The international workshop interrogates how prints vitally contributed to the early modern construction of targets of heuristic inquiry. The event brings together diverse incised, etched and engraved images, objects and materials produced c. 1500-1700 to reframe a comparative history of the rise of the ‘epistemic imprint’ across cultural, religious, and geographic divides as superintendent technology for aestheticizing knowledge formation rendering imperceptible entities accessible to the senses, from the interdisciplinary perspective of international academic researchers and museum professionals trained in different fields and drawing on diverse methodological approaches.

The workshop is open to the public free of charge.

Pre-registration is required, please contact:
Ruth S. Noyes, Novo Nordisk Fonden Mads Øvlisen Postdoctoral Research Fellow, National Museum of Denmark
Ruth.Sargent.Noyes@natmus.dk

Olivia Friis Uhrbrand, Workshop Assistant Coordinator, National Museum of Denmark
Olivia.Friis.Uhrbrand@natmus.dk

Wednesday 6 November - Restaurant Ofelia i Skuespilhuset, Royal Danish Playhouse (Sankt Annæ Pl. 36) *NOT the Royal Danish Theater*
17:30 Reception and dinner for speakers

Thursday 7 November - National Museum, Room U2 (Ny Vestergade 10)
Sessions chair: Hannah Wiepke
9:00-9:30 Arrival, registration and coffee
Michael Andersen, National Museum of Denmark
Welcome

SESSION 1
9:30-10:15 Alex Wragge-Morley
“Epistemic Images and Aesthetic Experience”

10:15-11:00 Tawrin Baker
“The Uses of Images of the Eye in Anatomy and Optics from Vesalius to Descartes”

11:00-11:30 Coffee

SESSION 2
11:30-12:15 Caroline Fowler
“Spectral Ships: Hercules Segers and Traces of Early Capital”

12:15-13:00 M.K. Foster
“Sharks in the Archives: Reimagining Fossils as Epistemic Artifacts”

13:00-14:00 Lunch, Restaurant Smør, National Museum (provided for speakers)

SESSION 3
14:00-14:45 Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen
“Filling in the gaps: Historical remaking as a methodology to research early modern botanical episteme”

14:45-15:30 Nick Wilding
“Skull, Moon, Flea: the afterlife of the image”

15:30-16:00 Coffee

SESSION 4
16:00-16:45 Eileen Reeves
“Imprinting Instruments”

Friday 8 November - National Museum, Room U2 (Ny Vestergade 10)
Sessions chair: M.K. Foster
SESSION 5
9:00-9:45 Julia Ellinghaus and Volker Remmert
“Imageries on Early Modern Scientific Instruments”

9:45-10:30 Daniel Margócsy and Mark Somos
“The Census Method: Uncovering Editions, Provenance, Annotations in the Case of Early Modern Books and Prints”

10:30-11:00 Coffee

SESSION 6
11:00-11:45 Stephanie Leitch and Britta-Juliane Kruse
“Visual Tools and Searchable Science in Early Modern Books”

11:45-12:30 Jolien Van den Bossche
“Digital resuscitation of the Officina Plantiniana’s woodblock collection: goals, approaches and new technologies”

Saturday 9 November – The Black Diamond at the Royal Danish Library, Holberg meeting room (Søren Kierkegaards Plads 1)
Sessions chair: Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen
SESSION 7
9:00-9:45 Arrival and viewing of items from Special Collections

9:45-10:30 Emma Perkins
“Tycho Brahe’s instrument illustrations: a new visual language of technology?”

10:30-11:00 Coffee

SESSION 8
11-11:45 Shira Brisman
“Globes as Gifts in the Era of Print”

11:45-12:30 Hannah Wiepke
“The ‘Interactive’ and ‘Knowing’ Print”

12:30-13:30 Lunch, Royal Library (provided for speakers)

SESSION 9
13:30-14:15 Stephanie Porras
“Forgetting how to see”

14:15-15:00 Meghan Doherty
“Tracking the Philosophical Transactions through the (Digital) Archive”

15:00-15:30 Coffee

SESSION 10
15:30-16:15 Evelyn Lincoln
“The Theater that was Rome”

16:15-17:00 Ruth S. Noyes
Closing discussion

Winslow Homer (1836 – 1910) is widely recognized as an important American painter, but he was also a prolific illustrator. From 1857 to 1875, Homer made countless images that were reproduced as wood engravings in popular nineteenth-century periodicals and journals, such as Harper’s Weekly, Everyday Saturday, Ballou’s Pictorial, Appletons’ Journal of Literature, Science and Art.
Thanks to a gift from David S. Hendrick III, the Newport Art Museum owns over 160 of Homer’s printed illustrations including some of his most well-known and popular images. Drawing from the Museum’s collection, this exhibition focuses on Homer’s many illustrations of children and adolescents. After the American Civil War, Homer frequently turned to children and youth as his subject matter. Depicted in bucolic settings or on the beaches of Gloucester, Massachusetts and Long Branch, New Jersey, the children and adolescents in Homer’s images took on symbolic significance. They represented the promise of America’s rebirth after the divisive Civil War. At the same time, Homer’s children also reveal some of the social realities of America in the late 1860s and 1870s. Disseminated in print publications, Homer’s portrayals of youth became part of the fabric of nineteenth-century visual culture.

Etched in Memory features color etchings by British artist James Alphege Brewer (1881-1946) presenting scenes from Belgium and Northern France—cathedrals, churches and town buildings threatened or damaged during the battles of World War I. In both the United States and Great Britain, these etchings were proudly hung on parlor walls in solidarity with the Allied cause and as a remembrance of the devastating cultural losses inflicted by the onslaught of war.

Born on July 24, 1881, Brewer was the son of Henry W. Brewer, artist and prominent convert to the Catholic Church, and the grandson of John Sherren Brewer, Jr., the editor of the Calendar of Letters of Henry VIII. He attended St. Charles Catholic College in Kensington before studying at the Westminster School of Art.

Brewer's etchings began to appear shortly after he married into the artistic Lucas family in 1910. Like many artists whose work supported family members, Brewer paid close attention to identifying subjects that would sell. This explains the many Continental cathedral exteriors and interiors—Milan, Rouen, Amiens, Toledo, Antwerp—as well as multiple views of various colleges at Oxford and Cambridge and other scenes of interest to tourists and readers of literature, including a large, atmospheric “Where Shakespeare Sleeps,” a view of Stratford-on-Avon signed by both James and his brother Henry.

Brewer’s most prolific year was 1915, when Alfred Bell & Co. published 13 of his etchings, 11 of them scenes of places that had been destroyed or were in danger from the events of the war. These views could have been sketched or photographed before the war using guidance from newspaper articles speculating about the course of a German invasion of Belgium. As a group, Brewer’s early war etchings argue for his inclusion in surveys of important and influential political art.

This exhibition is on loan from and curated by Benjamin S. Dunham. For more information on the works of James Alphege Brewer, please visit jalphegebrewer.info. Support for the exhibition was provided by the Francis Family Foundation.

The Annex Galleries is opening GUSTAVE BAUMANN: A RETROSPECTIVE, a sales exhibition of the artist's color woodcuts from across the U.S. between 1908 and 1962 - Chicago, Illinois to Santa Fe, New Mexico. The opening is Saturday, September 21, 2019, and it will continue through Saturday, November 2, 2019. We are also featuring a number of Baumann's rare, personal oil paintings and a number of ephemeral works - Christmas cards, publications with prints, etc.

The exhibition will also include a few auxiliary works that are meant for clarification of the processes he used or developed, which are not for sale, including a framed set of progressive proofs, blocks the artist carved to print the works from, tempera drawings which were used to transfer the image to the key block. There will also be a few three-dimensional works that Baumann created using gourds or cacti and his fertile imagination.

The exhibition is being held in conjunction with the publication of gallery director Gala Chamberlain's book "In A Modern Rendering: The Color Woodcuts of Gustave Baumann, A Catalogue Raisonné", with essays by Nancy E. Green and Thomas Leech, and a foreword by Martin Krause, which will be officially released by Rizzoli Electra on 24 September 2019.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797–1861)is renowned as one of Japan’s great artists of the nineteenth century. Manga and Anime are practically inconceivable without his visual imagery. He produced artistic and technically ground-breaking prints that were very popular with the general public. To celebrate the 150th anniversary of Austrian-Japanese friendship, the MAK is holding an exhibition on the Japanese ukiyo-e designer Kuniyoshi and his artistic and cultural milieu.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi could be counted as one of the central figures in the history of Japanese color woodcut prints towards the end of the Edo Period (1603–1868). Together with the leading publishers of his era and with other artists of the Utagawa School, including Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) and Utagawa Kunisada I (1786–1864), he created prints that are artistically and technically ground-breaking and yet very popular among the broad-based public. As a designer of commercial products he was always scouting for fresh impulses and new themes, and a new visual vocabulary. Besides single sheets and series, often produced in close cooperation with the entertainment industry, he interwove into his works cutting and cynical criticism of the upper-class establishment, which endeavored to prevent social change through tougher censorship and restrictions.

Many exhibitions on Kuniyoshi and his era have taken place across the globe in recent years, mainly focusing on political critique and humoristic narratives, also “tales of heroes.” Significantly, these are the very themes that are only sparsely represented in the extensive MAK Asia Collection.

The MAK houses color woodcuts by Kuniyoshi and his contemporaries that in their profile and compilation are unique across the world. The collection of Japanese color woodblock prints from the late Edo Period was compiled for the most part around 1900; here, two collector personalities must be singled out: Heinrich Siebold (1852–1908), whose collection found its way between 1892 and 1905 into the Viennese collections of Asian art, and Richard Lieben (1842–1919), from whose estate an extensive and superlative ukiyo-e collection was bequeathed to the MAK.

Therefore this exhibition in the anniversary year is a wonderfully fitting opportunity to show Kuniyoshi’s works in the way that only such collections with their historically compiled holdings are capable of and therefore, in addition, to provide insight into the strategy of European ukiyo-e collectors in Vienna around 1900. In a total of eight sections, the exhibition KUNIYOSHI + positions his work in the center of the Utagawa school: innovations in content and aesthetics make Kuniyoshi’s oeuvre act as a mirror reflecting the great political and social changes in Japan in the nineteenth century.

Rembrandt Hermanszoon van Rijn (1606–1669) was not just a virtuoso of oil painting, he was also a lodestar in the graphic arts and printmaking. During his own lifetime, Rembrandt’s prints were admired, collected, and soon gathered together in catalogues. The assignations of Rembrandt’s authorship were initially more acts of assertion than critical appraisals. While the catalogues raisonnés from the 18th century recorded up to 375 graphic works by the great master, today, only some 290 etchings are considered to have been made by Rembrandt’s hand. Some 350 years after his death, the works have lost none of their appeal, and the name Rembrandt has become a brand.

Among artists as well, Rembrandt found countless admirers and imitators. The Berlin-based painter Adolph Menzel (1815–1905) wrote the following to a friend in April 1844: “Recently I’ve been drifting about a lot in the Kupferstichkabinett, enjoying the engravings of the Dutch, above all Rembrandt, who is the crown jewel among them all. The more often one looks through his work, the more awestruck one becomes…!”

Menzel studied Rembrandt’s works in the 1840s in the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett, which was then open to the public in Monbijou Palace, in the vicinity of the Museumsinsel. Inspired by the style of this great master of etching, Menzel, who was trained as a printmaker, began experimenting with the medium, even trying his hand at the etching needle. This exhibition focuses on Rembrandt’s engravings that Adolph Menzel was able to study in the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett of the 1840s, and features 25 of Rembrandt’s prints, and four works by Menzel that resulted from his engagement with the Dutch master.

The Bolivar Art Gallery is pleased to host the 2019 Mid America Print Council (MAPC) Member’s Juried Exhibition, an annual exhibition showcasing the range of work in contemporary printmaking. This year’s juror Yoonmi Nam selected fifty pieces from the entries, including a variety of traditional print media as well as installation, animation, and sculpture.

The Mid America Print Council is an educational and community-based organization that focuses on all print related arts. Embracing both time-honored and innovative approaches, we promote awareness and appreciation of traditional and contemporary forms of printmaking. We are an inclusive association for individuals and institutions, administering the sharing of technical and critical information regarding print. Honoring our predecessors, we aim to bring new and sustained interest to this unique medium. Active on multiple platforms, MAPC is an organization that provides members with access to a network of printmakers, resources, opportunities, newsletters, and a biennial conference that features speakers, workshops, panels, shows, and exchanges. Through calls for participation, we organize members’ exhibitions and publish The Mid America Print Council Journal. Our goal is to recognize, advocate, and continue research in historical, current, and future print technologies. The Members’ Juried Exhibition occurs every fall and is meant to continue to promote the organization, particularly in non-conference years, and to give our membership regular opportunities to exhibit their work throughout the country.

Discover how celebrated American artist Winslow Homer’s work for the illustrated periodical Harper’s Weekly helped shape his later career as a painter and watercolorist.

During the Civil War (1861–1865), American artist Winslow Homer (1836–1910) served as a correspondent for Harper’s. His sketches of soldiers, both in battle on the front lines and in quieter moments back at camp, were reproduced to accompany the journal’s accounts of the conflict. Homer worked for Harper’s just as new technologies were making it possible to rapidly reproduce newsworthy images on a large scale. Working together with Harper’s editors and engravers, he employed a range of pictorial strategies to reassure skeptical readers that his illustrations were not fabrications, but eyewitness observations “drawn on the spot.”

While in the field as an artist-correspondent, Homer developed habits of seeing and pictorial strategies that informed his work in other media. In addition to tracing these connections, this show explores broader questions that Homer’s art raises about the responsibility of artists who work in periods riven by war and conflict.

In her work, the international acclaimed Spanish artist Lara Almarcegui (born 1972) investigates urban zones, she explores the relation between construction, decay and regeneration of our built world and engages with property situations of natural resources. Almarcegui describes her approach as follows: “I am searching for a way to talk about architecture while avoiding images.” She succeeds in doing so by meticulously doing researches, by gathering information and creating a dense net out of them. In the exhibition of ETH’s collection of prints and drawings, there will be a particular focus on the impact of drawing and other works on paper for the first time. These works enable the viewer to understand how the artist approaches her topics. With its focus on works on paper, the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich is expanding our view of the work of this important artist and at the same time presenting a previously less-known area of her work.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder is a world-renowned painter, but in the 16th century it wasn’t his paintings he was known for – it was his graphic work which brought him widespread fame. This 2019 exhibition offers you the opportunity to get up close and personal with Bruegel’s famous prints. As a pioneer in the rediscovery of Bruegel’s lesser-known masterpieces, KBR will exhibit its complete collection of prints during this special Bruegel year, at ‘The World of Bruegel in Black and White’.

Around the middle of the 16th century Flanders emerged as the international center of the production of, and trade in, prints. Bruegel and his publisher, Hieronymus Cock, both played a key role during this time. The craftsmanship and enterprising skills of these two men are the focus of the exhibition.

Many of the works are held in various editions or ‘states’. However, before a first edition ever came on the market and could be distributed across the world, a print had already undergone a long process. Discover this journey, from drawing to print, in the exhibition ‘The World of Bruegel in Black and White’.

Admire some of his original preparatory drawings, Italian landscapes, the seven deadly sins, virtues and his other marvelous prints. Dive into Bruegel’s imaginary world and be surprised by the extraordinary figures and details.

This exhibition is set in the Palace of Charles of Lorraine, a unique 18th century hidden treasure in the heart of Brussels. Don’t miss the opportunity to discover what are perhaps the lesser-known works of this great Flemish master!