The expressive power of line is central to the Japanese pictorial arts, and brush and ink drawings have long served as a vibrant way to conceive of artworks that would eventually be completed through printing or painting. Living Proof calls attention to a number of different approaches to draftsmanship practiced by Japanese artists in the nineteenth century. There is no historical tradition of collecting drawings in Japan comparable to that in the West, and they were not elevated by their creators to the status of independent artworks. Rarely collected or exhibited in the modern era, those few that have been published are invariably displayed alongside finished works, thus framing them purely in terms of their preliminary status. Japanese drawings, however, often served as domains of artistic conception and experimentation, of preparation and instruction—arenas in which the traces of sophisticated decision-making remain visible.

Living Proof features nearly eighty works by artists including Hokusai, Kuniyoshi, and Yoshitoshi. Best known as print designers, their compositions were mediated in the final woodblock print through the contributions of separate carvers and printers. This exhibition thus offers a rare opportunity to witness the artist’s hand directly. Frequent alterations and reworkings of an initial sketch also reveal the various stages in their creative process. In many cases, drawings were also intended as a didactic tool to instruct or encourage drafting practices among students. By highlighting the often-unseen improvisations, alterations, and even imperfections that have been excluded from a celebrated history of printmaking in Japan, Living Proof reframes these drawings as artworks in their own right.

The Kupferstichkabinett of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin is dedicating this exhibition to a topic that is as entertaining as it is varied: the subject of music in drawings and prints. A selection of about 100 of the most beautiful musical works will be on display.

The recurring leitmotif evident in the exhibition is the special affinity between musical and pictorial expression. In musical notation, for instance, many of the basic elements of the graphic arts such as lines, initials, abbreviations, and dots capture the fleeting sound of a melody and make it visible on paper – music, in short, is drawn. And on the other hand, in the prints and drawings on display here, the dancing, flowing, or staccato strokes of the pen, pencil, or burin are strongly reminiscent of musical rhythms and harmonies. With the rise of modernism, visual artists even started creating tonal compositions of lines and colours rendered with pen and brush. These works impressively illustrate the creative back-and-forth between the visual arts and music.

Scarcely another method has had such a deep and lasting effect on print-making as the invention in 1516 of the chiaroscuro woodcut by Italian artist Ugo da Carpi. After centuries of simple woodcut prints, the chiaroscuro technique constituted a totally new means of expression. By using differently cut wood blocks, artists were at last able to modulate dark and bright areas through a sensitive use of colour. The finely nuanced play of light and shade, the contrast between precise lines and fields of colour, mixed together with sensual and intellectual impulses, explain the particular attraction of this new form of woodcut.

The technique spread like wildfire in Renaissance Italy, attaining its aesthetic zenith above all in Venice and Parma, but also in the circles of the Rafael school in Rome. The Print Collection at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum has a large number of chiaroscuro woodcuts and is now presenting them for the first time as a suite: "A Revolution in Printmaking – The Italian Chiaroscuro Woodcut of the Sixteenth Century" brings together over 30 works by famed printmakers such as Ugo da Carpi, Antonio da Trento and Andrea Andriani.

On the occasion of the opening of the "Pavillon de l'estampe", the Cabinet cantonal des estampes presents a group show with works of three Swiss engravers: Marianne Décosterd, Ilse Lierhammer and Susan Litsios.

Commemorating five hundred years since Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to a Wittenberg church door, the art museum is organizing an exhibition exploring the impact of the Italian Renaissance and the Reformation through the prints of Albrecht Dürer and his contemporaries. It follows the development of Dürer’s genius from his apprenticeship through the eve of the Reformation. The exhibition offers insights into his innovative use of printmaking, his patrons, and humanistic friends.

Visitors will experience the artistic, cultural, and political changes that occurred leading up to Luther’s defiant act. The art museum will collaborate with other Cincinnati institutions in the commemoration.

Impressionism continues to be celebrated in blockbuster exhibitions worldwide: in the last few years alone, Impressionism, Fashion, Modernity (Art Institute of Chicago, Musée d’Orsay, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013); Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye (Kimbell Art Museum and National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2015-2016); and Inventing Impressionism: Paul Durand-Ruel and the Modern Art Market (Musée du Luxembourg, National Gallery, London, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2015).

Since 1878 when Théodore Duret published his Histoire des peintres impressionnistes, Impressionism has occupied a central place in the canon of art history. That place now seems to be called into question, however. New transnational approaches to nineteenth-century art history have troubled the perpetuation of Francocentric histories. This conference seeks to underscore the globalization and localization of Impressionism in the United States, Britain, Australia and beyond.

To commemorate the birth of Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) 150 years ago, the Kupferstich-Kabinett Dresden is presenting an exhibition of her graphic masterworks. The museum now holds 252 prints, four portfolio editions and 21 drawings: one of the most important public collections of the artist’s work.

The works of Käthe Kollwitz, who died in 1945 in Moritzburg near Dresden, represent perfect examples of the experimentation with new forms of expression taking place around 1900. In view of their quality and special correlation of artistic and content-related themes, they stand out uniquely from this movement.

Under the directorship of Max Lehrs (1855-1938), the Kupferstich-Kabinett Dresden was the first public museum to promote the work of the artist, thanks to a systematic purchasing policy. The artistic oeuvre of a woman with a decidedly social-critical attitude was a special feature in Wilhelminian Germany. Thus Max Lehrs contributed significantly to establishing Käthe Kollwitz as an artist.
As well as purchasing artistic works, the lively exchange of letters bears witness to the enormous esteem in which Kollwitz was held in Dresden owing to Lehrs’ actions.

A publication containing the exchange of letters between Käthe Kollwitz and the Kupferstich-Kabinett is being published for the first time, to coincide with the exhibition.

For the first time in Italy, an exhibition presents the works of Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861), the eccentric Japanese Floating World master. It explores the great variety of his work, drawing attention to his inventiveness and technical ability with a selection of 165 polychrome woodcuts.

The exhibition project is split into themes and will invite the visitor to appreciate the fascination and artistic importance of the bohemian painter who, without adhering to any school, knew instinctively how to create a new and provocative realism, an extreme synthesis of form, colour and movement. The author's stylistic evolution, of aristocratic origins but influenced by Paris's decadent life of the ‘urban-underclass’, will be outlined in all its phases, from painting to graphic design, with particular reference to Toulouse-Lautrec’s profound knowledge of Japanese prints and his passion for photography. Over 250 of Toulouse-Lautrec’s works, featuring 35 paintings, along with lithographs, etchings and the complete series of 22 posters made by the 'cursed' artist on loan from the Toulouse-Lautrec Musée of Albi and important museums and international collections.

Honoré Daumier (1808 – 1879) stands with his prolifi c body of work characterized by a way of describing reality that is at once detached and empathetic, alongside Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet as one of the fathers of Realism – the cultural movement that emerged out of positivism in France around 1840.

Daumier was also a great popularizer of ideas, a journalist who used images rather than words, a newspaper cartoonist who, like those of today, reacted to current events – current events that seem, strangely, not so very different from those of our own times. The exhibition presents about 180 or so of the artist’s engravings and drawings, including sculptures, grouped thematically with a particular focus on the development of a society avid for entertainment and its casualties, the development of the press, the world of art and artists and the birth of the European nations, not forgetting the famous series of lawyers and justice.