This article examines the role of printmaking in Helen Frankenthaler’s practice. While Frankenthaler
is primarily known for her monumental abstract paintings and invention of her ‘soak-stain’ technique, printmaking formed a vital part of her oeuvre over five-decades. Countering ingrained material hierarchies, I consider how the printerly manifests within Frankenthaler’s studio practice. In a January 1970 lecture at Yale University, Frankenthaler asserted that that there was ‘a lot more room for development’ within painting and the ‘best of it is going someplace’. Taking up Frankenthaler’s proposition, I argue hat her painting developed in the ‘someplace else’ of printmaking. As such, this article moves beyond the narrow confines of a medium specific discourse. Printmaking offers an alternate vantage point – spatially and materially ‘someplace else’ – through which to reconceptualize where and how Frankenthaler extended painting as an aesthetic category, subject and site of artistic production. Focusing on Frankenthaler’s work of the 1960s and 1970s, this article offers an exploration of the parallel reinvention of painting, printmaking and, concomitantly, the studio and workshop during this period.

This article argues that the French caricaturist and draughtsman Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard, known as J. J. Grandville (1803–47), used plates from Goya’s Caprichos (1799) as inspiration for his illustrations to Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables and Cent Proverbes (1845), as well as other illustrated books. In turn, it is also noted that La Fontaine’s Fables were the source of some of Goya’s Caprichos and Desastres de la guerra (Disasters of War) prints (1810–14). Examples of Grandville copying Goya, as well as of Goya using images from La Fontaine are here presented.

Beginning in the early 1960s, with only the meager budget of a part-time art history professor, Leo Steinberg (1920–2011) amassed a collection of more than 3,500 prints that spans the medium’s five-hundred-year history in the West. Akin to books on a shelf, Steinberg’s prints formed a visual library that shaped his scholarship in fundamental ways. His collection, incorporating the work of artists both famous and obscure, illuminates his claim that in the era before photography, prints functioned as the “circulating lifeblood of ideas,” disseminating figures, compositions, and styles across boundaries of geography, time, and medium. Through close observation of his own prints, Steinberg developed some of his most innovative arguments about the instructive richness of the copy and the expressive potential of body language, while also challenging reigning orthodoxies about modernism. This lavishly illustrated volume with essays by Holly Borham and Peter Parshall examines the development of Steinberg’s remarkable collection and its role in his scholarship. It also serves as a detailed guide to the collection, now housed at the Blanton Museum of Art, and as an introduction to the history of Western printmaking that it broadly encompasses.

In Ruth Asawa's final year at Black Mountain College, c. 1948–49, she used a rubber stamp borrowed from the laundry room and featuring the college's initials (BMC) to make a body of work. Three years later, a pattern derived from this work was mass-produced and marketed across the US under the name Alphabet – without attribution to Asawa, nor to the school for which the pattern's acronym stood. This essay examines the doubled abstraction of Asawa's stamp (in the sense of both material tool and figurative signature), as the letters that she first abstracted into images were subsequently disassociated from both her name and that of the school itself. By tracing Asawa's eventual reclamation of her authorship from this contextual abstraction, this essay makes a broader case for recognizing artistic practices of self-definition.

Prints of a New Kind details the political strategies and scandals that inspired the first generation of American caricaturists to share news and opinions with their audiences in shockingly radical ways. Complementing studies on British and European printmaking, this book is a survey and catalogue of all known American political caricatures created in the country’s transformative early years, as the nation sought to define itself in relation to European models of governance and artistry.
Allison Stagg examines printed caricatures that mocked events reported in newspapers and politicians in the United States’ fledgling government, reactions captured in the personal papers of the politicians being satirized, and the lives of the artists who satirized them. Stagg’s work fills a large gap in early American scholarship, one that has escaped thorough art-historical attention because of the rarity of extant images and the lack of understanding of how these images fit into their political context.

Featuring 125 images, many published here for the first time since their original appearance, and a comprehensive appendix that includes a checklist of caricature prints with dates, titles, artists, references, and other essential information, Prints of a New Kind will be welcomed by scholars and students of early American history and art history as well as visual, material, and print culture.

A picture book biography about the barber shop of woodcarver Elijah Pierce, recipient of the highest folk art honor in the United States.

“Creeeeak!” goes the screen door to self-taught artist Elijah Pierce’s barbershop art studio. A young boy walks in for an ordinary haircut and walks out having discovered a lifetime of art.

Mr. Pierce’s wood carvings are in every corner of the small studio. There are animals, scenes from his life, and those detailing the socio-political world around him. It’s this collection of work that will eventually win Elijah the National Heritage Fellowship in 1982 just two years before his death. But the young boy visiting the shop in the 1970s doesn’t know that yet. All he knows is: “You gotta meet Mr. Pierce!”

Based on the true story of Elijah Pierce and his community barber shop in Columbus, Ohio, this picture book includes cleverly collaged museum-sourced photos of his art and informative backmatter about his life. With engaging text by Pierce to the Soul! playwright Chiquita Mullins-Lee and Christopher Award-winning author Carmella Van Vleet, it’s illustrated with striking Japanese woodblock by Jennifer Mack-Watkins. A new addition to vital Black art history!

Printmakers have conspired, historically, to illustrate the maps created by European colonizers that were used to chart and claim their expanding territories. Over the last three decades, Latinx artists and print studios have reclaimed this printed art form for their own spatial discourse. This book examines the limited editions produced at four art studios around the US that span everything from sly critiques of Manifest Destiny to printed portraits of Dreamers in Texas.

Reclaiming the Americas is the visual history of Latinx printmaking in the US. Tatiana Reinoza employs a pan-ethnic comparative model for this interdisciplinary study of graphic art, drawing on art history, Latinx studies, and geography in her discussions. The book contests printmaking’s historical complicity in the logics of colonization and restores the art form and the lands it once illustrated to the Indigenous, migrant, mestiza/o, and Afro-descendant people of the Americas.

As a social phenomenon and a commonplace of internet culture, virality provides a critical vocabulary for addressing questions raised by the global mobility and reproduction of early modern artworks. This book uses the concept of virality to study artworks’ role in the uneven processes of early modern globalization.
Drawing from archival research in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, Stephanie Porras traces the trajectories of two interrelated objects made in Antwerp in the late sixteenth century: Gerónimo Nadal’s Evangelicae historiae imagines, an illustrated devotional text published and promoted by the Society of Jesus, and a singular composition by Maerten de Vos, St. Michael the Archangel. Both were reproduced and adapted across the early modern world in the seventeenth century. Porras examines how and why these objects traveled and were adopted as models by Spanish and Latin American painters, Chinese printmakers, Mughal miniaturists, and Filipino ivory carvers. Reassessing the creative labor underpinning the production of a diverse array of copies, citations, and reproductions, Porras uses virality to elucidate the interstices of the agency of individual artists or patrons, powerful gatekeepers and social networks, and economic, political, and religious infrastructures. In doing so, she tests and contests several analytical models that have dominated art-historical scholarship of the global early modern period, putting pressure on notions of copying, agency, context, and viewership.

Vital and engaging, The First Viral Images sheds new light on how artworks, as agents of globalization, navigated and contributed to the emerging and intertwined global infrastructures of Catholicism, commerce, and colonialism.