Known for his nudes and interiors, Pierre Bonnard spent his early years walking the streets of Paris, sketch pad in hand, capturing the bustling pace and energy of the city. He later referred to this subject as "the theater of the everyday," an approach to art-making that revels in the crowd and the spontaneous encounter. This lecture considers Bonnard’s early prints and paintings in light of the passive, quick-moving observation that generated them, highlighting their unique perspectives, empathy and humor.

Free with museum admission.

Käthe Kollwitz was a political artist, at least in the sense that she wanted to have an impact on viewers. But how do her images deliver messages without words? This lecture examines the unique strategy of pictorial communication that Kollwitz developed over seven years while producing her series Peasants' War (1901–1908).

Annette Seeler is an independent scholar and former curator of the Käthe-Kollwitz-Museum in Berlin. She contributes to projects at a variety of cultural institutions, including the Getty Research Institute, the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, the Käthe Kollwitz Museum in Cologne, the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, the National Gallery of Ireland, and the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg. She has published numerous essays and books on 20th century art, focusing on the work of Käthe Kollwitz, including the catalogue raisonné of the artist's sculpture.

This lecture complements the exhibition Käthe Kollwitz: Prints, Process, Politics, on view at the Getty Research Institute from December 3, 2019, through March 29, 2020.

Free, advance tickets required. Please visit the 'External Link' below for more information.

Andreas Marks, head of the Japanese and Korean art department at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, will discuss the artists and stories behind shin hanga, “the new print.” This art movement developed in the first half of the twentieth century in an effort to revive the great Japanese tradition of woodblock prints (known as ukiyo-e) and simultaneously capture the dynamic, modern life of Japan.

Exhibition galleries for "Seven Masters: 20th-Century Japanese Woodblock Prints" open for a public preview at 5 pm.

The lecture, “Changed Times: Sources & Methods behind 20th-Century Japanese Woodblock Prints,” begins at 7 pm in the UMFA’s Katherine W. and Ezekiel R. Dumke Jr. Auditorium.

Join Met curators and skilled printmakers for a discussion about the origins of etchings and the experimental techniques employed by artists working today.

Speakers
Felix Harlan, Printer and Publisher, Harlan & Weaver, Inc.
Jason Scuilla, Professor and Head of the Printmaking Department, Kansas State University
James Siena, artist
Nadine Orenstein, Drue Heinz Curator in Charge, Drawings and Prints, The Met
Freyda Spira, Assistant Curator, Drawing and Prints, The Met

This program is presented in conjunction with the exhibition The Renaissance of Etching.

Unlike their belle époque contemporaries who depicted the bustling boulevards and lively nightlife of Paris, artists Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard crafted intimate interiors and domestic scenes. This lecture examines Bonnard’s and Vuillard’s prints and paintings against the wider backdrop of the arts of privacy in fin-de-siècle Paris.

Caroline Fowler, interim director of the Research and Academic Program, discusses her newly published book, The Art of Paper: From the Holy Land to the Americas, and signs copies. In the late medieval and Renaissance period, paper transformed society—not only through its role in the invention of print but also in the way it influenced artistic production. The Art of Paper tells the history of this medium in the context of the artist’s workshop from the thirteenth century, when it was imported to Europe from Africa, to the sixteenth century, when European paper was exported to the colonies of New Spain.

The talk is free. Books are available in the Museum Store and can be purchased at the event.

At the time of its publication, McKenney and Hall’s History of the Indian Tribes of North America (1836-1844) was the most elaborately illustrated book ever printed in the United States. With a total run of 120,000 plates, the book’s production was crucial to the development of Philadelphia’s graphic printing industry. Originating as a portrait collection of Native leaders assembled by the U. S. War Department in the midst of efforts toward indigenous removal, History signaled an emerging relationship between the state-sanctioned and commercial production of images in the antebellum United States. Tracing the social, political and material histories of the McKenney and Hall portraits from treaty signings that took place in Anishinaabe and Dakota lands in the 1820s, to being printed in Philadelphia lithography studios, and then distributed into the hands of subscribers, this talk draws attention to connections between an expanding republic of print production and circulation and the expansion of the United States’ continental empire.

About the Speaker
Julia Grummitt is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History Department at Princeton University, where her dissertation research examines visual aspects of early 19th-century U.S. statecraft, tracking an evolving relationship between print production and U.S. territorial expansion. With broad interests in print history, histories of the book and visual and material culture, Julia has previously written about post-industrial American cities and 19th-century Canadian national parks, receiving her M.A. from Trent University (Ontario, Canada) in 2013 and her B.A. (Honors) from the University of King’s College and Dalhousie Universities (Nova Scotia, Canada) in 2009. Her current research has been supported by fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the American Philosophical Society, and the Library Company of Philadelphia where she was the 2018-2019 recipient of the William Helfand Fellowship in American Visual Culture.

Hear about the history of Landfall Press and the stories behind some of the workshop’s most significant prints, from Thomas Cvikota, guest curator and author of Landfall Press: Five Decades.

About the Exhibition
Landfall Press: Five Decades of Printmaking celebrates the history and innovation behind one of America’s most renowned printers-publishers on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary year. Founded in 1970 by Jack Lemon, in Chicago, Landfall Press has cultivated a uniquely collaborative environment and produced work for many artists at different points in their career. The press has operated out of Santa Fe, New Mexico, since 2004.

The exhibition features approximately 100 editioned prints and printmaking materials from the Museum’s Landfall Press Archive, established in 1992, and reveals the various and often complex processes that go into printmaking at Landfall.

Upcoming Talks:

Gallery Talks
Tues., 1:30 p.m.
Oct. 8, Nov. 12, Dec. 10, Jan. 21
With Nikki Otten, Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings

Panel Discussion
Thurs., Nov. 21, 6:15 p.m.
Welcome Jack Lemon, founder of Landfall Press, Thomas Cvikota, guest curator and author of Landfall Press: Five Decades, and artists Lesley Dill, James Drake, and Peregrine Honig, as they discuss the collaborative nature of printmaking.

All programs free with Museum admission, free for Members

Artists Deborah Roberts and Robert A. Pruitt discuss Charles White’s influence and legacy and their own interest in representations of black bodies in a conversation moderated by Dr. Cherise Smith, Chair of the African and African Diaspora Studies Department, the founding director of the Art Galleries at Black Studies, and an associate professor of AADS and Art History at The University of Texas at Austin, held in conjunction with the exhibitions Charles White: Celebrating the Gordon Gift at the Blanton Museum of Art and Charles White and the Legacy of the Figure: Celebrating the Gordon Gift at the Christian-Green Gallery on campus.

This event is free to attend. Seated is limited for this special event; register at the 'External Link' below starting September 16, 2019.

Explore in close detail three of the greatest prints by one of the most important printmakers in history: Rembrandt’s The Hundred Guilder Print (1648), The Three Crosses (1653), and Ecce Homo (1655). Discover what was new and special about these prints and examine how and why Rembrandt manipulated the market in unusual ways, especially at a time of increasing financial desperation in his life.

Presented by Paul Crenshaw, associate professor of Art History, Providence College, and president, Historians of Netherlandish Art, this lecture is the third session of the MFA's multi-session course "Why Rembrandt?" (September 25–October 23, 2019). Tickets are required; attendees may take the full five-week course or choose one or more lectures of interest.