This exhibition brings together lithographic prints and related graphic materials donated by key artists of the European avant-garde in support of the anarchist journal Les Temps Nouveaux (The New Times), edited by the writer and activist Jean Grave. Contributors included such famous artists as the Neo-Impressionists Camille Pissarro, Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross.

Organized around the social themes and aspirations that defined the politics of the anarchist movement, the exhibition addresses such timely issues as poor labor conditions, homelessness, cross-border migration, child abuse among the clergy, opposition to war and visions of a coming anarchist utopia.

The Temps Nouveaux artists also publicized their ideals through postcards, brochures and book illustrations, including those designed for working-class children. Thus these artists utilized the graphic arts as media for their avant-garde experimentation, even as they worked to convey their social message to a broad public.

This interdisciplinary conference re-evaluates the roles of booktrades peronnel, and explores directions for future research. It draws together book history, printing history, reading history, and literary studies.

Whether we view them as tastemakers, ideological brokers, or entrepreneurial opportunists, the personnel of the book trade undeniably shaped the book cultures of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. While capital, technology, and markets are all powerful factors in the trade’s development, its people are its most significant agents. Current research across periods is demonstrating the creative agency of book trade personnel, and the extent of their cultural and political engagement. As recent monographs and essay collections demonstrate, book trade history is now firmly established as a field of study: James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450-1850 (2007) and Publishing Business in Eighteenth-Century England (2017); Lisa Maruca, The Work of Print: Authorship and the English Text Trades, 1660-1760 (2007); Marta Straznicky, ed., Shakespeare’s Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography (2013); Kathleen Tonry, Agency and Intention in English Print, 1476-1526 (2016); Kirk Melnikoff, Elizabethan Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture (2018). Much remains to be done, however, to understand and theorise the cultural and social activities, subjectivities, and identities of book trade personnel.

Topics for consideration
• gender in the print trades
• representations of the book trade in print
• roles and figures within the Stationers’ Company
• ethnicity and the print trades
• queering the print trades
• the shaping of professional identity
• genres developed by the print trade
• printing families and inheritance
• interactions with other professional groups: guildsmen, theatre people, lawyers
• bookshops and printing houses as sites of sociability and education
• apprentices and youthfulness
• the gendering of print trade labour
• the social status of book trade personnel and the social stratification of the book trades
• regional and national identities in print
• creative influences
• pamphlets, periodicals, and ephemera
• copyright and property
• regulation and control
• libel, and seditious printing
• printers’ catalogues, wills, and effects
• the writer-as/and-printer; the printer-as/and-writer

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

Although her designs adorned the walls of homes and businesses across the United States, the name Frances (“Fanny”) Flora Bond Palmer (1812-1876) remains obscure. Arguably the most prolific and effective artist working behind the scenes for the Currier & Ives lithography firm, Palmer illustrated some of the most celebrated images associated with American life in the 1800s. In addition to designing over 200 popular prints, Fanny Palmer supported her family financially at a time when it was nearly unheard of for women to do so. This exhibition celebrates her achievements and offers a renewed examination of prints produced by Currier & Ives.

Since 1919, Japanese woodblock prints have been collected at The DAI, and today the museum has more than 350. The collection includes works from some of the most famous artists and examples of the typical genres, such as famous landscapes and beautiful women. Discover more about the development of the collection, and the donors who helped shape it, in this focus exhibition, which will run throughout the centennial year, with rotations of different prints every four months.

The Associated American Artists (AAA) revolutionized modern print collecting in the period following the Great Depression. Founded by Reeves Lewenthal in 1934, the AAA aimed to provide affordable fine works of art to the middle and upper classes across the United States. Publishing limited print editions of 250 to be sold for $5 apiece (roughly $88 today), the AAA brought prints to the people through mail-order campaigns, department store sales, and eventually a traveling-exhibition program. Lewenthal controlled which artists and subjects were published under the AAA name, focusing on themes that represented the “American Scene.” Rejecting European modernism and abstraction, Lewenthal selected American Regionalist and Social Realist works that explored the communities and lifestyles of everyday people, as well as prominent social concerns of the 1930s and 40s’.

While the AAA gained renown for publishing popular artists like Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry, Associated American Artists extends its reach to prints by lesser-known artists, foreign artists working in America, and Latin American printmakers. The labor and leisure of farm life, industrial life pre- and post-war, and family dynamics of the time all permeated the works of AAA artists and are showcased in this exhibition.

Please visit the 'External Link' below to read the exhibition brochure (PDF).

Founded in 1797 under the Directory, the Louvre Chalcographie holds over 14,000 engraved copperplates, used to make prints, and has the mission of disseminating the image of the museum’s masterpieces through the art of engraving.

This institution, which is part of the Musée du Louvre, arose from the merging of three collections of engraved plates, established from the second half of the 18th century: the Cabinet du Roi, including nearly 1,000 plates commissioned by Colbert to illustrate the greatness of Louis XIV’s reign; the Menus-Plaisirs collections, which spread the image of great court ceremonies and public festivities of the 18th century; and the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture’s collection, comprising pieces submitted by engravers upon their admission, and engraved plates acquired by the institution in the second half of the 18th century to develop its editorial collection.

This exhibition presents preparatory drawings, engraved copperplates, and prints made from them. It aims to trace the history of the three royal collections that each contributed in their own way to the dissemination of the king’s image. It also showcases the copperplates which, regarded until recently as mere tools for printing, are at the core of an engraver’s profession.

Graver pour le roi. Collection de la Chalcographie du Louvre is organized in a particular context: starting in 2020, the Chalcographie will not be allowed to print from plates dated prior to 1848, matrices that played a fundamental role in the circulation of the King Louis XIV's image.

Michelangelo’s sculptures, paintings, and architectural projects have been the subject of artistic admiration for more than 500 years. As a companion to Michelangelo: Mind of the Master, on view in the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Hall from September 22, 2019, to January 5, 2020, Master/Apprentice: Imitation and Inspiration in the Renaissance surveys the impact of Michelangelo—his practice, his projects, and his biography—on artists working in the Renaissance and beyond. The works on view examine how Florentine artists modeled their approach to the human form and their working methods on those of Michelangelo, as well as how artists further afield emulated and reinterpreted his work. The exhibition features prints reproducing and quoting Michelangelo’s major projects alongside works that document his architectural impact on the city of Rome. Drawn entirely from the Cleveland Museum of Art’s collection, the prints, drawings, and sculpted plaques on view explore a range of responses to Michelangelo and his work.

Organized in collaboration with graduate students in the course After Michelangelo, taught by Dr. Emily Peters and Climo Assistant Professor Erin Benay in the CMA-CWRU Joint Program.

Inaugurated in 2010, the annual Harvard-Yale Graduate Conference in Book History draws graduate students from across disciplines into a mutual dialogue concerning the History of the Book. All sessions are chaired by relevant faculty from regional institution

9:30–10:00: Coffee & Refreshments, Robinson Lower Library

10:00–10:05: Welcome and Acknowledgments, Robinson Lower Library

10:10–12:10: Panel 1
Religion and the Book (Chair: Peter Stallybrass)
Ievgeniia (Zhenya) Sakal, “The Council of Florence Revisited: Bibliographical Strategies of the Learned Churchmen”
Madeline McMahon, “From Print in the Archive to Printed Archive: Making Sense of Carlo Borromeo’s Acta ecclesiae Mediolanensis (1582)”
Khalil Andani, “The Qur’ān: From Revelation to Book”
Annika Schmeding, “Transcending Books: Publishing and Book Culture among Afghan Sufi Communities”

Modern (Im)Materialities (Chair: Katharina Piechocki)
Pooja Sen, “Oral Histories: Valeria Luiselli, Contemporary Art, and the Writers of Teeth”
Brandon Menke, “Ephemeral Objects: The Author, the Artist, and Sensuous Reaading in the Wake of AIDS”
Emily Kanner, “Marina Tsvetaeva’s Magic Lantern”
Geordie Kenyon Sinclair, “AB+VM: The Love Story in Verse of Two Women in the Gulag”

12:15–13:15: Lunch, Robinson Lower Library

13:15–14:15: Panel 2
Digital Approaches (Chair: Doug Duhaime)
Shiva Mihan, “Digitally Reconstructing a Medieval Persian Manuscript: Bāysunghur’s Rasāyil, Victim of a Dealer’s Greed”
Nicholas Frisch, “A Book of Books: Digitally Mapping Anthologies in Late Ming China (1600– 1644)”

Premodern Information (Chair: Alan Niles)
Alessia Bellusci, “Medieval and Early Modern Hebrew Books of Magic”
Hayley Cotter, “The Admiralty Jurisdiction Debates and Legal Authority in Seventeenth-Century England”

14:15–14:30: Break

14:30–16:00: Panel 3
The Book as Idea (Chair: Rachel Love)
Kyle Conrau-Lewis, “Conrad von Waldhausen and Antiquity: Commentary, Book, Booklet?”
Selin Unluonen, “A Composite Thing: The case of the Khamsa of Shah Tahmasp”
Miriam Kamil, “Ovid’s Invidia and Prudentius’ Vices: Classical Poetry in a Medieval Florilegium”

Manuscript and/or Print (Chair: David Stern)
Loren Waller, “Textual Genealogies and Adoption: Rethinking the Concepts of Manuscript, Authorship, and Legitimacy in Early Modern Japan”
Dana Key, “‘But what is writ by hand we reverence more’: Reconstructing the Education and Moral Life of William Hill, a Leicestershire Yeoman (1574–1658)”
Ishai Alon Mishory, “Threshold of Empire(s): The Soncino Colophon to Elijah Mizrahi’s Sefer Ha-mispar”

16:00–16:30: Closing Remarks and Group Discussion, Robinson Lower Library

This exhibition, a collaboration between the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC-USP), and the Terra Foundation for American Art, explores the influence of artist and printmaker Stanley William Hayter (1901–1988) on the evolution of printmaking in the United States and Brazil during the first half of the 20th century. Assembled around a never-before exhibited group of prints gifted in 1951 to MAC-USP by American philanthropist Nelson Rockefeller (1908–1979) and another smaller group gifted by Lessing Roswenwald, the exhibition highlights the impact that Hayter, well known as an experimental printmaker and teacher, had on a vast group of established and emerging artists. Centered on key prints by Hayter, the exhibition also includes an array of works by artists who printed alongside him in his workshop, Atelier 17, as well as a selection of prints that help to contextualize the practice of printmaking in the United States from 1900 through 1950.

Born in 1901 in London, England, Stanley William Hayter moved to Paris in 1926 and began his studies at the Académie Julian, but left the school soon after and discovered copper engraving, a medium he quickly became invested in for its expressiveness. The smooth, metallic surface of copper allowed lines to be drawn directly onto the copper plate with a freedom that aligned with Hayter’s artistic interest in automatic drawing and amorphous, organic shapes, or biomorphism.

In 1927 Hayter established the print studio Atelier 17 in Paris, which he relocated to New York City in 1940. The studio became renowned in both cities for Hayter’s generosity, energy, creative expression, and embrace of established and emerging artists. His practice impacted artists as varied as Americans Sue Fuller, Jackson Pollock, and Louise Nevelson, and Brazilians Geraldo de Barros, Fayga Ostrower, and Livio Abramo.

Printmaker, engraver, sculptor, and publisher, Leonard Baskin (1922 – 2000) imbued his work with his love of literature, mythology, and notions of human mortality. In connection with the exhibition A Passionate Muse: The Art of Leonard Baskin, exhibition curator William Breazeale will be joined by the artist’s son, Hosea Baskin, a noted rare-book collector and dealer to discuss Baskin – who collaborated with writers such as Ted Hughes and James Baldwin – and the intersection of art and literature.

About the Exhibition: A Passionate Muse: The Art of Leonard Baskin
Sculptor, printmaker, and illustrator, Leonard Baskin (1922-2000) was well known for his spirited visual fantasy and storytelling. He also cast his eye on the modern world, with sometimes-biting commentary on the ills of society, woven into religious or mythological scenes. This exhibition focuses on his independent prints, many of them monumental, that examine his often cynical, often hopeful view of human nature.