This exhibition includes nearly a dozen works by Whistler accompanied by more than 50 etchings by some of his most accomplished American and European contemporaries.

Whistler’s gritty images of the River Thames, views of Venice, and Parisian scenes are among works featured in the exhibition. Other artists who participated in the etching revival include Francis Seymour Haden, James McBey, Edwin Edwards, David Young Cameron, Muirhead Bone, Mortimer Menpes, Charles Meryon, Maxime Lalanne, Joseph Pennell, and Frank Duveneck, among others.

Although best known for innovative paintings such as Arrangements in Gray and Black No. 1 (popularly known as “Whistler’s Mother”), Whistler was a talented printmaker. The exhibition Whistler & Company examines the artist’s influential role in the etching revival of the 19th and early 20th centuries. This revival took hold in France, England and the United States. Artists set out to reestablish etching—the art of incising lines with an etching needle into a thin copper plate which was then inked and pressed into paper with the help of a printing press to create impressions—as an art form that could stand on its own. Inspired by Rembrandt, and the old masters, practitioners created remarkable original and expressive compositions that gained popularity with refined collectors and the broader public.

The legacy of expatriate American artist, James Abbott McNeill Whistler (Lowell, Massachusetts 1834-1903 London) was far-reaching, and his sphere of influence included early 20th-century East Tennessee. The Nicholson Art League, for instance, Knoxville’s leading art group of the period, dedicated its entire December 1, 1911 program to Whistler. Led by noted impressionist Catherine Wiley, the gathering featured presentations including “Whistler’s Influence on American Art,” and Whistler, His Life and Work.”

All of the works in in the exhibition are drawn from the Reading Public Museum’s permanent collection of works on paper, which numbers more than 10,000. Whistler & Company: The Etching Revival is organized by the Reading Public Museum, Reading, Pennsylvania.

This exhibition focuses on Northern and Italian Renaissance printmakers, such as Albrecht Dürer, and Dutch Republic prints, including Rembrandt, as well as the etching revival. The selected woodcuts, engravings and etchings present a variety of perspectives on the ambitions of the artists who created them, as well as their collectors and scholars.

Horizon Lines is staged as one of several activities to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Harold Wright and Sarah and William Holmes scholarships. The awards enable print scholars from Australia or New Zealand to examine prints at the British Museum. Taking its cue from the approaches of Harold Wright and the scholarships, the exhibition encourages considered looking, for the acquisition of knowledge and sheer enjoyment of prints.

The associated symposium, "Prints, Printmaking and Philanthropy: Celebrating 50 Years of the Harold Wright Scholarship", will focus on three broad themes - print exhibitions, print collections and print presses - and consider the influence of philanthropy in shaping print culture from historical and contemporary perspectives. The symposium will be held in the Forum Theatre, Arts West, at the University of Melbourne, September 30th - October 2nd 2019.

Please visit the 'External Link' below for more information about the exhibition, the accompanying catalog, and the related symposium.

The word “monster” comes from the Latin monstrum, meaning an anomaly in the natural order. Throughout the ages, artists have given shape to those abnormalities that populate collective imaginations. This exhibition showcases the unbridled creativity of Renaissance and Baroque artists, such as Albrecht Dürer, in bringing monsters to life in an artful manner.

Drawn from the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, a selection of engravings, etchings, woodcuts and drawings from the 15th through the 17th centuries highlights the different functions of monsters in the visual culture of early modern Europe. Whether they embody moral anxieties of the times or serve a decorative purpose, these fantastic beings elicit both terror and wonder. Through them, we can glimpse the power dynamics of religion and gender, and observe how art is capable of bringing a certain beauty even to the monstrous.

This exhibition provides a comprehensive overview of influential American artist Jacob Lawrence’s (1917–2000) printmaking oeuvre, featuring more than 90 works produced from 1963 to 2000. The exhibition explores three major themes that occupied the artist’s graphic works.

Lawrence started exploring printmaking as an already well-established artist. Printmaking suited his bold formal and narrative style exceptionally well. The relationship between his painting and printmaking were intertwined, with the artist revisiting and remaking earlier paintings as prints. The inherent multiplicity of this medium provided an opportunity for the artist to reach broader audiences.

Lawrence was primarily concerned with the narration of African-American experiences and histories. His acute observations of community life, work, struggle, and emancipation during his lifetime were rendered alongside vividly imagined chronicles of the past. The past and present in his practice are intrinsically linked, providing insight into the social, economic, and political realities that continue to impact and shape contemporary society today.

The history of the book in the late Middle Ages is a story of competing media as the handwritten and the illuminated encountered the print revolution in Europe. New printing technologies gave rise to a rich period of experimental cross-fertilization during which artists created hybrid works, books printed to look like manuscripts, and painted compositions modeled after prints. This exhibition includes works of both media, challenging the division between them and considering the culture of the book as technology met artistry.

Critical Printing is an experimental course offered by Harvard’s Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies that integrates studio and seminar instruction, allowing students to explore print as artists and scholars simultaneously. In this installation, as in the course, prints are organized not by medium or chronology, but by fundamental modes of critical thinking that emerge from the printmaking process. In the gallery, works are grouped around the following themes:

Reversal. In most forms of printmaking, the image is reversed as it passes between the matrix (the block or plate) and the paper. Many artists choose to preserve the impact of that original inversion in the final print, by composing with symmetries that suggest reversal or by exploiting the conceptual, social, and historical destabilizations that occur when texts and images are reversed.

Pressure. Printing involves the transfer of an image, under pressure, between two surfaces in direct physical contact. This means that all prints carry an immediate physical memory of their matrices, and many retain sculptural evidence of the deformations incurred in printing. Prints are therefore ideal for exploring themes of contact, memory, impression, and even oppression.

Color Separation. Each color in a print usually must be printed separately, from its own matrix. The color structure thus emerges sequentially and expresses itself in layers. Colors are “mixed” by layering, and inks can be sequenced to generate effects of coverage, veiling, or transparency. These effects lend themselves to meditations on temporality and on the broader cultural implications of color and visibility.

Depth. Printmakers work with plates, blocks, or screens with varying qualities of thickness and resistance. Whether incising or masking those matrices, they create material dramas of surface and depth that resonate with contemporary questions of identity, interiority, and trauma.

Replicability. The ability of printing to multiply and disseminate images, creating a form of visual public life, has had immense implications for modernity. The vitrine in the center of the room spotlights a single aspect of that capacity: the relationship between prints and the creation and authentication of cultural and economic value.

Over 20 prints are featured, including works by the following artists: Otto Dix, Helen Frankenthaler, Jesse Aron Green, Jasper Johns, Corita Kent, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, May Stevens, Utagawa Hiroshige, Edouard Vuillard, and John Wilson. Also included are examples of Notgeld, emergency currency printed in Weimar Germany around 1920.

This installation’s related course is taught by Jennifer Roberts, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities; and Matt Saunders, Harris K. Weston Associate Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University.

Around 1905, a number of young and as yet obscure artists, among them Max Beckmann, Lovis Corinth, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Emil Nolde, set out to write the most important chapter in the history of printmaking in the twentieth century. Flouting traditional rules of craftsmanship, they revolutionized woodcutting, etching, and lithography with works that bristled with enormous expressive energy and raw effects. Print media appealed to these artists because of their creative possibilities and because reproduction and distribution promised access to large audiences.

The exhibition showcases outstanding works of graphic art from the Kupferstichkabinett, with a focus on the years between 1905 and 1920. The stylistic and technical diversity of the selection illustrates that these artists cannot be lumped together under a label such as Expressionism.

On the occasion of the upcoming 90th birthday of Franz Gertsch, MASI invites the artist to plan an exhibition devoted to his oeuvre. This has led to a remarkable and striking meeting between Gertsch's outstanding woodcuts and the wood engravings by two artists whom he regards as much more than simply pioneer revolutionaries of xylography, Paul Gauguin and Edvard Munch. Despite their historical distance and stylistic divergences, these three artists display profound and unexpected affinities, which extend far beyond the technique they share.

Franz Gertsch, born in 1930 in the Swiss town of Mörigen, is numbered among the most significant contemporary artists in Switzerland. From the time of his international breakthrough at the Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972 until the present day, he has created a wide range of paintings and graphic works, which attempt a very special approach to reality. For Franz Gertsch, reality means both a pictorial and a conceptual challenge. Although he uses photos or slide projections as his points of departure, the paintings follow a logic all of their own, which aims for a rightness among all the elements.

Artist William Crutchfield (1932–2015), born in Indianapolis, Indiana, received a traditional studio training at the city’s Herron School of Art and later at Tulane University in New Orleans. His conventional education in the arts may have suited his eye for metronomic movement but perhaps not his prankish sense of humor.

Crutchfield moved to Los Angeles in 1967, settling near the shipyards of San Pedro, amid views of the bustling Port of Los Angeles. This industrial setting provided the artist with plenty of inspiration and subject material for his mechanically derived artworks (the artist once professed that the 1928 transatlantic flight of the Graf Zeppelin was one of his prime spiritual sources). The move also gave him the opportunity to create a more public persona after many years of teaching; that same year, he created a lithographic suite for publisher Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles and began regularly exhibiting in galleries.

Crutchfield continued to play with the theme of humankind’s fraught relationship with transportation throughout most of his career. Trains, ships, and airplanes are all portrayed as overbuilt models of modernity. Air Land Sea, a suite of 13 lithographs printed at Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles in 1970, exemplifies the artist’s master draftsmanship, his keen understanding of engineering, his wry wit and, most of all, his fascination with sundry modes of conveyance.

The patriot, silversmith, and entrepreneur Paul Revere was forever immortalized in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1861 poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” but his genuine accomplishments are often eclipsed by the legend of the midnight journey. This groundbreaking exhibition featuring more than 150 objects re-examines Revere’s life, transforming visitors’ understanding of the innovative businessman through an in-depth exploration of his accomplishments as a silversmith, printmaker, and pioneering copper manufacturer. Organized by the American Antiquarian Society, it draws from their unparalleled collection of Revere engravings, and also includes glimmering silver tea services; commonplace objects such as shoe buckles, thimbles, and medical tools; and important public commissions such as a bronze courthouse bell, all of which reveal facets of this versatile artisan’s career. Coordinated at New-York Historical by Debra Schmidt Bach, curator of decorative arts