There is an immediacy and intimacy to works on paper that seems to bring us especially close to an artist’s vision and process. Drawn directly on paper or a printing plate, in broad gestures or precise marks, these works convey the vivid presence of the artist’s hand. Rembrandt to Picasso: Five Centuries of European Works on Paper highlights more than a hundred European prints and drawings from our exceptional collection, many of which are on view for the first time in decades.

From the remarkably spontaneous etchings of Rembrandt, through the bold graphite lines of Pablo Picasso, the exhibition explores the roles of drawing and printmaking within artists’ practices, encompassing a variety of modes, from studies to finished compositions, and a range of genres, including portraiture, landscape, satire, and abstraction. Working on paper, artists have captured visible and imagined worlds, developed poses and compositions, experimented with materials and techniques, and expressed their personal and political beliefs. Other featured artists include Albrecht Dürer, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Francisco Goya, Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh, Käthe Kollwitz, and Vasily Kandinsky.

In conjunction with the exhibition One: Titus Kaphar, on view in the adjacent gallery, excerpts from a conversation with contemporary artist Titus Kaphar (b. 1976) accompany selected works here, addressing the often incomplete and difficult narratives presented by the predominantly white, male artists of the traditional Western art canon.

The Saint Louis Art Museum will present Printing the Pastoral: Visions of the Countryside in 18th-Century Europe, a free exhibition examining the early development of one of the most recognizable textile genres: copperplate-printed cotton, popularly known as toile.

Toile has remained popular since its inception more than 250 years ago, when technological advances allowed textile printers to exploit the type of copperplates long used by artists to print on paper. Artisans were then able to create nuanced, intricate designs, and their creativity flourished.

The emergence of copperplate-printed textiles coincided with the taste for scenes of country life and other pastoral imagery in Europe. Middle- and upper-class audiences clamored for fabrics patterned with idyllic scenes of shepherds, ladies on swings, amorous couples and village celebrations. Textile printers responded, drawing inspiration from a wide variety of sources.

This exhibition reveals the nostalgia for pastoral themes common to 18th-century textile consumers and art collectors by pairing furnishing fabrics, ceramics, and paintings with prints by—or after—Rembrandt van Rijn, Nicolaes Berchem, Paulus Potter, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and François Boucher. A featured object in Printing the Pastoral is a reconstructed bed, complete with coverlet and curtains, that illustrates the visual impact of these innovative fabrics in the 18th-century home.

Printing the Pastoral includes a number of textiles never before exhibited at the museum, including a recent gift of printed cottons from Richard and Suellen Meyer and a loan from the Missouri History Museum of an important early English copperplate-printed textile.

In 1919, 39 posters came to the Art Institute of Chicago, courtesy of the Underground Electric Railways London. The posters, full of brilliant colors and innovative designs, were part of an effort to encourage Londoners to use this commercial transportation system: to visit the city’s cultural attractions, go shopping, attend sporting events, and even venture into the countryside—all by taking Underground trains and buses, of course. Installed outside Underground stations on public streets and on the front of buses that traversed the city, these posters formed a vibrant civic art presence—a public gallery available to all.

Over the next 20 years more posters arrived at the museum, coming at irregular intervals and eventually forming a collection of almost 350 artworks—an extraordinary sample from the golden age of this remarkable poster campaign, one that continues to this day. Until now, however, the story of how and why these posters came to Chicago has not been known. The architect of the poster campaign, from its inception in 1908 until 1939, was Frank Pick, an executive with London’s Underground. Pick’s enthusiasm for art education led him to commission poster designs from many young artists. Indeed, it is likely that the close relationship between the Art Institute of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute was one reason that Pick chose the museum as the eventual keeper of this poster archive.

This exhibition, the first at the museum to showcase this unique collection, begins with a chronological sampling of the posters. Thematic sections feature popular subjects, such as the zoo, museums, and Hampton Court, the royal palace southwest of London on the Thames, while focused displays are devoted to three of the greatest artists who worked for the Underground: Charles Paine, Frederick Herrick, and one of the most illustrious poster artists of the 20th century, Edward McKnight Kauffer, who studied briefly at the School of the Art Institute on his way to Europe.

Among the show’s highlights is Charles Paine’s clever take on King Henry the VIII, depicting him with large shears trimming the heads off his topiary queens in Hampton Court by Tram (1922). Others include Mary Koop’s Summer Sales (1925), which invites viewers to follow a riot of brightly colored umbrellas toward their shopping destination; a modernist depiction of time by Clive Gardiner from 1928 urging riders to buy a season Underground ticket; and Harold Sandys Williamson’s Cheap Tickets to Town, Shop between 10 and 4 (1939), an almost surrealistic view of the London cityscape, its sky a sea of floating barrage balloons as protection from German bombs.

A century after the initial posters arrived at the museum, this exhibition features 100 posters—a celebration of the gift, Frank Pick’s inventive campaign, and the beautiful artworks it produced.

The Museum of Modern Art announces the appointment of Lanka Tattersall as curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints. Her responsibilities will include participating in the Museum’s acquisitions program, the installation of the collection galleries, and the development of special exhibitions and catalogues. Tattersall will join the Museum on July 1, 2019.

Please visit the 'External Link' below to read the full press release from MoMA.

Pablo Picasso innovated in almost all art media, from painting and sculpture to book arts and printmaking. Mia recently acquired a rare group of prints that show his exploration into a novel printmaking technique: the reduction linocut. In collaboration with master printer Hidalgo Arnéra, he pioneered this way of making multicolor prints from a single printing matrix. On display is Mia’s series of working proofs from Arnéra’s archive showing each step of the process. The subject of the prints? Bullfighting—a subject near and dear to Picasso’s heart.

Meant to stop people in their tracks with bold colors and seductive imagery, French advertising posters of the turn of the 20th century ultimately became highly collectible works of art. L’Affichomania: The Passion for French Posters presents the work of five innovative artists: Jules Chéret, Eugène Grasset, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, Alphonse Mucha, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The relaxed printing and posting guidelines granted in 1881 by the Freedom of the Press Law, along with new developments in commercial printing, resulted in tens of thousands of posters being plastered in the streets of Paris every year. These large, colorful prints were displayed on walls, kiosks, public urinals, and advertising carts throughout the city. The craze for posters, known as affichomanie, had begun. Depicting various products, inventions, events, and the famed performers of Montmartre—the emerging Bohemian center of Paris—posters brought art to the streets and into the home.

L’Affichomania: The Passion for French Posters includes nearly 60 vibrant works from the turn of the century. Organized by the Richard H. Driehaus Museum in Chicago, the exhibition will premiere at the Taft Museum of Art, its first stop on a nationwide tour.

From its first issue, in 1884, the weekly journal Le Courrier français championed advertising. Jules Chéret (1836–1932), considered the father of the poster, held a prominent place in its pages. The paper publicized and reproduced Chéret’s poster designs, and in return, the artist created advertisements for companies that financed it. Drawn from Susee and James Wiechmann’s promised gift of nearly six hundred Chéret works, the posters featured explore this reciprocal relationship, which proved mutually beneficial.

The Association of Print Scholars is excited to announce its selection for the APS-sponsored session at the CAA conference to be held in Chicago, February 12–15, 2020.

Title:
Registering the Matrix: Printing Matrices as Sites of Artistic Mediation

Session Chair:
Jun Nakamura, University of Michigan

Session Abstract:
Printing matrices often have storied pasts. Rembrandt’s plates were reprinted, reworked, otherwise altered, and sent under the roller until little of the artist’s hand remained. One eighteenth-century printer etched over a Rembrandt plate in the name of restoration before cutting it down into smaller plates; another printed Rembrandt’s plates with masks, plate tone, and in combination with other plates in order to create new compositions; and Rembrandt himself repurposed a plate by Hercules Segers. Beyond Rembrandt, Gauguin’s woodblocks were printed in editions by himself, by printer Louis Roy, and posthumously by Pola Gauguin. The resulting editions vary widely in inking, coloring, and support. Contemporary artists’ prints produced by publishers like Gemini G.E.L or Crown Point Press are often as much a product of collaboration with the printers as of the artist’s singular hand. While the Blocks, Plates, and Stones conference held at the Courtauld in 2017 did much to shed light on the matrix itself, examining the contributions of printers and publishers adds complexity to notions of authorship and illuminates processes particular to the medium; and looking at the afterlife and reuse of matrices provides evidence of artistic encounters, exchanges, and processes. This session seeks papers that address the printing matrix as site of mediation, across time and geography.

Papers topics might include:
- Reuse, restoration, or defacement of printing matrices
- The contributions of printers in printing other artists’ matrices
- Creative processes manifest in the printing of matrices, rather than in their making
- Collaboration via the matrix

A formal Call for Papers will be circulated with CAA's larger CFP with all sessions soliciting papers later this summer. Stay tuned!

Japanese woodblock-print artists produced numerous rich engagements with culturally resonant narratives that were often loosely based on historical events, then subsequently embellished in textual sources and their theatrical adaptations. The artists featured in this exhibition explore a wide and often gendered range of responses to those narratives’ emotionally charged moral and ethical dilemmas.

This exhibition features the Birger Sandzén Memorial Gallery's complete set of 44 Woodcut Society presentation prints in original letterpress folders. Stemming from an interest in collecting hand-printed bookplates, in 1932 Kansas City grain merchant
Alfred Fowler (1889–1959) established the Woodcut Society with the sole aim of increasing “interest in
fine woodcuts as a medium of artistic expression.” He planned to commission and publish two new
woodcut prints each year, proposing a subscription-based organization limited to 200 members who, for
$10 in dues per year, would receive the woodcuts mounted in a presentation folder printed by the Torch
Press of Cedar Rapids. As the Woodcut Society was primarily geared toward print collectors, and
“intended to be savored in the intimate setting of one’s private library,” the folders each opened to the
print facing a page essay by a noted print authority or penned by the artist.

Please visit the 'External Link' below for more information.