This essay tells the story of La Hune. La Hune is a library opened by Bernard Gheerbrant (1918-2010) in June 1944 in Paris. Five years later, it moved to Saint-Germain-des-Prés in order to meet Gheerbrant's ambitions: not only did he sell books, but he also started to organize exhibition. La Hune became a gallery for contemporary printmaking.

This article investigates the flexible boundaries of Early Modern Dutch print media and the practice of Early Modern publishers and collectors who combined printed images and texts to create historical narratives in accordance with their own beliefs. It takes as a case study one seventeenth-century Dutch Sammelband, or composite volume, that conveys an Orangist reading of the past and aspirations for the future through the purposeful arrangement of twenty-one printed images and texts about two statesmen: Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (1547–1619) and Johan de Witt (1625–72). The printed images, pamphlets, and broadsides contained in the Sammelband were published during two periods of intense political upheaval in the Dutch Republic, in 1618–19 and 1663–64. This article argues that the core of this Sammelband was a ready-made set of prints and pamphlets that Amsterdam printmaker and publisher Claes Jansz. Visscher bundled together in 1619 to capitalize on contemporary political conflicts and to shape viewers’ interpretations about the causes, remedies, and future implications of them. The Sammelband, like Visscher’s readymade bundles of prints and pamphlets, reveals how collections of Early Modern printed images and texts worked to control historical accounts, reinforce partisan points of view, and articulate political aspirations.

In 1879, Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, and Camille Pissarro collaborated to found a periodical that would feature their prints. For much of their careers, this unlikely trio of artists used the medium of printmaking to inspire and challenge each other, and these dynamics played a crucial role in their creative process. Indeed, the intimacy of the small-scale works on paper spurred the artists to heights of daring and creativity that often exceeded even that of their paintings.

The first in-depth study to focus on Cassatt, Degas, and Pissarro together, Innovative Impressions explores this under-examined aspect of their careers. Highlighting works drawn from collections across the United States, this volume reveals how these impressionists’ collaborative engagement with printmaking helped them to develop a visual language whose expressive potential far surpassed the traditional reproductive purpose of the medium and went on to inspire the uses of color for which these artists later became famous.

Invented in the late eighteenth century, lithography introduced a new process and new opportunities for the creation and circulation of printed images. Artists, printers, and publishers embraced the new medium for its relative ease and economic advantages as compared with the established printmaking media of woodcut, engraving, and etching. Taking root in Paris after the fall of Napoleon’s empire, the art and industry of lithography grew in tandem with the city as it became Europe’s artistic and urban capital over the course of the nineteenth century. Lithographs played a distinct role in both documenting and advancing—not to mention satirizing—the various competing art movements of the period.

Known for its collection of French prints and posters, the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University has rich holdings of lithographs made over the course of the 1800s, from lithography’s early years in Paris to the iconic color posters of the 1890s. This fully illustrated catalog showcases the highlights of the collection, offering insight into lithography’s fascinating role in the beginnings of modern mass media.

This paper introduces the way Johannes Kip’s A Prospect of Westminster & A Prospect of the City of London (c. 1720) furnished the design for a handscroll of the River Thames enamelled on the rim of a renowned armorial porcelain service made around 1730-40. Having thus situated an important exemplar of northern European landscape art in China by 1750, it further suggests that Kip’s topographic print may well have played an influential, not to say seminal role in the conceptualization of monumental, panoramic handscrolls of the foreign factories from which ultimately the iconic landscape genre emerged. Descriptive of the site of both commerce and aesthetic exchange, these export paintings have exercised a lasting hold on the historical imagination. In as much as export porcelain signified the China trade for Westerners, export paintings came to represent Canton, if not the whole of China for a global audience.

The 1748 Pianta Grande of Rome (Fig. 1) by Giambattista Nolli (1701-1756) is a milestone in the history of cartography. Its copious size (1760 x 2085 mm), intricate detail, and accuracy have made it an essential document for studying the architecture, landscape architecture and urban structure of Rome for over 250 years. The Nolli Map has served as the basis for a series of interactive digital projects that present historic maps and images of Rome as key resources for understanding the spatial history of that city.[1] The first of these projects, The Interactive Nolli Map Website, which digitally remasters this classic as an interactive tool, making it widely available to students, scholars and the general public, was launched in 2005. The next stage of the project involved the vedute, or urban landscape views, of Rome from Delle Magnificenze di Roma Antica and Moderna by Nolli’s contemporary and collaborator, Giuseppe Vasi (1710-1782). These 237 images were geo-referenced to the cartography of Nolli and linked to modern views, resulting in Imago Urbis, Giuseppe Vasi’s Grand Tour of Rome, which was published in 2008. Our current ongoing project, Open Rome: A Spatial History, digitally derived from the Nolli map and other cartographic sources, develops a layered cartographic system that extends from antiquity to the present. This array of historic and contemporary maps of Rome, provisionally displayed at Mapping Rome, is geo-rectified and brought into real geographic space, providing a scientific dimension for further research and discovery—especially for ongoing archeological studies of the Eternal City. Central to this investigation is the Forma Urbis Romae by Rodolfo Lanciani (1845-1929). This huge map consists of 46 plates with an overall dimension of 4560 x 6960 mm and is inspired by the early third-century marble map, Forma Urbis, from which it takes its name. It is significant that Nolli based his plan view or ichnographic mode on the precedent of the Forma Urbis.

Maria G Pisano’s article “Mark To Impress” was just published in The California Printmaker’s Journal of The California Society of Printmakers 2018, The New Print: Marriage of Technology and Tradition. The article focuses on two recent books, published by Memory Press, Colors of Memory and Caudex Folium. Both works use the new media of laser cut wood and plexiglass plates alongside collagraphs and stencil plates to actualize the text and designs of the pages.


Abstract:
As an artist, my principal mode of expression is through the artist book. Artists books are all encompassing in that they synthesize the fields of drawing, painting, print and printmaking media, papermaking, text, book design and any other creative venue, be it written or graphic. The book structure in its many creative outlets can be used to bring together all other fine arts components into a unique mode of expression. Book arts can combine the old and the new; from papermaking to computers, and as an expressive form can be used across disciplines.

Relief printing plates have traditionally been carved with knives, gouges and been engraved on wood, stone, metals, etc. This is a laborious process, and in older times different artists specialized in creating the design, cutting the printing matrix and doing the printing. Creating fine detailed images was extremely difficult; laser plates do not have these constraints, once the photographic digital image is rendered, the machine respond to the finest line and detail. There is a hiccup however, laser-cutting text in relief creates problems- there is not enough remaining surface to hold the closely cut letters, and this required a novel cutting and printing approach.

Technology is just another tool and my use of laser cut wood and plexiglass plates to actualize the enclosed books’ designs is both liberating and another mode of creating the surfaces from which I can hand print my pages. I can devote more time on the design, printing and binding of the work. These laser plates are created outside my studio, returning to the old system of collaboration between different makers.

For more details on the books in the accompanying images please visit:

Colors of Memory: Theme – patterns of nature as they reflect one’s life passages.
http://mariagpisano.com/?page_id=377


Caudex Folium: The book celebrates the Survivor Tree’s return to the 9-11 Memorial Plaza and resilience.
http://mariagpisano.com/?page_id=53 -

The weekly CAA Conversations Podcast continues the vibrant discussions initiated at our Annual Conference. Listen in each week as educators explore arts and pedagogy, tackling everything from the day-to-day grind to the big, universal questions of the field.

This week, Robert Howsare and Zach Fitchner discuss teaching printmaking.

Robert Howsare is an Assistant Professor of Art teaching printmaking and foundation courses at West Virginia Wesleyan College.
Zach Fitchner is a printmaking artist and Assistant Professor of Art at West Virginia State University.

Artists in Paris is the first project to map comprehensively where artistic communities, including printmakers, developed in the eighteenth-century city and offers rich scope for subsequent investigations into how these communities worked and the impact they had on art practice in the period. Yielding crucial new information and harnessing the exciting possibilities of digital humanities for art-historical research, this website is intended as a valuable resource for anyone studying or researching French art, or for anyone with an interest in the history of Paris. The artists mapped on Artists in Paris were all members of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture – the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture – between 1675 and 1793.

With its two modes – Year and Artist – the website accommodates searches either by date or by person. For instance, visitors can explore where artists were living at certain moments in time, or they can select individual artists and explore all the addresses lived at across their careers. Designed to be simultaneously inviting and informative, these interactive data-enriched maps answer many questions about the Paris art world. But they are also intended as an empirical base upon which to pose new kinds of inquiries, inspiring continued explorations into networks of artistic sociability, the role of the city in art production, the geography of the art world, and urban experience more generally.