Following in the wake of other great painters and printmakers such as Rembrandt and Goya, Mariano Fortuny y Marsal (1838−1874), an unquestionable master of Spanish nineteenth-century painting, put his virtuosic skills to exploring the expressive possibilities of printmaking – chiefly etching and aquatint – in 30 or so compositions depicting Orientalist themes, customs and classically-inspired subjects. Their fine quality makes him the most important Spanish printmaker of the second half of the 19th century.

In 1860, having produced a few illustrations for books in the previous years, Fortuny began making independent prints after his first trip to Morocco. Himself a collector – of prints by Rembrandt, Ribera and Goya, among many other art objects and antiques – he published only a few of his own during his lifetime through Adolphe Goupil, his Parisian dealer from 1866.

Although printmaking was a sporadic and secondary activity for Fortuny – he practised it at night, as his first biographer Baron Charles Davillier recalled in 1875, and as part of a commercial contract with his dealer – his etchings, an eclectic group of works created in barely 10 years, are a first-rate artistic corpus. Giving free rein to his creativity, the artist produced his most personal and experimental output in which, as his friend and devoted admirer Théophile Gautier pointed out, ‘he lends a mysterious and fanciful appearance to the truest reality’.

This exhibition brings together the artist’s main prints, which come from the collection of Enrique Juncosa Darder. They attest to his technical mastery at imbuing his graphic work with subtle painterly effects, his imaginatively devised compositions, and his attention to detail – the result of his painstaking work carried out on the original plates, seeking the desired effects through various state proofs.

Unlike their belle époque contemporaries who depicted the bustling boulevards and lively nightlife of Paris, artists Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard crafted intimate interiors and domestic scenes. This lecture examines Bonnard’s and Vuillard’s prints and paintings against the wider backdrop of the arts of privacy in fin-de-siècle Paris.

The MFAH hosts the debut presentation of Jasper Johns: 100 Variations on a Theme. Originally created by the artist in 2015 with the intention of accompanying his Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings and Sculptures, published in 2017 by the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, the monoprint series will be on view in Houston September 29, 2019, through February 16, 2020 before traveling on to the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany.

“This extraordinary suite of unique prints allows us to look back at the whole of Jasper Johns’s career,” commented MFAH director Gary Tinterow. “Their visual language expresses the many autobiographical details that have been so important to his identity as an artist.”

“This series provides the opportunity to see Johns’s creative process at work, as he manipulates the imagery in a playful and spontaneous manner. Each print informs the next,” said Dena M. Woodall, associate curator of prints and drawings. “We are delighted to share Johns’s monoprint series for the first time with our audience in Houston.”

Beginning in the early 1950s, Jasper Johns painted flags, targets, alphabets, and other everyday objects, creating a visual vocabulary that has recurred in his art for the nearly six decades since. At a time when abstraction was at its height, Johns’s selection of ordinary objects as his subject matter was a radical departure that quickly established him as one of America’s most influential artists. Jasper Johns: 100 Variations on a Theme exemplifies Johns’s innovation, displaying a series of 100 monoprints that incorporate elements from throughout his career.

As a prolific printmaker, Johns has worked with every technique, exploring the creative potential of each. Though printmaking is characteristically known for its ability to create a repeatable image, monotype and monoprint methods are known for their uniqueness: monotypes are typically made by applying viscous ink onto a smooth, nonabsorbent, unmarked metal or plastic plate, while monoprints use a plate with some fixed, repeatable carved, etched or engraved lines. The plate is then topped with paper and run through the press. For Johns, monotypes and monoprints are placed in the same category because of their changeability in printing. Both are unique during the printing process, leaving behind one strong impression that cannot be replicated exactly.

Johns created this series of 100 monoprints in 2015, over the course of 10 days in his Connecticut studio. The artist used an experimental intaglio plate—related to the 2007 etching titled Within—as the basis for the monoprint. Reworking the plate numerous times, Johns added an etched imprint of his hand and symbols of American Sign Language (ASL) and proceeded to transform the image 100 times. Each print informs the next, forming a narrative chain anchored by reoccurring elements from throughout his work: handprints, stenciled numbers, the alphabet, ASL symbols, and the string from his Catenary series of 2001. Johns also creatively wove the word raisonné into each print, using both letters and ASL symbols.

Other works on paper by Johns, including the artist’s Savarin (1977–81), Land’s End (1979), and Untitled (Red, Yellow, Blue) (1984), from the Museum’s collection and private collections, will be presented alongside the monoprint series to give context to the artist’s recurring themes and motifs.

This exhibition is the first to highlight the museum’s collection of works on paper produced in Latin America over the past century. Representing a wide range of countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, and Mexico, the works survey how artists have explored national and cultural identity during periods of political upheaval and dramatic social change. In particular, prints and drawings provided artists such as Roberto Matta, José Clemente Orozco, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Rufino Tamayo with a means of self-expression well suited for formal experimentation and reaching the broadest possible audience.

A Graphic Revolution begins with the realist style of Mexican muralists such as David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera. Artists in their generation and in the ones that followed used the themes of people, politics, and abstraction to express the complexity of Latin American identity. Featuring approximately 50 works from the museum’s collection, the exhibition also highlights several important recent acquisitions by modern and contemporary Latin American artists, including León Ferrari, Gego, Wifredo Lam, and Liliana Porter.

Caroline Fowler, interim director of the Research and Academic Program, discusses her newly published book, The Art of Paper: From the Holy Land to the Americas, and signs copies. In the late medieval and Renaissance period, paper transformed society—not only through its role in the invention of print but also in the way it influenced artistic production. The Art of Paper tells the history of this medium in the context of the artist’s workshop from the thirteenth century, when it was imported to Europe from Africa, to the sixteenth century, when European paper was exported to the colonies of New Spain.

The talk is free. Books are available in the Museum Store and can be purchased at the event.

Founded in 1963 by Jean Adhémar and published by the Comité national de l’estampe, the journal Nouvelles de l'estampe is intended to present current events in the field of printmaking and engraving. It deals with the printed image both as an art form and as a technology capable of multiplying images, with all the cultural and historical consequences that this has had.

All the issues published since 2010 are available full-text with the original illustrations in PDF format.

From now on the journal will be published only in electronic version. Under the aegis of the Comité national de l’estampe, it will publish, after approbation of the editorial board, articles written in French, English and Italian. Proposals should be sent to remi.mathis@bnf.fr

For the editorial rules, see: http://nouvellesdelestampe.fr/nouvelles-de-lestampe/soumettre-un-article/

San Francisco art collector Louis Belden gave his art collection, the gift of his lifetime, to our community. This collection of prints invites us to share in his passions for art, for collecting, for learning, and for giving back. These works offer a range of expression, experimentation, and expansion of the terrain of postwar modernism and post-modernism. His gift to Cameron Art Museum is truly unprecedented in our region, giving future generations access to this treasure for years to come.

These 134 modernist prints by 51 artists reveal Belden’s journey and are primarily presented in the order he acquired them. The exhibition begins with his bold 1971 acquisition, Art Beat, a neon orange silk screen by Nobu Fukui. By the mid-1990s, he had acquired work by the leading artists, the change-makers, the radicals, such as Josef Albers, Alexander Calder, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Rauschenberg, and Wayne Thiebaud. His final acquisitions of work by Richard Diebenkorn, Jasper Johns, and Ellsworth Kelly show the continuing growth and refinement of the collection.

Adolph Menzel (1815–1905) was the eye of the nineteenth century. In autumn of 2019, the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett – which possesses the largest collection of works on paper by this German artist, comprising more than 6,000 works – is rediscovering Menzel as a painter of works on paper with a major solo exhibition. The show will feature around 100 works in watercolour, pastels and gouache from the museum’s own holdings, along with a number of key loans. Together, they offer the first comprehensive survey of Menzel’s painterly works on paper.

Menzel is known as a painter of large works on canvas, and as the creator of countless studies in pencil. But it was first as a painter of works on paper that he began to employ the full palette of his artistic gifts of expression, creating colourful works ranging from experimental portrait studies through to elaborately composed paintings.

The majority of the works shown in the exhibition are standalone works, however there are also a number of preparatory studies for famous paintings – including the portrait studies carried out in preparation for the coronation picture commissioned by King Wilhelm I, which Menzel painted between 1861 and 1865, and which represents the largest and of Menzel’s paintings, depicting countless figures.

B.A.T. State III is a group exhibition co-curated by Anita Bunn and Francesco X. Siqueiros. In printmaking, the French phrase Bon à Tirer (good to go) refers to the final trial proof that an artist approves before the master printer begins production. The artist gives this approval by initialing the proof with “B.A.T.” and signing it. In B.A.T. State III, prints by 37 women artists are featured, produced over a span of 30 years at Siqueiros’s El Nopal Press in downtown Los Angeles.

Drawn to El Nopal Press by Siqueiros’s technical expertise and collaborative spirit, artists are encouraged to experiment. The results can be seen the vibrant mix of lithographs, relief prints, and monoprints on view at the Kleefeld Contemporary.

This presentation is a third, expanded iteration of B.A.T. Bunn, who had collaborated with Siqueiros to produce an edition of lithographs for a 2011 exhibition, was intrigued by the number of women artists with whom he had worked. In 2013, she proposed the first B.A.T., which she curated at Offramp Gallery in 2013. This show received much acclaim and was heralded as a “feminist tour de force” by Artillery magazine.

Artists of B.A.T. State III:
Lisa Adams, Judith F. Baca, Judie Bamber, Marietta Bernstorff, Susan Bolles, Mariana Botey, Anita Bunn, Carolyn Castaño, Yreina D. Cervántez, Emily Cheng, Chelsea Dean, Sandra de la Loza, Pia Elizondo, Yanieb Fabre, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, Elsa Flores, Diane Gamboa, Silvia Gruner, Sherin Guirguis, Shirley Jaffe, Annie Lapin, Laurie Lipton, Dominique Liquois, Mara Lonner, Rocío Maldonado, Rebecca Morales, Ruby Osorio, Renée Petropoulos, Daniela Rossell, Analia Saban, Susan Silton, Linda Stark, Marika Echachis Swan, Laureana Toledo, Alison Walker, Marion Wesson, and Liat Yossifor

After nearly a decade of focused work in printmaking, artist Betye Saar created her autobiographical assemblage Black Girl’s Window in 1969. This exhibition explores the relation between her experimental print practice and the new artistic language debuted in that famous work, tracing themes of family, history, and mysticism, which have been at the core of Saar’s work from its earliest days. Celebrating the recent acquisition of 42 rare, early works on paper, this is the first dedicated examination of Saar’s work as printmaker.