Floating Time: Chinese Prints, 1954-2002 brings together, for the first time, the University of Sydney Art Collection's ninty-three modern and contemporary Chinese prints. This substantial collection includes national prize-winning prints and works by internationally acclaimed artists, including Zhao Zongzao and Su Xinping. The half-century represented here reveals not only the development of the powerful woodcut tradition under Mao, but also the rapid expansion of printmaking as artists embraced a broader set of themes and more experimental techniques. Such developments reflect the tumultuous periods in which these works were produced and offer a unique and intimate glimpse into the lives of these fifty artists - a vastly different perspective from the familiar forms of contemporary Chinese art seen in better known international art circuits.

STEPHEN H. WHITEMAN is lecturer in Asian art in the Department of Art History and associate curator for China projects for the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney. MINERVA INWALD is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Sydney. BINGQING WEI is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Sydney. JOHN CLARK is professor emeritus in art history at the University of Sydney.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, Anglo-Americans purchased an unprecedented number and array of goods. The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America investigates these diverse artifacts—from portraits and city views to gravestones, dressing furniture, and prosthetic devices—to explore how elite American consumers assembled objects to form a new civil society on the margins of the British Empire. In this interdisciplinary transatlantic study, artifacts emerge as key players in the formation of Anglo-American communities and eventually of American citizenship. Deftly interweaving analysis of images with furniture, architecture, clothing, and literary works, Van Horn reconstructs the networks of goods that bound together consumers in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston.

Moving beyond emulation and the desire for social status as the primary motivators for consumption, Van Horn shows that Anglo-Americans’ material choices were intimately bound up with their efforts to distance themselves from Native Americans and African Americans. She also traces women’s contested place in forging provincial culture. As encountered through a woman’s application of makeup at her dressing table or an amputee’s donning of a wooden leg after the Revolutionary War, material artifacts were far from passive markers of rank or political identification. They made Anglo-American society.

Jennifer Van Horn is assistant professor of art history and history at the University of Delaware.

Series: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia

In a series of videos, Art Institute of Chicago conservator Harriet Stratis demonstrates how Gauguin, always pushing the boundaries of art, created his printed works of art.

Videos include:

- "Gauguin's Process: Making Wood-Block Prints"

- "Gauguin's Process: Making Transfer Drawings"

- "Gauguin's Process: Making Monotypes"

In late nineteenth-century France, more than a century after the introduction of color in printmaking, color became a major factor in the market success of lithography and other printmaking techniques. Published to accompany a major exhibition at the Musée Jenisch Vevey - Cabinet cantonal des estampes, "Enraptured by Color" offers a comprehensive compendium of color printmaking, with examples from all aspects of the trade. In a detailed introduction, curator Laurence Schmidlin takes readers through the process of producing a color engraving and explains the differences between color engravings and color prints. Additional essays, illustrated with rare documents and representative examples from the period, expand on the technical processes behind polychromy, or the use of several colors, and its effect on artistic production in France around 1890. Finally, the book explores, through a wealth of color illustrations, how color was exploited by important artists of the period, such as Pierre Bonnard, Paul Gauguin, Odilon Redon, Paul Signac, Édouard Vuillard, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Cassiano dal Pozzo’s print collection was unique in its scope and organisation. Some 3,000 prints are known, in nine albums and many loose impressions mainly divided between the British Library and the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. Cassiano (1588–1657) and his younger brother Carlo Antonio dal Pozzo (1606–89) did not commission printmakers to engrave plates (as they did drawings), buying instead what was available from the flourishing printmaking industry of the time. The material they collected was essentially documentary, and they organised the collection by subject matter: costumes, religious processions and ceremonies, tombs and catafalques, the history of St Peter’s, architecture, topography, maps and military engagements, portraits, social and humorous subjects, and so on. This first part of the catalogue presents ceremonies, costumes, portrait and genre prints.

A remarkable proportion of the prints are not to be found in the existing literature, and many constitute additions to the known works of major printmakers. Indeed Cassiano’s collection has been described as ‘so far outside the common range of print collectors both in the seventeenth century and today that a very high proportion of its contents is excessively rare and will only with great difficulty be found elsewhere’.

This ground-breaking catalogue will be an essential resource not only for students of prints, but for all those studying European visual culture in the seventeenth century.

Goupil & Cie, originally established as Rittner & Goupil in Paris in 1829, was one of the most prominent print and art dealers of the nineteenth century. Initially, the activities of the firm consisted of reproducing, publishing, and selling prints in Paris. Later, the directors diversified to also deal in original artworks. Goupil’s operations coincided with a turning point in the history of art, which marked the shift from traditional patronage of the arts—church, royalty, aristocracy, and state—to a market system made possible by an increasingly rich and powerful bourgeoisie. Goupil was one of the first dealers to engage in such a system, which in turn facilitated its ambitions of internationalization. After expanding first to London in 1842, the firm opened a New York branch in 1848 as Goupil & Co. and went on to develop an extensive network of branches and partnerships across Europe, the United States, the Ottoman Empire, and as far as Australia. While international expansion had a number of advantages—including higher growth potential by accessing a larger pool of clients—uncertain economic outlook, as well as cultural and regulatory differences, created a challenging scenario. Using Goupil’s New York branch as a case study, this article will investigate the strategy Goupil & Cie and its associates implemented to successfully balance the perks and perils of operating a business remotely.

As an addition to the numerous articles by DeCourcy E. McIntosh, which revealed for the first time the influence of the French dealer on the American market, this paper will explore in detail the obstacles to, and uncertainties in, creating and keeping a presence in the art market across the Atlantic in the mid-nineteenth century. Since 2012, with the acquisition by the Getty Research Institute of the archival material of the Knoedler Gallery, successors of Goupil & Co. in New York in 1857, it has now become possible to also reconsider some aspects of a business relationship that dominated the market for European art in America for half a century and secured the legacy of Goupil in this country.

The esteem in which Giorgio Vasari held prints and engravers has been hotly debated in recent criticism. In 1990, Evelina Borea suggested that the author of the Lives was basically interested in prints only with regard to the authors of the inventions and not to their material execution, and this theory has been embraced both by David Landau and Robert Getscher. More recently, Sharon Gregory has attempted to tone down this highly critical stance, arguing that in the life of Marcantonio Raimondi 'and other engravers of prints' inserted ex novo into the edition of 1568, which offers a genuine history of the art from Maso Finiguerra to Maarten van Heemskerck, Vasari focused on the artist who made the engravings and not on the inventor of those prints, acknowledging the status of the various Agostino Veneziano, Jacopo Caraglio and Enea Vico (among many others) as individual artists with a specific and recognizable style.

The aim of this article is to analyze this issue in greater depth, addressing it from the point of view of the history of connoisseurship: was Vasari the connoisseur interested in establishing who was responsible for the invention of the prints or their engraving, or perhaps of both?