In a Modern Rendering: The Color Woodcuts of Gustave Baumann: A Catalogue Raisonné
Written by Gala Chamberlain, Text by Thomas Leech and Nancy E. Green, Foreword by Martin F. Krause

A tribute to Gustave Baumann, a master color-woodcut artist whose prints helped form a popular image of America's natural beauty that has endured from the first half of the twentieth century to today.

Endowed with a deft hand and an eye for luminous color, Baumann (1881-1971) transformed American woodblock printing over his seventy-year career. This complete record of the artist's printed works, three decades in the making, includes early etchings and linocuts, 182 editioned color woodcuts, and hundreds of printed ephemera. More than 1,000 precise reproductions, many published for the first time, are illuminated by essays tracing Baumann's biography, techniques, and artistic practices.

An expressive carver, Baumann handled the entire printing process himself, making him a key figure in the American Arts and Crafts movement. German-born, Baumann settled in Santa Fe and became a central figure in the artistic community. His brilliantly colored landscapes of the Southwest and California coastline, celebrated in his day, are highly sought after by collectors today. This monumental publication allows for an unprecedented appreciation of one of the finest color-woodblock artists of the twentieth century.
About The Author

Gala Chamberlain is the trustee of the Ann Baumann Trust and director of the Annex Galleries, Santa Rosa, California. Nancy E. Green is the Gale and Ira Drukier Curator of European and American Art, Prints, and Drawings, 1800-1945 at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University.
Thomas Leech is director of the press at the Palace of the Governors and a curator at the New Mexico History Museum, Santa Fe.

In this important book Christina Weyl takes us into the experimental New York print studio Atelier 17 and highlights the women whose work there advanced both modernism and feminism in the 1940s and 1950s. Weyl focuses on eight artists—Louise Bourgeois, Minna Citron, Worden Day, Dorothy Dehner, Sue Fuller, Alice Trumbull Mason, Louise Nevelson, and Anne Ryan—who bent the technical rules of printmaking and blazed new aesthetic terrain with their etchings, engravings, and woodcuts. She reveals how Atelier 17 operated as an uncommonly egalitarian laboratory for revolutionizing print technique, style, and scale. It facilitated women artists’ engagement with modernist styles, providing a forum for extraordinary achievements that shaped postwar sculpture, fiber art, neo-Dadaism, and the Pattern and Decoration movement. Atelier 17 fostered solidarity among women pursuing modernist forms of expression, providing inspiration for feminist collective action in the 1960s and 1970s. The Women of Atelier 17 also identifies for the first time nearly 100 women, many previously unknown, who worked at the studio, and provides incisive illustrated biographies of selected artists.

Miguel Orozco's Catalogue Raisonné of Picasso Posters is quite different from previous compendiums of his affiches. It contains 412 posters included in the Czwiklitzer DTV catalogue, which in total has 475 entries. But the Orozco catalogue gives full entries to 31 'subordinate' posters that in the German catalogue appear as letters accompanying the main entry, i.e., the first poster of the series. This means that the present compendium uses in fact only 381 'main' Czwiklitzer DTV entries and discards 94 Czwiklitzer posters, not counting the 'subordinate' posters we have not included. And it only oncludes 346 out of the total 630 posters contained in the Rodrigo catalogue, leaving out some 280 of them. None of the posters left out has any intrinsic artistic value.

The main objective, the main contribution the Orozco book makes is to put the emphasis on the main, the noble Picasso posters, providing as far as possible a description of Picasso's involvement and telling the story of the work. It also incorporates some 100 additional items, not counted in the total of 947 main entries, which seek to clarify and or support the value of the poster or to explain the origin of the illustration used. It also unveils over one hundred posters not covered by either Czwiklitzer or Rodrigo. It uncovers many Picasso poster projects that had not been tackled by the catalogues raisonnés. They undoubtedly have an interest in the study of Picasso's poster making endeavours. And last but not least, it publicizes tens of Picasso poster projects or realisations that were designed as posters and were displayed as such, but were formally only newspaper covers. They were actually poster-sized and were posted as posters in the press-kiosks in the cities they were published.

This book will reveal the secrets of the new experimental forms of printmaking that are pushing the traditional boundaries, including mixing conventional techniques with photo-emulsion, glass and paper, using Perspex and paint stripper, printing with sand, and digital prints mounted on relief surfaces. The book will also look at issues surrounding using the moving image, and encaustic wax techniques for printing, transferring, collaging and combining traditional prints with wax. There will be further information about displaying objects and installations, as well as a section covering the various advantages and disadvantages of a range of non-paper surface materials that can be used for printmaking.

The book will follow the usual handbook layout, with clear, practical, illustrated step-by-step demonstrations aimed at beginners or experienced printmakers looking for new techniques.

Because money was no object, surimono usually used the finest materials and printing techniques. Most consisted of a picture combined with related poems, and the arrangement of the illustration and the calligraphic text was often very beautifully designed. Exquisite in design and technique and usually small in size, surimono have been described as 'jewels of Japanese printmaking' and have great visual appeal. Despite this, this will be the first time that the Ashmolean's collection of surimono, mostly from the Jennings-Spalding Gift and containing a number of rare and previously unpublished prints, has ever been catalogued.

Clare Pollard is the Curator of Japanese Art at the Ashmolean Museum. Kiyoko Hanaoka is a long-serving Volunteer in the Eastern Art Department of the Ashmolean Museum.

This highly anticipated and beautifully illustrated book examines the evolution of early printmaking in late medieval Europe. Through their means of production and the evidence of their utility, prints are explored in a broad social and economic context. Key topics include the complex problem of reconstructing the beginnings of the European woodcut; the practice of copying and dissemination of models endemic to the medium; and the varied functions of the print from the spiritual to the secular. A team of expert authors examines the many ways in which fifteenth-century woodcuts and metalcuts reflect the nature of piety and visual experience. Replicated images helped to structure private religious practice, transmit beliefs, disseminate knowledge about material facts, and graph abstract ideas. Mass-produced pictures made it feasible for people of all stations to possess them, thereby initiating a change in the role of images that eventually helped alter the definition of art itself.
The Origins of European Printmaking is an essential book for art historians, students, and collectors, as well as the general reader with an interest in medieval history and culture.

In questo volume, dal ricco corredo illustrativo, David S. Areford indaga le vicende di una preziosa collezione di stampe del XV secolo. Un tempo appartenuta a un notaio e avvocato, Jacopo Rubieri da Parma (1430 ca. - 1500), che incollò xilografie di varia provenienza alle pagine dei propri manoscritti giuridici, la raccolta è fin dal XVIII secolo conservata alla Biblioteca Classense di Ravenna.
L’innovativa ricerca dell’autore riconduce queste rare opere al loro contesto originale, quello di un raccoglitore di immagini di santi che affrancano le sue fatiche di copista e assemblatore di testi giuridici, illustrandoli e segnando le tappe della sua personale devozione. Le popolari raffigurazioni vengono così adattate agli scopi della quotidiana vita di devoto, della cui religiosità si fanno espressione personalizzata. Il volume vuole gettare nuova luce sul rapporto fra testo e immagine nei manoscritti giuridici della nota collezione di xilografie classensi, fornendo al contempo un saggio di come le immagini agiografiche potessero interpretare i temi fondamentali della devozione del tempo, quali il pellegrinaggio e le vite dei santi.

Structured around in-depth and interconnected case studies and driven by a methodology of material, contextual, and iconographic analysis, this book argues that early European single-sheet prints, in both the north and south, are best understood as highly accessible objects shaped and framed by individual viewers. Author David Areford offers a synthetic historical narrative of early prints that stresses their unusual material nature, as well as their accessibility to a variety of viewers, both lay and monastic. This volume represents a shift in the study of the early printed image, one that mirrors the widespread movement in art history away from issues of production, style, and the artist toward issues of reception, function, and the viewer. Areford's approach is intensely grounded in the object, especially the unacknowledged material complexity of the print as a portable, malleable, and accessible image that depended on a response that was not only visual but often physical, emotional, and psychological. Recognizing that early prints were not primarily designed for aesthetic appreciation, the author analyzes how their meanings stemmed from specific functions involving private devotion, protection, indulgences, the cult of saints, pilgrimage, exorcism, the art of memory, and anti-Semitic propaganda. Although the medium's first century was clearly transitional and experimental, Areford explores how its potential to impact viewers in new ways”both positive and negative”was quickly realized.

Selling Andrew Jackson is the first book-length study of the American portrait painter Ralph E. W. Earl, who worked as Andrew Jackson’s personal artist from 1817 until Earl’s death in 1838. During this period Jackson held Earl in close council, even providing him residence at the Hermitage, Jackson’s home in Tennessee, and at the White House during his presidency. In this well-researched and comprehensive volume, Rachel Stephens examines Earl’s role in Jackson’s inner circle and the influence of his portraits on Jackson’s political career and historical legacy.

By investigating the role that visual culture played in early American history, Stephens reveals the fascinating connections between politics and portraiture in order to challenge existing frameworks for grasping the inner workings of early nineteenth-century politics. Stephens argues that understanding the role Earl played within Jackson’s coterie is critical to understanding the trajectory of Jackson’s career. Earl, she concludes, should be credited with playing the propagandistic role of image-shaper—long before such a position existed within American presidential politics. Earl’s portraits became fine art icons that changed in character and context as Jackson matured from the hero of the Battle of New Orleans to the first common-man president to the leader of the Democratic party, and finally to the rustic sage of the Hermitage.

Jackson and Earl worked as a team to exploit an emerging political culture that sought pictures of famous people to complement the nation’s exploding mass culture, grounded on printing, fast communications, and technological innovation. To further this cause, Earl operated a printmaking enterprise and used his portrait images to create engravings and lithographs to spread Jackson’s influence into homes and businesses. Portraits became vehicles to portray political allegiances, middle-class cultural aspirations, and the conspicuous trappings of wealth and power.

Through a comprehensive analysis of primary sources including those detailing Jackson’s politics, contemporary political cartoons and caricatures, portraits and prints, and the social and economic history of the period, Stephens illuminates the man they pictured in new ways, seeking to broaden the understanding of such a complicated figure in American history.

Rachel Stephens is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Alabama. Her research investigates the art and visual culture of the antebellum era, particularly in the South. She received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Iowa.