You are warmly invited to a wine reception celebrating the launch of Printing Colour 1400–1700: History, Techniques, Functions and Receptions, edited by Ad Stijnman and Elizabeth Savage (Brill, 2015) at the Warburg Institute, University of London.


BOOK DETAILS
In Printing Colour 1400–1700, Ad Stijnman and Elizabeth Savage offer the first handbook of early modern colour printmaking before 1700, creating a new, interdisciplinary paradigm for the history of graphic art. The book unveils a corpus of thousands of individual colour prints from across early modern Europe, proposing art historical, bibliographical, technical and scientific contexts for understanding them and their markets.

The twenty-three contributions represent the state of research in this emerging field. From the first known attempts in the West until the invention of the approach we still use today (blue-red-yellow-black/‘key’, now CMYK), it demonstrates that colour prints were not rare outliers, but essential components of many early modern book, print and visual cultures.


VENUE
Warburg Institute, Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AB
1 October 2015, 6-8pm


DETAILS
Open to all (RSVP not required)
25% discount on orders
Queries? Elizabeth.Savage@manchester.ac.uk

The University of Antwerp has a modest collection of ca. 1400 objects, the
bulk of which were gathered in the early 20th century by the Jesuit and art
historian Ferdinand Peeters, whose primary goal was to collect representations
of Antwerp (from portrayals of its buildings to maps of the city and its
surroundings) from the 16th through the 20th centuries. Initially the objects
were used to decorate the corridors of what was then the Handelshogeschool, or
College of Commerce, but they are now stored and managed by the University
Library’s department of Special Collections, which is responsible for valuable
and fragile items.

The Electronic Catalogue

In 2012, the University of Antwerp began a project to develop an electronic cataloguing system for the registration of the prints and drawings in its care. By the conclusion of the project in 2014, an innovative system for registering not only individual objects, but also groups of prints, such as print series or book illustrations, had been implemented and used to register some 1400 works on paper. Nearly all of these records have also been supplemented with a high-resolution image of the work concerned. In addition, there are various options for searching not only for specific key words or dates, but also for more general thematic subdivisions within the collection, such as maps or historical events, or by technique.

Exceptional links within and between collections

What makes this cataloguing system especially satisfying to work with are the
various links contained within it. For example, if one starts with an
individual object, such as François Stroobant’s view of the south porch of the
Antwerp cathedral (see http://anet.ua.ac.be/record/opacuaobj/tg:uapr:463/E),
one can see not only the basic information on that particular print, but also
follow links to the print album in which it was originally published (under
Related objects) as well as the artists who contributed to the production of
this image and, in turn, all of the other objects on which they had worked,
both in this collection as well as in other collections within the larger
Antwerp network.

Similarly, one can also start with a record for a group of objects, such as the prints published in the 1602 account of the state entry into Antwerp of the Archdukes Albert and Isabella (http://anet.ua.ac.be/record/opacuaobj/tg:uapr:842/E). In these records, one has not only general information pertaining to the entire group of images (currently only available in Dutch), but also links to the individual descriptions of each of the images in the series, as well as catalogue descriptions of the book in which they originally appeared.

One can access the online catalogue via:

- the website for the University Library of Antwerp
(https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/library/collections/special-collections/ (under
“Quick links”)
- or via the following direct links:

* http://anet.be/opac/opacuaobj/E (for the English site)
* http://anet.be/opac/opacuaobj/N (for the Dutch site)

While the key sub-divisions within each catalogue entry appear either in
English or Dutch (depending upon the language in which you initiate your
search), the running text fields are currently only available in Dutch.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact either:

Dr. Tom Deneire, head of Special Collections
(tom.deneire@uantwerpen.be)
Dr. Karen Bowen, Print collection
(karen.bowen@uantwerpen.be)

A collaboration with the Lawrence Arts Center, Wonder Fair, the University of Kansas Printmaking Department.

The week of September 14-19 Print Week will be coming around again. This week full of exhibitions, print fair, workshops, presentations, and tours is dedicated to prints and the printmaking process. In 2013 the inaugural Print Week was launched with great success. The second biennial is poised to be even greater.

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) manipulated his copperplates in unprecedented ways to achieve printed images that were often in flux. That many of the different results were circulated as finished works in their own right marked a new moment in the appreciation of printmaking and the collecting of prints in the seventeenth century.

Rembrandt was the first artist to treat the print medium as a means of crafting visibly changing images. He was also the first printmaker to fully explore the use of newly available Asian papers for their aesthetic and technical effects. Many of these variations were the outcome of Rembrandt’s intense and restless search for results that satisfied his artistic sense. Others – especially among the portraits – were probably produced at the instigation of some of his print connoisseur patrons, a prospect that this exhibition explores further.

Rembrandt’s Changing Impressions highlights 18 of the artist’s most notably intriguing or dramatically altered prints. It gathers together 52 impressions from 14 different U.S. collections to best show the images in their circulated iterations. All of the works exhibited here were produced during Rembrandt’s lifetime, and almost all were likely printed by the artist himself or under his direct supervision.

This is the first time in over 40 years that such an exhibition has been undertaken, and the new scholarship contributes much to a reinvigorated discussion. A publication reproducing all the works will make these images broadly available, and a symposium timed to the IFPDA Print Fair will foster a scholarly conversation.

This project has been generously supported by the Netherland-America Foundation, the Dutch Culture USA program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York, the International Fine Print Dealers Association / IFPDA Foundation and the European Institute at Columbia University.

This traveling exhibition and its accompanying publications provide the first comprehensive overview of Associated American Artists (1934-2000), the commercial enterprise best known as the publisher of prints — sold via mail-order catalogue — by Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood.

The exhibition addresses not only AAA’s storied involvement in the popularization of American prints in the 1930s, but also its ongoing promotion of American art over six decades. Through aggressive marketing of studio prints, ceramics, and textiles, and associations with corporate advertisers, AAA sought to bring “original” American art over the threshold of every American home. “From Studio to Doorstep — Wherever You Are,” the company promised in a 1945 mail-order brochure. “No longer would the would-be possessor of a beautiful picture have to go to town and visit an art dealer; or still harder, hire somebody to do it for him. Quite the contrary! Every American post office [is] to be like a branch agency for the creations of the pick of American artists.”

A major catalog distributed by Yale University Press containing essays by scholars in the fields of American painting, printmaking, textiles, ceramics, and interior design accompanies the exhibition. A free, illustrated index of AAA prints, textiles, color reproductions, and ceramics will be made accessible online as a searchable PDF.

Organized by the Beach Museum of Art, the exhibition of 136 objects from over 25 museums and private collections will travel to the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, April 19-July 9, 2016; The American Textile History Museum, Lowell, Massachusetts, September 16, 2016 – January 2, 2017; and the Syracuse University Art Galleries, New York, January 26 – March 26, 2017.

The exhibition’s co-curators are Liz Seaton of the Beach Museum of Art and Jane Myers, former curator at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas. Scholar Gail Windisch, Los Angeles, is a third important contributor to the exhibition. Her original research served as the base for the project.

The aim of the seminar is to invite prominent artists, theorists, curators and museums to discuss the status of contemporary printmaking; from a traditional, theoretical and historical standpoint, to what is happening today and what could happen in the future.

The primary impact of the seminar is aimed at Nordic educational institutions, whose strong cultural connections continue to foster the development of printmaking as an artistic practice. Invited international speakers will deliver a series of talks, to contextualise Printmaking in the Expanded Field and present evidence of its future relevance within contemporary art.

For more information please send an email to: pitef@khio.no