The Mysterious Landscapes of Hercules Segers opens at the Metropolitan Museum on Feb. 13 (previews for members starting Feb. 8). In the meantime, you can enjoy the new web features that we have posted on the website. They were created by Rob Erdmann at the Rijksmuseum. They pair images of varied impressions and allow you to zoom in. You can swipe through several impressions of the same print and see the changes that Segers made.
Great fun for print geeks! Play with it and then come see the exhibition.

In the same decades that artists affiliated with Fluxus explored action-based, performative strategies set on disrupting the conventions of both art and everyday life, the book emerged as a significant artistic preoccupation. Not only were books important for anthologizing ephemeral action-based art, but they became in their own right sites of artistic experimentation with cognitive, visual, and tactile experience. Drawing on the remarkable collection of rare artists’ books housed in the University of Chicago Library, Concrete Poetry, Concrete Book explores how artists in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland investigated the material and technical forms of the book. Referring to the way that language takes up space on the page, arrests the eyes, and insists on physical interaction, works of konkrete poesie (concrete poetry) tested the material display of language, focusing on the object-quality of letters and words. To accommodate this dual staging of textual production and reception, artists’ books took on unusual forms, as in Gerhard Rühm’s kinetic book bewegung (motion, 1964) and Hansjörg Mayer’s reinvention of the alphabet in the fold-out book typoaktionen (type-actions, 1967). At the same time that artists’ books often activate the process of reading, they also deemphasize textual cognition, foregrounding instead touch and materiality, as exemplified in die-cut multi-colored cellophane pages of Dieter Roth’s bilderbücher (picture-books, 1957) and in Wolf Vostell’s unreadable 20-pound Betonbuch (Concrete Book, 1971). In tandem with Concrete Happenings, interactive workshops will provide unique opportunities for hands-on engagement with artists’ books, and a series of public lectures will provide further perspective on the concrete questions they raise about language, materiality, performance, and collaboration.

The Cleveland Museum of Art has announced the appointment of Emily J. Peters as Curator of Prints and Drawings. The museum’s renowned collection of prints and drawings, ranging from the Renaissance to the early 21st century, is distinguished by the quality and rarity of its holdings. Peters’s appointment follows an international search. She will assume her responsibilities at the CMA in April.

“Emily is an exceptional curator with a remarkable eye and creative approach. Her range of expertise and scholarly interests—which span five centuries and a panoply of graphic mediums—are admirable. We very much look forward to having Emily as a colleague in Cleveland,” said Director William M. Griswold.

As Curator of Prints and Drawings, Peters will oversee the care and development of the collection, working closely with the Director and Chief Curator on the identification and acquisition of works of art to augment the collection. Together with an Assistant or Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings—who will be appointed later this year—Peters will be responsible for exhibitions in the James and Hanna Bartlett Prints and Drawings Galleries; she will also curate special exhibitions in the Smith Foundation Hall and Gallery that highlight all aspects of European and American graphic art. Peters will also develop interpretive and didactic materials designed to appeal to broad audiences, helping to deepen visitors’ appreciation and understanding of graphic art.

The collections for which Peters will be responsible span more than 500 years of artistic production throughout Europe and the United States. Consisting of approximately 22,000 prints and 4,000 drawings, the collection is internationally known for its rarity and high quality. Areas of particular strength include Italian Renaissance drawings by Michelangelo and Raphael as well as a strong group of engravings and woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer. Highlights of the 17th century include drawings and a range of etched subjects by Rembrandt van Rijn, while an impressive group of early lithographs and celebrated drawings by Ingres and Degas stand out among the 19th-century holdings. The drawings collection is admired for watercolors by Blake, Turner and Palmer, and for luminous pastels by Cassatt and Redon. Among the highlights of modernism is a group of more than 50 German Expressionist prints and drawings by Miró, Picasso and Winslow Homer.

“I am honored to be joining the Cleveland Museum of Art at this exciting time,” said Peters. “Cleveland’s collection of prints and drawings is one of the finest in the United States, and I have long admired its many treasures as well as the important exhibitions and acquisitions presented by my predecessors at the museum. I look forward to thinking about new ways to present the collection and to working with my colleagues to augment its holdings in keeping with the CMA’s rich history of collecting. I am particularly looking forward to getting to know the vibrant community of prints and drawings supporters in Cleveland via the Print Club and the Painting and Drawing Society.”

Peters brings more than a decade of curatorial work and museum experience to the CMA. In 2005, she joined the curatorial team at the RISD Museum as Assistant Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs; in 2008, she was promoted to Associate Curator. A specialist of 15th- and 16th-century Netherlandish prints and drawings, Peters has mounted at RISD such diverse exhibitions as Design and Description: Renaissance and Baroque Drawings (2006); Urban America, 1930–1970 (2007); The Brilliant Line: Following the Early Modern Engraver 1480–1650 (2009); The Festive City (2014); and Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection (2015). Along with organizing exhibitions, Peters has collaborated closely with her curatorial colleagues at RISD in planning the reinstallation of the museum’s European galleries, set to open in the fall of 2017.

The virtuoso German printmaker, painter and sculptor Max Klinger inspired both Giorgio de Chirico and the early Surrealists. In January the Print Room will be exhibiting an unusual series of prints by Klinger from its own collection, with a glove in the leading role.

In Berlin in the spring of 1878, the then twenty-one year-old Max Klinger (1857-1920) exhibited a series of fascinating drawings under the title Phantasien über einen gefundenen Handschuh, (Fantasies on a Found Glove). The young German artist had become obsessed with a lady’s glove left behind at a roller-skating rink in Berlin. The glove inspired ten prints with sensual undertones, printed in 1881. We see the glove as it is about to be picked up, as an unattainable object of desire and as a source of disturbing nightmares.

Comforting
The prints featuring the glove are one of Klinger’s best-known series. In the exhibition in the Print Room these etchings will be accompanied by some thirty other prints from the museum’s collection. One of them, Tote Mutter (Dead Mother) of 1889, shows the poignant image of a young woman who has died, lying on her death bed, with a small child sitting on her breast. The scene is as dramatic as it is comforting; the death of an individual may be terrible, but the human species will survive.

Max Klinger
Max Klinger was trained in Karlsruhe and also lived and worked in Munich, Brussels and Paris. In 1887 he met his great exemplar, Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901), in Berlin. After a number of years spent travelling through Europe, Klinger returned to Germany and settled in his birthplace, Leipzig, where he became an important figure in German cultural life.

Klinger was admired in his own time for his virtuosity and drawing skills. That these prints were in black and white was no accident; Klinger maintained that painting was intended to express beauty and to glorify the world. Printmaking, by contrast, was ideally suited to fantasy and to recording the dark side of life.

Klinger’s work was of profound influence on the generation of artists that followed him. He is sometimes seen as the link between nineteenth-century Symbolism and the early Surrealists of the twentieth century. It was the Greek-Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) who was most impressed by Klinger’s mysterious power of expression.

Museum Schloss Moyland, 31.03.2017
Registration deadline: Mar 21, 2017

Original oder Reproduktion? Dilemma beim Ausstellen von Kunst auf Papier

Kunst auf Papier ist höchst lichtempfindlich. Daher werden grafische Arbeiten nur für kurze Zeit und bei stark reduziertem Licht gezeigt. Können/sollen Reproduktionen kostbare Werke auf Papier in Ausstellungen und Sammlungspräsentationen ersetzen?

Doch welche Konsequenzen hat das für unsere Wahrnehmung der Originale? Wie ist es in einem derartigen Fall um die vielbeschworene Aura des Kunstwerks bestellt? Erübrigt sich der Besuch im Museum, wenn man die reproduzierten Werke bequemer und detaillierter zu Hause am Bildschirm betrachten kann?

Für die Urteilsbildung über Kunst seit der frühen Neuzeit spielten (druckgrafische) Reproduktionen eine entscheidende Rolle. Die Fotografie mit ihren Möglichkeiten, etwa Details zu zeigen oder zu schönen, hat unsere Erwartungen an das Original verändert. Muss das Verhältnis zwischen Original und Reproduktion grundsätzlich neu bewertet werden?

Sieben Experten, Papierrestauratoren und Konservatoren, Leiter/innen Grafischer Sammlungen, Autoren, Kuratoren und Kulturwissenschaftler, äußern sich in diesem Symposium zu ihren Erfahrungen mit dem Ausstellen von Kunst auf Papier und dem Einsatz von Reproduktionen und diskutieren über mögliche Konsequenzen für die Ausstellungspraxis.


Ort
Museum Schloss Moyland

Preis
39 €, ermäßigt 29 € (inkl. Teilnahmegebühr, Museumseintritt, Pausengetränke sowie Mittagsimbiss)

Anmeldung
bis 21.3.2017 unter info@moyland.de
Bei Rücktritt bis zum Anmeldeschluss werden nach Anmeldung
15 € einbehalten, bei Nichterscheinen nach der Anmeldefrist
wird die Gebühr zu 100 % einbehalten.

Konzeption und Organisation
Dr. Barbara Strieder, Leiterin Grafische Sammlung, Stiftung Museum Schloss Moyland

TAGUNGSPROGRAMM

9.30 Uhr, Begrüßung
Dr. Bettina Paust, Künstlerische Leitung

9.45 Uhr, Einführung in das Tagungsthema
Dr. Barbara Strieder, Leiterin Grafische Sammlung

Impulsvorträge
10.00 Uhr, Original und Reproduktion – Über einen Gegensatz, der keiner ist
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Ullrich, Autor und Kulturwissenschaftler, Leipzig

11.30 Uhr, Faksimile als Chance für den internationalen Kulturdialog im
Medium der Ausstellung
Wolfger Pöhlmann, Freier Kurator und Sachbuchautor, München

12.15 Uhr, Liebe ohne Leiden – Zum Ausstellen von Kunstwerken auf Papier
Dipl.-Rest. Georg Josef Dietz, Leiter Abteilung Konservierung/Restaurierung, Kupferstichkabinett Berlin

Berichte aus der Praxis
14.45 Uhr, Der Einsatz von Reproduktionen am Beispiel des Block Beuys
Dr. Mechthild Haas, Leiterin Graphische Sammlung, Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt

15.20 Uhr, Einsatz von Faksimiles in der Berlinischen Galerie
Maria Bortfeldt, Foto- und Papierrestauratorin, Berlinische Galerie

16.45 Uhr, Konsequenzen für die Ausstellungspraxis?
Podiumsgespräch der Referenten und anschließender Schlussdiskussion im Plenum