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This publication contains the transcripts of Achilles Statius' dedication to Antoine de Granvelle and his important, unpublished introduction into Lafrery's edition of the "Inlustrium virorum" from 1569 with a translation of both texts into German.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.

Published on the occasion of an exhibition in Milwaukee, Thomas Cvikota’s, Landfall Press: Five Decades chronicles the press’s fine art publishing achievements, as recounted in interview
format by its founder/owner Jack Lemon. Supplemented by extensive photographic
documentation, images of the prints themselves, and a useful checklist of projects executed at Landfall by over 225 artists representing a range of aesthetic movements and stylistic approaches, this in-depth case study on Lemon’s professional life demystifies an oft-ignored area of artmaking. Cvikota's introductory chapter provides an historical examination that deepens one’s understanding of contemporary American printmaking’s roots and its development. This discussion is followed by a series of accounts on the many editions created at Landfall and the workshop's innovative use of printmaking's operational processes, with descriptions of the pioneering methods and tools Lemon and his team introduced. Through both conversations with Lemon and under separate sub-headings, the author also conveys Lemon’s business model for establishing and sustaining a print workshop and publishing business for 50 years, and conversely, the entrepreneurial challenges presented by the exponential growth of the art market in the 1980s and 1990s. Interweaving biography, how-to wizardry and art history, Landfall: Five Decades not only offers a vivid portrait of a remarkable career but also demonstrates the vital role of fine art print publishing in the larger art world, and the skill, craftsmanship, and knowledge required for creating prints.

Published on the occasion of an exhibition in Milwaukee, Thomas Cvikota's publication chronicles five decades of Landfall Press's fine art publishing achievements, as recounted in interview format by its founder/owner Jack Lemon. Supplemented by extensive photographic documentation, images of the prints themselves, and a useful checklist of projects executed at Landfall, this in-depth case study offers a vivid portrait of a remarkable career, descriptive inserts of innovative printmaking techniques, and a deeper historical understanding of contemporary printmaking's development in America.

Ann Chernow is an artist whose subject matter is based on women's images from the 1930s and 1940s "Film Noir" movies. These movies were the first as genre to depict 'independent' women; they influenced the female movie-goer in ways that changed the nation's gender attitudes. Joan Crawford and many other stars of said films were emblematic of the 'new' women. Although she alters the actual scenes that she works from, and uses contemporary models, Chernow's paintings, drawings and prints capture and redeem the emotional, universal moments from these Film Noir movies.
For her fourth Noir portfolio of fine prints, she has collaborated with Jane Allinson who wrote
parodic poems of famous authors and interpreted them with a tongue-in-cheek Noir tone.

This article examines Jules and Edmond de Goncourt’s novels in the context of the nineteenth-century etching revival and the brothers’ personal experience as aquafortistes, proposing that their engagement with etching influenced their novels in three ways. First, it suggests that the fragmented narrative, structure, and style of the Goncourts’ novels draw on the same principles as nineteenth-century print albums, which similarly emphasized discontinuity and juxtaposition. Secondly, an investigation of the brothers’ use of Charles Méryon’s etchings in their novel Manette Salomon reveals their interest in both textual transpositions of Méryon’s style and the literary topos associated with his work. Finally, the article concludes by exploring how the Goncourt brothers incorporated vocabulary and techniques from etching into their écriture artiste, moving beyond prior readings of their novels in relation to painting and demonstrating the diversity of artistic inspiration for their writing.

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.