Artists have always drawn to give form to their ideas, to train hand and eye, and to capture pictorial inventions on paper. South of the Alps, this art reached an apex in the 16th century. With this selection from its own holdings, the Dresden Kupferstich-Kabinett now offers visitors a rare opportunity to discover the breadth and diversity of Italian master drawings of the High and Late Renaissance.

The display features studies for paintings as well as creations that seem to owe more to the artist’s creative power than any concrete use as preparatory drawings. Fleeting sketches appear beside meticulously executed compositions. Together they give a lively impression of the artistic freedom that this medium offers – a true “Realm of possibilities”.

Old master drawings were only rarely signed, so that determining their authorship is a never-ending challenge. However comparing style, technique, and subject matter allows a close approximation of their art-historical context. At the Dresden Kupferstich- Kabinett this evaluation is already fully under way. The exhibition marks the ongoing cataloguing project researching the drawings of the Italian “Cinquecento“ in the museum’s holdings. In addition to well-known works that seldom go on display due to their fragility, the show also features some new discoveries.

One of the most prolific printmakers of the Baroque period, Wenceslaus Hollar (Bohemian, 1607–1677) rose up out of obscurity in one of Europe’s most turbulent eras to amass an astounding body of work. Underrated during his lifetime, Hollar produced up to 2,500 etchings in a prodigious 50-year career. The breadth and virtuosity of his works have inspired artists for centuries, and yet his name and profile are only now on the rise. Drawn exclusively from the Frank Raysor Collection, a promised gift to VMFA, this exhibition presents over 200 Hollar prints—remarkable for their range of subjects, stunning details, and rare visual records of 17th-century Europe.

Hollar lived through the Thirty Years’ War, the English Civil War, the Commonwealth, and the Restoration, and these events affected him personally and found their way into his art. He was at times Catholic and at times Protestant. He lived throughout Europe and even traveled to Tangier toward the end of his life. While he knew great fortune and received patronage from leading figures of the day, he died in poverty.

Born to a noble family, Hollar likely learned the rudiments of printmaking from court artist Aegidius Sadeler II. He soon began a lifelong practice of making copies after works by great artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci, and others. Retained by Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel and one of the finest connoisseurs of all time, Hollar gathered material for some of the epoch’s most accomplished topographical prints, most notably The Long View of Prague. In 1636, Hollar began producing fascinating scenes of modern life in allegorical guise as well as differing costumes of women, including a rare native Woman of Virginia. In Antwerp, Hollar created three series (Insects, Muffs, and Shells) that revealed his virtuosity as a master of etched illusion. Back in London, he etched scenes of the city before and after the Great Fire of 1666.

As one of the least known but one of the most prolific and “modern” artists of the Baroque period, Hollar is well represented in the Frank Raysor Collection, which rivals those held by the British Museum and the Queen’s Collection. The Raysor Collection, as a promised gift, makes VMFA one of the world’s five major Hollar repositories.

Thursday, March 21, 2019 (Olin Library, WU)
2:30-4pm Registration and Coffee
4-4:30pm Welcome/Opening Remarks from Laurie Norton Moffatt and D.B. Dowd
4:30-6:00 Panel 1: What is Illustration?

Friday, March 22, 2019 (Women’s Building, WU)

8-8:50am Registration and Coffee
8:50-9:00am Welcome/Opening Remarks

9-10:30am Panel 2: Case Studies in Nineteenth-Century Illustration

10:30-11:00 Coffee break

11-12:30pm Panel 3: Evolving Practices in Illustration

12:30-1:30 Lunch Onsite

1:30-3 Panel 4: Histories of Illustration/Analog and Digital

3:00-3:30 Coffee Break

3:30-5:00 Panel 5: Re-Visualizing America: Subjects, Space, and Sex

Shuttle Service to West Campus, 7425 Forsyth Blvd, Clayton MO 63105

5:30-6:30 Tour/Reception D.B. Dowd Modern Graphic History Library

6:30-7:30 Talk and Book Signing, Speaker: D.B Dowd, “Stick Figures.”

Saturday, March 23, 2019 (Steinberg Hall, WU)
8-9:00am Registration and Coffee
9-10:30am Panel 6: Illustration and Identity Formation
10:30-11:00 Coffee Break
11:00-12:30 Lightning Panel (5-7 minute presentations by graduate students)

12:30-1:30 Lunch Onsite

1:30-3:00 Panel 7: Illustration and Gender

3:00-3:30pm Coffee Break

3:30-5:00 Future of the Field: Conference Roundtable with Rockwell Center Fellows

5pm Concluding Remarks

6:30pm Conference Dinner sponsored by Wash U, with remarks and/or reflections from selected figures, and concluding remarks from Rockwell Museum

I want to share with you our new site on the Met's website devoted to the materials and techniques of drawings and prints that went live last week.
I think it looks terrific, if I do say so myself: https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/curatorial-departments/drawings-and-prints/materials-and-techniques

When you click through each of the printmaking techniques – woodcut, engraving, etching, silkscreen, and lithography, you will find fun GIFS that lead you through the processes of how each type of print is created.

The prints were produced over the summer by our department’s own Liz Zanis (those are her hands in the pix) at the Leroy Neiman Center for Printmaking at Columbia University and photographed by Paul Lachenauer. Freyda Spira managed the project and all the print curators in our department wrote the texts. Michael Cirigliano in Digital brilliantly managed the production. It was a team effort and we are delighted by how it turned out. It will be of use to teachers, students, and works on paper enthusiasts.

Only the print section is up at this point. We are looking forward to starting work on the drawing section now. Please feel free to share it with friends, colleagues, students, and any works on paper enthusiasts you might know!

What technical and aesthetic challenges did the German printmaker Käthe Kollwitz face while representing the awakening of a revolutionary consciousness? How did she capture the moment in which an oppressed class of people turns against its oppressors? The numerous preparatory sketches leading up to the final etching of Sharpening the Scythe show Kollwitz wrestling with these questions as a politically committed and technically ambitious artist.

Louis Marchesano is senior curator of prints, drawings, and photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and was former curator of prints and drawings at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Much of his work focuses on the history of printmaking in France from the 17th through the 19th centuries. In 2017, in recognition of his contributions to the field, he was named Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters).

This lecture complements the exhibition Käthe Kollwitz: Prints, Process, Politics, on view at the Getty Research Institute from December 3, 2019, through March 29, 2020.

Free | Advance ticket required

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

This exhibition presents over 70 prints by thirty-three Cuban artists who have all worked, at one time or another, at the Taller Experimental de Gráfica de Habana – the oldest, continuously running print workshop in Cuba. The Taller was established in 1962 by muralist Orlando Suarez with the help of Che Guevara, who was then Cuba’s Minister of Industry. From its inception, the workshop has focused on connecting artists with traditional printmaking techniques and fostering a dynamic artistic community based on the sharing and exchange of ideas, experimentation, and art criticism. This supportive community has allowed Cuban artists a relative freedom of expression, even amid the country’s larger political and cultural issues. It continues to be one of the most important workshops in Cuba.

The exhibition is pulled entirely from the collection of Drs. Antonio and Luz Racela.

The images of Lee Bontecou (American, born 1931) are unmistakably hers: black voids, cosmic orbs, floating serrated teeth, mutant flowers, and strange, hybrid forms. They reflect a post–World War II angst and existential fear brought on by the arms race and nuclear threat, coupled with awe at a technology capable of space travel. While best known for her wall reliefs that bridge the divide between painting and sculpture, Bontecou produced a series of important prints between 1962 and 1982 at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), a workshop founded by Tatyana Grosman in West Islip, New York, in 1957. This exhibition is the first show devoted to Bontecou’s prints since 1975 and is drawn from the Art Institute’s complete edition and significant archive of her ULAE production.

In Bontecou’s prints, as in her early sculptures, the color black dominates. “Getting the black,” she said, “opened everything up.” The color, through its endless interpretability, evokes the mystery of the infinite and the terror of the unknown. Her powerful prints—mostly lithographs but some etchings—attend to all of the profound issues Bontecou addressed in her sculptures and drawings. In particular, many of the prints she produced at ULAE explore the black void at the heart of her early sculptures, a motif that runs through her entire career.

Into the Void: Prints of Lee Bontecou analyzes for the first time the totality of her prints as a reflection and an extension of her larger corpus, showing not only final states of her prints but also working proofs, variant states, finished and preparatory drawings, matrices (such as the copper etching plates used to print her works), and other ephemera that shed further light on her practice. Including over 100 objects, the exhibition explores the phenomena of process, repetition, and artistic obsession, and traces Bontecou’s voyage through a series of experiments and happy accidents toward the mystique of her final, definitive images.

Liz Chalfin will speak at the “A Green Dream?” symposium in March 2019 in Kanazawa, Japan. Her talk “Innovation in Community: the Zea Mays Printmaking model.” will take place on Friday March 8, 2019 in the lecture room of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.

In images and words, founding director Liz Chalfin will describe the evolution of Zea Mays Printmaking as a model of a community based printmaking studio with a non-toxic mission and an international reach. She will discuss the challenges of creating and growing a community studio as well as the incredible opportunities that arise in the process. Her talk will emphasize the research program that is at the heart of Zea Mays Printmaking’s mission. Post-graduate student interns conduct primary research into safer products and practices, document their findings and share them online through the Zea Mays Printmaking website. Chalfin will share highlights from the research program, including a product that has gone to market and others that have been adopted worldwide.

This exhibition is the first European retrospective to offer a comprehensive insight into the work of New York artist Ruth Marten, who has become known for her surprising, witty and subversive revisions of old prints. The Max Ernst Museum of the LVR shows works from nearly five decades.

Ruth Marten worked in the 1970s as a tattoo artist and worked in the following years as an illustrator for various publishers and American magazines. After an extensive series that reveals her fascination for hair as a motif and texture, in 2006 she began to paint over postcards, engravings and illustrations from past centuries or to use them for collages.

On December 14, 2018, The Grolier Club unveiled its reconstructed state-of-the-art Exhibition Hall, capping a total renovation of the public spaces in the century-old building. To mark the occasion, The Grolier Club is mounting the celebratory exhibition "French Book Arts: Manuscripts, Books, Bindings, Prints, and Documents, 12th–21st Century". On view through February 2, 2019, the approximately 90 works are drawn entirely from The Grolier Club’s own rich and extensive collections.

This inaugural exhibition is a wide-ranging survey of the book arts of France, covering a thousand years of artistic achievements, from Medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts to artists’ books and designer book bindings of the current generation. Notwithstanding the many hundreds of public exhibitions that have been displayed at The Grolier Club in its 135 years, it has never before offered such a broad and deep survey of the artistic and typographic monuments of France.