Film, like the printed imagery inaugurated during the Renaissance, spread ideas – not least the idea of the power of visual art – across not only geographical and political divides but also strata of class and gender. Moving Pictures and Renaissance Art History examines the early flourishing of film, from the 1920s to the mid-1960s, as partly reprising the introduction of mass media in the Renaissance, allowing for innovation that reflected an art free of the control of a patron though required to attract a broad public. Rivalry between word and image, between the demands of narrative and those of visual composition, spurred new ways of addressing the compelling nature of the visual. The twentieth century also saw the development of the discipline of art history; transfusions between cinematic practice and art historical postulates are part of the story told here.

This essay reinterprets Karl Bodmer’s North American frontier watercolor portraits from the 1830s through their intended future destination and involvement in European print processes. I argue that Bodmer “painted print,” whereby the image separations required by print technologies shaped Bodmer’s working methods. Thus, Bodmer’s North American portraits are not complete representational spaces within themselves. Instead, their uneven completion, visual notations, blank backgrounds, and selected sections of detailed focus reflect their status as ever-moving image-objects within a larger print culture.

Herme oder Terme? Texte und Bilder zur Klärung der Begriffe aus: Achilles Statius, Inlustrium viror[um] ut extant in urbe expressi vultus Romae 1569/Formis Antonij Lafrerj und: Achilles Statius’ Inlustrium virorum … vultus: Hermen oder Termen? von Claudia Echinger-Maurach (FONTES 89)

This publication contains the transcripts of Achilles Statius' dedication to Antoine de Granvelle and his important, unpublished introduction into Lafrery's edition of the "Inlustrium virorum" from 1569 with a translation of both texts into German. In the following article Statius' explanation why these figures, which we today call herms, are called terms is embedded not only into the early history of these "terms" in art and architecture, but also into the history of publications on portraits of famous men and women in the 16th century.

This essay explores Sol LeWitt's printmaking from the 1970s and the 1990s, specifically a lithograph, a silkscreen, and several etchings that employ a medium-specific strategy of rotating the print matrix to produce single images or series. Interpreted in light of the artist's 1979 venture into film and dance (in collaboration with Lucinda Childs and Philip Glass), these prints reveal a system of choreographed moves (quarter turns, half turns, a reversal) that must be mentally and perceptually deciphered and thus re-created by viewers. Set in motion, LeWitt's lines and brushstrokes interact in unpredictable and chaotic ways, yet an organizing structure emerges.

German printmaker Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) is known for her unapologetic social and political imagery; her representations of grief, suffering, and struggle; and her equivocal ideas about artistic and political labels. This volume explores Kollwitz’s obsessive printmaking experiments and the evolution of her images, and assesses the unusually rich progressions of preparatory drawings, proofs, and rejected images behind Kollwitz’s compositions of struggling workers, rebellious peasants, and grieving mothers.

This selected catalogue of the Dr. Richard A. Simms collection at the Getty Research Institute provides a bird’s-eye view of Kollwitz’s sequences of images as well as the interrelationships among prints produced over multiple years. The meanings and sentiments emerging from Kollwitz’s images are not, as is often implied, unmediated expressions of her politics and emotions. Rather, Kollwitz transformed images with deliberate technical and formal experiments, seemingly endless adjustments, wholesale rejections, and strategic regroupings of figures and forms—all of which demonstrate that her obsessive dedication to making art was never a straightforward means to political or emotional ends.

This volume was published to accompany an exhibition on view at the Getty Research Institute at the Getty Center December 3, 2019, through March 29, 2020; and the Art Institute of Chicago May 30 through September 13, 2020.

Exploring the intersections of visual culture, design and politics in Beirut from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, this interdisciplinary study critically examines a global conjuncture in Lebanon's history, marked by anticolonial struggle and complicated by a Cold War order. Cosmopolitan Radicalism uncovers the transnational circuits that animated Arab modernist pursuits and sheds light on the forgotten trajectories and graphic design practices of its protagonists: Egyptian, Iraqi, Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian artists who wove through Beirut, in and out of its flourishing art galleries, publishing industry and political movements. Drawing on uncharted archives of everyday print media, the book reveals the translocal visuality that emerged with—and, crucially, shaped—Beirut’s development as a nodal city in the global sixties. It does so by focusing on three interrelated themes: the first is concerned with state promotions of Beirut as a Mediterranean site of international tourism and modern leisure; the second, with the city’s rise as a cultural nexus of modern art, pan-Arab publishing and anticolonial contestation, covert CIA funding notwithstanding; and the third, with its transformation, through the rise of the Palestinian Resistance, as a node in Third Worldist revolutionary anti-imperialism and transnational solidarity. Against a celebratory reminiscence of the ‘golden years’, Beirut's long sixties is conceived of as a liminal juncture, an anxious time and place when the city held out promises at once politically radical and radically cosmopolitan.

Landfall Press: Five Decades is a 628 page hardbound book that documents five decades of
Landfall Press with a special introductory section that examines the early life and
professional career of Landfall’s founder/owner - Jack Lemon. The five decades of Jack
Lemon’s life’s work was not just printing and publishing the prints, multiples, portfolios,
books, posters, magazines, catalogs, and 33rpm and 45rpm vinyl records, it’s also the
relationships he’s initiated and maintained over those 50 years. The book makes real the
value of strong collaborative partnerships and the extraordinary expertise required to make
art that’s significant and fundamental to the history of art.

Therefore, the book is truly a history book that places Jack Lemon and Landfall Press in the
proper context, the context of 20th and 21st Century art history. Authored by Thomas
Cvikota, with a Forward, written by Nikki Otten (Curator of Prints and Drawings at the
Milwaukee Art Museum) and a Preface written by Mark Pascale (The Janet and Craig
Duchossois Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago). The book
includes many never before published photographs from inside the Landfall workshops,
showing the printed art, the artists and the staff in production situations that illustrate the
text and make each decade a story unto itself. The story of Landfall Press is told in Jack
Lemon’s own voice, from a series of one-on-one interviews with the author. The book
explores the philosophy, the inspiration and the practices that make Landfall Press and Jack
Lemon a true American story, of entrepreneurship, technical innovation, longevity,
philanthropy, and collaborative genius.

Included in the book: A full index and a complete log of all the editions/projects, printed
and/or published by Landfall Press over fifty years. Special bound, dust-jacketed book with
grosgrain ribbon place marker. The book measures 13.25 x 9.5 x 2 inches. Each book
individually boxed and shipped from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Taxes apply. International
orders please contact us for rates. Both editions, the special edition signed by Jack Lemon and
the author, and the unsigned are shipping now.

Please direct all inquiries to: info@landfallpress.com

Please click the external link below to purchase.

By way of preparing a lithography stone for use, this narrative takes a polychronic journey between Jurassic lagoons and digital space, to reflect on the intimate relationship between a limestone matrix and a body moving through time. My intention is to consider this transformative coupling of geological matter and lived experience, through its temporal, environmental, inter-personal, and physical affects. Illuminating this task, a collection of observations that consider lithography stone as geological trace, material, technology, and artefact. In lingering on the substance of lithography stone, this language making process takes a materially grounded view, to explore the mutually generative worlds of stone lithography and writing.