Since the beginning of her career in the 1970s, Annette Messager has taken on various roles and identities, playing with the boundaries between fiction and reality, giving herself the freedom of addressing both private and social women’s issues. In her series of themed album collections, illustrated with drawings, notes, comments, photos, press cuttings and collage, she records her adventures, opinions and fantasies. Condemning stereotypes, she readily uses topics that traditionally evoke the feminine sphere. The 35 photographs illustrating the album collections in her series "Annette Messager truqueuse" (1975), are a true manifesto of her approach.

The Association of Print Scholars is pleased to announce the scholars and papers selected for inclusion in its affiliated society panel at the College Art Association conference taking place February 13-16, 2019 in New York.

Chaired by Christina Michelon (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities), the APS panel "Coloring Print: Reproducing Race Through Material, Process, and Language" investigates the racialized dimensions of print and printmaking. The medium has played a central role in the ideological founding of “race” and its hierarchies through visual representation. However, print’s materials, processes, and the language we use to describe them interface with conceptions of race in ways that require further study. For example, the term “stereotype” originated in the printing trade but has since evolved to mean an oversimplified general idea, often with pejorative racial connotations; the invention of chromolithography in the nineteenth century offered a more nuanced way of representing skin tones but simultaneously enabled the increased circulation of racist imagery; the rabid appreciation and collection of Japanese prints in the West altered artistic production globally while idealizing Eastern cultures; anthropological sketches and watercolor studies of native peoples were routinely translated to print, widely reproduced, and used as tools of imperialism and colonialism.

"Coloring Print" examines global printmaking traditions that advance our understanding of the role of the medium in the social construction of race. The papers chosen include:

"Red Ink: Ethnographic Prints and the Colonization of Dakota Homelands” by Annika Johnson (University of Pittsburgh)

"Sites of Contest and Commemoration: The Printed Life of Richard Allen, America's Early Race Leader" by Melanee C. Harvey (Howard University)

"A Franco-Indian Album: Firmin Didot’s Indian Paintings and Le Costume Historique’s Chromolithography (1888)" by Holly Shaffer (Brown University)

"The White Native Body in Asia: Woodcut Engraving and the Creation of Ainu Stereotypes" by Christina M. Spiker (St. Catherine University).

This exhibition at The Met Breuer presents a selection of some fifty works from The Met's Scofield Thayer Collection—a collection that is best known for paintings by artists of the school of Paris, and a brilliant group of erotic and evocative watercolors, drawings, and prints by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Pablo Picasso, whose subjects, except for a handful, are nudes. The exhibition is the first time these works have been shown together, and provides a focused look at this important collection; it also marks the centenary of the deaths of Klimt and Schiele.

An aesthete and scion of a wealthy family, Scofield Thayer (1889–1982) was co-owner and editor of the literary magazine the Dial from 1919 to 1926. In this avant-garde journal he introduced Americans to the writings of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, Arthur Schnitzler, Thomas Mann, and Marcel Proust, among others. He frequently accompanied these writers' contributions with reproductions of modern art. Thayer assembled his large collection of some six hundred works—mostly works on paper—with staggering speed in London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna between 1921 and 1923. While he was a patient of Sigmund Freud in Vienna, he acquired a large group of watercolors and drawings by Schiele and Klimt, artists who at that time were unknown in America.

When a selection from his collection was shown at the Montross Gallery in New York in 1924—five years before the Museum of Modern Art opened—it won acclaim. It found no favor, however, in Thayer's native city, Worcester, Massachusetts, that same year when it was shown at the Worcester Art Museum. Incensed, Thayer drew up his will in 1925, leaving his collection to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He withdrew from public life in the late 1920s and lived as a recluse on Martha's Vineyard and in Florida until his death in 1982.

Renowned as a giant of French Romantic painting, Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) was equally a dedicated and an innovative draftsman. Through a selection of more than one hundred works on paper—from finished watercolors to sketchbooks, from copies after old master prints to preparatory drawings for important projects—this exhibition explores the central role of drawing in Delacroix's practice.

The exhibition celebrates a major gift to The Met from Karen B. Cohen, an Honorary Trustee and longtime supporter of the Museum, of her renowned collection of drawings by Delacroix. Assembled with an eye to the artist's process, the collection highlights the ways in which drawing shaped Delacroix's artistic development throughout his career; his application of the medium in the preparation of prints, paintings, and public decorative programs; and his investment in the expressive potential of his materials. As the first North American exhibition devoted to Delacroix's drawings in more than fifty years, it introduces a new generation to the artist's draftsmanship.

It is a little-known fact that in the nineteenth century Rembrandt was an icon for numerous French avant-garde artists, Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Great names such as Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Odilon Redon and Theodore Rousseau took Rembrandt and his work as their example. To them he was an anti-academic cult figure, an artist who shrugged off academic rules and captured the world around him with a fearless immediacy. Many French artists decided to start etching – as Rembrandt had – and there was a revival of the art form.

Rembrandt in Paris: Manet, Méryon, Degas and the Rediscovery of Etching (1830-90) opens on 21 September in The Rembrandt House Museum. This is the first exhibition ever devoted to the etching revival in France. The finest works of art will be brought together for the show: elegant French ladies, Parisian cityscapes, impressive landscapes and artistic posters.

Spanning the sixteenth century to the present, this exhibition explores the breadth of the Gibbes print collection while focusing on the specific processes used to create the works. To help make connections between technique and the finished product, the installation pairs prints with rarely exhibited plates, blocks, and printmaking tools from the museum archives. Featured artists include master printmakers Albrecht Dürer, James Whistler, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Kara Walker, among others.

This year marks the bicentenary of the birth of Sir Francis Seymour Haden (1818-1910), a leading surgeon, wealthy member of London society, distinguished print collector and highly successful amateur etcher. Now an unfamiliar name, Haden was celebrated in his own time as a major figure in the ‘Etching Revival’, championing the freedom and expressiveness of the technique. He was also recognised as Rembrandt’s successor and he broke new ground in scholarly thinking on Rembrandt’s prints. This exceptional group of Haden’s work, lent from a private collection, traces the development of his style, and includes unrecorded early proof impressions that demonstrate his manner of working.

This touring exhibition commemorates the 200th anniversary of the birth of the founder and first President of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers (RE), Sir Francis Seymour Haden (1818-1910). The selection of prints, ranging from Haden to work by current RE members, reflects on the achievements of the society and the changes it has undergone. Works by Haden’s contemporaries at the end of the 19th century, including Samuel Palmer (1805-1881) and James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), hang alongside prints by current members; prints by all of the twelve RE Presidents (from 1880 to 2018) form a bridge between past and present.

French painter Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) was one of the greatest creative figures of the nineteenth century. Coming of age after the fall of Napoleon, he reconnected the present to the past on his own terms. Delacroix produced an extraordinarily vibrant body of work, setting into motion a cascade of innovations that changed the course of art. This exhibition will be the first comprehensive retrospective devoted to this amazing artist ever held in North America.

The exhibition, a joint project with the Musée du Louvre, will illuminate Delacroix's restless imagination through more than 150 paintings, drawings, prints, and manuscripts—many never before seen in the United States. It will unfold chronologically, encompassing the rich variety of themes that preoccupied the artist during his more than four decades of activity, including literature, history, religion, animals, and nature. Through rarely seen graphic art displayed alongside such iconic paintings as Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi (1826), The Battle of Nancy (1831), Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1834), and Medea about to Kill Her Children (1838), this exhibition will explore an artist whose protean genius set the bar for virtually all other French painters.

William Morris devoted his life to creating beautiful and useful objects using the highest-quality materials under fair labor conditions. His richly varied patterns have been reproduced without interruption since his death in 1896, testifying to their timeless appeal. The Cleveland Museum of Art’s collection includes woven and block-printed textiles spanning each stage of Morris’s vibrant career; they are joined in this exhibition by a generous loan from the Cranbrook Art Museum of an embroidery by William Morris’s daughter, May.

Also showcased are magnificent volumes from the Cleveland Museum of Art’s nearly complete collection of books printed by Kelmscott Press. Morris’s meticulously designed books were his final labor of love; indeed, they exhibit the same delight in organic forms and time-tested craftsmanship visible in his textiles. The voices of May Morris, Kate Faulkner, Walter Crane, and Edward Burne-Jones also feature among the projects that Morris so passionately brought to fruition. With Morris & Co. wallpaper and carpet reproductions, the exhibition Designing an Earthly Paradise brings to life Morris’s striking, revolutionary designs.