Category Archives: Exhibitions

“I have a great weakness for these little sheets of paper” -Rodin

(grainy image due to low light during hanging)

It is a great privilege to have work from the Graphic Arts Collection included in an exhibition at the Musée Rodin in Paris. Opening November 6, 2018, and running through February 24, 2019, the show entitled Rodin, Dessiner, Découper, includes nearly 250 drawings by Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), of which 90 are his rare and often surprising cut and assembled figures, 6 loaned by Princeton University’s Graphic Arts Collection. “Jouant de la mise en espace de ces corps,” writes curator Sophie Biass-Fabiani, “ce procédé révèle des silhouettes découpées audacieuses et un dynamisme d’une grande modernité. Cette exposition annonce un des modes d’expression novateurs du XXe siècle.”

http://musee-rodin.fr/fr/exposition/rodin-dessiner-decouper

The museum’s site goes on to quote Rodin, who said,

“‘I have a great weakness for these little sheets of paper.’ This is how Rodin showed his attachment to his drawn work. From his beginnings, Rodin realized–independently of his sculptures–drawings that he executed according to the living model. He presents his drawings in all exhibitions devoted to him, first in Brussels, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague in 1899, then Paris in 1900, Prague in 1902 or Düsseldorf in 1904. The museum retains most of this drawn work, about 7500 leaves.

An unprecedented mode of operation: drawing, cutting. Rodin submits his drawings made from a first throw to various metamorphoses. He decodes his drawings, identifies the line that suits him, sets the color using watercolor, cuts out his figures, puts them back, assembles them to other figures and gradually builds an unexpected device. In his early years, Rodin cut drawings and sketches that he pasted into albums. Between 1900 and 1910, he cut a hundred drawings of watercolor nudes which are the heart of this exhibition. By cutting them out, Rodin likes to manipulate them, to situate them in space in multiple ways, to cut them off voluntarily.”

(c) Musée Rodin

More information on how Rodin’s work made it to Princeton can be found here: https://graphicarts.princeton.edu/2018/03/10/auguste-rodin-cutouts/. Hanging and lighting will be completed this week and their beautiful exhibition catalogue with full color images will be available at Princeton next Monday.

“He plays with the small figures of paper which are the equivalent of his plaster figures. By relating these carvings to the three-dimensional character of the sculpture, the carved figures appear as a new “object” between the two-dimensional design and the sculpture. In another series, Rodin executes from his cut-out figures real assemblages that he fixes himself on a new support, interweaving the bodies in a new composition. Drawn and cut, these drawings are not mere technical accessories: they have conquered their status as full-fledged works. The dynamism of the silhouettes announces the modernity of Matisse.” –Sophie Biass-Fabiani, curator

http://www.musee-rodin.fr/fr/visiter/informations-pratiques-paris

 

 

 

Japanese Painting Manuals

芥子園畫傳 : Jieziyuan Huazhuan : The Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual. Part one 1679. Woodblock prints. Graphic Arts Collection [far left] https://graphicarts.princeton.edu/2013/12/16/the-mustard-seed-garden-painting-manual/

Thanks to Caitlin Karyadi, doctoral candidate at Princeton University, several volumes from the Princeton University Library are on view in a rotation within the Japanese galleries on the lower level of the Princeton University Art Museum. Mounted in conjunction with Picturing Place in Japan, Karyadi has done a beautiful job integrating our painting manuals with the Museum’s “funpon,” the preparatory sketches painters relied on to compete their work.

Here is one of her labels in full:


In the Making: The Practice of Painting in Early-Modern Kyoto, on view through December 16, 2018.

The Longest Painting in America

Longer than the Empire State Building is tall. Longer than three Statues of Liberty. Longer than fourteen blue whales. The Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage ‘Round the World is on view at Kilburn Mill, New Bedford, until October. https://nbwm.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=19513a5d13964a48aa9d00973c8a9674

All 1,275 feet of the panorama are currently on exhibit for the first time in generations, authentically depicting a whaling voyage originating from the port of New Bedford in the mid-19th century. Two years in the making, the narrative work was completed around 1848 in five rolls by New Bedford artists Caleb Purrington and Benjamin Russell, who traveled it around the country as a commercial enterprise.

The first four of Purrington and Russell’s rolls have been conserved and installed to the public thanks to the New Bedford Whaling Museum. https://www.whalingmuseum.org/programs/spectacle-motion-grand-panorama-whaling-voyage-round-world/

The location of the fifth and final section is unknown but hopefully the publicity this display receives will lead to the discovered of the last section.

 

Benjamin Russell lost his money in a banking scandal and signed on to a whaling ship that took him around the world. This is the trip he depicts, with a few historical events added throughout. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life are just a few of the literary sources referenced in the painting.


The four cotton rolls are hanging thanks to hundreds of magnets so that no damage will be done to the actual painting, and so that the entire display can travel if another venue is found somewhere around the country. Until then, the panorama has been digitized and can be viewed here: https://nbwm.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=19513a5d13964a48aa9d00973c8a9674

See also: Allan Forbes, Whale ships and whaling scenes as portrayed by Benjamin Russell. Presenting reproductions in color of the paintings of the foremost artist in that field edited by Ralph M. Eastman, assisted by K.G. Rogers (Boston: Second Bank-State Street Trust Co., 1955). Forrestal Annex ND237.R86 F7

International Xiloprint Exhibition 2019

A new collection catalogue was received today from the Casa da Xilogravura Museum in Campos do Jordão, Brazil, where they just launched a bilingual website: http://casadaxilogravura.com.br/english/index.php

“The Casa da Xilogravura Museum was created by Antonio Fernando Costella, a lawyer graduated from the Law School of Largo São Francisco. Also [a] journalist, Costella was university professor and to this day he is head of the initiatives of the museum.”

Printers take note: The Museum is scheduling a major international exhibition: XiloPrint 2019 and writes “The Xylography Museum invites all the engravers of the world to take part in the International Xiloprint Exhibition 2019 Brazil.”

Every printmaker in the world is asked to send one woodcut or wood engraving through November 30, 2018, to
Museu Casa Da Xilogravura
Caixa postal 42
12460-000 Campos do Jordão
Brazil.

Moby Dick crosses over


Congratulations to our colleagues at the Princeton University Art Museum, where the exhibition Frank Stella Unbound: Literature and Printmaking opened this weekend and can be seen through Sunday, September 23, 2018. The show features a number of books from our collections and highlights Stella’s inspiration from literature. Organized in conjunction with the 60th anniversary of the artist’s graduation as a member of the Class of 1958, the exhibition will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville.

See above our three volume Moby Dick, with prints by Rockwell Kent, installed so you can see Stella’s responding print on the wall. Label copy gives the viewer a quote from the book’s text, rather than an art historical commentary.

“Frank Stella Unbound: Literature and Printmaking focuses on a revolutionary period in the artist’s printmaking career, between 1984 and 1999, when Stella executed four ambitious print series, each of which was named after a distinct literary work: the Passover song Had Gadya, a compilation of Italian folktales, the epic American novel Moby-Dick, and the illustrated The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. In the four series titled after these sources, Stella created prints of unprecedented scale and complexity, transforming his own visual language—as well as his working process in all media—and reaching a technical and expressive milestone in printmaking.”—PUAM press release.

See more: http://artmuseum.princeton.edu/art/exhibitions/3331

Darboven


Congratulations to our colleagues at the Princeton University Art Museum, where the exhibition “Hanne Darboven’s Address — Place and Time” opens today. As the press release notes, the show “presents a selection of works that explore how space, time and communication were organized and experienced in 20th-century European culture. Using a variety of techniques for drawing, writing and arithmetical calculation, Darboven reconfigured elements derived from the Gregorian calendar, the postal system and personal correspondence, including picture postcards and handwritten letters.”

https://www.princeton.edu/news/2018/04/26/place-and-time-exhibition-german-conceptual-artist-darboven-stems-princeton

Work by Darboven (1941–2009) and Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) from Rare Books and Special Collections are included, with additional Darbovens on view in the Marquand Library in McCormick Hall and in the Department of German in East Pyne Hall.

A day of programming will celebrate the opening beginning at 1:30 on Friday, April 26. Poster and schedule: http://german.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/hanne-darbovens-address-event-flyer.pdf.

To hear more, watch the Artists on Artists Lecture on Hanne Darboven with Nick Mauss and Ken Okiishi at the Dia Art Foundation from March 7, 2017: https://youtu.be/AUCOcaaVAmM

Puerto Rican Graphic Arts

Yiyo Tirado Rivera (born 1990), Betancinados, 2016. Xilography.  Collection of Alma Concepcion and Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones.

Inspired by the emblematic figure of Ramón Emeterio Betances (1827-1898), Puerto Rican radical abolitionist and revolutionary. Betances lived in exile in France most of his life and was one of the major leaders of the Grito de Lares (1868), an armed insurrection against the Spanish colonial regime.

This print is one of the highlights of the exhibition Puerto Rican Graphic Arts on view in Aaron Burr Hall, Princeton University, in connection with the 50th anniversary of the Program in Latin American Studies. For more images and additional events, see: https://plas.princeton.edu/news-events/news/puerto-rican-graphic-arts

 

 

Antonio Martorell (born 1939), Mask, 1979. Screen print and collage. Collection of Alma Concepcion and Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones.

From the portfolio Loas, 1979, based on a text on Afro-Caribbean deities and rituals by Antonio T. Díaz-Royo. This text inspired Atibón Ogú, Erzulí, a choreodrama by Alma Concepción, for Taller de Histriones, a Puerto Rican mime company directed by Gilda Navarra. Set designs, costumes, and body art by Martorell. Music by Emmanuel “Sunshine” Logroño.

 

Born in 1939, Jose Rosa studied at the Taller del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueño (Graphic Arts Workshop of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture) run by Lorenzo Homar (1913-2004) and later succeeded Homar as the workshop’s director. As this poster demonstrates, he was a master of screen printing.

The print was later exhibited and reproduced in the catalogue José Rosa: Exposición Homenaje: Obra Gráfica, 1963-1996: Antiguo Arsenal de la Marina Española, Viejo San Juan, Puerto Rico, 29 de abril al 31 de agosto de 1998 ([San Juan, P.R.]: Programa de Artes Plástica, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1998).

 

Myrna Báez (born 1931), Baile, 1963. Linocut and woodcut. Inspired by traditional Puerto Rican dance and music. Collection of Alma Concepcion and Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones.

Jukhee Kwon

Colleagues from the Art Libraries Association (ARLIS) converge on New York in a few days. Various galleries around town have book themes and one recommended stop on their gallery tour will be Metamorphosis, featuring the work of the South Korean artist Jukhee Kwon at the Ierimonti Gallery on the Lower East Side. Kwon uses discarded books to create word sculpture, installed to simulate a paper forest. Zoom in below ↓


According to the press release “The idiosyncratic social life and energy possessed by each book is returned to its inception as a tree, wherein the spine of the book becomes the root system and each page acts as a branch. Kwon’s creative process deconstructs the book into the set of its meanings, splicing it into each stage of its vital cycle.”

Artists’ books and hand-made posters

The exhibition “This font was handmade by literally chopping off the serifs of Princeton Monticello,” is on view at the Hurley Gallery in the Lewis Arts complex now through February 23, 2018.

The show includes hand-made posters and artists’ books by Princeton University seniors and juniors in the Program in Visual Arts, curated by faculty member Pam Lins. In both, the students explore unique formats for image and text combinations, many going far beyond the usual codex format or flat sheet of paper.

Their website notes, “The senior posters are a response to a project for the students in the Exhibition Issues and Methods Seminar to make a “handmade” poster while considering their upcoming spring thesis shows. The students determined what “handmade” could mean to them at this point in digital culture and gave them a chance to contemplate the history of artists producing their own visual aids in regards to their exhibitions.”

For these class, students also view and study the historical artists’ books in the Rare Book and Special Collections Library at Princeton University. Here are a few samples of their work.

http://arts.princeton.edu/events/junior-book-senior-poster-show/2018-02-07/


The History of Printing in Eight Hours

Many of you will remember the wonderful exhibition, The Printed Picture at The Museum of Modern Art in 2008–2009, co-curated by Peter Galassi, Chief Curator of Photography, and Richard Benson, Dean of the Yale University School of Art. Some of you might have been in the gallery over the two days in May and June 2008 for Benson’s 8 hour lecture on the entire history of printing.

If not, this website posted by the Yale Art Gallery allows you to see the entire series of talks explaining ink, photographic, and digital printing processes, augmented with information from the book, The Printed Picture, authored by Richard Benson. http://printedpicture.artgallery.yale.edu/

He begins with hand prints on caves walls and ends with a digital print after Paul Strand along with a lesson on the intrinsic value of a print. Here is just a tiny clip:

The New York Times obituary for Richard Benson, June 27, 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/27/arts/design/richard-benson-dead-photographer-and-photo-printer.html