"Blank Spaces of the Graphic Arts - Function, aesthetics and meaning of the undesignated space"

The aim of the early modern workshop is to pursue the unsigned body in its various expressions and functions as an active image-determining element. The contributions of the workshop are based on fundamental questions concerning concrete physical properties of the blank paper, semantic as well as image-theoretical differentiations of the phenomenon of the void depending on the technique and subject of the work. In doing so, the gaze focuses, among other things, on the brightness and darkness of the material nothing, as well as on atmospheric landscape spaces as open places of potential, metaphysical and artistic reflections. Furthermore, it is examined how and with what aesthetic implications in the print graphic an exemption of the figure may be due to different motivations or which gaps art-historical contemplation itself produces. Another focus of the event is the relationship between image and text (omission).

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PROGRAMM

Donnerstag, 18. Januar 2018

14:30
Begrüßung:
Gerhard Wolf

Einführung:
Lisa Jordan und Elvira Bojilova

Moderation: Maria Aresin

15:00
Iris Brahms (Freie Universität Berlin)
Luft, Licht, Leere, Leinen, Lapsus. Konnotationspotentiale von Papier auf Zeichnungen um 1600

15:30
Heiko Damm (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz)
Mut zur Lücke. Zur Ästhetik der Aussparung im zeichnerischen Werk von Luca Giordano

16:00 Pause

Moderation: Samuel Vitali

16:30
Anna Christina Schütz (Universität Stuttgart)
Himmlische Leere. Die unbezeichnete Fläche auf gezeichneten Landschaften um 1500

17:00
Huigen Leeflang (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)
The printmaker Hercules Segers and his experiments with surface and space

17:30 Pause

Moderation: Jessica Richardson

18:00
Renzo Baldasso (Arizona State University)
The Aesthetic of White in the Early Black Art

18:30
Lisa Pon (Southern Methodist University)
Blank Forms: Print, Paper, and the Invitation to Inscribe


Freitag, 19. Januar 2018

Moderation: Felix Jäger

10:00
Franz Engel (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Negative Präsenz. Die Persistenz des Chaos im Bildgrund

10:30
Margareta Ingrid Christian (University of Chicago)
Luftraum: Empty Space in Riegl's Studies on the Baroque

11:00 Pause

Moderation: Irene Gilodi

11:30
Stephanie Porras (Tulane University)
Graphic absence, the excerpt and the print collection

12:00
Anja Wolkenhauer (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen)
Die Fragilität der Medienmischung (Der Text als Leerstelle)

12:30 Pause

14:30
Besuch des Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe degli U zi (nur für Vortragende)
mit Marzia Faietti, Roberta Aliventi, Laura Da Rin Bettina, Michele Grasso und Pierluca Nardoni

Colorful, inventive posters advertising Paris’s many entertainment venues, products, department stores, and more in the late nineteenth century made their maker, the French artist Jules Chéret (1836–1932), famous. His work in color lithography, which was previously used for commercial printing, transformed printmaking into a medium that artists today still see as rich for experimentation. This exhibition features highlights from the gift of nearly six hundred Chéret posters to the Museum from local collectors James and Susee Wiechmann.

The Italian Renaissance marked a crucial turning point in Western art. Under the influence of humanist thought, new sources of inspiration emerged and medieval traditions gave way to innovative practices. The role and the status of drawing evolved: it became a favoured tool for study and means of expression, both for the diffusion of models and for the elaboration of ideas.

This exhibition highlights the different functions of drawing and the development of its use in 15th and 16th century Italy through the presentation of some one hundred sheets on loan from the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. Assembled in Rome between 1737 and 1756 by the painter Lambert Krahe (1712-1790), this collection was notably used for teaching purposes, offering aspiring artists exceptional access to the works of masters such as Correggio, Perugino, Vasari and Veronese.

The Kupferstichkabinett presents Willi Baumeister’s drawings in the first comprehensive museum exhibition of his work in Berlin since his major retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie in 1989.

Born in 1889 in Stuttgart, Baumeister was a passionate and meticulous draftsman throughout his life. This is particularly true of the artist’s period of ‘inner emigration’ during the Nazi era, when it was nearly impossible for him to paint in the studio. Instead, he covertly made hundreds of drawings in Bad Urach in the Swabian Alps. But even in the preceding years – Baumeister was awarded a professorship by the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in 1928 – drawing was an essential part of his work. It served fundamentally not only as a preparation for painting or as a method of reflecting thereupon. Nor was it merely used to develop print editions. Rather, the drawings – at times in colour or made on coloured paper – are pictorially condensed compositions that stand on their own, revolving time and again around the theme of the abstracted human figure, and its movement and placement on surfaces and in space. Until the 1930s, the line was of central importance in his art.

From the late 1910s up until Baumeister’s death in 1955, he created stylistically striking groups of work – including the Sportbilder (sport pictures), the Flämmchenbilder (small flame pictures), and the Ideogramme (ideograms) – in which the figure gradually develops into a pictorial icon, an organic cipher, which Baumeister also placed in literary narrative contexts in the 1940s. One of the decisive figures bridging pre-war Modernism and post-1945 German and European abstraction, Baumeister was committed to the figurative ‘prototypes’ that he enthusiastically found in prehistoric cave paintings. His private collection of non-European objects contained a world of forms that was also a source of inspiration to him, as it was, to an extent, to the contemporaneous Surrealists.

A witness to political revolutions and radical aesthetic shifts, Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) forged a pictorial sensibility of his own, characterized by anatomical, gestural, and psychological extremes. Bizarre, exaggerated, theatrical, and often melodramatic, his drawings embraced obscure literary and historical subjects intended to elicit profound emotional response.

Fuseli was born in Switzerland but traveled to Germany and Italy early in his career, eventually settling in London, where he played a prominent role in the newly established Royal Academy. While he worked in various media, Fuseli excelled at drawing. This medium was central to his practice, evidenced by the extraordinary number of drawings he made—ranging from quick sketches to watercolors that often exceeded the ambitions of his oil paintings.

The Art Institute is home to a remarkably rich collection of Fuseli’s surviving works, including large-scale drawings; smaller, less-finished sketches; and significant paintings and prints. Shockingly Mad: Henry Fuseli and the Art of Drawing considers drawing as an expressive means unto itself, paralleling the broader arc of Fuseli’s career as writer, painter, critic, and teacher. As comparisons to the work of his contemporaries reveal, Fuseli can be said to have forged a radical new drawing style. With roots in Classical antiquity and Renaissance Italy, Fuseli’s passionate, unrestrained approach reflects the revolutionary spirit of his age, which was marked by social and political upheaval. The Art Institute’s holdings are complemented by a number of important local, national, and international loans, and the exhibition itself is accompanied by the adjacent installation Gods and (Super)heroes: Drawing in an Age of Revolution—a selection of drawings by Jacques-Louis David, Théodore Géricault, Francisco Goya, and others that further contextualizes Fuseli as a draftsman.

This exhibition of nearly 30 manuscript illuminations travels through 400 years of the Middle Ages and across numerous countries in western Europe. Although often tiny in scale, these exquisite fragments from choir books, books of hours, and religious narratives offer a fascinating microcosm of medieval Europe, a world that extended from the sacred context of the great Gothic cathedrals to the cosmopolitan culture of the sunlit Italian courts.

This impressive and wide-ranging collection was assembled over a lifetime by Sandra Hindman. A noted medieval manuscript scholar and the founder of Les Enluminures, Hindman has generously given approximately one third of the exhibition’s illuminations to the Art Institute. The presentation celebrates her recent gift while also documenting her own journey as an innovative and imaginative teacher and student of the medieval book.

A richly illustrated book by Christopher de Hamel accompanies the exhibition. Hamel, a renowned authority on illuminated manuscripts, uses the Hindman miniatures as a starting point for reflections on the world of the Middle Ages.

The genesis of Prince Eugene of Savoy’s outstanding collection of prints has hardly been researched so far. One of its most prized holdings, particularly coveted by the Prince, is an extensive Raphael oeuvre (today in the Albertina), consisting of seven large folio volumes that contain the prints after Raphael by contemporary and later engravers. Like the bulk of the collection, the Raphael oeuvre had been assembled and catalogued in 1717/18 by the Parisian bookseller, publisher and print dealer Jean Mariette in cooperation with his now more famous son Pierre-Jean Mariette. The lecture by Antoinette Friedenthal - who is currently preparing an annotated edition of the correspondence between Jean Mariette and Pierre-Jean Mariette, 1717-1719 - will explore this important chapter in the history of connoisseurship.

Named after the Salon carré at the Louvre, where it was held between 1725 and 1848, the Salon’s rise as the world’s preeminent regular exhibition of contemporary art was intertwined with the rise of a modern viewing public. Early presentations—first at the Palais Royal and then in the Grande Galerie of the Louvre by the 1690s — were of comparatively restricted attendance. Yet already contained in them was the tension between the rule-bound tradition of academic pedagogy and the more progressive tendencies of venturesome artists pandering to popular taste.

What had begun in the 1670s as the French Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture’s desire to foster artistic competition and thus progress, and as an invitation to a nascent public to scrutinize and judge the products of its Academicians, had evolved by the mid-eighteenth century into one of the most charged public forums for the exchange of aesthetic and political ideas. A catalyst was the emergence of the new literary genre of art criticism in the 1740s, which from the outset contained a strongly partisan wing highly critical of official art and of the Crown’s management of national art production. Aesthetic judgements were in this way often of a piece with political critiques, thus compounding the meanings and public impact of artworks and their interpretation.

As an arm of the French Crown, the Académie suffered a similar fate during the Revolution, being abolished in 1793 only to re-emerge as the Institut national and, later, as the École des Beaux Arts. These successive institutions managed the Salon fitfully. It endured in close alliance with official arts policy during the Empire and benefited from the more permissive era of the Bourbon Restoration. Later, having fully entered the popular imaginary through the explosion of modern press coverage after mid-century, it became the defining context that gave rise to modern art. Indeed, if the number of exhibitions and visitors doubled during Napoleon’s reign, by the last quarter of the century the Salon had reached an altogether different level of impact. Now featuring thousands of works viewed by tens of thousands of visitors, the Salon as an international cultural phenomenon can be seen as the precursor of today’s many biennales.

"iMprint" is an annual exhibition promoting local and international artists working in original printmaking. This year’s edition is the first curated intaglio exhibition to feature established local and international artists, as well as the exhibiting original artworks by world-renowned artists such as Marc Chagall, Marino Marini, Victor Pasmore and Julian Trevelyan. Moreover, this year’s exhibition is giving special attention to and showcase the art works of Italian master etcher Gianfranco Ferroni.

Exhibiting artists include Paul Carbonaro, Marc Chagall, Gianfranco Ferroni, Eman Grima, Marino Marini, Luciano Micallef, Victor Pasmore, Richard Saliba, Giuseppe Santomaso, Gino Severini, Julian Trevelyan, Jesmond Vassallo, etc.