Poursuivant pour la quatrième année consécutive son partenariat avec le musée des Beaux-arts de
Tours dans le cadre de l’opération « Dans les collections de la BnF », la Bibliothèque nationale de
France rend hommage cette année à Raphaël, l’un des artistes les plus célèbres de l’art occidental,
à l’occasion des 500 ans de sa mort le 6 avril 1520. Intitulée Raphaël et la gravure, cette exposition
s’articule autour de14 estampes de Marcantonio Raimondi, Agostino Veneziano, Marco Dente et Ugo
da Carpi, conservées au département des Estampes et de la photographie de la BnF. Gravées d’après
des compositions du maître, elles illustrent toute l’importance accordée par Raphaël à cet art pour
la diffusion de son œuvre.

Raphaël, maître de la Renaissance
Raphaël est sans nul doute l’un des artistes les plus connus de l’histoire de l’art occidental. Sa renommée
est due, d’une part, au nombre d’élèves qu’il a formés et qui ont favorisé la connaissance de sa manière
et, d’autre part, à l’estampe, qui a permis dès son vivant la diffusion de ses compositions.

Né le 6 avril 1483 à Urbino, petite cité des Marches et important foyer de la Renaissance italienne,
Raphaël fait ses premiers pas dans l’atelier de son père, Giovanni Santi, peintre et poète de la cour des
Montefeltro. Orphelin très jeune, il perfectionne son art dans sa ville natale, puis collabore avec le Pérugin,
le peintre le plus recherché de son temps. En 1504, il arrive à Florence, où il découvre les œuvres de
Léonard et Michel-Ange. Du premier, il tira les leçons du paysage et du portrait, et du second celle de la
mise en espace du corps humain. En 1508, à la demande du pape Jules II, il rejoint l’équipe de peintres qui
œuvraient à la décoration des « stanze » (chambres) du Vatican.

Il s’impose rapidement comme le chef du chantier papal. Le pontificat de Léon X lui permet ensuite de
s’affirmer comme l’artiste le plus important de la Rome de l’époque : il fut non seulement peintre, mais
également architecte, archéologue et antiquaire.

Dès son vivant, ses œuvres sont envoyées en France au roi François Ier. Ces tableaux constituent le
noyau de la collection royale, exposée depuis la Révolution au musée du Louvre. À sa mort, le 6 avril
1520, Raphaël était devenu l’artiste le plus aimé de son temps.


Raphaël invenit
Raphaël tient une place centrale dans l’histoire de la gravure et de son développement en Italie, à
tel point qu’il est traditionnellement présenté comme le premier artiste à avoir compris le potentiel
de ce médium pour favoriser la connaissance de son œuvre et la diffusion de sa renommée. Sa
collaboration avec le graveur Marcantonio Raimondi est célébrée depuis Les Vies de Vasari (1550,
1568), ce dernier devenant par la même occasion le tout premier graveur d’interprétation. Cependant,
l’association entre les deux artistes ne se limita pas à la reproduction par le graveur des tableaux du
peintre car Raphaël fournit aussi des dessins préparatoires, parfois inachevés, spécifiquement conçus
pour être transcrits en gravure, comme c’est le cas avec le célèbre Massacre des innocents.

Raphaël est également étroitement lié à la réalisation des tout premiers clairs-obscurs italiens, ces
gravures sur bois en camaïeu obtenues par l’impression d’autant de matrices que de couleurs souhaitées,
selon une technique née dans le monde germanique vers 1506-1510. Les premiers chiaroscuri italiens sont
ainsi l’œuvre du graveur Ugo da Carpi et portent l’invenit de Raphaël, comme La Mort d’Ananie, datée
de1518. Dans l’entourage de Raimondi, d’autres graveurs tels Agostino et Marco Dente reprirent les
compositions de Raphaël, travaillant à partir des dessins du maître ou des gravures de Raimondi.
La fortune gravée de Raphaël fut donc, dès son vivant, considérable et ne cessa pas avec sa mort.

USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute's 2020-21 Seminar "On Paper"

Part 1: Social Reading Group
Any time, September - October 2020

Participate in the asynchronous, on-going social reading group. Instructions for accessing and discussing the pre-circulated reading, “Handwriting of the Self: Leonardo da Vinci” by David Rosand, through at perusall.com will be sent to those who register.

Join us whenever and as often as you like before October 29. We will be able to comment on and question the text and each other to ask ourselves how do thinking and drawing relate:
• For Leonardo, as Rosand presents him?
• For each of us, as thinkers, writers, doodlers, scribblers, calligraphers, and/or artists?
• For those of us who still take pen to hand regularly, and/or those of us who think/draw/write with smart apps/devices?

As we peruse Rosand’s text, together we might:
• Consider what Rosand says when a drawing includes both images and text—add your comments as to you think about the similarities/differences between writing and drawing
• See what Rosand says is Leonardo’s “favorite and most typical doodle” and comment on what your own habitual scribbling churns out.
• Find where others have already highlighted passages about lefthandedness: any lefties out there: tell us what you think!
• Highlight what Rosand says about drawing and memory, and in a comment agree or disagree from our own daily experiences …
• Pick out why Rosand calls a key section “Drawing and Knowing”—and comment as to how that relates to our theme of “thinking as drawing”…

On the Oct 29 synchronous event, our guest speakers, who are art/architectural historians and practicing artists, will address your comments as they speak informally about what drawing as thinking means to them in our roundtable conversation. Join our conversation now through our social reading group!

Part 2: Roundtable Conversation
Thursday, October 29, 12:30 - 2 pm (PDT)

Moderator:
Lisa Pon, University of Southern California

Panelists:
Leslie Geddes, Tulane University
Andrea Kantrowitz, SUNY New Paltz
Morgan Ng, University of Cambridge
Nick Sousanis, San Francisco State University

For more information please email: emsi@dornsife.usc.edu

Please visit the 'External Link' below to register via Zoom for the synchronous zoom meeting and/or the asynchronous reading group.

In conjunction with the exhibition A Graphic Revolution: Prints and Drawings in Latin America, join contemporary artists Fidencio Fifield-Perez, J. Leigh Garcia, and Michael Menchaca for a conversation about their use of printmaking to express their identity and experiences as Latinx artists in the United States, and the social and political issues that inform their work today.

Fidencio Fifield-Perez was born in Oaxaca, Mexico, and raised in the US after his family migrated. His practice critiques the authority given to paper objects over the people they document. Recent works reincarnate discarded maps and envelopes as ex-votos and papel picados. Fifield-Perez received his MA and MFA from the University of Iowa and his BFA from Memphis College of Art.

J. Leigh Garcia is an artist born and raised in Dallas, Texas. Garcia received a master of fine arts degree and a master of arts degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a bachelor of fine arts degree in printmaking from the University of North Texas. Garcia is currently a print media and photography professor at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio.

Michael Menchaca blends the framework of ancient Mesoamerican codices, European bestiaries, and Japanese video games with the seductive, attention-seeking digital interfaces of Big Tech. He exhibits his work in immersive installations that apply a combination of printmaking, painting, and digital animation, exploring Latinx identities in a post-internet American landscape. Born in 1985 in San Antonio, Texas, Menchaca received his BFA from Texas State University in 2011 and his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2015. Menchaca lives and works in San Antonio, Texas.

Please visit the 'External Link' below to register for this free event.

For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become. — James Baldwin

James Baldwin’s writing, over fifty years old, continues to show us how to use our imagination to see our experiences and our country in new light during times of political and social change. Join artists Yashua Klos, Nontsikelelo Mutiti, and Karen J. Revis, and in a conversation about what brings hope to America in their own work. Yashua Klos is a Chicago-born artist who uses innovative printmaking techniques to address issues of identity, race, memory, and community. Nontsikelelo Mutiti is a Zimbabwe-born visual artist and educator who elevates the practices of Black peoples through conceptual design, experimental publishing, and archiving practices. Karen J. Revis is a New York-based artist whose series REVISionary Prints explores her experience growing up in the Black community and celebrates leaders throughout African-American history. The talk will be moderated by Yulia Topchiy of Assembly Room, co-curator of Living in America.

About Living in America
Living in America: An Exhibition in Four Acts is an online and in-person exhibition curated by Assembly Room that will unfold over the course of the fall season. Organized into four thematic “acts”—Outrage, Love, Hope, and Care—Living in America explores the transformative power of art in times of crises.

Featuring artists Mildred Beltré, Vanessa German, Mark Thomas Gibson, Elektra KB, Yashua Klos, Narsiso Martinez, Azikiwe Mohammed, Nontsikelelo Mutiti, Africanus Okokon, Karen J. Revis, Swoon, William Villalongo, and Dáreece J. Walker. Living in America presents a wide range of practices and spotlights the relevance and adaptability of print formats during political upheaval and resistance. Works include conventional printmaking, mixed media incorporating found printed matter, and those informed by reproduction and dissemination. New work is shown here for the first time by Elektra KB, Yashua Klos, Azikiwe Mohammed, and Africanus Okokon, as well as a site-specific stencil installation by Nontsikelelo Mutiti.

This Zoom webinar is free and open to the public. Live captioning will be available. The event will be recorded and made available online. Feel free to send questions in advance to contact@ipcny.org.

Adding to a sizable first gift of etchings by Rembrandt in 2007, the Berne-based collector Eberhard W. Kornfeld has donated an additional thirty-one works to the Kunstmuseum Basel. The exhibition Rembrandt’s Etchings, held in the Hauptbau’s mezzanine galleries concurrently with the grand special exhibition Rembrandt’s Orient, now showcases around sixty works from both donations.

Even in his lifetime, Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669) was widely acclaimed not only for his paintings, but also for his extraordinary gifts as a printmaker. Many art lovers even thought that the etchings were the genuine sensation: Rembrandt’s singular handling of this printmaking process—his use of a variety of techniques and his repeated revisions of his plates, which yielded virtually inexhaustible potentials for variation—makes each print a unique item coveted by collectors. The earliest collections of his etchings are in fact documented for the seventeenth century, and high-quality and rare prints still fetch large sums in the art market.

The Berne-based auctioneer and collector Eberhard W. Kornfeld is an experienced connoisseur of Rembrandt’s oeuvre. He became devoted to the artist early on in his career, in the late 1940s, when he worked at Gutekunst and Klipstein Auctioneers, and started building his own collection of Rembrandt’s etchings. In 2007, he made a donation of most of these treasures to the Kunstmuseum Basel’s Kupferstichkabinett (Department of Prints and Drawings), followed by a second gift in 2019. Not a single week passes in which he does not take out the etchings to study them, Kornfeld, who retains a lifelong right to the enjoyment of the works, remarks. Paying tribute to these acts of civic-minded generosity benefiting the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, the public art collection of Basel, the exhibition offers our visitors a first opportunity to examine the thirty-one works of the second donation. The display is rounded out by etchings from the first donation and our own holdings, illustrating how neatly the different divisions of the collection complement each other.

The altogether around seventy prints chosen for the exhibition represent a florilegium that lets our visitors experience Rembrandt’s prodigious artistry as an etcher in all its facets. Selected examples bring into focus the watermarks of the new accessions, which are now considered a key piece of evidence in the appraisal and dating of the prints. Other works are presented with their provenance; some were formerly in famous collections.

This focused exhibition, drawn from the Whitney’s collection, will look at the creative and irreverent ways that seven artists—Ruth Asawa, Sari Dienes, Pati Hill, Kahlil Robert Irving, Virginia Overton, Julia Phillips, and Zarina—have employed the everyday objects around them to make prints. Nothing Is So Humble takes its title from an evocative proposition by Dienes that recognized aesthetic possibilities in the most mundane of subjects: “Bones, lint, Styrofoam, banana skins, the squishes and squashes found on the street: nothing is so humble that it cannot be made into art.”

The artists in this exhibition share an unconventional approach to printmaking. Rather than mark a metal plate or carve into a block of wood, they have worked directly with the stuff of their environments: making a rubbing from a maintenance hole cover, photocopying a hairbrush, running nylon stockings through an etching press, or even pressing a slice of prosciutto onto a printing plate.

The resulting surface impressions—at once precise and abstracted—capture intimate views of their commonplace subjects that teeter between recognizable and elusive. By making visible what might otherwise be overlooked, these works transform ordinary encounters into poetic and poignant accounts of our world.

Note: Currently, the exhibition is described as closing in "Spring 2021" according to the Whitney's website. Please visit the 'External Link' below for updates.

The Print Center and the International Print Center New York have come together to aggregate resources related to print and print culture supporting Black Lives Matter and other social justice causes. This list was born out of the 2020 protests. It is a work in progress. Resources include exhibitions, publications, free/low-cost printing, events, organizations, fundraisers, reading lists, and other initiatives. Please share resources for potential inclusion by emailing info@printcenter.org.

Please visit the 'External Link' below to access this list.

Organized by the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology (Oxford) and the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD, The Hague). This study day will take place online on zoom across two sessions. The event is free to attend but registration (for the full study day) is required due to limited places.

Program
16 October 2020 (timezone GMT +1)

10:00 – Welcome

10:05–10:50: Session 1: The Young Rembrandt exhibition
10:05 – An Van Camp (Christopher Brown Curator of Northern European Art, Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford), A Curator’s View of the Young Rembrandt Exhibition

10:30 – Peter Klein (Professor Emeritus in Wood Biology, University of Hamburg) and Jevon Thistlewood (Paintings Conservator, Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford): A rediscovered painting from Rembrandt’s Workshop at the Ashmolean Museum

10:50 – Break

11:00–12:30 Session 2: Recent Material-Technical Research on Rembrandt’s Early Drawings and Prints
Moderator: Jane Turner (Head of the Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

11:00 – Michiel Franken (Curator of Technical Documentation Rembrandt and Rembrandt School, Netherlands Institute for Art History RKD, The Hague): Rembrandt, his Teachers and the Education of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Artists

11:20 – Rick Johnson (Geoffrey S. M. Hedrick Senior Professor of Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York): Identifying New Watermarks in Impressions of Rembrandt’s Early Etchings: The WIRE Project at Cornell UniversityRick Johnson (Geoffrey S. M. Hedrick Senior Professor of Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York): Identifying New Watermarks in Impressions of Rembrandt’s Early Etchings: The WIRE Project at Cornell University

11:40 – Erik Hinterding (Curator of Prints, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam): The Young Rembrandt as an Experimental Printmaker

12:00 – Questions and Discussion

12:30–13:30 Lunch

13:30 – 16:00 Session 3: Recent Art-Historical and Provenance Research on Rembrandt’s Early Drawings and Prints
Moderator: Jacquelyn Coutré (Eleanor Wood Prince Associate Curator of European Painting and Sculpture before 1750, Art Institute of Chicago)

13:30 – Ilona van Tuinen (Curator of Drawings, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam): The Emergence of Rembrandt as a Draughtsman

13:50 – Olenka Horbatsch (independent art historian, London): Rembrandt’s Use of Unfinished Proof Impressions in his Printmaking

14:10 – Stephanie Dickey (Bader Chair in Northern Baroque Art, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada): Everyday Life in Rembrandt’s Early Works

14.30 – Break

14:40 – Tico Seifert (Senior Curator of Northern European Art, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh): The King, the curious, and the collectors: Rembrandt’s works in Britain before 1700

15:00 – Robert Fucci (Lecturer, University of Amsterdam): Understanding the Collecting and Patronage of Rembrandt’s Prints in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam

15:40 – Questions and Discussion

16:00 – End of the Conference

Please visit the 'External Link' below to register.

Phil Sanders is a collaborative master printer, author, artist, educator, and arts business consultant. Print education and printer training has been a long term focus for Sanders who has trained printers at workshops in the US and abroad. Sanders lectures and teaches workshops regularly on art, printmaking, collecting and the business of art. He is also the author of Prints and Their Makers, a definitive publication on contemporary collaborative printmaking, published by Princeton Architectural Press and distributed by Chronicle Books.

Sanders’ online conversation will focus on work currently in process in his studio. He will also show artworks that he has done with artists over the past 25 years. Sanders has worked as a collaborating Master Printer with hundreds of artists and produced several thousand works, many of which are contained in the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Library of Congress and Yale University Art Gallery among others. The presentation will conclude with an opportunity for participants to ask questions.

Please visit the 'External Link' below to register for this free event.

Join Galina Mardilovich on Wednesday, October 14, as she reflects on the Rona and Martin Schneider Collection of American and European Prints at the Syracuse University Art Museum.

Please visit the 'External Link' below to register for this free lecture.