibition dives deeper into Degas’ obsession with repetition of subjects throughout his entire artistic journey. Visitors will see his transformation from a portraitist and painter of historical subjects to one interested in the contemporary life of late-nineteenth-century Paris. By experimenting constantly throughout his career he developed techniques that allowed him to capture modern subject matter through sharp and precise lighting, such as café concerts, street scenes with new electric lighting, sporting events, and theatrical settings. He considered his work in all media a constant continuum. Works by J.A.D. Ingres, Eugène Delacroix, and Paul Cézanne also are shown, adding depth to the exhibition’s narrative.

The DAM is the sole American venue for the exhibition. Degas: A Passion for Perfection is presented and organized in association with the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge, England, whose Degas holdings represent the most extensive in the United Kingdom across the various media in which Degas worked. The exhibition is organized by Jane Munro, Keeper of Paintings, Drawings and Prints at the Fitzwilliam Museum, and curated locally by Timothy J. Standring, Gates Family Foundation Curator at the DAM.

As a young student of American history, Jacob Lawrence was frustrated with the lack of narratives addressing the African American experience, as well as the absence of black heroes from history books. He later discovered that there were indeed black heroes to admire and emulate, including Harriet Tubman. He was most fascinated, however, with the leader of the 18th-century Haitian Revolution, Toussaint L’Ouverture (1743–1803). In 1938 he painted his first image of the narrative, but soon realized that this great and complex story needed to be a series. Eventually, Lawrence would create 41 panels about Toussaint L’Ouverture and the struggle for Haitian self-governance. A gifted printmaker, he decided to create a portfolio of 15 screenprints based on the panels.

Echoing Thomas Jefferson’s words that “all men are created equal,” Toussaint L’Ouverture said, “I was born a slave, but nature gave me the soul of a free man.” This sentiment informed his leadership of the Haitian Revolution, and created what was the first free colonial state in which race was not a factor in determining social status.

The 15 screenprints comprising the portfolio are being generously lent by Harriet and Harmon Kelley.


****Also on view "100 Years of Printmaking in San Antonio: Mary Bonner" (January 4, 2018 to April 1, 2018)

Bursting into the public realm in the mid-1960s, the protest poster has been used all over the world to incite change and empower the voice of the people. This exhibition presents the political poster as a powerful tool for organizing and activating communities in response to some of the most pressing issues over the past 50 years, from the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements to social justice, immigration, environmental causes, and more.

Get with the Action, a title taken from a screenprint by the artist and progressive activist nun Corita Kent, explores the medium of the poster as a communication device — one intended to be publically displayed, produced en masse, and often ephemeral — to inform and energize a wide audience. The works on view, focused on the creative output of the Bay Area and beyond, highlight the power of applied graphic design and its utility in presenting information while rallying citizens around a cause.

Curated in three rotations over six months, each presentation of Get with the Action calls attention to SFMOMA’s commitment to graphic design and to the continually relevant, if not urgent, movements of our time.

This fall, the Museum will celebrate the legacy of Carol (1932–2015) and Seymour Haber (1929–2012), longtime friends of and donors to the Portland Art Museum. Drawn exclusively from gifts and promised gifts from the Habers, this exhibition explores their personal vision and brilliant, insightful taste for Japanese modern art.

The Habers were astute connoisseurs of fine craftsmanship, which led them to assemble an impressively diverse collection of prints, books, and ceramics by contemporary Japanese artists. They loved to host visiting artists from Japan, and often had wonderful anecdotes about how they acquired their works. The selection presented here includes the work of internationally renowned masters, such as Munakata Shikō, whose bold monochrome woodblock prints redefined the possibilities of that time-honored process, and Hamaguchi Yōzō, whose meticulous mezzotints inspired an entire generation to take up that demanding technique. Other artists, less well known in the West but equally fascinating, include Ida Shōichi, a conceptual artist known for his innovative printmaking processes, and Kurosaki Akira, whose vividly colored abstractions often disguise a naughty sense of humor. The collection reveals an abiding attraction to rich color and textures, and to works with a sense of humor, charm, and whimsy.



****Also on view: "Kingdom Animalia: Animals in Print from Dürer to Picasso" (December 2, 2017 - May 13, 2018)

Furry, fierce, majestic, or sublime, animals have been featured in the graphic arts since the advent of printmaking. Mammals, fish, reptiles, and birds act as rich allegorical symbols, precise scientific specimens, and vehicles for pure formal expression. Drawn from the Museum’s collection, this exhibition offers a 500-year sampling of the wide-ranging depiction of the kingdom Animalia in prints, drawings, and posters, from the playful to the ferocious. Artists as diverse as Albrecht Dürer, John James Audubon, Eugène Delacroix, and Pablo Picasso are joined by regional favorites Beth Van Hoesen and Frank Boyden, among others, in this lively exploration of artful animals.

Through a selection of almost 200 works and rare documents, the exhibition "Dessiner pour bâtir. Le métier d'architecte au XVIIe siècle" examines the social, cultural and artistic importance of the figure of the modern architect in France, from Henri IV's era to Louis XIV's. How did one become an architect? How was a building built? What functions had drawing in the conception of a building? The are some of the questions that the exhibition tries to answer.

This exhibition gathers 70 drawings by 56 artists created in the 19th-century. It studies the functions of drawing, from sketches to finished works. The exhibited works come from three major collections from Verona: the collection of drawings of Alberto Pariani, which is kept at the Biblioteca Civica di Verona, the collection of the Banco BPM and the collection of the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe dei Civici Musei d'Arte.

Drawings played a crucial role in the artistic practice of the three giants of the Flemish Baroque, Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641), and Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678). This exhibition features the greatest works on paper by the artists in the Morgan's collection, as well as a few key loans from local collections. The show highlights the distinctive graphic styles of each artist and their influence on one another. The Morgan is particularly well-suited to tell this fascinating story as its holdings of Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jordaens are unparalleled in the United States.

"Jacopo de’ Barbari – an Italian and the Renaissance in the North"

The Venetian Jacopo de’ Barbari is considered one of the most enigmatic and simultaneously most interesting artists of the turn of the 16th century. In art history, he is often described as the “wrong-way driver” who bucked the general trend of the Renaissance: while Netherlandish and German artists, for instance Albrecht Dürer, were travelling south and taking inspiration from Italian art, de’ Barbari travelled in the opposite direction from south to north. From 1500 until his death (before?) 1516, he worked as court painter in a number of royal courts north of the Alps, including for Maximilian I in Nuremberg (1500–1503), Frederick the Wise in Wittenberg (1503–1505) and for Margaret of Austria in Mechelen (1511–1515/16), where he remained until the end of his life.

The relationship between the recently arrived Jacopo de’ Barbari and his native colleagues was not always without friction. For instance, when the Italian sought a long-term position as court artist for Frederick the Wise, he had to concede defeat to his rival Lucas Cranach. Albrecht Dürer, on the other hand, seems at first to have been reasonably taken by his Italian colleague, but when de’ Barbari refused to share his insights into the theory of proportion, Dürer reacted with annoyance.

There are 29 or 30 surviving engravings by Jacopo de’ Barbari, from which the Kupferstichkabinett is exhibiting a selection of 24 prints in a one-room show at the Gemäldegalerie. The works evidence all the variety, as well as the apparent contradictions, of the Renaissance between antique fantasies and Christian subject matter. The prints are wonderful documents of the cultural transfer of the period. In an unparalleled manner, they combine the stylistic and motific elements and characteristics of Italian, German and Netherlandish art and as such shaped the work of many other artists. Through his graphic work, de’ Barbari shows himself to be a particularly unique and influential artistic figure of a positively European dimension.

In the spring of 2018 the Fondation de l’Hermitage is turning its attention to pastels, a fascinating medium halfway between drawing and painting. Inspired by Danseuses au repos, the famous pastel by Degas donated to the Fondation de l’Hermitage twenty years ago, this exhibition will feature 150 masterpieces from public and private collections in Switzerland. Works covering five centuries, from the early Renaissance masters to contemporary artists, will provide a historical overview of this singular technique.

The visit begins with the earliest drawings retouched in pastel (Barocci, Bassano) before moving on to the golden age of portraiture in the 18th century (Carriera, Liotard, La Tour, Perronneau, Tiepolo), followed by a renewal of pastel techniques in 19th century landscapes (Boudin, Sisley) and the virtuosity of Impressionist figure drawing (Degas, Manet, Morisot). The turn of the 20th century saw a great vogue for the medium, illustrated here by works by the Nabis (Denis, Vuillard), society portraits (Helleu, Tissot) and the visionary explorations of Redon and the Symbolists (Khnopff, Lévy-Dhurmer, Delville). One room will focus on the vibrancy of Swiss art in the same period (Amiet, G. Giacometti, Grasset, Segantini, Steinlen). After considering the 20th-century avant gardes and their quest for abstraction and modernity (Giacometti, Kirchner, Klee, Kupka, Miró, Picasso), the exhibition will conclude with the contemporary scene (Chamberlain, Samaras, Sandback, Stämpfli, Mangold, Nemours, Szafran, Scully), culminating in a mural specially designed for the event by young Swiss artist Nicolas Party.

With this entirely new selection the Fondation de l’Hermitage offers the public an exclusive opportunity to explore the splendours of pastels and the range of a medium that has lent itself to experimentation of all kinds through the combined power and grace of pure colour.