This fall, the Vanderbilt University Museum of Art invites the public to look at works on paper in unexpected ways through "Paper Backs: Hidden Stories of European Prints from the Vanderbilt University Museum of Art Collection." The exhibition encourages visitors to encounter 60 prints dating between 1530 and 1915 from multiple vantage points and discover a rich ecosystem of works on paper that includes but also goes beyond the pristine masterpieces typically displayed in museums.

The exhibition emphasizes two sets of interconnected stories. The first section, Paper Tracks, traces the movement of prints between artists and collectors over centuries, showing the intermediary role played by dealers as well as the disruptive impact of historic events such as war. The second section, Paper Hacks, focuses on the prints’ uses (and abuses) by prior owners, demonstrating the changing value of paper images over time. To tell these stories and loop audiences into art historical detective work, the exhibition highlights physical aspects of works on paper that are often hidden, such as stamped marks, offhand doodles, and found materials used in the previous conservation and presentation of prints. Visitors will be able to study selected prints in double-sided displays, while other prints will be shown with their backs facing out. An online version of the exhibition (accessible through the museum's website and going live on September 2) will allow users to toggle between both sides of each print.

The exhibition is primarily drawn from VUMA’s recently rediscovered collection of more than 6,400 European and American prints dating from 1500 to 1915. The collection was assembled by the New York-based Sullivan family and given to the George Peabody College for Teachers and the Brooklyn Museum between 1916 and 1950. Long relegated to storage, the prints reemerged during campus construction in 2023. Their recovery coincided with a renewed investment in VUMA’s collections, including its first full inventory and a new public-facing online collection database.

Visitors will encounter well-known and obscure printmakers and collectors active from the Renaissance through World War I. Many of the prints in Paper Backs will be displayed for the first time. Notable debuts include: a printed headpiece meant to be cut out and worn at a Renaissance wedding (it was later salvaged by an unidentified collector, who pasted it to the back of a nineteenth-century map); an etching by Elisabetta Sirani (1638–1665) that features an elegant ink sketch of a sarcophagus on the sheet’s back; and an enigmatic 1530s engraving formerly owned by the first president of the British Royal Academy of Arts, Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792). Several large sheets of paper featuring prints glued down by the American collector George Hammond Sullivan (1859–1956) will allow visitors to see how prints were stored and enjoyed before entering museum collections. Fifteen prints from the former collection of the Italian artist Giovanni Locarno (active ca. 1800–1862), meanwhile, will collectively offer a window into how artists assembled and used their print collections in the era just before photography took over many of prints’ previous functions. VUMA’s collection includes more than 100 prints featuring Locarno’s distinctive stamp.

In addition to European prints, Paper Backs will also feature a painting by Charlotte Lentrein de Senezcourt (1844–1914), an Edo-period Japanese woodblock print (displayed alongside a 1915 woodcut by fashion illustrator and textile designer Alberto Fabio Lorenzi (1880–1969) depicting a World War I battle scene made to imitate a Japanese fan, and a seventeenth-century album of prints by Johann Wilhelm Bauer formerly owned by Giovanni Locarno, which the university's Special Collections recently acquired.