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.

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Postmodernism is normally framed as a Western movement, with theoretical and philosophical roots in Europe. Scott’s essay links artistic postmodernism to the influence of Maoism in the West, specifically through the dissemination and absorption of the content and form of Maoist propaganda. Taking into consideration the broad significance of Mao and China for art and culture in the West in the second half of the twentieth-century, the essay comes to terms with the material effects of a global propaganda movement, and the remains of a personality cult, that currently transcends the traditional political categories of the Left and the Right.

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.

This essay explores several fifteenth-century woodcuts of the Christ Child in relation to the so-called Proleptic Passion, the theme of the Child of Sorrows, and the subtle ways in which the images collapse time.