Renowned for his innovative work with silkscreen printing, Lou Stovall's works are part of numerous collections, including the National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Phillips Collection. Washington Post art critic Paul Richard once wrote, "As a printer of his own art, and of the art of many others, as a framer and installer and shepherd of collections, Stovall has inserted more art into Washington than almost anyone in town."

Of the Land: The Art and Poetry of Lou Stovall presents a series of prints and accompanying poems that showcase the artist's work during the 1970s, when he was developing his unique silkscreen technique and exploring both natural and abstract elements. An introduction by the book's editor and artist's son, Will Stovall, along with an autobiography from the artist anchor the Of the Land series in its time and place—a period of jazz, protest, and prolific art production in Washington, DC, that birthed the Washington Color School. Stovall's contributions, as well as his collaborations with well-known artists like Jacob Lawrence, Sam Gilliam, Elizabeth Catlett, and Robert Mangold, have cemented him as one of the most significant American artists of our age.

Part of a tradition of African American artists and thinkers who met at Howard University, Lou Stovall created the Workshop in 1968, a small, active silkscreen studio printing posters for arts and DC-focused events. His deep influence on the silkscreen medium, the art community, and DC will be part of his lasting legacy.

The first reference work to cover all engravers working on copper in Britain and Ireland 1714–1820

This biographical dictionary of engravers working on copper encompasses both those who produced fine art prints, and also those who engraved book illustrations for medical, technical and literary works, all of which played a more important part than is usually realised in spreading information in the age of Enlightenment. Some 3,000 biographical entries draw on much unpublished information, researched over four decades, notably records of apprenticeship, genealogy, insurance and bankruptcy as well as newspaper advertisements and contemporary accounts.

This is the first reference work to cover all engravers working on copper in Britain and Ireland 1714–1820. Many biographical entries describe celebrated engravers producing “fine art” prints of paintings, which spread knowledge about living and dead artists. However, this book also builds up a more complex picture of the occupation of printmaking and includes engravers, many previously unresearched, who engraved ephemeral material, such as trade cards, bank notes, and satirical prints as well as the images that spread knowledge across literary, geographical, historical, topographical, medical and technical fields.

Emerging from the post-war period, printmaking underwent a marked elevation in status and transition from specialist medium to one widely adopted by some of the foremost names in contemporary art. This book charts how Britain emerged from the post-war years and thrived in the early 1960s, navigated the social changes of the 1970s and 1980s, and saw the ascendency of contemporary British art from the 1990s to the present day. From wood engravings and etchings to lithographs and screenprints, the versatility of the printmaking medium has enabled artists to expand their practice to explore new possibilities. The works featured in the book are all drawn from Pallant House Gallery’s extensive collection of over 2,500 prints. More than 100 artists are represented, including Edward Bawden, Enid Marx, Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton, Barbara Hepworth, Lubaina Himid, David Hockney, Lucian Freud, Paula Rego, Grayson Perry, Tracey Emin, Chris Ofili, and many more.

Simon Martin is director of Pallant House Gallery. Louise Weller is head of exhibitions at Pallant House Gallery.

Hieronymus Van Winghe, a canon at the cathedral in Tournai, came from a learned family and actively gathered texts and images that reflect a wide range of interests. Although few of the prints he collected are still preserved, records of his purchases via the Plantin-Moretus Press of Antwerp provide significant data as to how and what he collected. For, not only do they point to his reliance on the Galle family of print publishers for many of his acquisitions, but they also reveal numerous prints that he purchased at the end of his life. These last records provide valuable insights into not only Van Winghe’s own preferences, but also a glimpse of the general market for prints by artists from the Southern Netherlands in the early 17th century.

This is an unprecedented, detailed account of the life and career of the Flemish printmaker and publisher Charles de Mallery, who was part of the renowned, extended Galle and Collaert families of print publishers of Antwerp. It reveals not only the often ignored diversity of his production, but also his remarkable and profitable participation in an unexpectedly active international trade in prints in seventeenth-century Europe. This documentation of the extent of his success as a print publisher is all the more potent when compared with his subsequent demise due to significant, unanticipated financial demands following the death of his wife. We consequently demonstrate in riveting detail how prosperous professionals can quickly be reduced to impoverishment, forced to sell their possessions and accept whatever work they could get, ultimately becoming dependent upon the good will of others.

This book explores the theme of drawing and the possibilities that lie within the medium, with some 60 works from the MuCBA collections by contemporary artists. MCBA conserves nearly 11 000 works, over half of which are drawings. It invites the public to discover a lesser known part of our collection, while focusing on the question of the medium’s intrinsic potentiality and the inexhaustible vital energy characterizing it. The title points to not only the initial act of drawing on a support, but also the indecision that springs from those first steps, i.e., the suspended state of the resulting forms, the tension between the mark and the support which together make up a single entity, the random outcomes that are part and parcel of techniques involving liquids, and finally the inner motoricity of drawing. Artists featured: Silvia Bächli, Bruno Baeriswyl, Yaron Berent, Lorna Bornand, Cyril Bourquin, Miram Cahn, Gianfredo Camesi, Marianne Décosterd, Alexandre Delay, Martin Disler, Peter Emch, Pierre Haubensak, Barbara Heé, Jean-Claude Hesselbarth, Thomas Huber, Alain Huck, Stéphan Landry, Jean Lecoultre, Urs Lüthi, Jean-Luc Manz, Robert Müller, Muriel Olesen, A. R. Penck, Anne Peverelli, Edmond Quinche, Markus Raetz, Peter Roesch, Klaudia Schifferle, Francine Simonin, Richard Tuttle, Janos Urban, Jacqueline Urban-Nicod, Claude Viallat, and Kurt von Ballmoos.

The first reference monograph on Marie Cool Fabio Balducci, this publication edited by Laurence Schmidlin offers a thorough overview of their singular practice and critical work. For 25 years they have been developing—under a double name voluntarily without conjunction—an unclassifiable body of work between sculpture and live practice based on short, often repetitive actions carried out at first only by Marie Cool, but later also by others in confined spaces (studio, exhibition space) using common objects from standard work environments (sheets of A4 paper, adhesive tape, pencils, office tables) and natural elements such as water or sunlight. Carried out in silence, these actions take the form of simple gestures and short interventions: moving pencils at a regular rhythm, holding two A4 sheets of paper against each other, pouring a bottle of water on a desk, or following the sun reflected by a glass. The themes of ownership, precariousness, and the subjection of the body to the material world underlie their rigorous and modest work. Their practice has recently taken on an installative dimension in relation to the exhibition space, thus offering the audience a space for exchange and reflection in relation to the stakes of today’s society and the experience we make of it.

What ties western art together? This extended essay attempts to distill some of the basic ideas with which artists and observers of their art have grappled, ideas worthy of ongoing consideration and debate. The fostering of visual creativity as it has morphed from ancient Greece to the present day, the political and economic forces underpinning the commissioning and displacement of art, and the ways in which contemporary art relates to past periods of art history (and in particular, the Renaissance), are among the topics broached. Architecture, drawings, prints, films, painting, sculpture, and decorative arts from Europe and the US are considered and examined, often including nonstandard examples, occasionally including ones from the immediate surroundings of the author (who is based in New England). Although this book is primarily geared to those who would like a brief introduction to some basic aspects of a visual tradition spanning thousands of years, students of aesthetics might also discover useful benchmarks in this concise overview. The author places the emphasis on how art has been used and loved (or sometimes despised or ignored) more than on which works should be most famous.

This article examines caricaturist Paul Gavarni’s lithographic series, Les Lorettes vieillies, and Jules and Edmond de Goncourt’s short text, La Lorette, as two conflicting visions of the lorette, a type of nineteenth-century prostitute celebrated in literary and visual sources. The Goncourts’ text has previously been studied for its explicit aim to break the rules around representing the lorette; however, I propose here that Gavarni’s little-known images were in fact more radical. Exploring the ways in which Les Lorettes vieillies humanizes the experience of the ageing lorette, a taboo topic in other sources, I show how the series challenges society’s norms around age and gender. Finally, I suggest that we should consider Les Lorettes vieillies, published at the same time and in the same newspaper as La Lorette, as an important intertext informing the Goncourts’ own presentation of the lorette as a transgressive figure.