Johannes Gutenberg printed the first book, the Gutenberg Bible, around 1455. Over 500 years later, his invention still shapes how we communicate. But what did his press look like? And how did it work? This term-long portfolio of events participates in an international initiative to commemorate the 550th anniversary of Gutenberg’s death and celebrates the relaunch of the IES Annual Lecture in the History of the Book. It is part of the international 2018 Gutenberg Year, https://gutenberg2018.eu.

The event portfolio includes:

"IES Annual Lecture in the History of the Book + Keepsake Printing"
This event gives participants the rare opportunity to learn how Alan May and Martin Andrews reverse-engineered and rebuilt Gutenberg’s invention, and then stand in Gutenberg’s footsteps to print a take-away keepsake themselves on the replica Gutenberg Press. Raphaële Mouren (Warburg) will respond. The event is free, including keepsake printing and wine reception, with a recommended donation of £10 to benefit St Bride Library.

"Masterclass (graduate students/ECRs)"
This three-part, hands-on masterclass offers graduate students, postdocs, early career researchers the unique opportunity to learn about the history of the printing press itself by examining historical relief printing presses and reconstructions covering the hand-press period, 1450-1830. Participants must commit to attending all sessions and writing a blog post about the training. Eligibility: current PhD students and early career researchers (up to 10 years post-PhD)

"A Selection of Incunabula at Senate House Library"
The reception coincides with a private view of SHL's earliest printed books. Highlighting some of its rarest holdings allows SHL to promote its collections to a wider public and new user constituency and advocate IES's object-based teaching philosophy.

"School Visit"
Fifteen Year 12 History students (ages 16-17) from St Marylebone School will learn about the history of printing. They will have a hands-on workshop at the Dürer Press, print a keepsake, and visit the Durning-Lawrence Library to explore early printed travel accounts from Senate House Library Special Collections.

Philadelphia-based artist Dox Thrash (1893–1965) was both a pioneering printmaker and a noted participant in the “New Negro” movement of the 1930s and ’40s. A veteran of World War I, as well as the minstrel stage, he trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before making his way to Philadelphia, where he ultimately forged a career as both a painter and a graphic artist.

In 1937, Thrash signed on for employment with the Federal Art Project’s Fine Print Workshop. There, while working with fellow artists Hugh Mesibov and Michael Gallagher, he began to experiment with a new approach to intaglio printmaking, which today is known as the carborundum mezzotint process. With its broad tonal range, the new process was ideally suited to the sensitive portrayals of Black life for which Thrash would become known.

Dox Thrash, Black Life, and the Carborundum Mezzotint brings together numerous examples of the experimental process by Thrash and other colleagues working in the Fine Print Workshop. Also on view are works by Thrash in other print mediums, as well as watercolors and drawings, all of which powerfully document the artist’s intimate, invested engagement with African American culture in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

Long a household name, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) is considered to be one of the great nineteenth-century masters. A principal member of the Impressionist circle, Renoir made everyday life his subject matter, creating scenes and characters seemingly pulled from the quotidian world of fin-de-siècle Paris. Alongside friends and colleagues like Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Alfred Sisley, Mary Cassatt and Gustave Caillebotte, Renoir created the visual imagery we most associate today with avant-garde Parisian art. If you think about bearded, top-hatted men dancing happily with cherubic, rose-cheeked women as classically Impressionistic, you can thank Renoir for cementing that image in your mind’s eye.

Be they Baroque vedutas, magnificent Renaissance buildings, or architectural ensembles like Vienna’s Ringstrasse: since time immemorial, it has been architectural drawings that artists have used both to document the urban and rural past and to envision the future.

The presentation Masterworks of Architectural Drawing provides new insights into this fascinating genre: a selection of around 120 highlights from the Albertina’s important collection of architecture-related works covers a period running from the Late Gothic and the Renaissance to the Baroque and Classicism, to Historicism and Art Nouveau, and continuing all the way to the architecture of the present day. World-famous drawings by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Theophil von Hansen, Adolf Loos, Frank Lloyd Wright, Clemens Holzmeister or Hans Hollein and many others reveal the essence and unique qualities of architectural sketches while also showing painters’ compositional takes on and naturalistic perceptions of buildings, architectural ensembles, and cities.

Typographia Linguarum Externarum – The Medici Oriental Press.
Knowledge and Cultural Transfer around 1600

Workshop
Organized by Eckhard Leuschner and Gerhard Wolf

within the framework of the project:
"Die Typographia Medicea im Kontext: Text und Bild als Medien des Kultur- und Wissenstransfers zwischen europäischen und orientalischen Kulturräumen um 1600"

funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft


PROGRAM

Thursday, 11 January

9.30
Welcome and Introduction
Eckhard Leuschner and Gerhard Wolf

10:00
Per la biografia di G. B. Raimondi
Angelo Michele Piemontese (Rome)

Coffee Break


Chair: Peyvand Firouzeh

11:15
The Road to Rome: Patriarch Ignatios Ni'matullah Between Faith and Benefit
Hazim Alabdullah (Florence)

12:00
'Come il cavallo al corso del Palio' – The Production of the Arabic Gospels
Caren Reimann (Würzburg)

Lunch Break


Chair: Eva-Maria Troelenberg

15:00
Vatican Censorship and the Printing of the Gospels in Arabic
Dennis Halft (Beer-Sheva)

15:45
Leonardo Parasole and the Woodblocks for the Medici Press
Evelyn Lincoln (Providence)

Coffee Break


Chair: Marco Musillo

17:00
"Resta il favellare solo essere proprio dell'homo": Giovanni Battista Raimondi's Philosophy of Language
Mario Casari (Rome)

17:45
Raimondi's Lexicons: Between Learning and Editing Instruments
Sara Fani (Florence)


Friday, 12 January

Chair: Ursula Rautenberg

9:00
Amira's Grammatica Syriaca: Genesis; Structure and Perspectives
Margherita Farina (Paris)

9:45
G. B. Raimondis Übersetzungstätigkeit im globalen Kontext der Frühen Neuzeit um 1600 (mit besonderem Fokus auf BMLF, Or. 463: ff. 212-259)
Yahya Kouroshi (Würzburg)

Coffee Break


Chair: Pavla Langer

11:00
The First Edition of Bernardino Amico's Trattato delle Piante et Imagini de i Sacri
Edificii di Terra Santa (Rome 1609/10) and Its Historical Context
Else Schlegel (Berlin/Stuttgart)

11:15
Bernardino Amico, The Medici Press and Treatises on the Holy Land around 1600
Annette Hoffmann (Florence)

11:45
"Acciò le sacre ceremonie si osservino uniformamente in tutte le chiese": Images of Catholic Liturgy in Raimondi's 'Pontificale Romanum' (with an Outlook on Their Reuse in Picart's 'Religious Ceremonies of the World')
Eckhard Leuschner (Würzburg)

12:30
Conclusions
Gerhard Wolf

12:45
Final Discussion

LOCATION
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut
Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai
Via dei Servi 51, 50122 Florence / Italy

CONTACT
Annette Hoffmann
hoffmann@khi.fi.it

The early 1960s marked a significant turning point in American printmaking: the rise of communal studios provided new avenues for creative and technical exchanges between artists. Since the early 1940s, when Stanley William Hayter transplanted his Atelier 17 from Paris to New York, American artists were becoming familiar with a wide range of printmaking techniques. By the latter twentieth century, printmakers such as Tatyana Grossman, founder of ULAE (Universal Limited Art Editions), and June Wayne, who founded the Tamarind Workshop in Los Angeles, greatly enlarged and successfully marketed the printmaking enterprise.

These new-style printmakers began to take on some of the responsibilities of publishers and dealers, helping to streamline the production and distribution of artists’ prints. Artists formerly rooted in the solitary studio practices of Abstract Expressionist painting began to collaborate regularly with master printmakers (some, like Robert Motherwell, even going as far as to establish their own workshops). In California, the emergence of collaborative presses helped to rescue lithography from virtual extinction—which in turn made abstract prints readily available to American collectors.

The works in American Abstraction: The Print Revival of the 1960s and '70s, most of which are drawn from the splendid gift of Judith and Stephen Wertheimer to the Bruce Museum, include prints produced by Ernest de Soto of The Collectors Press Lithography Workshop and Irwin Hollander of Hollander’s Workshop. From vibrant biomorphic forms and primitive marks to lively calligraphic gestures and bold color-field patterning, the works in American Abstraction suggest the evolution of abstract art in printmaking during two exciting decades of the post-war moment.

This exhibition was curated by Elizabeth Smith, 2017-18 Zvi Grunberg Resident Fellow, and underwritten by the Connecticut Office of the Arts and The Charles M. and Deborah G. Royce Exhibition Fund.

The Art Institute of Chicago announced that Jay A. Clarke will join the museum on April 1, 2018, as the new Rothman Family Curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings. Clarke will oversee the department’s ambitious efforts in research, publishing, acquisitions, and exhibitions to shape an innovative and exciting vision for the museum’s internationally recognized collection of nineteenth-century works on paper.

Kevin Salatino, the Anne Vogt Fuller and Marion Titus Seale Chair and Curator of Prints and Drawings, shared: “Jay has superb curatorial credentials and an outstanding reputation as a strong leader, generous mentor, respected scholar, and creative collaborator. Her curatorial and research experience at the Art Institute from 1991-2009, and her widely respected work now at the Clark and beyond, assure a powerful combination of knowledge and expertise to make her an exceptional addition to our department, and to our museum.

In her work since 2009, as the Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the esteemed Sterling and Francine Clark Institute (the Clark) in Williamstown, Massachusetts, Jay has organized twelve exhibitions, including: The Strange World of Albrecht Dürer (2010), Spaces: Thomas Struth and Candida Höfer (2011), The Impressionist Line from Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec (2013 and 2017), Machine Age Modernism (2015), Whistler’s Mother: Grey, Black, and White (2015), Photography and Discovery (2016), Japanese Impressions: Color Woodblocks from the Rodbell Family Collection (2016), No Rules: Helen Frankenthaler Woodcuts (2017), and Picasso|Encounters (2017).

In her tenure there, Jay built the Clark’s collection with an impressive range of purchased and gifted acquisitions, published and lectured extensively, mentored numerous graduate student interns, and taught eight seminars in the Graduate Program in Art History at Williams College. In 2016, she was a Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Brown University.

Following from Printing Colour 1400-1700, this conference will be the first interdisciplinary assessment of Western colour printmaking in the long eighteenth century. It will bring together researchers, curators, special collections librarians, printers, printmakers, cataloguers, conservators, art historians, book historians, digital humanities practitioners, scientists, and others who care for colour-printed material, seek to understand them, or use them in research. The discussion will encompass all media, techniques, and functions, from fashion to fine art, wallpaper to scientific communication. The programme includes papers, posters, private views of eight collections, as well as reception at Senate House, London.

SPEAKERS
Martin Andrews (University of Reading), Sidney Berger (Simmons College), Andrew Bush (National Trust), Juliet Carey (Waddesdon Manor), Dionysia Christoforou (Rijksmuseum), Michèle Cloonan (Simmons College), Rob Dixon (sirjoshuareynolds.com;stipple.co.uk), Margaret Morgan Grasselli (National Gallery of Art), Lea Hagedorn (Herzog August Library), Geert-Jan Janse (University of Utrecht), Corinne Le Bitouzé (Bibliothèque nationale de France), Sarah Lowengard (The Cooper Union), Manon van der Mullen (Rijksmuseum), Chiara Palandri (National Library of Norway), Michael Phillips (University of York), Claudia-Alexandra Schwaighofer, Benedetta Spadaccini (Ambrosiana), Ad Stijnman (Leiden University), Zalina Tetermazova (Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts), Simon Turner (Hollstein)

POSTERS BY
Wendy Andrews (Cambridge University), Rob Banham (Reading), Jake Benson (Leiden), Phillippa Mapes (English Heritage), Alice Nicoliello, Robin Rider (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Elizabeth Savage (Institute of English Studies), Ad Stijnman (Leiden), Corinne Thépaut-Cabasset (Versailles), Evelyn Wöldicke (Stiftung Brandenburger Tor)

PRIVATE VIEWS
British Museum (Elizabeth Savage), Courtauld Institute of Art (Rachel Sloan, Courtauld), Rob Dixon (Rob Dixon), Senate House Library (Tansy Barton), Roger Smith (Roger Smith), St Bride Foundation (Ad Stijnman), Typography Department, University of Reading (Rob Banham), V&A (Liz Miller), Wellcome Library (Julia Nurse & William Schupbach)

FUNDER
This event is sponsored by a major conference grant from the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung. It is also sponsored by the British Academy, Bibliographical Society, Institute of English Studies, Senate House Library, and Wellcome Collection.

Conference: 10–11 April 2018 (Senate House, London)
Private views: 12 April 2018 (British Museum, Courtauld Institute of Art, Rob Dixon, Senate House Library, Roger Smith, St Bride Library, V&A, Wellcome Collection)
Keynotes: Margaret Morgan Graselli (National Gallery of Art) and Martin Andews (Reading)
Convenors: Elizabeth Savage (Institute of English Studies) and Ad Stijnman (Leiden University)

Join the editorial board of Master Drawings as they reflect on a year of discoveries, scholarship, and exhibitions in the drawings world. Included in the conversation are reviews of major exhibitions of works by masters like Raphael, Bosch and Michelangelo, among others.

Speakers include:

Editor of Master Drawings: Jane Turner - Head of the Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Associate Editor: John Marciari - Charles W. Engelhard Curator and Department Head, Drawings and Prints, Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY

Associate Editor: Jennifer Tonkovich - Eugene and Clare Thaw Curator, Drawings and Prints, Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY

Associate Editor: Margaret Morgan Grasselli - Curator of Old Master Drawings, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Associate Editor: Isabelle Dervaux - Acquavella Curator and Department Head, Modern and Contemporary Drawings, Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY

This event will take place in the historic Academy Mansion located at:
2 E 63rd Street, New York, NY

Tickets:
$10 per person
The proceeds made from ticket sales will help to cover the costs of administering this event. All excess proceeds will be donated to Master Drawings Journal.

Use the link to reserve tickets.

On the centenary of his death, the Musée d'Orsay pays tribute to Edgar Degas (1834-1917) with an exhibition based around the little known work by the writer, poet and thinker, Paul Valéry (1871-1945).

The friendship between Degas and Valéry lasting more than twenty years resulted in an essay published by Editions Vollard in 1937, Degas Danse Dessin. Both intimate and universal, it conveys a poetic, fragmentary image of the painter’s personality and his art, and a kind of meditation on the creative process.

In the exhibition, documents on display and archival documents show these men and their social interaction. Degas’ numerous drawings and Valéry’s famous notebooks reveal the importance of these works, which were, for both, the crucible of their art.

The main themes explored in the exhibition Degas Danse Dessin are expressed by linking extracts from Valéry’s essay to the graphic works, paintings and sculptures of Degas. This resonance between text and images offers an insight, by turns, into the artist’s drawing and his fondness for the worlds of dance and horseracing, which Valéry links to his own search for line and movement.