Presented in honor of the 30th reunion of the class of 1987, this installation features thirty works by thirty artists from the Hilary Tolman, class of 1987, Collection. This Collection includes 129 works created between the 1950s and the present, during the “creative print” (sōsaku hanga) movement in Japanese printmaking. This style of printmaking differs from the better known historical graphic tradition in Japan, called ukiyo-e. Prior to the twentieth century, Japanese prints were an ephemeral, popular art form. Mass-produced and often considered disposable, ukiyo-e prints were the product of workshops and were printed by skilled craftsmen under the direction of a publisher. Printmaking was not seen as an outlet for self-expression. While some Japanese artists began printing their own work during the early 20th century, it was not until after World War II that sōsaku hanga became widely produced and collected. A wide variety of materials and approaches to printmaking has flourished in Japan since this time, yielding a broad and diverse body of work to appreciate.

The extraordinary works in the Hilary Tolman, class of 1987, Collection make SCMA one of the strongest college collections of postwar Japanese prints. Of particular interest in this collection and installation are works by important women artists, including influential pioneers such as Yoshida Chizuko, revered legends such as Shinoda Tōkō, and younger-generation artists such as Saito Noriko.

We are grateful to the Tolman Collection for the ongoing commitment to building this area of strength in the museum’s collection, which allows members of our community to fully explore Japanese printmaking.

Francisco Goya witnessed decades of political turmoil and social upheaval as court painter to four successive rulers of Spain. Among his greatest achievements were four series of etchings that chronicle the transformation of Spanish society and his own personal visions: Los Caprichos (The Caprices), Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War), La Tauromaquia (Bullfighting), and Los Disparates (The Follies). Near the end of his life, Goya also produced a set of four grand lithographs known as the Bulls of Bordeaux. This exhibition highlights prints from each series, exploring the imagery and techniques that make Goya one of the greatest graphic artists of all time.

From the chaos of war to the spectacle of the bullfight, the prints in the exhibition show Goya’s remarkable ability to move between documentary realism and expressive invention. Unlike his commissioned paintings, his graphic works allowed him the freedom to explore provocative subjects such as prostitution, witchcraft, and political corruption. This exhibition also highlights how Goya pushed the limits of printmaking to heighten the expressive effect of his subjects.

In the decade before his death, the American artist George Bellows (1882–1925) embraced lithography, a printmaking technique in which the artist draws directly onto a stone or plate with an oil-based medium. Of the more than 170 lithographs that Bellows produced, twenty belong to his “War Series,” which was immediately controversial when published in 1918.

As an illustrator for left-wing periodicals such as the Masses, Bellows was accustomed to addressing social issues pointedly, but he condemned “obvious, heavy propaganda.” Nevertheless, in 1918, with the United States at war, the former pacifist completed a series of prints, drawings, and monumental paintings that was mobilized as just that. Drawing on press and government accounts—Bellows enlisted in the United States army but did not fight overseas—and owing a debt to the themes in Spanish artist Francisco de Goya’s Disasters of War, he represented extreme brutality in a highly classicized formal language. His depictions of reported German atrocities on the Western front were used by media outlets and the federal government to stoke anti-German sentiment. Bellows’s “War Series” highlights the complex and porous relationship between art and propaganda. The artist’s attempt to balance narrative strategies adopted from history painting with contemporary reportage, while ambitious, created an unresolvable tension that accounts, in part, for the series’ mixed reviews and limited endurance.

Graphic Matters reflects on the centennial of American entry into World War I by reexamining Bellows’s prints for the timely questions they raise about representation, aestheticized and institutionalized violence, nationalism, and masculinity.

Presenting a new perspective from which to interpret works in the Museum’s permanent collection, this exhibition positions works from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries in dialogue with twentieth-century works, traversing the boundary of time to draw visual and conceptual connections across time periods. The exhibition will be divided into three thematic sections: the use of late-medieval techniques (woodcuts and text-image compositions), references to medieval themes (Christian motifs and the personification of death during World War I), and the representation of medieval subjects (gothic architecture) in early-twentieth-century German art. In addition, German avant-garde artists’ commitment to express emotion in their artwork necessitated the incorporation of different sensory experiences into their visual compositions in a similar fashion as medieval Christian art. Medieval and modern artists’ common engagement with haptic and auditory senses in optical art will be explored in each of the three parts of the exhibition as well. The exhibition presents an analysis of western medieval forms, practices, and themes as contributors to the expression of emotion and spirituality in German Expressionism.

For many American artists, New York City in the early twentieth century epitomized modern life. Through a variety of media, they captured an increasingly diverse populace, expanding skyline, and changed public mores. The group of print artists featured in this exhibition resisted the trend towards abstraction, choosing instead to represent the human figure in the urban environment. They worked with etching needles, burnishers, plate, and stone to capture people at work, at play, and on the move. The resulting prints offer intriguing glimpses of a rapidly changing American metropolis.

A Wry Eye features a selection of prints, drawings, and sculpture by a small group of artists whose work has navigated wit, irony, and humor. A large part of the exhibition will be devoted to Jim Dine's recent works that deal with the psychologically complex Pinocchio figure, all of which were recently donated to the Spencer by the artist. Among the other works are Joyce Treiman's 1961 lithographic suite, The Mirrored Couple; the 12 lithographs that constitute Kiki Smith's Banshee Pearls; and several works by William Wiley. Common to these and the other exhibited works are elements of self-scrutiny, playfulness with a dash of the sinister, and wit with a sense of danger.

Save the Date!

Cork Printmakers presents FIRST EDITION - A Print Symposium at Millennium Hall, City Hall, Cork

"Multiple Dimensions: Exploring Printmaking as an expanded practice in contemporary visual culture"

Speakers include:

Susan Tallman, Editor in Chief, Art in Print, Chicago, USA
Michael Kempson, Convenor of Printmaking Studies & Director of Cicada Press, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Dr. Angela Griffith, History of Art & Architecture Department, Trinity College, Dublin
Jason Urban & Leslie Mutchler, both of The University of Texas, Austin, USA. Jason Urban is also Co-Editor of Printeresting.org, an award winning online resource for print miscellany.
Dr. Carinna Parraman, Professor in Design & Colour Print, UWE, Bristol; Co-Director, Centre for Fine Print Research (IMPACT is the CFPR's main Symposia)
& MANY MORE
Also featuring a trail of exhibitions in six venues across Cork City Centre - details to be announced! Tickets range from €40 (students / limited early bird tickets) - €65 (standard). Available from Monday April 3rd!

This one-day symposium, convened by two University of Nottingham colleagues, Professor Fintan Cullen (History of Art) and Dr Richard A Gaunt (History), seeks to interrogate the nature of the United Kingdom’s status as a global power in the long nineteenth century (c.1780-1920) by considering the varied ways in which it was viewed, and represented, in graphic satire during this period.

The speakers range from young to established scholars who will visit Nottingham from other parts of the UK, Ireland, Poland, Germany and Australia. Their papers will consider the UK’s global relationships from the perspective of the constituent parts of the UK (most especially England and Ireland) and from overseas, reflecting upon issues of race, gender, nationhood and ethnicity across the period in question.

Keynote speaker:
Professor Brian Maidment (Liverpool John Moores University)

Speakers:
Dr Allison Stagg (Freie Universitat Berlin)
Dr Matthew Potter (Northumbria University)
Dr Carly Hegenbarth (independent researcher, UK)
Dr Pawel Hamera (Pedagogical University of Cracow, Poland)
Professor Peter Gray (Queen's University Belfast)
Dr Emily Mark-FitzGerald (University College Dublin)
Dr Richard Scully (University of New England, Australia)
Professor Lesley Milne (University of Nottingham)

This first general EDPOP conference aims to bring together European specialists in the field of popular print. Although popular print culture has been studied intensively since the 1960’s, this was done mainly with a regional or national focus, based on the assumption that popular print in the vernacular had a limited geographical reach. Recent research has revealed however, that popular print culture had strong European characteristics and an often transnational infrastructure. In order to answer the question how European popular print culture was in the period 1450-1900, we have to discuss different starting points, approaches and methodologies.

In this conference we will explore comparative and intermedial approaches, long term publication histories of genres and titles, the benefits of databases and digital tools, the accessibility of collections, the reconstruction of production and distribution networks and the transnational dimensions of texts and images. This conference is one of the activities of the international network ‘European Dimensions of Popular Print Culture’ (see: https://edpop.wp.hum.uu.nl/), financed by NWO (Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research).

Organising committee: Massimo Rospocher (Trento): mrospocher@fbk.eu and Jeroen Salman (Utrecht): j.salman@uu.nl

Form in Fragments: Abstraction in German Art, 1906–1925 explores tendencies toward abstraction in German Expressionism, a movement that foregrounded representational approaches to art making. Russian-born artist Wassily Kandinsky, a founding member of the Expressionist artist’s group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), is typically credited with inventing a radical art of pure abstraction in 1911, becoming the first of several major artists across Europe to abandon the representation of objects, real or imagined, embracing instead the possibilities of line, shape, form, and color. Despite the ripple effects of Kandinsky’s innovation, his fellow Expressionists largely maintained their commitment to depicting nature, urban life, the human body, and the psyche with passion and verve. Importantly, however, they also complicated their representational images through formal strategies of dissolution, fragmentation, simplification, geometricization, and high contrast, often flirting with the edges of abstraction. Comprising over 60 works on paper drawn from LACMA’s collection, including works by Otto Dix, Lyonel Feininger, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, and Franz Marc, as well as a selection of early abstract films by Hans Richter, this exhibition highlights the various ways in which abstraction informed and troubled Expressionist pictures.