US $25

The Global Journal of Prints and Ideas

November – December 2016
Volume 6, Number 4

Panoramic Wallpaper in New England • Christian Marclay • Fantastic Architecture • Ania Jaworska • Barbara Kasten
Degas Monotypes at MoMA • American Prints at the National Gallery • Matisse at the Morgan • Prix de Print • News
PHILIP TAAFFE
The Philip Taaffe E/AB Fair Benefit Prints are available at eabfair.org

Philip Taaffe, Fossil Leaves, screenprint, 25x38”

variable edition of 30

Philip Taaffe, St. Steven’s Lizards, screenprint, 25x34.5”

variable edition of 30

Thanks to all the exhibitors and guests for a great fair!

November – December 2016 In This Issue
Volume 6, Number 4

Editor-in-Chief Susan Tallman 2

Susan Tallman On the Wall
Associate Publisher Catherine Bindman 3
Julie Bernatz A French Panoramic Wallpaper in the
Home of a New England Lawyer
Managing Editor
James Siena and Katia Santibañez 8
Isabella Kendrick Zuber in Otis
Associate Editor Susan Tallman 10
Julie Warchol To The Last Syllable of Recorded Time:
Christian Marclay
Manuscript Editor
Prudence Crowther Prix de Print, No. 20 16
Colin Lyons
Editor-at-Large Time Machine for
Catherine Bindman Abandoned Futures
Juried by Chang Yuchen
Design Director
Skip Langer Exhibition Reviews

Webmaster Julie Warchol 18

Ania Jaworska at MCA Chicago
Dana Johnson
Vincent Katz 21
Matisse Bound and Unbound
Joseph Goldyne 25
New Light on Degas’ Dark Dramas
Vincent Katz 29
Degas at MoMA
Ivy Cooper 33
Prints in the Gateway City
Lauren R. Fulton 35
On Paper, on Chairs: Barbara Kasten
Book Reviews
Paige K. Johnston 38
Higgins’ and Vostell’s
Fantastic Architecture
Catherine Bindman 40
(Printed) Art in America
News of the Print World 43
On the Cover: Christian Marclay, detail of
Actions: Splish, Plop, Plash, Plash (No. 4) Contributors 72
(2015), screenprint with handpainted acrylic.
Image courtesy of the artist and USF Graphic-
studio ©2015. Photo: Will Lytch.

This Page: Ania Jaworska, detail of Faking It

from A Subjective Catalog of Columns (2015),
screenprint on folio paper.

Art in Print
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On the Wall
By Susan Tallman
P rints are, most commonly, pictures
of things. But they are also frequently
pictures on things. Take the early 19th-
century panoramic wallpaper that opens
this issue of Art in Print. It depicts Roman
ruins, Roman skies and Roman bushes,
but it sits stolidly adhered to the four
walls of a dining room in a house in the
Berkshires. It offers many illusions—the
fantasy of being far away, of being out of
doors, of brick and mortar dissolved into
blue heaven and rolling Campagna—and
at the same time, provides the tangible
assurance of being exactly what it is:
printed paper glued to plaster and lathe.
As discussed by Catherine Bindman and
by the house’s owners, artists James Siena
and Katia Santibañez, the magic lies in
this doubling of solid reality and make-
believe.
If the term “architectural prints”
prompts visions of Piranesi etchings and
their many near relations, the centuries
of conversation between flat paper and
three-dimensional structures have pro-
duced a nimble variety of strategies and
forms—Piranesi’s views and wallpaper
are two, to which we might add archi-
tectural blueprints, schematized pro-
jections, printed paper models and an
endless array of depicted interior spaces.
Contributors to this issue have looked
at the many ways that artists negotiate
between the space of architecture and
the space of the page. In some cases, the
connection is clear to see: in her Subjec-
tive Catalog of Columns (2015), recently on
view at the Museum of Contemporary Art
in Chicago, architect Ania Jaworska mim-
icked the didactic crib sheets of architec-
tural orders and styles that have served
to educate architects for centuries; Julie
Warchol discusses her wry accounting of
recent architectural history through the
styling of vertical support elements.
A far more conceptual—even exis-
tential—critique of the discipline is
embedded in Fantastic Architecture, the
1970 book assembled by Fluxus artists
Wolf Vostell and Dick Higgins. Paige K.
Johnston reconsiders this “tripped-out
thought experiment,” recently re-released
in facsimile form, and its contention that
only the unfettered ideas of art could save
2 Art in Print November – December 2016
Panel of wallpaper depicting the Crystal Palace
as seen through a garden archway, with flights of
steps and architectural framework, with falsified
perspective (1853–55), color machine print on
paper, 99 x 53.6 cm. Published by Heywood,
Higginbottom & Smith, Manchester, England
(probable). ©Victoria and Albert Museum,
London.
architecture from the late-20th-century
economic forces.
In the project selected by Chang
Yuchen for this issue’s Prix de Print, artist
Colin Lyons has gone further—not sim-
ply proffering a visionary design on paper
but building one: his Time Machine for
Abandoned Futures (2015) features a roof
composed of etching plates and acid that
together form a battery to power the elec-
trolytic cleaning of mechanical destritus
left behind after the Klondike Gold Rush.
Barbara Kasten is best known for
abstract still-life and architectural pho-
tographs that fragment the perception of
coherent space, but her earliest work with
photography used the human figure, a
bentwood chair, a drafting grid and the
architectural-office medium of diazo-
type; Lauren Fulton reports on the recent
exhibition of these seldom seen works.
Other essays and reviews here touch
only lightly on architecture, but it is
always present. The National Gallery of
Art’s survey, Three Centuries of American
Prints, reviewed here by Catherine Bind-
man, charts American visual culture
from its early images-as-tools pragma-
tism to its sophisticated images-as-art
dominance, which also means from pic-
tures-in-an-album to pictures-on-the-
wall. As is evident from Ivy Cooper’s
examination of contemporary print-
making in St. Louis, artists routinely
consider the print as an occupier of space,
not simply a delineator of it.
The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibi-
tion of Degas monotypes (which was so
substantial it is covered here by two writ-
ers) included no pictures of buildings, yet
the artist’s ability to evoke the intimacy
of close interior spaces is essential to the
power of many of these works, as Vin-
cent Katz and Joseph Goldyne point out.
Katz also reviews the Morgan Library
and Museum’s recent exhibition chart-
ing Henri Matisse’s involvement with the
art of the book, from Mallarmé’s Poésies
to his own famous Jazz—a work that can
be viewed both in the lap and on the wall.
Finally, this issue contains a survey of
recent work by Christian Marclay, an
artist who has spent his career elucidat-
ing the incongruence of sound and vision.
Marclay’s work isn’t about architecture,
but few artists have focused more persis-
tently on our myriad, imperfect strategies
for representing one type of experience
through another. People often talk about
the “failure of representation,” but failure
is too pejorative a word. As with the
Colosseum over the mantelpiece in the
Berkshires, there is space for delight in
the gap between experience and its repre-
sentation—the gap that bedevils and
enchants and motivates all the activities
we call art.
Susan Tallman is the Editor-in-Chief of
Art in Print.
‘Phantasmagorias of the Interior’:
A French Panoramic Wallpaper in the Home of a
New England Lawyer
By Catherine Bindman
Vues d’Italie wallpaper installed in the house of James Siena and Katia Santibañez in Otis, MA. All color images of the wallpaper in the house are courtesy
of Armin Kunz, New York.
A s New York artist James Siena tells
it, the small town of Otis in West-
ern Massachusetts (incorporated in 1810)
has only ever been distinguished for two
things: an early nudist colony, established
in 1933, and the house of Squire Lester
Filley, a noted lawyer, member of the
State Legislature and founder of the local
Episcopal church.1 Filley’s eight-room,
red-brick residence, built in 1812, was the
first grand home in Otis, and in at least
one respect its interior decoration was
noteworthy. 2 As the 1939 WPA guidebook
of the area noted, “one room is decorated
with scenes from Italy—the Colosseum in
Rome, views of the Mediterranean, and
the Carnival in Venice—all in full color
on an imported paper almost 150 years
old.”3 Sixty-five years later, when Siena
and his wife, the artist Katia Santibañez,
acquired it, Squire Filley’s house was still
the grandest in town and its dining room
walls still harbored their remarkable Ital-
ian fantasy.
By 2004 the wallpaper was water-
stained in some places and slightly shred-
ded in others, but the colors retained
their vividness and the original scheme
appeared to be intact. Though neither
artist immediately recognized the paper,
Santibañez soon noticed the printed
inscription: “Mongin fecit in Rixheim
1818.” It was not difficult to establish that
they were now the owners of the Vues
d’Italie, a panoramic wallpaper designed
by Antoine Pierre Mongin (1761–1827),
who, for 20 years, was the chief designer
of one of the preeminent manufactur-
ers of such papers, Zuber & Cie, based in
Rixheim in the Alsace. It is fortunate that
not only was Zuber one of the few firms
that allowed artists to sign the wallpapers
Art in Print November – December 2016 3

Detail of the Vues d’Italie in Otis.
they designed but that it has also main-
tained remarkably complete archives.4
From their records we know that the Vues
d’Italie, first issued in 1818, was reissued
eight times until about 1870, attesting to
its popularity. 5
At the end of the 18th century, French
manufacturers had begun to produce
ambitious panoramic wallcoverings,
largely for promotional purposes: in a
competitive business they fostered a
reputation for exceptional quality, thus
supporting sales of the standard repeat-
pattern papers that typically made up
the bulk of production.6 While the pano-
ramic papers employed the same wood-
block techniques already well established
in the industry, they incorporated a range
of bravura technical and aesthetic effects.
The Vues d’Italie is entirely representa-
tive in this respect: in its complete form
it comprised 20 individual lengths, each
made up of joined sheets of handmade
paper 7 impressed with a series of colos-
sal block prints (often based on published
etchings and engravings); together they
were designed to encircle a room with
continuous, nonrepeating vistas. The
manufacture of these papers was a labo-
rious, largely manual operation: each
element of the image was composed by
superimposing distemper colors, via
individually carved blocks, over an ini-
tial outline to achieve gradations of tone
in the manner of chiaroscuro woodblock
printing. The most ambitious panoramic
papers, like this one, required several
thousand blocks. Further, the ground was
carefully brushed on and subtly shaded to
enhance the sense of depth and the illu-
sion that the light and air of the outside
world had been brought indoors.
These extravagant wallpapers typi-
cally featured classical, biblical or mytho-
logical subjects, views of elegant French
gardens and towns, landscapes, foreign
lands, military and political events, and
Detail of the Vues d’Italie in Otis.
scenes taken from literature. 8 Exported
to America, they introduced a carefully
calibrated fantasy world into the draw-
ing rooms and dining halls of grandiose
plantation houses and presidential man-
sions as well as into the homes of up-and-
coming bourgeois consumers like Squire
Filley of Otis. 9 For during the 19th cen-
tury, as Walter Benjamin suggested, the
home became increasingly understood
as a refuge against the new demands of
industrial and business life. “From this
derive the phantasmagorias of the inte-
rior—which, for the private individual,
represents the universe. In the interior,
he brings together remote locales and
memories of the past. His living room
is a box in the theater of the world.”10
The panoramas domesticated the dis-
tant. In wallpapers such as Dufour’s Les
Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (1804) and
Zuber’s L’Hindoustan (1807) the costumes
of the natives often bear more than a
touch of theatrical artifice; other papers
offered battles sanitized of bloodshed and
mythological scenes devoid of all but the
mildest erotic overtones or evidence of
suffering.
Wallpaper manufacturers certainly
seem to have had the measure of their
customers: in the Vues d’Italie, well-
dressed tourists of a kind with whom the
owners might easily identify are seen pic-
nicking around monuments and interact-
ing with picturesque locals. These scenes
were designed to transport the propri-

4 Art in Print November – December 2016

Panels of the Vues d’Italie in Otis.
etors, whether living in a humid villa in
the Deep South or a drafty pile in New
England, to an Italianate arcadia, but
the text that came with them also touted
the panorama as a kind of giant postcard
“worthy of the depiction of memories of
this classic terrain.”11 And indeed, some
of Zuber’s wealthier clients might well
have seen such monuments at first hand
on the Grand Tour.
The existence of this promotional lit-
erature suggests that manufacturers were
attuned to the aspirations, interests and
prejudices of their clients and wished,
above all, to reassure them of the wisdom
of their investment in these costly and,
frankly, somewhat flashy wallcoverings.
Zuber’s rival, the firm of Dufour, went
so far as to suggest that its first scenic
paper, The Voyages of Captain Cook (1804–
6), might create “a community of taste
between those who live in a state of civi-
lization and those who are at the outset
of the use of their native intelligence” and
could even have an educational function:
“The mother of a family will give history
and geography lessons to a lively little
girl. The [several kinds of] vegetation can
themselves serve as an introduction to
the history of plants.”12
The demand for French luxury wall-
papers in America was boosted by the lift-
ing of import duties on French products
after 1787 and by a general Francophilia
stemming from a sense of shared repub-
lican values. Although a significant wall-
paper industry had been established in
America by about 1800, especially in New
England, and while local craftsmen were
able to produce traditional repeat-pattern
papers of good quality, fine papers and
especially panoramic papers had to be
ordered from France.13 So brisk was the
export business to America documented
in Zuber’s archives that, Catherine Lynn
notes, “it is safe to assume that examples
of every major scenic wallpaper printed at
the Zuber factory were readily available
almost as soon as they were introduced in
France.”14 The company’s records further
reveal that before 1834, when most of the
firm’s trade was handled by a New York
dealer, the Zuber firm dealt directly with
40 firms and individuals in New York,
13 in Philadelphia, seven in Baltimore,
five in New Orleans, and 11 in Boston, in
addition to a few each in many other cit-
ies in the South and Northeast.15 We do
not know where the Filleys purchased
their panoramic paper, but it was likely
from one of the many Boston dealers
who placed notices in local newspapers
announcing their wares. Perhaps it was
James H. Foster, who advertised in 1817
in the New England Palladium his stock
of “RICH PAPER HANGINGS” “in colors
and long-strip landscapes,” among them
the “Views in Italy,”16 or maybe Josiah
Bumstead, who offered in 1821 a selection
of “French Paper Hangings” including
“Views of distinguished places in Europe,
Asia and America.”17 The Zuber records
reveal that a set like this would have
cost between $20 and $40, equivalent to
$15,000–$30,000 today.18 It is astonish-
ing to consider that this sum was spent
for the decoration of a single room in the
home of a devout provincial lawyer of the
early 19th century.19
The hanging of this paper in the Fil-
ley house is also indicative of the design’s
ingenious adaptability. For while these
schemes were ideally intended to be
viewed in their entirety as coherent spec-
tacles, the manufacturers typically based
the designs on a modular structure: the
narrative scenes were punctuated at
Art in Print November – December 2016 5

Panels of the Vues d’Italie over the mantelpiece in Otis.
intervals by generic landscape passages—
foliage, trees and rocky areas—that could
be added or removed to suit the room’s
dimensions and the taste of the owner
without disturbing the central theme.
However grand the vista, it was always
designed to wrap around on itself so that
the image could “begin” anywhere. One
could even customize the weather: the sky
of Zuber’s Vues d’Italie, for example, could
be purchased with or without clouds. Per-
haps reflective of Yankee sensibilities,
the Filleys chose clouds.
This kind of flexibility distinguished
these customizable manufactures from
the tapestries, frescoes and paintings
that had traditionally decorated aris-
tocratic homes. Papers such as the Vues
d’Italie could be adapted both vertically
and horizontally. Produced in lengths of
about 13 vertical feet (each ca. 20 inches
wide), with the main printed scenes con-
fined to the lower half and the rest occu-
pied by sky, the papers could be cut down
from the top to accommodate lower ceil-
ings without disturbing the narrative. 20
In the Otis house, the space between the
chair rail and the picture rail is 5 feet 7
inches, suggesting that the paper was cut
down by about 7  1/2 feet from the top.
The room itself measures 16 feet 4 inches
by 15 feet 5 inches and is interrupted by
two doors, four windows and a fireplace
mantle and chimney. Nineteen of the
twenty available lengths were installed;
the scene over the mantelpiece was
6 Art in Print November – December 2016
further trimmed, as was common, with
ornamental paper borders supplied by the
manufacturer. 21 Thus a paper that might
easily line a palatial entrance hall was
made to sit comfortably in this relatively
modest room.
And yet, to find an important French
panoramic wallpaper in the New England
home of a professional man is extraordi-
narily rare. Though Americans appear to
have been drawn to wallpapers of Ital-
ian scenes, and the frequent reissuing of
Zuber’s Vues d’Italie is testament to its
popularity, the paper seems to have had
a poor survival rate. Not a single panel
appears among the 143 panoramic papers
documented by pioneering wallpaper
scholar Nancy McClelland in a two-year
study conducted in 1924. 22 Richard Nyl-
ander’s 1986 survey of New England wall-
paper addressed panoramic wallpapers
only in a brief section and did not refer
to the Vues d’Italie, 23 although Catherine
Lynn mentions that some American
examples have been discovered. 24 In any
case, Lester Filley’s house seems to have
escaped attention and has never been
noted in the scholarly literature. For a
paper to have survived in a home like Fil-
ley’s, especially since the early 19th cen-
tury, appears to be especially unusual 25
and may be attributable to the fact that
Otis—whose population remains well
under 2,000 people—has never been sub-
ject to much in the way of development.
The room itself has, of course, under-
gone changes. A set of photographs from
the turn of the century shows it crowded
with late-Victorian horror vacui—the
wallpaper hung with dour portraits and
homely samplers and further under-
mined by competition from the swirly
flourishes of the ornamental rug. At some
point earlier, a damaged section over the
mantelpiece was covered over with a left-
over panel of the Vues showing tourists in
front of the Colosseum—the repair dem-
onstrates distinctive Yankee thrift but
little regard for spatial or narrative logic.
Nonetheless, the provincial American
lawyer who installed an imported wall-
covering of the most luxurious and fash-
ionable kind in his home at the dawn of
the 19th century can hardly be accused of
being a tightwad. One can almost picture
Squire Filley and his wife, Corintha, in
their chilly dining room during the
Massachusetts winter, imagining them-
selves wandering among the monuments
in the diaphanous sunlight of the Cam-
pagna as they prepare to welcome their
drab and faintly disapproving neighbors
to view their fancy new wallpaper, the
very latest thing from France.
Catherine Bindman is a New York-based editor
and art critic who has written extensively on both
old master and contemporary prints.
Notes:
1. Filley donated the land for the church next
door to his house and also paid more than half its
construction costs. Edward and Lois Knight state
that the church was completed in 1830; St. Paul’s
Episcopal Church, Otis, Massachusetts (1984),
cknight12.tripod.com/stpaulsotisma/pages/histo-
ry-knight1984-text.html. James Siena, however,
notes that a sign on the church dates it to 1827.
2. The records show that Lester Filley married
Corintha Twining in 1814 and that by 1815 they
had a daughter, the first of four children. It is rea-
sonable to assume that Corintha had a role in the
acquisition of the wallpaper, which was not issued
by Zuber until four years after the marriage. http://
ma-vitalrecords.org/MA/Berkshire/Otis/Images/
Otis_B027.shtml.
3. Federal Writers’ Project of the Work’s Progress
Administration for Massachusetts, The Berkshire
Hills (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1939), 209–10.
The authors also note that “the Cornwall family,
occupants of the house for many years, have
kept it in a good state of preservation” and that
while “The house is not officially open to the pub-
lic … those interested are usually permitted to go
through.” https://archive.org/stream/berkshire-
hills00fede/berkshirehills00fede_djvu.txt.
4. These are now housed in the Musée du Papier
Peint in Rixheim.
5. Odile Nouvel-Kammerer, Papiers Peints Pano-
ramiques (Paris: Flammarion/Musée des Arts
Décoratifs, 2002), 300, no. 62. The version print-
Vues d’Italie in Otis, ca. 1900. Courtesy of the Otis Library and Museum, Otis, MA.
ed in this book, of unknown date, varies in some
details from the one in the Filley house, and it
seems that differences crept into the design as
it was reissued over the years. These alterations
probably reflected wear and tear to some of the
many individual printing blocks, requiring certain
motifs to be replaced or eliminated altogether. Ac-
cording to the Zuber website, the Vues d’Italie is
one of the panoramic papers for which the original
blocks were destroyed at some point, in this case
after the last edition in 1870. The Zuber firm cur-
rently offers a somewhat simplified version of the
Vues d’Italie using silkscreen printing on a hand-
brushed ground. www.zuber.fr.
6. In 1818, panoramic papers made up only 20
percent of the value of Zuber’s inventory; even
in 1840, at the height of the firm’s production of
these papers, they only constituted 26 percent of
its overall production; Odile Nouvel-Kammerer,
Papiers Peints Panoramiques, 73.
7. Continuous rolls of machine-made paper were
widely available in England, France and America
by 1830. Joanna Banham, “The English Re-
sponse: Mechanization and Design Reform,” in
The Papered Wall: History, Pattern, Technique,
ed. Lesley Hoskins (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1994), 135.
8. Among the best-known of these are Zuber’s
La Guerre d’Indépendence Américaine of 1852,
a variation on the Vues d’Amérique du Nord of
1834, and the firm’s Vues d’Écosse of 1827,
loosely based on Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the
Lake.
9. Dufour’s Les Paysages de Télémaque dans
L’Île de Calypso (1818), purchased by Andrew
Jackson in 1836, for example, survives in the 20. Nouvel-Kammerer, Papiers Peints Pano-
grand hallway of his home, the Hermitage in ramiques, 24.
Nashville, TN; a set of Dufour’s Vues d’Italie (ca. 21. Surviving photographs of the room dating to
1822) was installed in the Gay Mont plantation ca. 1900 show that an unrelated standard pat-
house in Caroline County, VA, probably a few terned wallpaper had been installed around the
years after its enlargement in 1819. dado and just below the ceiling. It was removed
10. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nine- by a later owner before Siena and Santibañez
teenth Century,” in The Arcades Project, tr. How- purchased the property.
ard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, 22. McClelland, “Some Famous Scenic Papers
MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, and their Owners,” chapter 5.
1999), 19. 23. Richard C. Nylander et al. Wallpaper in New
11. “dignes de représenter des souvenirs de ce England (Boston: Society for the Preservation of
sol classique”; quoted in Odile Nouvel-Kammerer, New England Antiquities, 1986), 123–5.
Papiers Peints Panoramiques, 300. 24. Ibid., 223.
12. Catherine Lynn, Wallpaper in America: From 25. Lynn, Wallpaper in America, 224.
the Seventeenth Century to World War 1 (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1980), 202
13. See Richard C. Nylander, “An Ocean Apart:
Imports and the Beginning of American Manufac-
ture,” in The Papered Wall: History, Pattern, Tech-
nique, ed. Lesley Hoskins (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1994), 114–131.
14. Lynn, Wallpaper in America, 214.
15. Ibid., 215.
16. Joanne Kosuda-Warner, Landscape Wallcov-
erings, (London/New York: Scala in association
with Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum,
2001), 35.
17. Nancy McClelland, “Some Famous Sce-
nic Papers and their Owners,” in Historic Wall-
Papers: From Their Inception to the Introduction
of Machinery (Philadelphia: J.B. Lipincott, 1924),
274.
18. Lynn, Wallpaper in America, 225.
19. https://www.measuringworth.com/ppowerus/.
Art in Print November – December 2016 7
Zuber in Otis
By James Siena and Katia Santibañez
Vues d’Italie wallpaper installed at James Siena and Katia Santibañez’s house in Otis, MA. Image courtesy of Armin Kunz.
James Siena
I n 2004 we rented a house in the
Berkshires for part of the summer
and picked up a book of real estate
listings for fantasy’s sake. We bought the
second house we saw and the reason was
simple: the wallpaper. The listing read
something like: “historic brick farmhouse
with hand-painted wallpaper.” We had to
see it.
The paper was not, in fact, painted,
we realized when we came to inspect the
dining room, but printed, and it was like
nothing we had seen before: a magnifi-
cent panorama, depicting scenes of what
appeared to be the ruins of ancient Rome,
but from a time when the preservation of
the past was not thought of as it is now.
These ruins were crawling with bushes
and trees and people dining al fresco, get-
ting their palms read by a gypsy, watching
a puppet show; some in Ottoman dress.
8 Art in Print November – December 2016
Little did we know that the paper would
turn out to have been made in France by
Zuber & Cie nearly 200 years ago. It was
remarkably intact for its age.
The previous owner of the house was
an elderly man named Carleton Mott (of
the Motts for whom Mott Street in Little
Italy in New York is named). When he
purchased the house in 1986, the pan-
oramic paper had been augmented below
with a patterned wallpaper of unknown
origin, as can be seen in late 19th-cen-
tury photographs in the collection of
the Otis Library and Museum. Mott, an
interior designer, chose to remove these
extra papers, and while it is something
we would never have done ourselves, it
does serve to focus the viewer’s attention
on the panorama. In any case, it may well
be that Squire Lester Filley, who built the
house in 1812 and presumably oversaw
the installation of the Zuber paper, never
intended such a busy array. Mott told us
that he had been offered $35,000 for the
panoramic paper—more than a quarter
of the value of the house and land at the
time. Thankfully he refused.
I am struck by the ingenuity of the
paper’s design and making and the
respect it shows for its subject, despite
the historical ignorance of the time. The
sheer ambition of the craftsmanship
is still evident: the number of colors is
beyond counting and the preindustrial
techniques used are difficult to unravel.
Katia and I both make reduction prints, in
which the matrix is continually reduced
and re-printed over the existing impres-
sions (an often confounding process), and
I am reminded of this type of strategic
printmaking when I look at certain pas-
sages in the room. Take, for example, the
foliage, particularly the trees. I’m not sug-
gesting that reduction was the method
used to make this paper, but I think a
similar tactical planning of color separa-
tions is evident in the chiaroscuro pas-
sages depicting trees in daylight—dark
near the trunk, the leaves nearly black,
and then a succession of leaves, rendered
over multiple printings, in many values
right up to a bright spring green. I can
imagine the block-cutters working with
drawings on some sort of very thin paper
that may actually have been glued to the
blocks. Am I projecting my awareness of
Ukiyo-e printmaking techniques, some-
thing French artisans would not see for
another sixty-plus years? Perhaps. Suffice
it to say, I am astounded by the technical
virtuosity in this work.
I am also deeply moved by the style of
drawing throughout: despite the printed
signature, there’s a vernacular anonymity
to the way this entire work is designed.
The cult of the individual, pervasive
in Modernism and beyond, is not pres-
ent here. My own work pays homage to
craftsmanship and intricacy (albeit in
a very personal way, referencing math-
ematics, physics and empirical thinking), Vues d’Italie wallpaper installed at James Siena and Katia Santibañez’s house in Otis, MA.
Image courtesy of Armin Kunz.
and I am struck by the modesty of the
overall effect of the paper in the room.
It is meant to transport us, and it does. The panorama—Vues d’Italie—is in the dle of a meal, eyes and minds can slow
By downplaying virtuosity in drawing, dining room, which is the first room I see down and wander into the world of the
however, it communicates verisimilitude in the morning; I glance at it before step- wallpaper.
of experience, leaving the technical wiz- ping into the shower. When I stand at the I hope my father will travel to Massa-
ardry of the printmaking squarely in the center of the room, I am surrounded by chusetts one day and see this fabulous
background. This is, to me, an emblem of Italy—but I think about the paintings of room.
early 19th-century parsimony, albeit in Hubert Robert (who died ten years before
the service of depicting an exotic locale the paper was first printed in 1818) and of James Siena and Katia Santibañez are artists
almost none of its viewers would directly the Parc Monceau in Paris with its 18th- who live and work in New York City and in the
experience. That is a marvelous para- century faux-Classical “ruins.” Berkshires.
dox when viewed from our time, one I’m I have wondered about the connection
thrilled to embrace. between this wallpaper and my art: when
One evening, a couple of years after I was a student at the École des beaux arts,
we bought the house, we were in Paris— my paintings were informed by architec-
Katia’s hometown—walking down the tural edifices and the trees surrounding
Boulevard Beaumarchais, when to our them, and I always use layers of water-
surprise and delight we happened upon based paint, producing a matteness and
the Zuber showroom. There, in the win- opacity similar to the effect of the dis-
dow, was “our” wallpaper. What a jolt temper used in the aged Zuber paper.
of coincidence, connection and contra- We do not know much about Lester
diction! A French vision of an Italian Filley, the lawyer who built our house in
fantasy, first met in New England, then the early 19th century. Perhaps he chose
re-encountered in Paris, by a Franco- this paper because he had traveled to
Italian–New England couple. How fitting. Europe and wanted to share his experi-
ence with his friends and his family, or
Katia Santibañez perhaps for him Europe was merely a fan-
tasy, as it was for many Americans.
In the early 21st century, Filley’s

I grew up in France, and my father, a

decorative painter, covered the walls
of our home with patterned and Japanese
papers. I was familiar with the Zuber
wallpaper company but I had never seen
any of their panoramas. Now I am lucky
enough to live in a New England house
with one.
house—now our home—is a place where
an American artist with Italian ances-
tors and a French artist who is now also
an American citizen spend some of each
year, building a life, making art, protect-
ing memories. The dining room is where
we share conversation, food and music
with our friends, and where, in the mid-

Art in Print November – December 2016 9

To The Last Syllable of Recorded Time:
Christian Marclay
By Susan Tallman

A t the end of the eight-page descrip-

tion of Diego Velazquez’ Las
Meninas (1656) that opens The Order of
Things, Michel Foucault acknowledged a
fundamental snag in his undertaking:
The relationship of language to paint-
ing is an infinite relation  .  .  . neither
can be reduced to the other’s terms:
it is in vain that we say what we see;
what we see never resides in what we
say. And it is in vain that we attempt
to show, by the use of images, meta-
phors or similes, what we are saying;
the space where they achieve their
splendor is not that deployed by our
eyes but that defined by the sequential
elements of syntax.1
Foucault was, at that moment, con-
cerned with the 17th century, but the
mismatch he articulates is universal—an
ineluctable ellipse between two endeav-
ors, both seductive, both lit indepen-
dently with the promise of meaning.
Contemporary art has spent the last half-
century scrutinizing that ellipse with the
tenacity of a dog worrying a bone, and
not only with words and canvas. If “paint-
ing” can be understood as a metonym for
visual art in general, and music can be
considered a “language” (aural informa-
tion unfolding over time), then Christian
Marclay may be the artist of the “infinite
relation” par excellence.
For nearly four decades Marclay has
explored the incommutability of sound
and vision, working in sculpture, perfor-
mances, installations, works on paper,
scores and paintings. As both a visual
artist and DJ on the improvised music
scene in the 1980s, Marclay did just about
everything you could to do vinyl records— Christian Marclay, Actions: Splish, Plop, Plash, Plash (No. 4) (2015), screenprint with handpainted
played them on turntables, cut and col- acrylic, 49 x 35 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and USF Graphicstudio ©2015. Photo: Will Lytch.
laged them, cut their jackets and collaged
those, stacked them in towering columns, cases. This preoccupation with pictured Though often described as a “sound
glued them to the floor to be walked on, sound might have become limited and artist,” Marclay has never focused on the
melted and crumpled them, inked and repetitive, an iconographic one-shtick phenomenological presence of sound
printed them.2 When vinyl became less pony, but Marclay has built it into a poetic, in space in the manner of Maryanne
commonplace, Marclay turned his atten- droll and occasionally bruising meditation Amacher or Alvin Lucier. It is the things
tion to cassette tapes, CDs, loudspeak- on time and all our beautiful and futile we confuse with sound that fascinate
ers, musical instruments and their empty attempts to fix it. him—the recordings, the notation, the

10 Art in Print November – December 2016

packaging, the devices that pretend to
give solid and immutable substance to
fleeting experience. Using a camera,
Marclay has compiled a vast pictorial
encyclopedia of objects that ask us to
hear with our eyes: musical staves on
blackboards and deodorant tubes, biceps
tattooed with quarter notes, wrought-
iron G-clefs. His 2007 portfolio of pho-
togravures, Sound Holes, documents the
perforated metal sunbursts, snowflakes
and Chinese Checkers patterns of inter-
com systems.
Photography’s job is to freeze the
moment, and in that sense it is the oppo-
site of music, which can be experienced
only by the trickling away of seconds.
The nesting of such contradictions is
exactly what Marclay does so well. His
photographic editions Graffiti Composi-
tion (2002), 3 Shuffle (2007)4 and Ephemera
(2009) 5 are also musical scores. Each pic-
ture provides a set scene and also a play-
able motif that can be unfolded, mixed
and sequenced by the user—unfrozen
and returned, as it were, to time.
There is a reason that Shakespeare had
Macbeth frame the futility of existence in
terms of sound.6 The allure of objects—
silent and stalwart—is that they endure,
but sound decays, comes to an end, gives
way to the void. Implicit in much of Mar-
clay’s earlier work, this trade-off has
become increasingly visible over the past
decade, beginning with his 2006 screen-
prints, based on Andy Warhol’s first
Electric Chair paintings (1964–65).7 Mar-
clay’s versions dispensed with the chair Christian Marclay, from Sound Holes (2007), suite of 21 photogravures in a clamshell box, image
and most of the room, preserving only a 9 x 7 inches each, sheet 13 1/4”x 11 inches each. Edition of 12. Image courtesy of the artist and USF
Graphicstudio ©2007. Photo: Will Lytch.
door and its plangent sign: SILENCE . It
is a part of the composition that Warhol
himself eliminated when he returned by Anna Atkins, whose 1843 Photographs itself inevitably recalls the blueprints that
to the subject in 1967 and cropped the of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions is Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Weil
image more tightly. For viewers who can thought to be the first photographically made between 1949 and 1951—works that
identify the chain of citations (Marclay illustrated book. constitute as good a marker as any for the
to Warhol to the execution chamber at Marclay’s specimens were cassette mid-century paradigm shift away from
Sing Sing), the presence of death is tapes. Each of his 35 Automatic Draw- expressionism and toward the stuff-in-
explicit, but even without footnotes, the ings (2008) is an individual portrait of the-world concerns of everything since.
word and its grainy delivery intimate loss a Sony cassette disgorging a loop of Marclay, however, approached cyano-
and terror. tape. (Because there is no negative, each type on an unprecedented scale: over the
In 2008 Marclay returned to the impression is unique.) The clear plastic course of two years he created works in six
Florida workshop where he had made case produced a nimbus-like glow, and it compositional series, 8 the largest more
his Sound Hole photogravures, Graph- is almost impossible not to read the spools than eight feet long. While Graphicstudio
icstudio, to work with cyanotype. One as eyes and the lolling twist of tape as an had some experience with the medium,
of the earliest techniques for a direct elaborate tongue. The curls resemble the size and specifics of Marclay’s project
photographic exposure (no camera, no the ovoid loops produced by wrists freed presented new challenges, and Tampa’s
negative), cyanotype was developed in from conscious control, and Marclay’s climate created further complications—
the 1840s to duplicate drawn designs like title points to Surrealist automatism, but the heat of the sun would cause the tape
architectural blueprints. Its potential other associations are equally compel- to move unexpectedly, while the humid-
for fixing evanescent botanical speci- ling. The tape’s seemingly organic wiggle ity meant prepared papers had to be
mens was, however, quickly recognized evokes Atkins’s algae, and the medium used within the day. On the other hand,

Art in Print November – December 2016 11

Christian Marclay, Memento (Prince) (2008), unique cyanotype, 51 1/2 x 97 3/4 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and USF Graphicstudio ©2008.
Photo: Will Lytch.
the 15–20-minute exposure times meant
Marclay could drape, rake and swirl miles
of disemboweled quarter-inch tape, add-
ing and removing elements, much as an
etcher might add or stop out lines on a
plate to vary the strength of different
lines, producing images of subtle, sub-
aquatic depth.
Cassettes, like LPs, were once handy
metonyms for music, but they never had
the same expansive confidence—there
Christian Marclay (center) producing a unique cyanotype at Graphicstudio, University of South Florida,
Tampa. Image courtesy of USF Graphicstudio, Photo: Will Lytch.
12 Art in Print November – December 2016
was always something a little mean, a lit-
tle sad, a little “seventies” about them. A
black vinyl disk outside its sleeve is iconic,
but the spilled guts of a cassette are
mildly indecent—a sign that things have
gone badly wrong. The power of Mar-
clay’s cyanotypes is closely wrapped with
this slightly abject, slightly tragic char-
acter. Their one-to-one scale prompts
us to identify instantly the material
that formed these ribbons of light, to
recognize the destruction they repre-
sent, to understand their lost promise as
music.
Many of the cyanotypes are sub-
titled with the names of the bands and
composers they contain. But while it is
tempting to search for hardcore urgency
in Memento (Hüsker Dü) or classicism in
Allover (Céline Dion, Dvořák, Mozart and
Others), this is nonsense: magnetic par-
ticles on strips of plastic block light in
the same way whether they play Ignatz
Biber or Justin Bieber. And in any case,
the musical selection is circumstantial—
the result of whatever economic cur-
rents caused these particular recordings
to wash up in Tampa thrift shops in the
early 21st century. (Marclay, who lives
most of the year in London, calls Graphic-
studio his “studio away from his stu-
dio,” but the city’s low-end retail outlets
are also a draw; in ten years of visits to
Tampa he has never been to the beach.)
In the Memento cyanotypes, shattered
cassette boxes litter the bottom while
tape droops in bedraggled catenaries
from the upper edge like party streamers
the morning after—the relics of a disco-
era Miss Havisham. In the Allover series
he removed gravity from the equation,
scattering tape across the prone paper
in layers that suggest nebulae, neural
ganglia, or, as per the title, the “allover”
paintings of Jackson Pollock.
 The nod to Pollock isn’t simply a pun
based on the way that tape echoes the
fall of paint when flung. The definitive
“action painter,” Pollock embodied the
idea of painting as performance. What
went on the canvas, as Harold Rosenberg
put it, was “not a picture but an event,”9
and this conflation of passive object and
motile behavior has implications that
extend far beyond Expressionism. What-
ever truths about the human condition
might be read into action painting, it also
stakes a claim as a recording.10
Action has since emerged as the stated
subject of Marclay’s collages, gravures,
scrolls and screenprint paintings. In
them, the deep silence of the cyanotypes
gives way to sound and fury—the jag-
ged letterforms and massed exclamation
points of comic book onomatopoeia.11
Manga Scroll (2010) is a 60-foot-long roll-
ing torrent of cartoon verbiage that, like
so many of Marclay’s prints, also func-
tions as a musical score.12 The swell-
ing or attenuation of letter blocks, their
boldness or fragility, offer performance
instructions as clearly as any pianissimo
marking. The comics artists who drew
these noises were striving for instanta-
neous impact, and yet onomatopoeia has
never been a universal language—not
only do writing systems and spelling con-
ventions vary, the aural experience of par-
ticular events seems to differ from culture
to culture: a drinking dog goes “glup” in
Finland, but “lefety lefety” in Hungary.13
Left: Installation view of Manga Scroll (2010) at “Christian Marclay. Action,” Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, 30 August–15 November 2015. Photo:
René Rötheli, Baden. Right: Christian Marclay, Manga Scroll (2010), lithography on Gampi paper, sheet 16 x 787 1/2 inches, scroll 19 x 3 x 3 inches,
box 20 3/4 x 5 x 5 1/8 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and USF Graphicstudio ©2010. Photo: Will Lytch.
For Marclay, slippage, rather than trans-
parency, is the point. The words were
cut from American editions of Japanese
manga: each POING and KBLOOSH rep-
resents a sound heard, transliterated, cal-
ligraphed and printed; then translated,
redrawn and printed again; then clipped,
collaged, digitally trimmed and printed a
third time, in order to be read and trans-
lated—finally—back into sounds in time
and space.
Manga Scroll and the large hanging
scrolls that followed14 contrast the qui-
etude of traditional Japanese aesthetics
with the brashness of Japan’s most popular
contemporary cultural export. His manga
photogravures do something similar to the
Western graphic tradition. The implicit
dignity of intaglio endows these excitedly
silly syllables with an unexpected elegance
and authority. In SPLOOSH (2012), the title
word explodes at the center of the page
in expected style, but the irregular blob
that sits behind it has none of the linear Christian Marclay, Automatic Drawing (2008),
precision of a cartoon; instead it suggests cyanotype, 12 x 7 1/2 inches. Graphicstudio
a beautifully etched liquid mess—the proof. Image courtesy of the artist and USF
Graphicstudio ©2008. Photo: Will Lytch.
aftermath of a SPLOOSH, rather than its
schematic representation. Three modes of
explanation are abutted here—the word, Coriander Studio in London. Cartoon
the drawing, and the trace—all shouting onomatopoeias of liquid sounds—the
“action” in perfect stillness. splats and slups that might accompany
This pairing of an action’s result with the action of action painting—are printed
the graphic rendering of its sound pro- overtop canvas or paper that has been
vides the structure for the screenprint splashed with paint. The result is, of
paintings that Marclay has been mak- course, funny—the wiseacre visual lan-
ing since 2013 with Graphicstudio and guage of Pop defusing the metaphysical
Art in Print November – December 2016 13

pretensions of Abstract Expressionism.
Marclay describes them as “parodies of
painting,” but goes on to point out, “they
have to be beautiful or work visually. I
think the idea of beauty and parody can
coexist.” And unlike the carefully delin-
eated Brushstroke paintings of Roy Lich-
tenstein, the joke here is tethered to a real
event. The paint really did go sploosh;
there was a moment when Marclay stood
a few feet away and made that happen.
The forensic evidence is as plain to see as a
blood splatter.
First shown at Paula Cooper in 2013,
these works anchored “Liquids,” Mar-
clay’s 2015 exhibition at White Cube in
14 Art in Print November – December 2016
London. “Liquids” also incorporated
onomatopoeic videos, a live concert
series, an on-site record-pressing plant
that could transform the concert into
vinyl before your eyes, and screenprint-
ers live-printing record jackets. (Though
the art on the walls was out of reach for
most buyers, the records could be had for
just £25.) Here, it would seem, you had it
all—actions and experiences recorded,
processed, stamped, adorned. Each stage
was duly marked and yet, in the end, time
disappeared anyway.
Time—regulated, standardized, tick-
tock time—is the subject of Marclay’s
most famous work, the 24-hour video
Left: Christian Marclay, Actions: Whop
SwooooshSplsh (No. 8) (2012), screenprint
with hand-painted acrylic, 34 7/8 x 49 1/8 inches.
Above: Christian Marclay, Klak Klak Klak
(2012), photogravure, image 11 11/16 x 8 1/8
inches, sheet 14 9/16 x 11 1/16 inches. Edition of
25. Both images courtesy of the artist and USF
Graphicstudio ©2012. Photos: Will Lytch.
installation, The Clock (2010), which
won the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion
award and has made Marclay something
of a museum-going-household name.
Composed of more than 12,000 film
clips marking every minute of the day,
The Clock is hypnotic, exhausting and
exhilarating in its scale, in a way no static
object—however wrapped in the sub-
lime—can be.
But for all the differences of form
between it and Marclay’s prints and
paintings, scrolls and scores, they work to
frame the same thing: the ellipse between
the way life is lived, one note to the next,
and the records we feel compelled to
make of it. Maybe the space of that ellipse
is infinite, as Foucault promised, and
maybe it signifies nothing, as Macbeth
opines. Marclay suggests there is room
for both: sound and silence; silence
turned back into sound. “Time is music,”
Marclay has said, and composer Nicolas
Collins, who has performed with him
since the 1980s, notes that he has always
been a “master of time.”
Susan Tallman is the Editor-in-Chief of
Art in Print.
Notes:
1. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An
Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York:
Vintage Books, 1973), 9.
2. Working with Judith Solodkin at Solo Impres-
sion in New York in 1990, Marclay made relief
prints from inked records arranged on the press
bed. (The trick was in inking the surfaces so the
grooves did not fill in, allowing each to appear
as a luminous, weightless disk.) With Solodkin
he also used letterpress to blindstamp Beatles
lyrics across the central spreads of the White
Album (designed by Richard Hamilton) and Sgt.
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (designed by
Peter Blake).
3. Graffiti Composition began as a public art proj-
ect during the Berlin sound art festival Sonam-
biente; music notation paper was fly-pasted
around the city and its afterlife documented in
photographs. A selection of 150 photographs was
published as an edition-cum-score, and has been
frequently performed in concert. See Susan Tall-
man, “All the World’s a Stave,” in Christian Mar-
clay: Festival (New York: Whitney Museum of
American Art, 2010), vol. 1, n.p., and Susan Tall-
man, “Always this Tüdelditut: Christian Marclay’s
‘Graffiti Composition,’” Art on Paper 4, no. 6 (July/
Aug. 2000): 28–33.
4. Shuffle (New York: Aperture, 2007) is a boxed
deck of 75 oversized cards, each bearing a pho-
tograph.
5. Ephemera (Paris: mfc-michèle didier, 2009)
includes 28 folios, published in an edition of 90.
6. “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,/
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,/ To
the last syllable of recorded time;/ And all our
yesterdays have lighted fools/ The way to dusty
death. Out, out, brief candle!/ Life’s but a walking
shadow, a poor player,/ That struts and frets his
hour upon the stage,/ And then is heard no more.
It is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/
Signifying nothing.” Macbeth (5.5.19–28).
7. The screenprinting was done with Donald
M. Sheridan, who had worked for Warhol in the
1970s and ’80s.
8. In addition to the Automatic Drawings, Memen-
tos and Allovers described here, there were
Mashups (diptychs in which each side featured
one cassette-spewing tape), large and small Cas- Christian Marclay, Sploosh (2012), photogravure, 15 3/4 x 11 5/8 inches. Edition of 10. Image courtesy
sette Grids (arrangements of cassette boxes both of the artist and USF Graphicstudio ©2012. Photo: Will Lytch.
filled and empty), as well as some untitled works.
See Christian Marclay: Cyanotypes, (Zurich: JRP/
Ringier Kunstverlag, 2011).
9. Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Paint-
ers,” Art News 51, no. 8 (Dec. 1952): 22. 13. From Dr. Derek Abbot’s spreadsheet of animal
10. Marclay has noted, and made work about, onomatopoeia: http://www.eleceng.adelaide.edu.
the propensity of jazz album covers to feature au/Personal/dabbott/animal.html/
abstract expressionist painting, a pop-cultural 14. In each of Marclay’s hanging scrolls, an
acknowledgement of this equation. onomatopoeic comic-book collage occupies the
11. In 1989 Marclay made a number of works in central position held by calligraphy in a tradi-
which he painted over comic book pages to iso- tional kakemono scroll. The collages were vastly
late bits of onomatopoeia. See Russell Fergu- enlarged from tiny originals such that dot screens
son, ed., Christian Marclay (Los Angeles: UCLA become loud polka dots and torn paper fibers look
Hammer Museum and Göttingen: Steidl, 2003) like fur. The rectangular arrangement of surround-
and Madeleine Schuppli, ed., Christian Marclay: ing fabrics is more-or-less in accordance with
Action (Aarau, Switzerland: Aargauer Kunsthaus tradition (a large rectangle at the top for heaven,
and Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2015). a slightly smaller one at bottom for earth, and nar-
12. Manga Scroll has been performed by Joan row vertical pillars either side), but their strident
LaBarbara, Shelley Hirsch, Phil Minton, Elaine patterns and chemical colors echo the character
Mitchener, David Moss, Theo Bleckmann and of the collages with contrapuntal precision. See
Koichi Makigami. Excerpts from many of these Christian Marclay: Scrolls (Tokyo: Gallery Koy-
performances can be viewed on YouTube. anagi, 2011).

Art in Print November – December 2016 15


PRIX
de
PRINT
This iteration of the Art in Print Prix
de Print has been judged by Chang
Yuchen. The Prix de Print is a
bimonthly competition, open to all
subscribers, in which a single work is
selected by an outside juror to be the sub-
ject of a brief essay. For further informa-
tion on entering the Prix de Print, please
go to our website: http://artinprint.org/
about-art-in-print/#competitions.
Colin Lyons, Time Machine for Abandoned
Futures (2015)
Gold-rush artifacts, plexiglas, aluminum,
copper sulphate, soda ash, copper etching
plates, zinc etching plates plates, wires,
96 x 108 x 168 inches. Unique work.
E
rected on a bluff overlooking
Bonanza Creek in the Canadian
Yukon, Colin Lyons’ Time Machine for
Abandoned Futures uses a vast battery,
made of etching plates and acid, to power
the electrolytic cleaning of broken tools
and machine parts left behind by the
Klondike Gold Rush. Once cleared of
rust, the artifacts were etched with what
Lyons calls “markings of ruination.”
The project takes on physics, chemis-
try, environmentalism and social history,
but to me, as a printmaker, it is also very
much about the nature of printmak-
ing itself. And so I offer the following
thoughts:
Printmaking is about traces. A finger-
print on a dusty desk, a childhood scar
on your knee, a transparent area on a
frosted window left by a warm breath;
printmaking is about something once
here and no longer.
16 Art in Print November – December 2016
Prix de Print No. 20
Time Machine
for Abandoned Futures
by Colin Lyons
Juried by Chang Yuchen
Traces are inevitable. Flowing water
changes the shape of pebbles and coast-
lines, people live and then disappear.
They leave artifacts behind, with which
we speculate and imagine their own-
ers’ existence, constructing an image of
our past.
Artifacts in museums attract me like
a magnet. I stare and stare, sometimes
without reflecting on what the object is,
merely trying to keep my eyes affixed to
it. There’s always a feeling of potential, as
if something vital is about to reveal itself
in the rusty surface, but just not yet. It
is as if we—the artifact and I—will both
vanish in loneliness as soon as I turn
my eyes away.
Rust and erosion, and wrinkles, too.
These traces are loaded with informa-
tion, with the dimensions of places and
histories. They whisper stories rich in
texture. We desire stories, always and
forever. “Rather than your face as a young
woman, I prefer your face as it is now.
Ravaged,” says the lover in Marguerite
Duras’ autobiographical novel.1
“In the essay,” Adorno writes, “concepts
do not build a continuum of operations,
thought does not advance in a single
direction, rather the aspects of the argu-
ment interweave as in a carpet. The fruit-
fulness of the thoughts depends on the
density of this texture.“2
Printmakers tend to plan ahead, to be
never-theless flexible, to enjoy physi-
cal labor, and to be drawn to the subtle.
Printmaking is a kind of education, that
is to say, a means to an end (I forgot my
high school math long ago but I am a
better problem solver because of those
endless homework problems I did at 16).
Like a tunnel full of experiences and
satisfactions, it leads to wide-open space
at the end. Printmaking is a manner of
practice, respectful and committed, and
the form of the outcome is free.
Every work of art includes the activity
of performance; whichever medium it
takes. There are always decisions, actions
and reactions, composition and impro-
visation. The artist is walking, seeking,
collecting materials and treating them
with (critical) affection. Artists expose
themselves in the field of discourse and
feelings, as dancers measure and mani-
fest gravity in their movements.
“Gold Rush.” It is an historical event but
also a kind of poetry. The words, joined
together, suggest a flood of glittering,
molten metal—incredibly beautiful but
also horrifying, seductive and destruc-
tive.
The requirement of contemporary art:
something new, something old, some-
thing to look at, something to talk about.
The requirement of the heart: care.
Chang Yuchen is an artist who lives and works
in New York.
Notes:
1. Marguerite Duras, The Lover, tr. Barbara Bray.
(New York: Scribner’s, 1993).
2. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” tr.
Bob Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, New German
Critique 32 (Spring-Summer 1984): 151–71.
Colin Lyons, Time Machine for Abandoned Futures (2015). Top: View of the installation on Midnight Dome in the Klondike. Center left: The artist using
a metal detector searching through dredge tailings near Bonanza Creek. Center right: The roof-top battery composed of etching plates and acid. Lower
left: Electrolytic cleaning of rust from the scavenged artifacts. Lower right: Object showing etched markings. Time Machine for Abandoned Futures was
produced with the support of Klondike Institute of Art & Culture and Canada Council for the Arts. All photos by the artist.

Art in Print November – December 2016 17

EXHIBITION REVIEW

Ironic Columns and Cynical Structures:

Ania Jaworska at MCA Chicago
By Julie Warchol

“BMO Harris Bank Chicago Works:

Ania Jaworska”
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
25 August 2015 – 31 January 2016

T he Museum of Contemporary Art’s

exhibition of prints and sculpture
by Ania Jaworska was the first in its ongo-
ing series on artists working in Chicago
to feature an architect, and the first solo
show for Jaworska. Curated by Grace
Deveney, it addressed the relationship
between graphic and built spaces; design
and construction; history and practice
through a site-specific installation of
sculptures, Cynic Architectures (2012–2015)
and a portfolio of 17 screenprints, A Sub-
jective Catalog of Columns (2015), that
offers an abridged, quirky history of mod-
ern architecture through one of its most
salient features.
Conceptually related in their critique
of form and function, the two bodies of
work occupied separate spaces. The five
black sculptures, arranged in a small
gallery with black walls and carpet, sug-
gested familiar objects and devices for
directing the human passage through
space. The curved steel arch of Gated
Area (2015) led into a small, circular space
fenced by a low steel railing; one could
easily enter the circle by stepping over
the railing, but the work highlighted
ingrained human habit: most visitors
chose to enter and exit through the arch-
way. While Gated Area beckoned us in,
the circled stanchions of Untitled (Empty
Gesture, 2015) impeded access, restrict-
ing visitors from nothing but empty
space. Other sculptures employed words
in mind/object games: three rectilinear Ania Jaworska, Saint from A Subjective Catalog of Columns (2015), screenprint on folio paper,
columns, strategically barred and dotted, 55.9 x 76.2 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
contrived to spell an elongated “HI,” and
another column was topped with a slowly The architectural realities experienced play on the didactic visual catalogues
rotating “HERE” sign, tweaking the mute kinesthetically in Cynic Architectures that have directed Western architectural
architectonic minimalism of Robert are explored graphically in Jaworska’s understanding since Caesar Caesariano’s
Morris, whose gray columnar sculptures screenprint portfolio of real and imag- 1521 translation of Vitruvius’ De architec-
are meant to call attention to their pres- ined columns, which was displayed in tura (originally first-century BC), with its
ence as forms that transform our interac- its entirety across two large white walls engravings of elements and elevations in
tion with the surrounding space. in a separate gallery. The portfolio is a schematic isolation.1 Of all the various

18 Art in Print November – December 2016


Installation view: “BMO Harris Bank Chicago Works: Ania Jaworska,” Museum of Contemporary Art
Chicago, 2015–2016. Photo: Nathan Keay, ©MCA Chicago.
building parts, the column came to stand
as the premier representative of distinct
architectural styles. Whatever under-
standing most of us have of the orders
of ancient Greek architecture—Doric,
Ionic and Corinthian—usually boils
down to the columns we saw illustrated
in textbooks and classrooms. “The col-
umn,” Jaworska explains, “has become a
complex symbol that embodies issues of
status, taste, tradition and advancement.
It has been celebrated and misused, rein-
vented and ridiculed.”2
Shrewdly, Jaworska uses these
detached architectural supports to distill
recent and contemporary cultural zeit-
geists, from neoclassical stateliness to
modernist severity to the fanciful post-
modern indulgence. As in the didactic
engravings that anatomized architecture
from 1521 onward, each of Jaworska’s sub-
jects is isolated on the page, decontex-
tualized from any natural surroundings
or integrated purpose. But in place of
engraving’s stern black-and-white linear-
ity, she has adopted the strong flat color
and hard-edged style of Pop screenprints,
updating the venerated Vitruvian model
for 21st-century eyes and imaginations.
She designed these clean, bold images
using the contemporary, digital tools of
the architectural trade—AutoCAD and
Illustrator—and printed and published
them herself.
Subjective Catalog is not an exhaus-
tive history of architectural accomplish-
ments, but a witty satire on history’s
habitual repetition of forms, beginning
with the subject of #1, which the architect
proposes may be the first column: two
sticks tied together. The precariousness
and flammability of early columns—the
first in ancient Mycenae and Greece were
made of wood, not stone—is also repre-
sented by Wooden Column on Fire (It Was
Always Burning), a flat, patterned render-
ing of a Doric column set aflame. Desire
highlights contemporary columns that
are constructed from artificial materials
to resemble trees in a perverted effort to
get “back to nature.”
In other prints, Jaworska quotes, con-
torts, praises and critiques the sleek,
minimal forms of mid-20th-century
modernism as well as the ostentatious
appropriations of certain postmodern-
ists. The most reverent of these prints,
Saint, pays homage to Ludwig Mies van
der Rohe, the godfather of high modern-
ist architecture in Chicago, in the form of
a cross-shaped steel column, ringed with
a halo, in a rich field of black. A professor
for two decades at the Illinois Institute
of Technology, Mies accrued a large net-
work of students devoted to his minimal
glass-and-steel International Style. Saint
cunningly acknowledges the soaring
I-beams that form the façade of Mies’s
famous 860–880 Lake Shore Drive Apart-
ments (located just a few blocks from the
MCA) as modernist icons.
In contrast to the solemnity of Mie-
sian forms, The 90s depicts seven free-
floating colorful, metallic columns that
playfully defy expectations of vertical-
ity, an oblique reference to architects
such as Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid and
Will Alsop who supplanted high modern
sobriety with curved lines, bright colors
and seemingly impossible structures.3
After Slavin House riffs on Greg Lynn’s
innovative proposal for a house to be
constructed from a single curvilinear
steel tube in place of straight columns.
In Jaworska’s tribute, the incomplete “col-
umn” spells out “ WOW,” an affirmation of
the design’s unprecedented conception.
Some compositions act as metaphors
for architectural history itself. Although
the vertical corkscrew in The Future Is
Informed by the Past alludes to the spi-
raling of the Solomonic columns of Byz-
antium, it also symbolizes the cyclical
nature of history, as architects continu-
ously recycle old forms in new structures.
The choppy, irregular outline in Where is
that Knife? refers to Stanley Tigerman’s
directive to young architects to carve out
new ideas rather than reiterate the tired
forms of their predecessors.4 The pink,
curvaceous, anthropomorphic column in
It’s Not Easy calls attention to the difficul-
ties of women working in what remains a
male-dominated field.
The screenprint Faking It—like the
sculpture VIP Lounge (2015)—exposes the
symbolic nature of architectural forms
stripped of their structural purpose. The
print features two engaged Ionic col-
umns that blend almost seamlessly into a
neoclassical stone wall, while the shad-
ow cast by a free-standing Ionic column
emphasizes the structural irrelevance of
Ania Jaworska, It’s Not Easy from A Subjective
Catalog of Columns (2015), screenprint on folio
paper, 55.9 x 76.2 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Art in Print November – December 2016 19
Left: Ania Jaworska, Faking It from A Subjective Catalog of Columns (2015), screenprint on folio paper, 55.9 x 76.2 cm. Right: Ania Jaworska,
After Slavin House from A Subjective Catalog of Columns (2015), screenprint on folio paper, 55.9 x 76.2 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
both the pilasters and the column. VIP
Lounge consists of two flat, thin, steel
shapes reminiscent of Ionic columns
propped several feet from the gallery wall
by four inelegant sandbags. Left with
rhyme but no reason, these forms are
reduced to little more than self-aggran-
dizing kitsch.
Finally, embodying architecture’s
cyclical nature, Jaworska ends her Subjec-
tive Catalog where it began, with a simple
vertical line: The Future brings the mini-
mal modernist column to the point of
near-invisibility.
Through these whimsical, immacu-
lately printed studies, Jaworska recreates
the typological catalogue as a sharp
insider commentary on the past, present
and future of architecture. In her prints
and sculpture she makes clear that archi-
tects do more than construct spaces; they
create and perpetuate forms imbued with
symbolism. Entertaining and educa-
tional, Jaworska’s art teaches us to slow
down, take notice and think critically
about the structures that surround us
every day.
20 Art in Print November – December 2016
Julie Warchol is the Associate Editor of
Art in Print and the Curatorial Associate at the
Terra Foundation for American Art in Chicago.
Notes:
1. Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, eds., The
Emergence of Modern Architecture: A Documen-
tary History from 1000 to 1810 (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2004), 95.
2. Ania Jaworska, “A Subjective Catalog of Col-
umns” (unpublished statement, 2015), in Grace
Deveney, “Signs of Our Place,” BMO Harris
Bank Chicago Works: Ania Jaworska (Chicago:
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2015).
3. Ania Jaworska, unpublished PDF document,
2016. Thanks to the artist for graciously provid-
ing more information on A Subjective Catalog of
Columns.
4. Like Jaworska, Tigerman has created numer-
ous drawings that satirize architecture, which he
calls “Architoons.” See Deveney, “Signs of Our
Place.”
EXHIBITION REVIEW

Matisse Bound and Unbound

By Vincent Katz

“Graphic Passion: Matisse and the Book Arts”

Morgan Library & Museum, New York
30 October 2015 – 18 January 2016

T he Morgan Library and Museum’s

remarkable exhibition on Henri
Matisse’s book works provided a wide-
ranging, in-depth view of his achieve-
ments in the realm of the artist’s book
and, perhaps surprisingly to some view-
ers, more commercial types of publica-
tion. One of the features the exhibition
and its accompanying substantial cata-
logue made apparent is that Matisse,
at the same time he devoted himself
fully to all elements of book production,
maintained a catholic attitude, assess-
ing each book project in its own terms,
always attempting to innovate within a
given form. He understood that books,
by nature collaborative ventures, were
opportunities for intersections, for going
beyond what one person alone could or
would accomplish. Of the 47 illustrated
books documented in the catalogue, 30
were included in the exhibition, often
supplemented by ancillary materials,
including sketches, rejected designs for
covers, and correspondence.
The exhibition, curated by John
Bidwell, Astor Curator of Printed Books
and Bindings at the Morgan, and its cata-
logue made use of previously unpublished
correspondence that provides intimate
knowledge of the artist’s decision-making
processes with regard to layout, orna-
ment and typography for each project.
Alternate, unused versions were help-
fully provided along with the glorious
final products, yet the amount of work
on display was not overwhelming, as
can sometimes be the case when a treat-
ment attempts to be definitive. Here, on
the contrary, the judicious choices were
illuminating.
The Frances and Michael Baylson
Collection, donated to the museum in
2010, is a definitive resource of Matisse’s
books, and it formed the backbone of the
exhibition. This gift followed one from
the Pierre and Tana Matisse Founda-
tion in 1997 of the Pierre Matisse Gallery
Archives, which include correspondence
Henri Matisse, linocut illustration and initial in Henry de Montherlant, Pasiphaé, Chant de Minos
(Les Crétois) (Paris: Martin Fabiani, 1944). Frances and Michael Baylson Collection, The Morgan
Library & Museum. ©2015 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photography
by Graham S. Haber, 2015.
from Henri confiding to his son details of
his progress on such book projects as the
problematic Ulysses (1935) and the classic
Jazz (1947). Objects from these two highly
significant collections were supple-
mented by choice pieces from the exten-
sive Cone Collection of Matisse’s work at
the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Matisse did not focus seriously on
books until the 1930s, when he was
already in his sixties, but they became
a mainstay of his output during World
War II, when he was isolated in the south
of France and used books to dissemi-
nate his recent work. He continued to be
deeply invested in such projects until his
death in 1954.
While his fascination with books
deepened later in life, the exhibition
included some intriguing examples from
early in his career. In 1912 he contributed
a portrait of André Rouveyre to a book of
that artist’s drawings. In 1918 he did five
drawings to go with three poems by his
friend Pierre Reverdy. The poet was not
happy with the resulting book, Les jock-
eys camouflés (The Camouflaged Jock-
eys), so took on the role of publisher for a
second edition, in which the typography
matches the simplicity of the drawings in
scale. This story is revealing, as it illus-
trates clearly how artwork, and poetry
as well, are transposed into book form.
Despite the most meticulous planning,
sometimes things go awry. This exhibi-
tion gave several examples of the creators’
refusing to accept a result as definitive
and continuing on to another effort in
order to bring the publication closer to
the artistic vision.
There was an interesting sidebar that
came near the end of the exhibition—
a copy of Virgil’s Eclogues, published in
Weimar in 1926 with woodcut illustra-
tions by Aristide Maillol. Matisse owned
a copy and used it as a model for Repli
(1947), a later book collaboration with his
friend Rouveyre. Also on view was a trac-
ing by Matisse’s assistant, Lydia Delector-
skaya, from the Maillol book that Matisse
shared with the printers of Repli so they
would have a clearer idea of his goals. It
is an interesting example of Matisse’s
knowledge of, and appreciation for, more
traditional typography. Matisse’s own
lettering was usually freer and more
experimental.
Matisse’s first engagement with the

Art in Print November – December 2016 21

Left: Henri Matisse, preliminary designs for Stéphane Mallarmé, Poésies (1932). Collection of The Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation ©2015 Succession
H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photography by Graham S. Haber, 2015. Right: Pierre Matisse, photograph of Henri Matisse in the Bois
de Boulogne (ca. 1931–1932). Gift of the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation, 1997, The Morgan Library & Museum. ©2015 Succession H. Matisse / Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York.
classic livre d’artiste, as it had been prac-
ticed in France by such artists as Manet,
Bonnard, Picasso and others, came in
Poésies (1933), a setting of the poetry of
Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898). The
publisher Albert Skira, some 35 years
Matisse’s junior, had founded his press in
1928 in Lausanne and opened an office in
Paris not long after. In 1933 he contacted
André Breton about a Surrealist journal
that became Minotaure, but before that
Skira offered Matisse the opportunity
to do a deluxe livre d’artiste, giving him
artistic control of the design. While Skira
may have chosen the type, Matisse had
his way with the imagery in the 29 etch-
ings ultimately used. This experience was
formative, and Matisse carried that sense
of freedom into many of his later projects.
It affected how he thought about books.
It is significant too that Mallarmé was
the poet chosen. Matisse felt a strong con-
nection to poetry—this came across very
clearly at the Morgan—and he chose to
work with it much more frequently than
with prose. Something about its visual
quality, but also its airy, indefinable nature
attracted him. Mallarmé had been recog-
nized in his own time as a trendsetter,
and his importance has only grown. He’s
particularly appreciated for his emphasis
on the musical as opposed to the semantic
elements in his verse, and for a high degree
of abstraction that renders his poems non-
specific, highly generalized, with powerful
emotional content.
Matisse’s first step for the Mallarmé
project was to sketch out the spreads
(which he called “openings”). This makes
sense, as Mallarmé himself was one of the
first poets to conceive his work in terms
22 Art in Print November – December 2016
of spreads. It also shows Matisse’s imme-
diate understanding of the nature and
potential of the book form. In the prints
included in the final book, Matisse’s sim-
ple but forceful etching line jumps off the
white expanse of paper. He described his
goals in filling the sheets: “The drawing
fills the entire page so that the page stays
light, because the drawing is not massed
towards the center, as usual, but spreads
over the whole page.”1 Matisse was sub-
tly transgressive in combining word and
image on the same sheet, as opposed to
placing artwork and text on facing pages,
as in many more traditional publications.
Another project with an important
writer—this time a living one—showed
great promise. George Macy of the Lim-
ited Editions Club, based in New York,
contracted Matisse in May of 1934 to do
an artist’s book version of James Joyce’s
Ulysses. Originally published in 1922 by
Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Com-
pany in Paris, Joyce’s masterpiece had
been banned in the U.S. and was not pub-
lished there in a complete form until 1934.
Matisse had not read Ulysses, but he knew
the book’s structure was based on Homer’s
Odyssey, as he had seen Joyce’s schematic
chart indicating the parallels between his
characters and Homer’s. Matisse decided
to use six subjects from the Greek epic and
to supplement them with a smaller num-
ber of images referring directly to Joyce’s
descriptions. Later this was reduced to six
Homeric subjects total, printed in soft-
ground etching; it is worth noting that
the illustration for Circe was based on a
Folies Bergère–type performance Matisse
had attended. Joyce approved of Matisse’s
approach, as he did not think literal illus-
trations desirable. Matisse always avoided
a direct interpretation of text. Instead he
strove to give his visual contributions an
agency parallel to that of the texts they
accompanied. Macy, however, felt Joyce’s
writing was too difficult to decipher and
was hoping Matisse’s images could be used
to make it more understandable.
Matisse wanted to explore a different
medium than he had used for Poésies.
“I need to conceive form in other terms
than the arabesque,” he wrote his son. 2
Pierre tried to convince his father to
stick with tried and true engraving, but
Matisse proposed to use lithography for
Ulysses, in order to work from dark to
light areas. These experiments did not
prove satisfactory, according to Matisse,
because Macy provided him with subpar
materials. Without informing the pub-
lisher, he switched to soft-ground etch-
ing, in a further attempt to achieve depth
and gradations.
Macy, provoked by this turn of events,
went so far as to hire another artist, the
American illustrator Lewis C. Daniel,
but the Joyce expert Stuart Gilbert pro-
nounced Daniel’s work to be caricature
that overlooked the humane qualities
of the novel. Macy had to go back to
Matisse. Ultimately 20 preliminary stud-
ies, reproduced in gravure on yellow and
blue paper, were included as a palliative,
the publisher thought, to help explain
the imagery to subscribers. Matisse, frus-
trated by the publisher’s lack of support,
ultimately disavowed the book, a sad
result indeed after the amount of work he
poured into it.
About ten years after Poésies, Matisse
got deeply involved in a book that pro-
Left: Henri Matisse, Le Toboggan, plate XX in Jazz (1947), pochoir. Courtesy of Frances and Michael Baylson ©2015 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York. Photography by Graham S. Haber, 2015. Right: Henri Matisse, Dernières oeuvres de Matisse 1950–1954 (Paris: Éditions de la
Revue Verve, 1958). Frances and Michael Baylson Collection, The Morgan Library & Museum. ©2015 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York. Photography by Graham S. Haber, 2015.
jected a different direction. Pasiphaé
(1944), by Henry de Montherlant, is based
on the Greek myth in which the Queen
of Crete is driven mad by Poseidon, caus-
ing her to desire and ultimately to have
sex with a bull, thereafter giving birth
to the Minotaur. For this book, instead
of thin engraved black lines on a white
ground used in Poésies, Matisse chose
the smoother lines of linocut to give his
images of Pasiphaë and the bull a surging
energy, while the effect of white lines on
a rich, dark ground enhanced the sense of
darkness inherent in the myth. Pleased
with linocut’s effect in conjunction with
letterpress text, Matisse would go on to
use it for several books. “Lino engraving
is a true medium predestined to be used
by the painter-illustrator,” he wrote. 3
Confined to a wheelchair after surgery
for abdominal cancer in 1941, Matisse
went on to develop the brilliant, colorful,
energetic cut-paper work that he contin-
ued for the rest of his life. He designed six
covers for the experimental art journal
Verve during the years 1937–60. The pub-
lisher, born Stratis Eleftheriades in Myt-
ilene, Greece, in 1889, had gone to Paris
to study law, changed his name to Téri-
ade, and became an important critic and
patron of the arts. The lavish treatment
and the dedication of space to recent
production by artists such as Bonnard,
Braque, Chagall and Picasso made Verve
special. As John Russell put it, “Funda-
mentally it was a hedonistic publication.
Marvels, not monsters, were its first field
of interest.”4 The last cover designed by
Matisse turned out to be posthumous,
and Tériade decided to make the issue an
homage to the master’s final years, show-
casing his work from 1950 to 1954.
After moving to Vence in 1943, Matisse
began using the cutout technique to
compose what would become perhaps
his best-known book, Jazz, published
by Tériade in 1947. Jazz is exemplary of
how Matisse treated each opportunity
to make a book in specific, experimental
ways. Despite the difficulties of work-
ing on this complex project during the
war, Tériade made sure that the artist
had everything he needed to achieve his
ambitious goals. Matisse was moved to
describe his publisher as “a very gifted
man, who has a great influence on artists,
especially when his passionate love for a
book is so great that it becomes part of
his life.”5 Clearly, this was a very different
experience from what Matisse had gone
through with Macy on Ulysses.
The Clown and Toboggan were the first
two images for the book that Matisse
showed Tériade, and, like some of the
pieces that followed, such as Horse
and Rider, they show that he originally
thought of the project as about the cir-
cus. Only later was the concept, if not the
images themselves, transformed under
the title Jazz. The greatest challenge was
finding a printing process that could
reproduce the particular gouache colors
of Matisse’s papiers découpés. After try-
ing—and giving up on—photogravure,
wood-engraving, photo-engraved zinc
blocks, linocut and pochoir, they finally
went back to the latter as the best at cap-
turing the vibrancy of Matisse’s colors,
albeit with some inaccuracy in reproduc-
ing the precise contours his scissors had
demarcated.
Art in Print November – December 2016 23

Henri Matisse, preliminary study for the etching in
the Circe chapter, Ulysses (1934). Collection of
The Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation ©2015
Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York. Photography by Graham S.
Haber, 2015.
The creation of the images was impro-
visatory in nature, which provided the
link to jazz, and Matisse composed a
text for the book that also partook of
spontaneous thought-experiments. The
project had originally been conceived as
an examination of color properties, and
the text was supposed to reflect those
concerns. Matisse, however, changed his
mind: “I am sick of color right now,” he
wrote Tériade, “and I dare not write about
it.”6 Instead he composed a series of short
texts that ruminate on happiness, jazz,
esthetics, creation, drawing and love.
The texts, drawn by the artist in a flow-
ing, cursive hand, perform an important
decorative function, as is always the case
with text in Matisse’s books, but that is
not to say that their observations are
insignificant. He writes:
The vertical is in my spirit. It helps
me orient the direction of lines,
and in my quick drawings, I don’t
make a curve, for example that of
a branch in a landscape, without
having an awareness of its rapport
with the vertical. My curves are not
mad.7
Despite the book’s success on publi-
cation, Matisse’s friend Rouveyre had
reservations, and Matisse wrote in
agreement:
I share your opinion absolutely.
Despite all the effort I put in it, I
never could get it right in principle.
24 Art in Print November – December 2016
It’s a failure through and through—
and I wonder why these cutouts are
appealing to me when I make them
and see them on the wall and why
they don’t have that puzzling aspect
I find in Jazz. I think it is the trans-
position that ruins them and strips
off their sensual quality—without
which anything I do is fruitless. For
that matter I told Tériade before
the exhibition what little sympathy
I have for that book. And now you
see it is an unprecedented success, a
landmark, etc. etc. 8
Eventually, Matisse came to praise the
color qualities of Jazz, while allowing that
the contours, made by artisans imitating
cuts the master had made, were not ade-
quate. There must be that feeling every
time, for an artist as demanding as
Matisse, to see the work so transformed.
But that is the essence of the book, and
thankfully Matisse not only persevered
but devoted some of his best energy to it.
A key to his success, from our point of
view, is that he never started out with a
preconceived idea, but let the materials,
the texts, collaborators and other ele-
ments guide him. “Composition condi-
tioned by the elements employed as well
as by their decorative values: black, white,
color, kind of engraving, typography,” he
wrote. “These elements are determined
by the demands of harmony for the book
as a whole and arise during the actual
progress of the work. They are never
Henri Matisse, Circus, plate II in Jazz (1947), pochoir. Courtesy of Frances and Michael Baylson
©2015 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photography by Graham S.
Haber, 2015.
decided upon before the work is under-
taken, but develop coincidentally as
inspiration and the direction of my pur-
suits indicate.”9 This improvisatory
approach to book-making, combined
with Matisse’s native genius for drawing,
color and composition, make his book
oeuvre unique.
Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, critic and
curator.
Notes:
1. Henri Matisse, “How I Made My Books,” in John
Bidwell, Graphic Passion: Matisse and the Book
Arts (New York: The Morgan Library & Museum,
2015), 233.
2. Henri Matisse, letter to Pierre Matisse, 28
March 1934, Pierre Matisse Gallery Archives,
quoted in Bidwell, 97.
3. Matisse, “How I Made My Books,” quoted in
Bidwell, 234.
4. John Russell, “Flair for the Grand Gesture:
Celebrating a Magazine,” The New York Times,
9 October 1988.
5. Jack Flam, ed., Matisse on Art (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995); quoted in
Bidwell, 177.
6. Henri Matisse to Tériade, quoted in Bidwell,
180.
7. La verticale est dans mon esprit. Elle m’aide
à préciser la direction des lignes, et dans mes
dessins rapides, je n’indique pas une courbe, par
exemple celle d’une branche dans un paysage,
sans avoir conscience de son rapport avec la
verticale. Mes courbes ne sont pas folles. Henri
Matisse, Jazz (Paris: Tériade éditeur, 1947).
8. Henri Matisse to André Rouveyre, quoted in
Bidwell, 183.
9. Matisse, “How I Made My Books,” quoted in
Bidwell, 233.
EXHIBITION REVIEW

New Light on Degas’ Dark Dramas

By Joseph Goldyne

“Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty”

The Museum of Modern Art, New York
26 March – 24 July 2016

T he recently concluded once-in-a-

lifetime exhibition of Degas mono-
types at the Museum of Modern Art
accomplished something rare among
ambitious monographic shows: along-
side works of unqualified greatness, it
gave space to imperfect, experimental
efforts without lessening our perception
of the artist’s stature. This grand display
made it clear that, despite his universally
acknowledged natural gifts, Degas was
all about hard work and persistence. In
the case of monotype, this labor was ded-
icated to a medium that did not best show
off his most marketable abilities: his elo-
quent draftsmanship, his convincing
capture of subtle emotion, and his inno-
vative and complex compositions, often
with bodies in motion. Indeed, for all the
interest in Degas’ remarkable pioneering
efforts on its behalf, he created relatively
few monotype masterpieces.
So why all the fuss? Firstly, the exhibi-
tion’s view of Degas as an open-minded
seeker is something of a revelation, given
the less venturesome artistic camps in
which he felt comfortable. Secondly,
it provided compelling evidence of his
artistic character—if Degas found a
process or subject fascinating, he pur-
sued it regardless of the public, collec-
tors or critics. Though personally and
socially conservative, even reactionary,
in his art Degas was driven by remark-
able curiosity and sustained by natural
enthusiasm. Like those who understand
what it means to do good science, Degas
seems to have been unfazed by less-than-
hoped-for results or even outright failure. Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, Café-Concert Singer (Chanteuse de café-concert) (ca. 1877), mono-
type on paper mounted on board, image 18.5 x 12.8 cm, sheet 23.5 x 18 cm. Private collection.
The breadth of inventive work at MoMA
proved that Degas found paths to follow
even when what he pulled from the press in copying and recopying. Replying to a of a monotype impression, whether
appeared unpromising. question from Ambroise Vollard about coarsely or delicately finished, was of far
In her insightful catalogue essay, how an artist should learn to paint, less interest to Degas than its potential
Stephanie O’Rourke interprets the art- Degas said somewhat archly: “only for inspiring post-printing alterations
ist’s approach to monotype in light of his after having given every proof of being with pastel or gouache and oil paint and
“enduring fascination with the chang- a good copyist could one reasonably even reproduction by means of trans-
ing terms of reproduction in the nine- allow you to do a radish from nature.”2 fer lithography. Richard Kendall makes
teenth century.”1 He was a great believer One can conclude that the uniqueness the important point that in “Ingresque

Art in Print November – December 2016 25

Ludovic Napoleon Lepic, The Mill Fire (L’Incendie du Moulin) (ca. 1870–76), one of the 6 monoprints exhibited from the series Views from the Banks
of the Scheldt (Vue des Bords de lEscaut), etching with monoprint inking, image 34.3 x 74.4 cm, sheet 45 x 81 cm.The Baltimore Museum of Art.
Garrett Collection.
terms, this new departure represented
heresy and rebellion of the worst kind.”3
Graphic experimentation was in
Degas’ blood long before 1876, when he
was first introduced to monotype, a fact
underscored by the inclusion of three
impressions of his magnificent early
etching The Engraver, Joseph Tourny (ca.
1865). One impression was simply printed
with standard wiping, but the other two
were monoprinted variants. The variant
in the collection of the Staatliche Kunst-
halle, Karlsruhe, is particularly success-
ful, featuring retroussage as well as high-
lights achieved by careful wiping on the
head, sleeve and table. As with most of
Degas’ etchings, there are relatively few
extant impressions of Joseph Tourny, sup-
porting the contention that sales were
never Degas’ purpose in printmaking.
Kendall points out that in 1879, when
Degas was extremely active with mono-
type, he showed 30 new pastels and oils at
the fourth Impressionist exhibition, but
not a single print.4 The fifth Impression-
ist exhibition of 1880 included just three
prints, and their experimental nature
was emphasized by Degas’ labels: “trials
and proofs of the plates” (essais et états de
planches) [see Art in Print May–Jun 2016]. 5
It is the multitalented and pedigreed
Ludovic-Napoléon Lepic (1839–1889)
whom we have to thank for introduc-
ing his nearly-as-well-bred friend Degas
to monotype, and Degas’ probable first
monotype, The Ballet Master (ca. 1876),
26 Art in Print November – December 2016
was signed by both Degas and Lepic
(probably as the printer).6 Among the
didactic joys of the exhibition were the
six unique variant monoprints of Lepic’s
large etching, Views from the Banks of the
Scheldt (1870–76), in which the artist kept
changing the plate by monotype-like
drawing and wiping. Lepic treated the
etched image much as a theatrical light-
ing designer might treat a set—a fixed
base whose mood, weather conditions
and time of day could be manipulated at
will. Degas must have been transfixed by
this magical sequence and reminded of
his own experiments with Joseph Tour-
ney.7
Lepic’s exciting variants are “mono-
prints” rather than “monotypes,” because
their base is an inked etching that could
have been identically printed multiple
times. The monotype has no such fixed
structure to fall back on. Degas created
most of his by rolling or dabbing blank
ink on a smooth metal plate, usually
copper, and then working into the inks
with a rag or brush (to wipe away ink in
a broad area) or a pointed wooden imple-
ment (e.g., the wooden end of a brush
that could be sharpened) to achieve a fine
white line. Sometimes, however, he sim-
ply painted his image on the plate with a
brush and/or his fingers.
For most artists, surprise attends
the printing of every monotype, a con-
sequence of the varying viscosities and
drying times of inks, the density of their
application, the paper’s moisture, the
thickness and freshness of the press blan-
kets and the pressure of the press. One
never knows to what degree finger- or
brushwork has removed and/or spread
the ink in a passage, or whether a pur-
posefully thin film of ink has survived its
short ride under the roller. Degas’ small
landscape, The River (Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston), benefits enormously from
the preservation of just such thin pig-
ment. The rapid work in ink on a metal
plate always offers the unexpected: under
the best of circumstances, the result not
only preserves the work on the plate, but
looks even better on paper. More fre-
quently, the results can be disappointing.
There are, and were, no guarantees.
The great gift of this exhibition was
the inclusion of works whose less-than-
ideal displays of Degas’ talents allowed
us to understand the risks he took. In the
Omnibus (Musée Picasso, Paris) and The
Two Connoisseurs (The Art Institute of
Chicago) are “quickies” that beg for some
refinement of facial details and details
of dress. As completed singular impres-
sions, they do not meet our expectations
of Degas. The same can be said for Song of
the Scissors (Fogg Museum, Harvard Uni-
versity), where unresolved physiognomy
and “press drag” conspire to produce a
muddied presentation. 8 And yet we know
from other examples that, given time and
interest, Degas could have employed this
muddy monotype as the foundation for a
stunning pastel. In contrast, The Jet Ear-
ring (Metropolitan Museum of Art) and
Portrait of Ellen Andrée (Art Institute of
Chicago) show the descriptive subtle-
ties of which Degas was a master and
which monotype, even if executed with
rapidity, is capable of producing. It may
seem unfair to disdain the product of
a medium because it has not produced
a more nuanced, refined image when
it is still attractive to many specifically
because of its rough, finger-painting–like
immediacy.
But is it unreasonable to hold Degas
to such a high standard? The truth is
that we—the general public—were never
meant to see many of these works. As
graphic “shavings” from his press, their
significance lies, not in their power as iso-
lated works of art, but in their status as
steps on a way to other masterful works
that continue to puzzle and captivate.
Mastery was an underlying theme of
the exhibition, but the skills most critical
Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, Factory Smoke (Fumées d’usines) (1877–1879), monotype on paper, image 11.9 x 16.1 cm, sheet 14.7 x 17.3 cm.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund.
to Degas’ monotypes may have been the
insight and imagination that prepared
him to deal with the unexpected and to
envision the possibilities of mere effects,
harnessing them for their potentially
suggestive power. For an artist who cre-
ated an abundance of major statements
in drawing, pastel and oil for an audience
increasingly receptive to his subjects and
style, monotype provided a safer place to
fail—and thereby learn. It was an area of
minimal interest to the art crowd of his
time, partly due to the hierarchy of media
in which editioned prints were at the bot-
tom and unique prints were simply a con-
fusing mystery. (Even after Degas’ time,
monotype making was frequently a boys’
club activity for after-dinner banter and
relaxed creation—fun and games.) 9
The organizers of “A Strange New
Beauty” clearly agreed on the excep-
tional merits of two of the most mem-
orable images, Factory Smoke (Fumées
d’usines, 1877–79) and Café-Concert
Singer (Chanteuse de café-concert, ca.
1877). Small in size, each was given a
wall of its own on either side of a central
freestanding stanchion in the first gal-
lery. Factory Smoke acted as the exhibi-
tion’s introductory image as well as the
cover of the catalogue and reveals Degas’
interest in the aesthetic possibilities of
a key component of the industrial land-
scape. Smoke—nuanced, ineffable, con-
stantly changing like the momentary
gestures he captured so brilliantly—was
a made-for-Degas challenge. What was
impressive about the Café-Concert Singer
was the speed with which the artist must
have created a believable gesture and
posture. Not so elaborately contrived as
some of his pastels and paintings, the lit-
tle figure’s extended arm and black glove
are articulated with an authority that
lives on in one’s memory. Other stand-
outs ranged in subject and treatment
from the early Jet Earring—a compressed
prefiguration of where he would take the
Art in Print November – December 2016 27
medium—to the later Woman Drying Her
Feet (Femme s’essuyant les pieds, près de sa
baignoire), ca. 1880–85 (Metropolitan
Museum of Art)—loose, dramatically
rectilinear and high in contrast.
Degas’ use of a monotype “underlay-
ment” to enhance the colors of pastel
additions was one of the most felicitous
pathways taken in his experiments and
comprised a good portion of the exhibi-
tion. Pastel over monotype, especially a
dark first impression monotype, glows
in an especially resonant way. Once one
notes the distinct appearance of the
joined media, it is hard to miss the effect,
even from a distance. Unfortunately not
included was the pasteled second impres-
sion of that first monotype created with
Lepic, The Ballet Master (1876), now in the
collection of the Nelson Atkins Museum
of Art. It offers one of the best examples
of how Degas employed this combination
of media to capture the dramatic depth
and light of the theater stage and its
denizens with unprecedented vividness.
Less well-known are Degas’ landscape
monotype works of the 1890s, almost 30
of which were included at MoMA. After
one has viewed those covered in pastel,
the plain monotypes can initially appear
impoverished, but they have a special stat-
ure as pluripotent abstractions—like stem
cells, these relatively undifferentiated
monotypes could transform into a variety
of specific compositions, guided by Degas’
marvelously textured pastel work.
As a proselytizer for graphic art in gen-
eral, Degas established a microculture of
experimentation, encouraging friends
such as Camille Pissarro and Mary Cas-
satt to become engaged in making prints.
It can be argued, however, that only Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, The Jet Earring (Profil perdu à la boucle d’oreille) (1876–1877)
monotype on paper, image 8.2 x 7 cm, sheet 18 x 13.2 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Degas rose to Olympian heights in the
Anonymous gift, in memory of Francis Henry Taylor.
graphic arts of his age, and this exhibition
strengthened that argument. His early
study of the history of draftsmanship, his Notes: 7. For a discussion of Lepic’s variant impressions of
1. Stephanie O’Rourke, “The Singular Multiple,” in Banks of the Scheldt, of which there were at least
youthful exploration of silverpoint on
Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty (New York: 85, see Rena Hoisington, BMA Voices: “Views from
gessoed and tinted papers, his penchant The Museum of Modern Art, 2016), 59. the Banks of the Scheldt” at http://blog.artbma.org/
for ongoing experimentation, his keen 2. Ibid., 58. tag/views-from-the-banks-of-the-scheldt/.
appreciation and collecting of great 3. Richard Kendall, “An Anarchist in Art: Degas 8. Press drag is the term some printers use for
paintings and drawings, and finally his and the Monotype” in Edgar Degas: A Strange monotype passages that seem blurry and/or
own supreme technical facility combined New Beauty, 25. streaked. The pressure of the roller can smear
4. Ibid., 32. areas of variant viscosity (incompletely mixed ink
to produce an expansive genius. Degas’ 5. See The New Painting: 1874–1876, ed. Charles pigment and oil or thinner) relative to the stable
monotypes—successes and failures—are Moffett (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986), 311. regions of well-mixed ink, and the result is a blur or
a testament to a devoted explorer, fearless 6. The Ballet Master (1876), National Gallery of a plexus of streaks.
to experiment technically in pursuit of Art, Washington DC. For a comparison of Degas’ 9. There is considerable literature regarding mono-
rich artistic rewards. probable first monotype and the cognate or sec- type making by American students at the American
ond impression that was worked up with pastel, Art Association in Paris, fundamentally a men’s
see Jean Sutherland Boggs and Anne F. Maheux, club, as well as among seasoned painters in the
Degas Pastels (New York: George Braziller, 1992), United States. See Joann Moser, Singular Impres-
Joseph Goldyne is a painter and printmaker. fig. 2/10: The Ballet Master and Figure 11: Ballet sions/The Monotype in America (Washington:
He lives in Sonoma, CA. Rehearsal, 28–29. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 11–41.

28 Art in Print November – December 2016

EXHIBITION REVIEW

Meditations on Air: Degas at MoMA

By Vincent Katz

“Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty”

The Museum of Modern Art, New York
26 March – 24 July 2016

W hile I was walking through the

exhibition of Degas monotypes at
MoMA, examining those interior spaces
he was able to evoke, it occurred to me
that his real subject was air—that Degas
had chosen monotype because it is best
suited to catching the ephemeral. Why
did he not use oil on canvas or pastel for
these images? There were examples of
those media in the exhibition, but it was
clear that monotype provided Degas a
different mode of working and of seeing.
Monotype has something in common
with photography, and Degas’s use of
cameras was cited in the exhibition and
its accompanying catalogue. But even
if Degas had never taken a photograph
or referred to the form, we still would
notice the connection. One similarity
can be found in the speed of execution.
Many of the images here are glimpses,
scenes of a type that might be captured
by photography—people passing on the
street or engaged in activities indoors.
Most of Degas’s monotypes are small,
about the size of a typical photographic
print of the time. Not that Degas made
monotypes on the spot—he didn’t; but
he devised ways to use the swiftness of
monotype to capture the instantane-
ity of seeing. A painting or pastel would
require a much more labor-intensive
process, even if the final image might
partake of an air of evanescence and
changing light. The monotype, by con-
trast, can be made quickly, and its status
as a unique object (not one of a number
in an edition) also parallels its quickness Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, On the Street (Dans la rue) (1876–1877), monotype on China paper,
of vision. It is not something planned, or image 16.2 x 12.2 cm. Collection of Mrs. Martin Atlas.
staged, in the studio.
Degas made more than 300 mono- image from dark marks on white paper. at mixing techniques in order to achieve
types in two distinct forays: first from Degas, however, worked not only from the precise level of visibility or obscurity
the mid-1870s to the mid-1880s and again light to dark but, with greater innovation, he wanted for each section. Once one
in the early 1890s. Early on he worked from dark to light. Starting with a com- focuses on them, the monotypes, despite
with his friend Ludovic-Napoléon Lepic pletely inked plate he dabbed, swiped and their small size, become vast in scale.
who was a key figure in the medium’s pushed away ink to reveal lighter areas Degas’s earlier, better known mono-
revival, but Degas quickly began to exer- that framed subjects in darkened rooms. types consist mostly of urban scenes—
cise his particular genius for invention. The spontaneity of his method conveyed close-up encounters on Parisian
The standard approach was to create an a sense of contingency. He became adept boulevards and street corners, backstage

Art in Print November – December 2016 29


scenes at the ballet, performers illumi-
nated by electric light at café concerts,
prostitutes lounging or encountering
customers, and women bathing, dress-
ing, undressing or simply relaxing in
what seem to be their private quarters.
In these pieces, Degas moved quickly
away from his younger vision, which
30 Art in Print November – December 2016
was dominated by his desire to emulate
the draftsmanship of Ingres and influ-
enced by the etchings of Rembrandt (as
seen in the cross-hatching of his 1857
self-portrait). In this new realm Degas
seemingly made up his technique on
the spot, attempting to capture the
moment in front of him rather than to
recall an established technique. In those
moments, in the immediacy of hands on
plate and a single pass through the press,
he became the modern artist par excel-
lence that the poet Stéphane Mallarmé
claimed he was in the essay from which
the MoMA exhibition took its title. Mal-
larmé wrote of:
the at once natural and yet modern
functions of women  .  .  . [that] have
enchanted M. Degas  .  .  . The wise
and intuitive artist does not care to
explore the trite and hackneyed view
of his subject. A master of drawing, he
has sought delicate lines and move-
ments exquisite or grotesque, and of a
strange new beauty, if I dare employ
towards his works an abstract term,
which he himself will never employ in
his daily conversation.1
Many times Degas was not content
with just a single impression, but would
work further, turning his unique work
into a kind of édition variée by printing
counterproofs from the printed impres-
sion or by running the plate through the
press again to produce weaker impres-
sions (known as cognates). He would
often use these cognates, which inevita-
bly carried less information than the first
impressions, as the basis of drawings,
embellishing them with pastel. There
were many of these “pastelized” mono-
types in the exhibition and, though they
showed Degas’s ability to work an image
to a high degree of coloristic draftsman-
ship, they distracted somewhat from
the raw adventurousness of his mono-
type technique. With the unembellished
works one felt privy to inside informa-
tion, seeing what it was really like to be
backstage, in the dressing room, up close,
prepared to improvise. The monotypes
convey drama.
Jodi Hauptman, who curated the
exhibition with assistance from Rich-
ard Kendall, stresses in the catalogue
the multiplying nature of Degas’s pro-
cess as evidence of his desire to deny
the uniqueness of the monotype. There
may be some truth to this, but I would
Above Left: Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas,
Heads of a Man and a Woman (Homme et
femme, en buste) (ca. 1877–1880), monotype
on paper, image 7.2 x 8.1 cm. British Museum,
London. Bequeathed by Campbell Dodgson.
Below Left: Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas,
Dancer Onstage with a Bouquet (Danseuse
saluant) (ca. 1876), pastel over monotype on
paper, 27 x 37.8 cm. Private collection.
argue that his real transgression lay
elsewhere—in his technique and choice
of subject matter that, if not designed to
épater la bourgeoisie, was certainly meant
to open the eye to the illicit behaviors of
the modern demi-monde. The technique
he innovated, with its speed of execu-
tion, its ability to luxuriate in tactile
handling of ink, and the intimate scale
of the works themselves, created a feel-
ing of being allowed into forbidden
precincts, shared by the artist with his
viewers.
One of the fascinating things about
the first group of Degas’s monotypes,
which includes most of his major series,
is their palpable sense of the modernity
of his times. “Modernity is the transient,
the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half
of art, the other being the eternal and the
immovable,” wrote Charles Baudelaire
in his famous 1863 essay “The Painter
of Modern Life.”2 Though Baudelaire’s
Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, The Road in the Forest (ca. 1890–1893), monotype on paper,
title cited painting, it is in his mono- 30 x 40 cm. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Frances L. Hofer, M19786. Photo
types that Degas can be seen to embody courtesy Imaging Department ©President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Baudelaire’s ideal most perfectly. Degas
worked largely from memory and his city
monotypes, such as On the Street (Dans friend—or is it merely someone walking hurried gestures. Once again, Degas gives
la rue, 1876–77) and Heads of a Man and past?—is in motion, mouth open, veil the impression of rapidity, within which
a Woman (Homme et femme, en buste, drawn down over her eyes, her hair and the clearest details are the participants’
ca. 1877–80) are close-up views of people its clasp carefully depicted. The back- headgear.
passing. They are moments that only ground, a series of vertical swipes broken Around 1880, Degas did a series of
photography otherwise could capture— up by diagonals, could be buildings across monotypes inspired by the short stories of
the photography of a Cartier-Bresson, the street, or the fencing of a park. A man his friend Ludovic Halévy. It is not known
a Garry Winogrand, a Helen Levitt or a lurks at the edge of the composition, whether or not there was a book projected
Rudy Burckhardt—or perhaps poetry, almost completely excised from view, but by the two of them, and they were never
but such poetry would have to wait for his hat with wide brim, his head and his published together during their lifetimes.
Guillaume Apollinaire or Frank O’Hara. shoulder are delicately evinced by Degas. The stories revolved around a Madame
In On the Street, we see one woman from His face is out of focus, but it could and Monsieur Cardinal, and particularly
behind, just the top of her torso, her gar- be turned in the direction of the two their two daughters, Pauline and Vir-
ment smudged by a film of rain, her hair women. In Heads of a Man and a Woman, ginie, both ballerinas at the Paris Opéra.
hanging down, and in exquisite detail, we see a couple straight on, but they too The conventional narratives involve the
her hat, with its floral decorations. Her are in motion, their faces blurred by their daughters’ love lives and the meetings
and assignations with their many admir-
ers, controlled for the most part by Mme
Cardinal. When Halévy did produce an
edition of these popular stories, he chose
a commercial illustrator. Probably the col-
laboration between Degas and Halévy, if
such it was, could never come to fruition
precisely because Degas’s work does not
literally illustrate the mundane narratives
contrived by the writer. Halévy’s goal was
to titillate the bourgeoisie, which is quite
different from scandalizing it.
Degas was not interested in shock value
but was rather enraptured by secluded
spaces and intimations. No doubt, like
Halévy, he too enjoyed the backstage and
Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, Woman in a Bathtub (Femme au bain) (ca. 1880–1885), monotype the corridors of the Opéra. He probably
on paper, image 20 x 41.6 cm. Private collection. liked to observe the men approaching

Art in Print November – December 2016 31

Left: Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, An Admirer in the Corridor (Ludovic Halévy dans les coulisses) (ca. 1876–1877), monotype on paper, image
16.1 × 12 cm, sheet 23.6 × 17.9 cm. Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Graphische Sammlung. Right: Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, Two Young Girls (Deux jeunes
filles) (ca. 1877-1879), monotype on China paper, image 15.9 x 12.1 cm. Private collection, Chicago.
and conversing with the ballerinas. But
he took from it something completely
different. In the monotype An Admirer
in the Corridor (Ludovic Halévy dans les
coulisses, c. 1876–77) we see a befuddled
gentleman from the back, the sharp
angle of the corridor hurrying a bal-
lerina out of the composition at lower
right, so that only the bottom of her tutu
and a stockinged leg are visible. In other
pictures from the series, we can observe
hushed conversations, almost like trans-
actions, but we are not near enough to
know exactly what the outcome may
be. Degas was interested in projecting
spaces, or as I said earlier, air, and the
mixture of his ink, the density or fluid-
ity he chose, experimenting on the plate
until he reached the balance of evanes-
cence and solidity of line, is each time
utterly convincing. One theory about
the failed collaboration with Halévy is
that the writer thought the protagonist
in Degas’s images resembled himself and
was insulted by that figure’s aloofness.
Another explanation may be that Degas’s
style was simply too advanced, too subtle,
32 Art in Print November – December 2016
for the more mainstream writer to coun-
tenance.
It is not known whether Degas fre-
quented brothels, but it matters little.
Whether his subjects originated in the
ubiquitous photographs of naked women
that circulated in the decades after the
medium’s invention in 1839 or in his per-
sonal experience, they were ultimately
transformed by Degas. While some of
his motifs are common in risqué photo-
graphs—mirrors, stockings, etc.—Degas
used them quite differently. The women
in his bordello monotypes lounge, they
wait for customers, they talk to one
another. They are not made to fulfill a
male ideal of beauty or erotic fantasy;
rather, they are natural and behave natu-
rally. The same is true of the series Degas
did, mainly in the dark field technique,
of women by themselves, reading, drying
themselves, getting ready for bed.
Degas’s final monotypes differ from
the earlier ones in both process and sub-
ject matter; using oil paint rather than
printing ink, he created a series of land-
scapes made from memory and imagina-
tion. These images, particularly those he
chose not to embellish with pastel, have a
solidity distinct from the black and white
murk of the earlier monotypes. They
recall Turner’s experiments with abstrac-
tion, and look forward to the ways that
Odilon Redon would merge color densi-
ties in unreal settings. Yet it is the city
scenes, particularly those in black and
white, that captivate us most. There,
Degas was truly revolutionary. Working
as fast as he could, he was able to repre-
sent what it felt like to be modern, for the
first time.
Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, critic and
curator.
Notes:
1. Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Impressionists and
Edouard Manet,” The Art Monthly Review and
Photographic Portfolio, London, 1, no. 9 (1876):
121.
2. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern
Life,” in Selected Writings on Art and Literature,
tr. P.E. Charvet (London: Penguin Books, 1972),
402.
EXHIBITION REVIEW
Prints in the Gateway City
By Ivy Cooper
Joan Hall, Acid Ocean (2012), printed, cut, pulp painted, hand-formed paper, Mylar, acrylic and cast resin pins made with sand and beach detritus,
fibers: abaca, kozo, gampi, 64 x 245 x 18 inches (variable dimensions). Courtesy of the artist.
“Printmaking in St. Louis Now”
The Sheldon Art Galleries, St. Louis, MO
4 March – 7 May 2016
C omprising works by 29 artists and 5
presses, “Printmaking in St. Louis
Now” was a testament to the liveliness of
contemporary art in St. Louis generally,
and specifically to the city’s continued
engagement with print, on the part of its
artists and its persistent and productive
presses.
In 1978 Peter Marcus founded Island
Press (originally the Collaborative
Printmaking Workshop) at Washington
University in St. Louis with a focus on
innovative and large-scale printmaking.
Island alumni went on to found new col-
laborative presses such as Wildwood Press
and Pele Prints. Artists from around the
country came to St. Louis to collaborate
on prints, while other artists set up their
own workshops, like Tom Huck’s Evil
Prints, or were simply inspired to think
and create in terms of print. The results
of all this activity occupied all 7,000 feet
of the Sheldon Art Galleries’ exhibition
space.
The show was remarkable for the
breadth and variety of works and print-
making approaches. Tom Huck’s com-
pulsively detailed woodcut triptych,
Transformation of Brandy Baghead Pts.  1,
2, & 3 (2009), formed the centerpiece of
one room—a nearly seven-foot-tall gothic
satire of rural life and beauty pageants. In
her News Paper Series (2015) Lisa Bulawsky
juxtaposed evocative words and images
on newsprint, mounted them on wooden
library rods, and invited viewers to page
through them at will, a reflection of the
print’s historical role as a democratic
medium. Kevin McCoy’s Cognitive Dis-
sonance screenprints appropriate a
variety of images, from photos of Kim
Kardashian to historic illustrations of
slave confinement implements, to explore
quasi-scientific racial taxonomies that
persist in some forms today.
A continuing fascination with grand
scale was apparent in a number of works.
Island Press founder Peter Marcus was
represented by the 8-foot-long Roman
Ruin (1998); Sage Dawson contributed
Dust (2015), a 12-foot-square compilation
of collagraph and linocut representa-
tion of a house seemingly undergoing its
own demolition; and Acid Ocean (2012) by
Joan Hall combines cast-paper marine
debris, Mylar and handmade paper in an
Art in Print November – December 2016 33
Left: Buzz Spector, Effaced Nabokov (2014–15), altered found book [Copies of Dimitry Nabokov, ed. The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov
(New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2009], 1 3/4 x 12 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches. Edition of 5. Courtesy of the artist and Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis. Right: Radcliffe
Bailey, Tricky 3 (2012), pigment print, collagraph, collage, glitter, 64 x 41 inches. Edition of 8. Courtesy of Island Press, St. Louis.

undulating, translucent work that spilled single gallery. Such was the case with the contemplation. Well-staged and wide-
from wall to floor. Poised between nature prints of Yvette Drury Dubinsky and Car- ranging, Lahs-Gonzales’s ambitious exhi-
and artifice, it suggests both the ocean’s mon Colangelo, which deal with dizzying bition established the continuing
power and its vulnerability. maps and dislocations in strikingly dif- vibrancy of printmaking in St. Louis
Hall was one of several artists who ferent tones. In another room, a wall plas- today.
considered the print as an object as much tered with overlapping posters from
as an image. Jane Hammond’s Natural Firecracker Press offered a riotous con- Ivy Cooper is a St. Louis-based writer. She is
Curiosities (2010), made with Wildwood trast to Robert Goetz’s Omega Point currently Professor of Art History at Southern
Press, is a contemporary Wunderkammer (2015), a spare monoprint of apes in quiet Illinois University Edwardsville.
of faux animal skins, shells and insects of
her own invention, all made from printed
paper, mounted in a Plexiglas box. Bunny
Burson’s Hidden in Plain Sight series is
based on letters written by her grand
parents as they sought unsuccessfully
to flee Europe during World War II, and
includes woodcuts, carved matrices,
and envelopes transformed into printed
metal talismans. Buzz Spector’s Effaced
Nabokov (2014–15) is a hardback copy of
Vladimir Nabokov’s The Original of Laura
in which the artist has torn out pages
systematically on a gradient, transform-
ing the block of the codes into a slippery
slope. The novel in question was left
unfinished at the time of the author’s
death and its subsequent publication was
highly controversial; Spector’s adaptation
adds a further layer of authorial confu-
sion and loss.
The installation, by gallery director
Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, allowed works to
breathe, invited close looking and forged Tom Huck, The Transformation of Brandy Baghead Pts. 1, 2, & 3 (2009), woodcut, left: 82 x 24
conversations among artworks within a inches, center: 82 x 45 inches, right: 82 x 24 inches. Edition of 40. Courtesy of the artist.

34 Art in Print November – December 2016

EXHIBITION AND BOOK REVIEW

On Paper, on Chairs: Barbara Kasten

By Lauren R. Fulton

“Barbara Kasten: Stages”

Graham Foundation, Chicago
1 October 2015 – 9 January 2016

Barbara Kasten: The Diazotypes

Edited by Ellen Alderman and
Elisa Leshowitz; text by Alex Klein
56 pages, 24 color illustrations
Published by Graham Foundation,
Chicago and D.A.P., New York, 2015
Out of Print

F or those who know Barbara Kasten’s

meticulously staged, cinematic photo-
graphs, the recent retrospective orga-
nized by the Institute of Contemporary
Art in Philadelphia held surprises. In
addition to her disrupted photographs of
postmodern architecture and elaborate
geometric constructions, the exhibition
included two rarely seen bodies of work
from the beginning of her career: a group
of sculptures from 1972 and a series of
diazotype prints created in 1973 that
together revealed a set of conceptual con-
cerns that can be seen to underpin all the
work that followed.
The diazotypes, titled Figure/Chair,
constitute some of Kasten’s earliest work
with photography. Diazotype is a pho-
tomechanical print process, similar to Barbara Kasten, Figure/Chair (1973), three diazotypes on newsprint, 22 x 17 and 17 x 22 inches each.
cyanotype, that was still commonly used Graham Foundation, Chicago, 2015. Photo: RCH | EKH.
for architectural drafting in the 1970s.
Printed on newsprint, the diazotypes the photographer herself, they bring to types reproduced in the book formed an
offer a perspectival variety and ingenuity mind the body and performance work important supplement, clarifying the
similar to her later, color photographic of Joan Jonas and Ana Mendieta from range and ambitions of the work. In their
series such as Architectural Sites and Con- the 1960s and ’70s. 2 These underscore presentation of the human body’s rela-
structs. But while her later work depends Kasten’s wavering between the two- and tionship to, and negotiations with, space
on complex arrangements of mirrors and three-dimensional at this time, linger- and the printed page, the diazotypes con-
objects and space, the diazotypes are far ing between perceived and actual space, nect intriguingly to the Graham Founda-
simpler. They document a nude model a tension that evolves throughout subse- tion’s mission to foster exchanges of ideas
shot from various angles and assuming quent series. on architecture.
peculiar positions—twisting, crouch- The exhibition, titled “Stages” in a Sharing a room with the diazotypes
ing, and straddling a chair situated in a nod to Kasten’s theatrical arrangement were the three surviving examples of
grassy area. On each sheet the subject is of spaces and forms, as well as to the Kasten’s Seated Forms fiber sculptures,
represented in multiple formats—posi- chronology of her artistic career, was pre- important works that had not been dis-
tive/negative, left/right reversed, profile/ sented at the Graham Foundation in Chi- played in decades. 3 Each consists of a
frontal. Laying over some of these images cago as part of the city’s 2015 Architecture painted wooden café chair draped with
is a grid, grounding and emphasizing Biennial, and was accompanied by a lim- woven rope, hand-dyed in the same color
the figure in space and reinforcing the ited edition publication on the diazo- as the paint—one green, one yellow, one
architectural overtones of the diazo- types. Since just three of these works red—and suggestive of lifeless, headless
type.1 Though the images do not feature appeared in the exhibition, the 24 diazo- bodies.

Art in Print November – December 2016 35

Installation view: “Barbara Kasten: Stages,” Graham Foundation, Chicago, 2015. On wall: cyanotype photograms, including Photogenic Painting,
74/1 (1974) (left) and Torso (1974) (right). In foreground: Seated Forms (1972). Photo: RCH | EKH.
As a graduate student at the Cali-
fornia College of Arts and Crafts (now
California College of the Arts), Kasten
studied fiber art with Trude Guermon-
prez, a German artist who merged Bau-
haus weaving traditions with the textile
and craft movement then emerging in
the Bay Area. Seated Forms combines the
furniture prop used in Figure/Chair and
the concern with materiality that drove
Kasten’s involvement in fiber: “develop-
ing shapes and creating relationships,”
as she put it in a student statement.4 In
combination, the diazotypes and fiber
sculptures offered viewers both rep-
resentational space and actual space.
The relationship is clear in the way the
woman in the diazotypes interacts with
the chair, undoubtedly a stand-in for the
voluptuous forms presented with the
sculptures. Seated Forms and Figure/Chair
together incorporate sculpture, fiber,
performance and photography. Kasten’s
training in painting, in which she earned
a bachelor’s degree in at the University of
36 Art in Print November – December 2016
Arizona, is undetectable.
The work for which Kasten is best
known, the Constructs and Architec-
tural Sites series produced in the 1980s,
have linked her to a younger generation
of conceptual photographers, includ-
ing Liz Deschenes, Anthony Pearson
and Jessica Labatte. Without digital or
postproduction manipulations, Kasten’s
photographs disorder our perception of
space; working on site in public build-
ings or with scenarios assembled in her
studio, she fragments places and things
with strategically arranged mirrors and
lighting. With their reflections, shadows
and theatrical lighting, these images
have a dramatically different demeanor
from her earlier work, but the concern
with space and perception remains the
same: “I move around in my sets but the
photographs that result don’t allow the
viewer to be physically involved,” Kas-
ten notes. “I want the viewer to relate
in a bodily way to the three-dimen-
sional set, but not necessarily be in it.”5
The subjects—more accurately, props—
in these later series have no existence
outside their photographic representa-
tion; and in presenting these elaborate
three-dimensional constructions in two
dimensions, from a particular fixed point,
she limits our view: we can only imagine
what it would be like to experience them
as physical phenomena in space. Kasten
presents the viewer, she has said, with
“my own selective vision of the sculpture.
It’s my perception, it’s my photographic
vision that you are seeing, and in the
sculpture itself you can experience your
own relationship to it.”6 The vivid colors
draw us in, while the density and com-
plexity push us out.
In 1985, more than a decade after the
diazotypes, Kasten designed costumes and
sets for a performance by choreographer
Margaret Jenkins, Inside Outside/Stages
of Light. The title is telling and the project
can be seen as a continuation of her inter-
est in Bauhaus design and of her study of
how forms and bodies in action occupy
Inside Outside/Stages of Light (1985), still from video documentation of performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, NY. Choreography:
Margaret Jenkins; dancers/collaborators: Melissa Rolnick, Mercy Sidbury, Livia Blankman, Ellie Klopp, Bryan Chalfant, and Greg Gibble; costumes and set
design: Barbara Kasten; lighting: Sara Linnie Slocum with Barbara Kasten; sound score and design: Bill Fontana; videography: Mark Robison. Courtesy of
the artists.
space. A video recording of the produc-
tion, on view in the exhibition, showed
dancers moving between and around
large columns and pyramids. Recently
Kasten has returned to such construc-
tions, as in the video projection Scenario
(2015), which was installed in the Graham
Foundation’s ballroom and functioned as
the exhibition finale.
“Stages” offered a vital overview of
Kasten’s career, and also a rare and
important look at early work that is in
some way a missing link. Joining the
material concerns of the Bauhaus to the
investigation of bodies, space and repre-
sentation, these works formed a point of
inception for the bold, cinematic concep-
tualism that Kasten has made her own.
Lauren R. Fulton is Curatorial Assistant at the
Aspen Art Museum.
Notes:
where she worked with Magdalena Abakanowicz
at the Poznań Higher School of Fine Arts. The
1.This grid can also be seen in the screen in Kas-
Seated Forms were first exhibited in Warsaw, and
ten’s Photogenic Paintings from the mid-1970s,
continued to be shown throughout the ’70s in the
as well as in Torso (1974).
United States. In her catalogue essay, Jenni Sor-
2. It should be noted that unlike these artists and
kin touches on the similarities between Kasten’s
others of the period, Kasten did not participate
and Abakanowicz’s work and points out that the
in any feminist dialogue or activism through her
latter began a series, Seated Figures (1974–79),
work. However, in an interview included in Bar-
resembling Seated Forms after Kasten had
bara Kasten: The Diazotypes, the artist states:
returned to the States. See Sorkin, “Tactile Begin-
“There is a synergy between the figure and the
nings,” in Barbara Kasten: Stages (Philadelphia:
chair, which can be seen as symbolic of the
Institute of Contemporary Art and JRP | Ringier,
manipulations that are imposed on women to
(2015), 153–54.
fit into conforming roles in society; they present
4. Barbara Kasten, graduate statement, ca. 1970,
another way of looking at the female nude, in defi-
published in Barbara Kasten: Stages, 174.
ance of social mores. In both the sculptures and
5. Barbara Kasten, interview by Amanda Ross-
the prints, the body’s relationship to designed form
Ho, “Barbara Kasten and Amanda Ross-Ho Part
implies a rejection of prevailing societal structures
1,” Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles,
even by simply making visible the practical dif-
2015, http://www.moca.org/stream/post/barbara-
ficulty of a body becoming one with a chair and
the contortions that need to take place to accom-
kasten-and-amanda-ross-ho.
6. Alex Klein, “Pictures and Props,” in Barbara
plish this!” See Alex Klein’s interview with Kasten,
Kasten: Stages, 109.
in Barbara Kasten: The Diazotypes (Chicago:
Graham Foundation and D.A.P., 2015), n.p.
3. The three chair-fiber sculptures shown in the
exhibition are the only ones still in existence. The
first was created in 1971, before Kasten moved to
Poland for a year on a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship,
Art in Print November – December 2016 37
BOOK REVIEW
Fantastic Architecture
Edited by Dick Higgins and Wolf Vostell
200 pages, 120 B&W images
Published by Something Else Press,
New York, 1970. Facsimile English
edition published by Primary
Information, Brooklyn, 2015.
$28.
A New Polymorphous Reality:
Higgins’ and Vostell’s Fantastic
Architecture
By Paige K. Johnston
F antastic Architecture is a playground,
a tripped-out thought experi-
ment freed of hypothesis and conclu-
sion. Between its covers, architecture is
unconstrained by logistical, material or
financial limitations, residing instead in
the realm of ideas.
The book begins with an explosion:
the endpapers (front and back) present
a halftone photograph of a mushroom
cloud, labeled, with drolly unnecessary
didacticism, “nuclear explosion.” The
image is a metaphor for what the edi-
tors—Fluxus artists Dick Higgins and
Wolf Vostell—intended to do to the archi-
tectural status quo in the late 1960s: blow
it up. In Vostell’s introductory manifesto,
which, in its placement before both the
title page and front matter “blows up” the
architecture of the book itself, he laments
that man is languishing in a world of
repressive architecture where “everything
is forbidden.”1 Unleashing an arsenal of
exclamation points, he declares, “only
the realization of utopias will make man
happy and release him from his frustra-
tions!”2
38 Art in Print November – December 2016
What follows is a compendium of
nearly 70 radical architectural projects by
36 contributors from the United States,
Western Europe and Japan. The projects
range from paper architecture to land
art, essays and instruction pieces, under-
scoring Vostell’s declaration that “Action
is architecture! Everything is architec-
ture!”3 In his introduction, Higgins sug-
gests that artists have a unique ability
to see things in the world without being
bound to any particular framework. In
other words, the problem with architec-
ture is architects and the system that sup-
ports them.4
Fantastic Architecture, first published
in 1969 in German under the title Pop
Architektur, was released in English by
Something Else Press the following year.
Primary Information released this fac-
simile edition, hardbound with fabric
covers and a glossy jacket, in 2015. The
projects are presented as if in a scrapbook,
reproducing photographs, typewritten
descriptions, telegrams, hand-written
notes, drawings and early computer print-
outs. Printed on heavy stock, the images
bleed to the edge and often occupy the
full spread; the orientation of both texts
and images shifts unpredictably from
horizontal to vertical. This disorienta-
tion caused by these formal discontinui-
ties heightens the individual personality
of each project, making for a particularly
physical reading experience as the reader
turns the book this way and that.
These artists thought big—cutting the
earth in half (Stefan Wewerka), blowing
up the earth with 12,000 nuclear bombs
in order to send it zooming into outer
space (Raoul Hausmann), cross-country
conveyor belts (Geoff Hendricks), giant
balls (Claes Oldenburg), giant scis-
sors (Oldenburg), giant irons (Vostell),
giant train cars (Hans Hollein). In Plan
for building a new city of Vienna (1968),
Gerhard Rühm proposes four buildings,
each in the shape of a letter—W  I  E  N—
collectively spelling the city name. The
buildings would be “completely sealed off
from the outside . . . so that the inhabit-
ants are not troubled by having to go out,”
suggesting that everything man needs to
sustain life could be found within: one
building for city administration, one for
meditation, one for “the sex lives of the
inhabitants” and one for the elderly and
invalids. 5 Other projects manifest the
gigantic through a relationship to time.
For example, Ben Vautier’s handwritten
Architecture Project 1963 (1963) succinctly
proposes: “Don’t throw anything away
for 70 years. Keep it. Live with it. Put it
in your room hause, appartement or gar-
den.”6
Alongside such visionary project pro-
posals—unrealized and unrealizable—
the book also includes documentation
of extant land art works such as Michael
Heizer’s Dissipate (1968); as Vostell points
out, what unites all of them is a desire to
disturb the familiar.7
Peppered throughout the volume are
14 short texts by Higgins and Vostell,
headed “Captions” and printed on tracing
paper (Mylar in the facsimile). Histori-
cally, architects used tracing papers to
produce, amend and layer their drawings,
and the editors surely used it to make this
reference. But where the utility of trans-
lucent paper lay in the connections that
could be made between layered drawings,
Higgins and Vostell use it to print text,
which creates visual noise that disrupts
the legibility of the texts as well as what
lies on the page behind. Unlike captions
in a newspaper, which sit obediently
beneath photographs to clarify things,
these captions sometimes physically
disrupt and obscure their subjects: the
spread reproducing Dissipate is bisected
by Caption 7, a gesture that cuts into the
photograph in much the way that Dissi-
pate cuts into the landscape of the Black
Rock Desert.
Loosely topical, these captions cover a
range of subjects such as “change, renewal,
metamorphosis,” “ecology,” “compres-
sion” and “cost,” providing avenues for
understanding projects whose purpose
may at first be opaque, as well as draw-
ing out links between them. Written in
a consistent voice, both professorial and
poetic, the captions are most engaging
when they ask questions of the reader and
of the projects. “Why propose a stair lead-
ing nowhere?” the first caption inquires,
in response to Hausmann’s “How about a
city with only rumpus rooms?”8 The book
is a conversation between the editors and
the projects, between the projects them-
selves, and between the book and the
reader.
Before the nuclear explosion that
closes the volume, Higgins and Vostell
drop a penultimate bomb. In a conclud-
ing caption, which appears unexpectedly
after the author photos and final credits,
they observe that “not one of the projects
in this entire book [deals] primarily with
the problems of race or of nationality,
the two great questions of our time  .  .  .
Gerhard Rühm, Plan for building a new city of Vienna (1968), reproduced from Dick Higgins and Wolf Vostell (ed.), Fantastic Architecture
(New York: Something Else Press, 1970 and Brooklyn: Primary Information, 2015).
are these questions being avoided?”9
Fantastic Architecture was born at the end
of one of the most tumultuous decades
in United States history, and yet beyond
lampooning consumer culture the proj-
ects do little to address the issues roiling
the world around them. For the editors to
assemble this book only to end it by pos-
ing their own critique of what they have
just presented pivots the conversation
further in the direction of the reader,
now implicated in the need to pursue
questions yet unanswered.
But after five decades of similarly criti-
cal, satirical, political artworks, the con-
sumption and luxury critiqued by the
artists in Fantastic Architecture have bal-
looned into a full-blown throw-away
society. Questions of race and geopolitics
remain urgent, as evidenced by refugee
crises, recent efforts by state lawmakers
to undermine voting rights (reversing
Civil Rights gains from the 1960s), and
the continued brutalization of African-
Americans by police. Turning a discipline
on its head, as Higgins and Vostell were
wont to do, may be a lively and essential
endeavor, but in turning their final ques-
tion to the merits of their own endeavor,
perhaps the editors were acknowledging
that fundamental societal change
requires more than provocative propos-
als: it takes action.
Paige K. Johnston is one half of the collaborative
duo Life After Life whose work has recently been
featured in exhibitions at Villa Vassilieff, Paris,
and Company Gallery, New York.
Notes:
1. Dick Higgins and Wolf Vostell, eds., Fantastic
Architecture (Barton, VT: Something Else Press,
1970; facsimile edition, New York City: Primary
Information, 2015), Vostell introductory section.
(No page numbers).
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., Higgins introduction.
5. Ibid., Gerhard Rühm submission.
6. Ibid., following Caption 13.
7. Ibid., Vostell introduction.
8. Ibid., Caption 13.
9. Ibid., Caption 14.
Art in Print November – December 2016 39
BOOK REVIEW
Three Centuries of American Prints from
the National Gallery of Art
By Judith Brodie, Amy Johnston and
Michael J. Lewis with essays by 12
authors
360 pages, 206 color illustrations
Published by the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C. / Thames & Hudson,
New York, 2016
$39.95 softcover / $60 hardcover
The exhibition travels to the National
Gallery in Prague (4 October 2016 –
5 January 2017) and to the Antiguo
Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City
(7 February – 30 April 2017).
(Printed) Art in America
By Catherine Bindman
Susan Tallman describes in her essay
as “the general imbalance of power
between those who control representa-
tion and those who are its subjects—the
all-important difference between being
depicted and being heard that is core to
all forms of oppression.”1
The first major museum exhibition
in decades to survey the full history of
American prints, the National Gallery
show (3 April–24 July 2016) included 150
prints divided both chronologically and
thematically through nine sections,
beginning with “Transatlantic Exchange”
and ending with “Pluralism.” The cata-
logue also proceeds chronologically, but
deviates from the exhibition in its orga-
nization and articulation of themes. An
introductory overview by Michael J. Lewis
and a closing essay on the museum’s col-
lection by curator Judith Brodie bracket
three broad historical divisions—Colo-
nial Era to the Civil War, Reconstruction
to World War II, Post-World War II—each
containing a number of short, distinctive John Simon after John Verelst, Sa Ga Yeath Qua
views by scholars of American history, art Pieth Tow, King of the Maquas (after 1710),
and literature. At the expense of a certain mezzotint, 41 x 25.4 cm. National Gallery of Art,
Paul Mellon Fund.
amount of coherence, this arrangement
provides a complex, textured, individual-
ized picture of a vast territory—a vision ship,” Lewis makes the point that prints
no less ambitious than that of the exhibi- were nonetheless of central importance. 3
tion itself. The rudimentary engraving practiced
Lewis’s lengthy introduction is clever, by metalsmiths and other artisans could
often humorous and largely convinc- easily be translated to prints, and com-
ing. He establishes commercial con- mercial illustration played an essential
siderations as essential to American role in a mercantile culture devoid of
printmaking from the beginning and courtly patronage. From these Colonials
deftly synthesizes two tendencies “that to Winslow Homer, Andy Warhol and

A mong the earliest works in the

National Gallery of Art’s compre-
hensive summary of the history of Amer-
ican printmaking are four mezzotint
portraits made by John Simon after John
Verelst’s paintings of the Native Ameri-
can leaders who made a diplomatic visit
to Queen Anne in London in 1710. These
documents, freighted to contemporary
eyes with the weight of “noble savagery,”
set in motion a story that ends three cen-
turies later with Kara Walker’s 2010 etch-
ing and aquatint, no world (from the series
An Unpeopled Land in Uncharted Waters),
showing what might be a slave ship held
aloft in choppy waters, the tragic disso-
nance between black and white boldly
reiterated through the contrast of bright
paper and dark ink. These works not only
frame the history of American print-
making in terms of a transition from
the largely functional to the consciously
artistic, but also starkly represent what
have been at loggerheads throughout
the history of the American print—the
impulse to make an intrinsically beautiful
object and the desire to convey an urgent
message.”2 (Often, of course, regardless of
the artist’s intent, the two tendencies col-
lide in a single mesmerizing image.) Lewis
is especially strong on the early colonial
material, introducing the first-known
American print, John Foster’s woodcut of
the grim-looking Puritan minister Rich-
ard Mather (ca. 1675), as a prime example
of didacticism in early American print-
making. Even here, however, he finds
a probable commercial angle: Foster’s
use of two separate blocks would have
allowed him easily to replace Mather’s
head and potentially print a whole series
of Puritan ministers with minimal effort.
While New England remained “a highly
literate culture, troubled by the Second
Commandment, lacking great collections
and having no tradition of connoisseur-
beyond, American artists have often
obtained their early training in commer-
cial graphic art.
Lewis’s tale of early printmaking in
America is populated with pragmatists,
opportunists and men-on-the-make. Con-
sider Paul Revere’s brazen pilfering of Peter
Pelham’s depiction of the Boston Massa-
cre, which Revere rushed to press before
Pelham could do so. The Bloody Mas-
sacre (1770) establishes Revere’s primacy
in recognizing the commercial opportu-
nities offered to printmakers by a major
political event.4 There is also something of
the tabloid journalist about the engraver
Amos Doolittle, who, with the painter
Ralph Earl, showed up in Lexington and
Concord to interview participants just
ten days after the battles there on April 19,
1775. Their awkwardly rendered but cap-
tivating cycle of hand-colored engravings
showing the course of the battle was in
print before the end of the year.5

40 Art in Print November – December 2016

 In the mid-19th century, James Smil-
lie’s engraving after Thomas Cole’s Voy-
age of Life—Youth (1853–56) was among
the fine prints produced by the Ameri-
can Art-Union in contrast to the sea
of workmanlike images that had char-
acterized American print production
in the 1840s. The arrival of German
lithographers such as Julius Bien after
the 1848 revolutions provided a much-
needed shot of technical expertise too;
Bien responded to a pressing demand
for geological surveys and other practi-
cal images and also produced, in 1858,
the first full-sized chromolithographed
edition of Audubon’s Birds of America.6
Lewis’s discussion of the later periods is
somewhat less compelling. His argument
that John Sloan and George Bellows—
who both worked as illustrators for the
left-wing periodical The Masses—shared
Whistler’s and Cassatt’s chiefly aesthetic
“freedom from narrative or moralizing
content” seems questionable.7 Ultimately,
he returns to the notion of commer-
cial illustration as an essential training
ground for American artists, informing
the visual idioms of such contemporary
printmakers as Warhol and Barbara Kru-
ger, among many others. For Lewis, Kara
Walker’s no world, with its “ineffably deli-
cate printmaking in the vein of Whistler”
and “chilling political content,” fruitfully
unites what he sees as the two conflicting
tendencies in American printmaking. 8
Frances Flora Bond Palmer, “Wooding Up” on the Mississippi (1863), color lithograph with extensive
hand-coloring on wove paper, image 18 x 27 3/4 inches, sheet 21 x 30 inches. Published by Currier &
Ives. National Gallery of Art, Donald and Nancy deLaski Fund.
The other writers—not charged with
having to cover this complete history—
were free to work from perspectives
both wide-angled and close-up. Alexan-
der Nemerov takes an eccentric angle
on The Bloody Massacre, reconsidering
it in the context of Boston coffeehouse
culture and as “equivalent to a strong
cup of coffee”—a stimulant and a call to
action “made to be borne on the winds,
carried by the latest shouts.”9 John Fagg
looks at Mary Cassatt and John Sloan
through their treatment of female bod-
ies in relation to those that proliferated
in popular publications at the turn of
the century.10 Adam Greenhalgh consid-
ers the Ashcan School in terms of con-
temporary anxieties about burgeoning
immigrant populations and unsustain-
able urban expansion11—by these lights
Bellows’ 1916 lithograph Splinter Beach is
not a lighthearted scene of city urchins
at play but a depiction of “wharf rats”
(the slang term for juvenile delinquents,
which the artist used to subtitle the origi-
nal drawing), and is related to popular
imagery that “triangulated immigration,
contagion, and swimming.”12 Similarly,
while Greenhalgh accepts the ortho-
doxy that before the Great Depression
American artists generally championed
the dynamic energy of the modern city,
he convincingly argues that the insta-
bility inherent in John Marin’s famous
1913 etchings, Woolworth Building (The
Paul Revere, after Henry Pelham, The Boston
Massacre (The Bloody Massacre) (1770),
hand-colored engraving, image 20 × 21.91 cm,
sheet 27.31 × 23.81 cm. National Gallery of Art,
Rosenwald Collection.
Dance) and Brooklyn Bridge, No.  6 (Sway-
ing), might also reflect simmering worries
about imminent structural collapse, both
architectural and economic.13
It is, of course, easy to follow any num-
ber of tantalizing routes through this
thicket of printed matter. It is worth not-
ing, for instance, that many of the most
striking and least familiar prints are by
women. Two exquisite Currier & Ives
lithographs by Frances Flora Palmer—A
Midnight Race on the Mississippi (1860) and
“Wooding Up” on the Mississippi (1863)—
show steamboats at night. In the first,
two boats engage in a race; in the sec-
ond, African-Americans load logs while
white passengers on the decks enjoy the
moonlit view. As David C. Ward observes,
Palmer has pictured “an antebellum
America about to explode.”14 Later we
find the austere geometries of Helen Lun-
deberg’s beautiful lithograph Planets (ca.
1937), made under the auspices of the Fed-
eral Art Project in a style she described
in a 1934 manifesto as “Postsurrealist.”
The stillness and purposeful enigma of
Lundeberg’s print contrasts sharply with
the busy mechanistic dynamism of Jolán
Gross-Bettelheim’s Home Front (1942),
showing an assembly line in a munitions
factory. By the early ‘40s this Hungarian-
Jewish immigrant and card-carrying
Communist had moved away from capi-
talist conspiracies to this kind of war
propaganda. Elizabeth Catlett’s famous
1953 linocut of the abolitionist Harriet
Tubman leading her fellows north is a
powerful image in which Tubman is not
Art in Print November – December 2016 41

Kara Walker, no world from An Unpeopled Land in Uncharted Waters (2010), etching, aquatint,
sugarlift aquatint, spitbite aquatint and drypoint, image 60.7 90.2 cm, sheet 76.8 x 100.5 cm. National
Gallery of Art, Donald and Nancy deLaski Fund.
merely a depicted subject but an agent of
historical change.
The connection between printmaking
and film is touched on in several essays.
Joyce Tsai notes how Louis Lozowick’s
important lithograph New York (ca. 1925)
“compresses the sheer verticality of the
Manhattan skyline into a dynamic if not
claustrophobic enclosure like a backdrop
for German expressionist cinema.”15
Edward Hopper and Martin Lewis pro-
vide obvious examples of what might
be called cinematic etching, and Leo G.
Mazow discusses the lithographs that
Twentieth Century Fox commissioned
from Thomas Hart Benton in 1940 to
promote the film version of The Grapes of
Wrath, contrasting the broken-down car
that hinders the Joads’ departure from
Oklahoma with the easy mobility of such
popular prints.16 My personal favorite in
this context is Mabel Dwight’s Queer Fish
(1936), a lithograph of four adults look-
ing at (and, in one case, suspiciously like)
the bug-eyed inhabitant of an aquarium;
David Lubin points out that the print was
made the same year as Hitchcock’s Sabo-
tage, in which two conspirators meet in a
dark aquarium at the London Zoo.17 Here
the tank’s glass wall serves as a screen
against which each group of creatures
watches the other as if in a film. The
strange moment of eye contact between
the man on the right and the fish that
42 Art in Print November – December 2016
he so closely resembles is nearly as zany
as the row of three middle-aged bot-
toms on the left turned decisively toward
the viewer. The Reverend Mather would
surely not have sanctioned it.
During the post-war period, as Ameri-
can art took on international significance
for the first time, artists began to dispense
with both figuration and three-dimen-
sional effects. Amy Johnston addresses
the lack of “a coherent system of picto-
rial depth” in post-war American art—the
sheer flatness of the printed abstractions
of artists like Jackson Pollock, David
Smith and Louise Nevelson.18 Jennifer L.
Roberts introduces another kind of flat
screen, enlivening our understanding of
both the technique and the bland ano-
nymity associated with the screenprints
of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Her description of
Ed Ruscha’s 1970 screenprint portfolio,
News, Mews, Pews, Bews, Stews, and Dues,
as “essentially a series of strained stains,”
is a highlight.19 Beyond their obvious
movie-star connections, she links War-
hol’s screenprints to that other screen-
based image mediator, television—at the
height of its ascendance during the ‘60s.
Finally, Tallman closes out the story with
a discussion of recent printmaking and its
savvy combination of conceptual clarity
and tactile intimacy. Like Lewis, she takes
up Kara Walker’s no world as an iconic
contemporary American image, focused
through lenses of race and gender, its
drama encapsulating “the last moment of
the old New World before all things are
soiled.”20
There will surely be more opportuni-
ties to explore this extraordinary mate-
rial: the exhibition represents only a tiny
taste of the National Gallery’s exemplary
collection of more than 22,500 American
prints, one that has almost doubled in
size since 2000 through the donations of
Dave and Reba Williams as well as acqui-
sitions from the Corcoran Gallery of Art
since it closed in 2014. At a time when
issues of American identity and culture
are as fraught as they have ever been, we
could do worse than to reflect upon what
our printmakers have had to say about
this experiment in modern nationhood.
For as Michael Lewis observes, “print, far
from being a minor art, is the archetypal
form of American artistic expression.”21
Catherine Bindman is a New York-based editor
and art critic who has written extensively on both
old master and contemporary prints.
Notes:
1. Susan Tallman, “American Printmaking, 1977
to the Present,” in Three Centuries of American
Prints from the National Gallery of Art (Washing-
ton, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2016), 264.
All subsequent essay citations refer to this
exhibition catalogue.
2. Michael J. Lewis, “American Prints, Their Mak-
ers, and Their Public,” 27.
3. Ibid., 3.
4. Ibid., 8.
5. Ibid., 8.
6. Ibid., 18.
7. Ibid., 23.
8. Ibid., 27.
9. Alexander Nemerov, “Paul Revere’s Caffeine:
The Bloody Massacre,” 34, 36.
10. John Fagg, “Marking Distinction,” 126–31.
11. Adam Greenhalgh, “Building Bodies, Body
Buildings: New York City around 1900,” 142.
12. Ibid., 143.
13. Ibid., 146.
14. David C. Ward, “ ‘And the War Came …’: Rup-
ture and Contradiction in Mid-Nineteenth-Century
Visual Culture,” 77.
15. Joyce Tsai, “American Mosiac: Modern Ameri-
can Prints,” 162.
16. Leo G. Mazow, “Mobility and Connectedness,”
199.
17. David M. Lubin, “ ‘Just Looking’: Prints 1925–
1940,” 185.
18. Amy Johnston, “Picturing Depth in Mid-
Twentieth Century America,” 220.
19. Jennifer L. Roberts, “Sifted: Screenprinting
and the Art of the 1960s,” 240.
20. Tallman, “American Printmaking, 1977 to the
Present,” 262.
21. Lewis, “American Prints, Their Makers, and
Their Public,” 4.
News of the John Baldessari, Madame Cezanne’s Hairdos
(Pyramid, Cube, Oval, Trapezoid, Cone, Rhom-

Print World boid, Sphere, Octagon) (2016)

Three-color screenprints, various dimensions.
Edition of 60 each. Printed and published by
Gemini G.E.L. LLC, Los Angeles. $8,000 each.

Selected New Editions

Hurvin Anderson, Paradise (2016)

Woodblock, screenprint and silver leaf, 35 3/4 x
28 inches. Edition of 40. Printed and published
by Durham Press, Durham, PA. Price on request.

Chakaia Booker, Untitled (2016).

Willem Boshoff, Lost in dark I and

John Baldessari, Madame Cezanne’s Hairdos
(Pyramid) (2016).
Huma Bhabha, Leochicospeedy (2016)
Photogravure, spit bite aquatint, image 74.5 x 49.5
cm, sheet 88.5 x 60 cm. Unique image. Printed
and published by Niels Borch Jensen Editions,
Copenhagen. Price on request.
Hurvin Anderson, Paradise (2016).
Lost in dark II (2016)
Two color lithograph and sandblasted relief
prints, 75 x 60 cm. Edition of 25. Printed by Mark
Attwood and Jacky Tsila, White River, South
Africa. Published by The Artists’ Press, White
River. R9,500.

Richard Armendariz, Modern Prometheus

Unbound (Remix) (2016)
Woodcut, 35 x 47 3/4 inches. Edition of 10.
Printed and published by Flatbed Press, Austin,
TX. $2,000.

Willem Boshoff, Lost in dark I (2016).

Sascha Braunig, Stays (2016)

Richard Armendariz, Modern Prometheus
Unbound (Remix) (2016).
Huma Bhabha, Leochicospeedy (2016). Aquatint etching, soft ground, sugar lift aquatint,
burnishing, 38 3/4 x 27 3/4 inches. Edition of 25.
Allison Bianco, The Old Jamestown Bridge Printed and published by Wingate Studio, Hins-
Series (2016) dale, NH. Price on request.
Three prints: etching, mokuhanga, screenprint,
12 x 18 inches each. Edition of 24 (only 1–14 will be
reserved for complete, boxed suites). Printed by
the artist and Lois Harada, Providence, RI. Pub-
lished by the artist and Cade Tompkins Projects,
Providence. $1,800 for the series, $750 each.

Frances B. Ashforth, Water Study 50 (2016)

Water base monotype, 30 x 30 inches. Unique
image. Printed by Chris Shore at the Center for
Contemporary Printmaking, Norwalk, CT. Pub-
lished by the artist, Center for Contemporary
Printmaking. $2,100.

Sascha Braunig, Stays (2016).

Allison Bianco, The Old Jamestown Bridge
(2016).

Chakaia Booker, Untitled (2016)

Lithograph and chine collé, 20 x 29 inches.
Edition of 25. Printed by Justin Sanz and John
Andrews, New York. Published by EFA Robert
Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, New York.
$1,000.

Frances B. Ashforth, Water Study 50 (2016).

Art in Print November – December 2016 43

John Buck, The Cat (2016)
Color woodcut with hand coloring, 37 x 74 1/4
inches. Edition of 15. Printed by Bud Shark,
assisted by Evan Colbert, Lyons, CO. Published
by Shark’s Ink., Lyons, CO. $5,200.
John Buck, The Cat (2016).
Andy Burgess, Pool House (2016)
Lithography, 29 1/2 x 37 inches. Edition of 30.
Printed by Joe Freye, Madison, WI. Published by
Tandem Press, Madison. $5,000.
Andy Burgess, Pool House (2016).
Robin Cameron, Maquette I–XII (2016)
Series of 12 chine collé monoprints, 19 x 13 5/8
inches, 17 1/4 x 12 3/4 inches, 13 x 12 3/4 inches
and 19 x 8 3/4 inches. Unique image. Printed and
published by Wingate Studio, Hinsdale, NH.
$1,200 each.
Robin Cameron, Maquette VII (2016).
Nancy Campbell, Uwabe (2015)
Screenprint, 22 x 30 inches. Edition of 12. Printed
and published by the artist, Amherst, MA. Avail-
able from Stewart & Stewart, Bloomfield Hills,
MI. $700.
Nancy Campbell, Uwabe (2015).
44 Art in Print November – December 2016
Rodney Carswell, Orbelus and Root (2016)
Color lithograph with pochoir and color litho-
graph, 26 x 30 1/2 inches and 26 x 30 1/2 inches.
Edition of 25 each. Printed by Bud Shark, assisted
by Evan Colbert, Lyons, CO. Published by Shark’s
Ink., Lyons, CO. $2,000 each.
Tacita Dean, LA Exuberance 9 (2016).
Lesley Dill, In This Short Eternity Inside my
Thought (2016)
Relief on Kozo with clay, silk organza and thread,
12 x 5 x 7 inches. Edition of 12. Printed by Jason
Rodney Carswell, Orbelus (2016). Ruhl, Madison, WI. Published by Tandem Press,
Madison. $4,500.
Enrique Chagoya, Aliens Sans Frontières (2016)
Color lithograph, 24 x 28 inches. Edition of 30.
Printed by Bud Shark, assisted by Evan Colbert,
Lyons, CO. Published by Shark’s Ink., Lyons, CO.
$2,000.
Lesley Dill, In This Short Eternity Inside my
Thought (2016).
Mario Doucette, La dispersion des Acadiens
(after Henri Beau) (2016)
Etching, 18 1/4 x 24 inches. Edition of 10. Printed
by Laine Groeneweg, Toronto, Ontario. Pub-
Enrique Chagoya, Aliens Sans Frontières lished under the auspices of the Open Studio Vis-
(2016). iting Artist Program 2016, Toronto. $800 CAD.
Stephanie Cormier, Tool To Taste The Tears
Of The Moon (2016)
Screenprint, 48 x 38 inches. Edition of 5. Printed
by Nicholas Shick, Toronto, Canada. Published
under the auspices of the Open Studio Visiting
Artist Program 2016, Toronto. $1,800 CAD.
Mario Doucette, La dispersion des Acadiens
(after Henri Beau) (2016).
Liza Eurich, Staging (2016)
Screenprint on acetate, variable dimensions.
Edition of 10. Printed by Flora Shum, Toronto,
Ontario. Published under the auspices of the
Open Studio Visiting Artist Program 2016,
Toronto. $700 CAD.
Stephanie Cormier, Tool To Taste The Tears
Of The Moon (2016).
Tacita Dean, LA Exuberance 1–15 (2016)
Hand-drawn three-color blend lithograph, 29
7/8 x 29 7/8 inches each. Edition of 36 each.
Printed and published by Gemini G.E.L. LLC, Los
Angeles. $4,000 each.
Liza Eurich, Staging (2016).
Nancy Friese, Still Grove (2016)
Soft ground etching with aquatint, drypoint
and roulette, image 24 x 48 inches, sheet 30 x 54
inches. Unique image. Printed by the artist with
assistance by Peter Pettengill, Wingate Studio,
Hinsdale, NH. Published by the artist and Cade
Tompkins Projects, Providence, RI. $8,750.

Ana Maria Hernando, Flores para la Nũsta I Mildred Howard, I’ve been a Witness to this
(2016). Game XIII (2016).

Nancy Friese, Still Grove (2016).
Takuji Hamanaka, Tiles (2015)
Water based woodcut mounted on museum
board, 32 x 25 inches. Unique image. Printed and
published by the artist, Brooklyn, NY. $4,000.
Daniel Heyman and Lucy Ganje, In Our
Own Words: Native Impressions: We Can Be Self-
Sufficient (2015–16)
Suite of 12 reduction woodcuts on handmade
paper and 12 letterpress prints, 26 1/4 x 19 1/4
inches each. Edition of 9. Printed by the artists
and Kim Fink, Sundog Multiples, North Dakota.
Published by the artists and Cade Tompkins Proj-
ects, Providence, RI. $40,000.
Jacqueline Humphries, : ) : ) (2016)
Color soap ground and spit bite aquatint with
aquatint, 20 x 20 inches. Edition of 20. Printed by
Sam Carr-Prindle, San Francisco, CA. Published
by Crown Point Press, San Francisco. Price on
request.

Takuji Hamanaka, Tiles (2015).
Don Ed Hardy, Ink is King (2016)
Color lithograph, 30 x 22 inches. Edition of 30.
Printed by Bud Shark, assisted by Evan Colbert,
Lyons, CO. Published by Shark’s Ink., Lyons, CO.
$1,800.
Daniel Heyman and Lucy Ganje, from Jacqueline Humphries, : ) : ) (2016).
In Our Own Words: Native Impressions:
We Can Be Self-Sufficient (2015–16). Sidney Hurwitz, Bristol Port (2016)
Etching/aquatint, 23 x 32 inches. Edition of 15.
Jim Hodges, (2016) Printed by Robert Townsend in Georgetown,
Intaglio, screenprinting, woodcut collé and pig- MA. Published by the artist. Available from Stew-
ment printed Gampi sheet with cut outs, image art & Stewart, Bloomfield Hills, MI. $900.
34 x 24 inches, sheet 41 x 30 inches. Edition of
28. Printed by Highpoint Editions, Minnea-
polis, MN. Published by Highpoint Editions and
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. $14,000.

Sidney Hurwitz, Bristol Port (2016).

Michael Joo, 7 Sins (2016)

Don Ed Hardy, Ink is King (2016).
Ana Maria Hernando, Flores para la Nũsta I
and II (2016)
Color lithographs with cut outs, 40 3/4 x 27
inches each. Edition of 30 each. Printed by Bud
Shark, assisted by Evan Colbert, Lyons, CO. Pub-
lished by Shark’s Ink., Lyons, CO. $3,000 each,
$5,400 for the pair.
Set of seven silvered screenprints, 47 x 35 inches
each. Variable edition of 8. Printed and published
by the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies,
New York. $35,000 for the set, $6,000 each.
Jim Hodges, ɹǝɯɯnS ɟo (2016).
Mildred Howard, I’ve been a Witness to this
Game XIII and XVIII (2016)
Monoprint/digital/collage with metal leaf, 20 5/8
x 15 1/8 inches each. Unique images. Printed by
Bud Shark, assisted by Evan Colbert, Lyons, CO.
Published by Shark’s Ink., Lyons, CO. $3,500 each.

Michael Joo, from 7 Sins (2016).

Art in Print November – December 2016 45

Paula Kraemer, Roast I–V (2016)
Drypoint monoprint and monotype, image 3 x 3
inches, sheet 10 x 8 inches. Edition of 20. Printed
and published by the artist, Open Gate Press,
Madison, WI. $150 each.
Paula Kraemer, Roast I (2016).
Robert Kushner, Morning, Noon, Night (2016)
Color lithograph triptych with gold leaf, 27 x 75
3/4 inches. Edition of 30. Printed by Bud Shark,
assisted by Evan Colbert, Lyons, CO. Published
by Shark’s Ink., Lyons, CO. $5,500.
Robert Kushner, Morning, Noon, Night (2016).
Mary McCleary, Names Written In Water and
Young Crow Arranging His Collection (2016)
Polymer gravure etching and chine collé polymer
gravure etching, image 17 x 22 inches, sheet 22 x
30 inches and image 22 x 18 inches, sheet 32 x 24
inches. Edition of 30 each. Printed and published
by Flatbed Press, Austin, TX. $1,400.
Mary McCleary, Young Crow Arranging
His Collection (2016).
Beatriz Milhazes, Mother’s day (2016)
Woodblock, screenprint and gold leaf, 51 7/8 x 17
inches. Edition of 40. Printed and published by
Durham Press, Durham, PA. Price on request.
Beatriz Milhazes, Mother’s day (2016).
46 Art in Print November – December 2016
Serena Perrone, Alberi Site Specific Portfolio
(2014–15)
Suite of 12 etchings, 10 x 8 inches each. Edition
of 7. Printed by the artist, Philadelphia. Published
by the artist and Cade Tompkins Projects, Provi-
dence, RI. $5,000.
Serena Perrone, Alberi Site Specific
Portfolio (2014–15).
Endi Poskovic, Čuvalo (Agony in the Garden) 
(2016)
Woodcut printed in colors, 32 x 24 inches.
Edition of 20. Printed and published by the art-
ist at the  Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in 
Krakow, Poland.  Available from Stewart & Stew-
art, Bloomfield Hills, MI. $800.
Endi Poskovic, Čuvalo (Agony in the Garden)
(2016).
Ed Ruscha, Unstructured Merriment (2016)
19-color lithograph and screenprint, 23 1/4 x 30
inches. Edition of 60. Printed and published by
Gemini G.E.L. LLC, Los Angeles. $15,000.
Ed Ruscha, Unstructured Merriment (2016).
Alison Saar, Deluge (2016)
Relief with hand painted dye, 23 1/2 x 14
5/8 inches. Edition of 30. Printed by Bruce
Crownover, Madison, WI. Published by Tandem
Press, Madison. $1,500.
Alison Saar, Deluge (2016).
Analia Saban, One-Continuous Line (Pocket
Watch, Blender, Electric Toothbrush, Combo
Television Unit, Massage Recliner) (2016)
Series of five one-color etchings, 54 1/4 x 41 inches
each. Edition of 18 each. Printed and published by
Gemini G.E.L. LLC, Los Angeles. $5,000.
Analia Saban, Pocket Watch (One-Continuous
Line) (2016).
Matt Saunders, Malina 1, 2 and 3 (2016)
Five-color lithograph, 60 x 83.5 cm. Edition of 15.
Printed by Ulrich Kuehle, Berlin. Published by
Keystone Editions, Berlin. €1,500 each.
Matt Saunders, Malina 1 (2016).
Richard Serra, Elevational Weight I–VI (2016)
Hand-applied Paintstik and silica on handmade
paper, various dimensions. Edition of 28 each.
Printed and published by Gemini G.E.L. LLC, Los
Angeles. $10,000–14,000 each.
Richard Serra, Elevational Weight IV (2016).
Mungo Thomson, Pocket Universe #7 (Silver)
(2016)
Aluminum blind embossment,, 26 x 22 inches
(including frame without glazing). Edition of 20
aluminum unique works. Printed and published
by Highpoint Editions, Minneapolis, MN. $4,000.
Mungo Thomson, Pocket Universe #7
(Silver) (2016).
Wayne Thiebaud, Hot Chocolate (2016)
Direct gravure with drypoint printed in brown,
7 3/4 x 10 inches, sheet 13 3/4 x 15 inches.
Edition of 25. Printed and published by Crown
Point Press, San Francisco. Price on request.
Wayne Thiebaud, Hot Chocolate (2016).
Jessie Van der Laan, talus integument p3 and
talus integument s5 (2016)
Monotype and relief, 50 x 30 inches and 20 x 12
inches. Unique image. Printed and published
by Amanda Verbeck, Pele Prints, St. Louis, MO.
$1,500 and $400 each.
Jessie Van der Laan, talus integument p3
(2016).
Dan Walsh, Axis (2016)
Reduction woodcut, image 19 3/4 x 19 3/4 inches,
sheet 22 x 22 inches. Edition of 21. Printed by
Justin Israels, New York. Published by Pace
Editions, Inc., New York. Price on request.
Dan Walsh, Axis (2016).
Jacob Robert Whibley, things we are for (2016)
Relief print, 16 x 25 1/2 inches. Edition of 15.
Printed by the artist and Pamela Dodds, Toronto,
Ontario. Published under the auspices of the
Open Studio Visiting Artist Program 2016,
Toronto. $600 CAD.
Ken Wood, Writ Large IV and Write Large V
(2016)
Collagraph and relief, 44 x 40 inches each.
Edition of 6 each. Printed and published by
Amanda Verbeck, Pele Prints, St. Louis, MO.
$2,200 each.
Jacob Robert Whibley, things we are for (2016).
Stanley Whitney, Untitled (2016)
Series of nine prints: spit bite aquatint, line etch-
ing, soft ground etching, image 49.5 x 62 cm each,
sheet 74 x 82.5 cm each. Edition of 18. Printed
and published by Niels Borch Jensen Editions,
Copenhagen. €1,800.
Ken Wood, Write Large V (2016).
John Zurier, Summer Book blue sugarlift (2016)
Series of 10 spit bite aquatints, image 20 x 14 cm,
sheet 35.5 x 27 cm. Edition of 12. Printed and pub-
lished by Niels Borch Jensen Editions, Copenha-
gen. €1,100.
Stanley Whitney, from Untitled (2016).
Claudia Wieser, Untitled (2016)
Seven-, six- and three-color lithographs with 23.6
Karat gold leaf, 55 x 39 cm and 39 x 39 cm each.
Edition of 30 each. Printed by Sarah Dudley, Ber-
lin. Published by Keystone Editions, Berlin. €750
and €600 each.
John Zurier, Summer Book blue sugarlift
(2016).
John Zurier, Lighthouse/Mirror (2016)
Color soft ground etching on gampi paper chine
collé, image 15 x 9 1/2 inches, sheet 22 x 15 1/2
inches. Edition of 15. Printed and published by
Crown Point Press, San Francisco. $1,500.
Claudia Wieser, Untitled (2016).
Paula Wilson, In the Desert: Mooning (2016)
Collagraph on muslin from two plates with
handprinted collage on muslin and inkjet collage
on silk, mounted on canvas and wood slats, 72 x
48 inches. Edition of 10. Printed and published by
Island Press, St. Louis, MO. $3,750.
John Zurier, Lighthouse/Mirror (2016).
Paula Wilson, In the Desert: Mooning (2016).
Art in Print November – December 2016 47
 Exhibitions of Note Niels Borch Jensen
http://www.nielsborchjensen.com/
ALBuquERquE, NM
“Garo Antreasian: Innovation in Print” DAVENPoRT, IA
“American Scene on Paper”
2016 9 September 2016 – 27 January 2017
Tamarind Institute
http://tamarind.unm.edu/
10 September – 31 December 2016
And:
FALL CATALOG AuSTIN, TX
“Mauricio Lasansky: Kaddish”
12 November 2016 – 8 January 2017
“Xu Bing: Book from the Sky” And:
19 June 2016 – 22 January 2017 “Rembrandt and the Jews:
now online: And: The Berger Print Collection”
“Warhol by the Book” 8 October 2016 – 15 January 2017
www.davidsongalleries.com 16 October 2016 – 29 January 2017 Figge Art Museum
Blanton Museum of Art http://figgeartmuseum.org/
or
http://blantonmuseum.org
hard copy $12 DENVER, Co
BALTIMoRE “Performance on Paper: The Posters of
“Front Room: Guerrilla Girls” Phil Risbeck and John Sorbie”
info@davidsongalleries.com 25 September 2016 – 17 March 2017 10 July 2016 – 8 January 2017
Denver Art Museum
206.624.7684 Baltimore Museum of Art
http://artbma.org http://denverartmuseum.org
313 Occidental Ave. S. | Seattle, WA 98104
BASEL ESSEN, GERMANY
“Enthralling Engraving: “Richard Deacon:
The Enterprise of Hendrick Goltzius” Drawings and Prints 1968–2016”
20 August – 13 November 2016 26 August – 13 November 2016
Kunstmuseum Basel Museum Folkwang
http://kunstmuseumbasel.ch https://www.museum-folkwang.de/

BEDFoRD, uK FLINT, MI
“Picasso & The Masters of Print” “Pressed for Time: History of Printmaking”
Logo size on brochure covers
and invites should be 1 inch wide
Minimum clearance around the logo
15 October
is half the total2016 – logo.
height of the 16 April 2017 10 September – 30 December 2016
TheThis
Higgins
space must beBedford
kept free of all
Flint Institute of Arts
graphic and typographic elements
http://thehigginsbedford.org.uk http://www.flintarts.org/

BoSToN FoRT WoRTH, TX

A CRITICAL DISCOURSE
“one Wall, one Work: Daniel Buren” “Sam Francis: Prints”
ON THE CURRENT 3 August 2016 – 5 February 2017
STATE OFon brochure
PRINTMAKING
10 September – 10 December 2016
Logo size covers
and invites should be 1 inch wide
Minimum clearance around the logo
Barbara Krakow Gallery
is half the total height of the logo.
Amon Carter Museum of American Art
http://www.barbarakrakowgallery.com/
This space must be kept free of all X http://www.cartermuseum.org/
graphic and typographic elements

“William Merritt Chase” HouSToN

X 9 October 2016 – 16 January 2017 “Prints and Plates”
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 21 September 2016 – 12 January 2017
http://mfa.org 1600 Smith Street Gallery
Available for sale at X
http://www.artsbrookfield.com/
store.openstudio.ca
CHICAGo
X “Chicago Printers Guild—Publishers Fair” “Edwin Schlossberg: From Here”
18 November – 19 November 2016 1 October – 26 November 2016
Elastic Arts Hiram Butler Gallery
http://www.chicagoprintersguild.org/fair/ http://hirambutler.com/
The descriptor is not locked-up
with the logo, it must appear on all
“Degas: A New Vision”
CHICHESTER,
Open Studio publications
uK
16 October 2016 – 16 January 2017
“Prints for the Pub:
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
The Guinness Lithographs”
The descriptor is not locked-up
http://mfah.org
19 October 2016 – 15 January 2017
with the logo, it must appear on all
Open Studio publications

Pallant House Gallery

http://pallant.org.uk
CINCINNATI
“The Book of only Enoch and
The Jackleg Testament, Part I: Jack & Eve”
24 September 2016 – 12 March 2017
Cincinnati Art Museum
http://cincinnatiartmuseum.org/
“Connie Sullivan: Ripples Through Time”
17 September – 18 November 2016
HudsonJones
http://hudsonjonesgallery.com
ITHACA, NY
“JapanAmerica: Points of Contact,
1876–1970”
27 August – 18 December 2016
The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art
http://museum.cornell.edu
LoNDoN
“Marcel Dzama and Raymond Pettibon:
Let us compare mythologies”
5 October – 12 November 2016
David Zwirner
http://davidzwirner.com

“Surface Cutting”
CoPENHAGEN
7 September 2016 – 20 February 2017
“Copenhagen | Georg Baselitz”
Royal Academy of Arts
23 October – 19 December 2016
http://royalacademy.org.uk

48 Art in Print November – December 2016

LoS ANGELES
“Warhol 80's”
22 October – 11 November 2016
Gallery Brown
http://gallerybrown.com
“Renaissance and Reformation: German
Art in the Age of Dürer and Cranach”
20 November 2016 – 26 March 2017
And:
“Picasso and his Printers”
23 July – 27 November 2016
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
http://www.lacma.org/
“Paper or Plastic? New Editions by
Analia Saban”
10 September – 12 November 2016
Mixografia
http://www.mixografia.com/
“Pop for the People: Roy Lichtenstein
Prints by Gemini G.E.L.”
7 October 2016 – 13 March 2017
Skirball Cultural Center
http://skirball.org
MADRID
“Marco Rountree. Muralismo Floritural”
15 September – 19 November 2016
And:
“ugo Rondinone. Windows, Stars & Poems”
26 September 2016 – 11 February 2017
La Caja Negra
http://www.lacajanegra.com/
MANCHESTER, uK
“Marcantonio Raimondi and Raphael”
30 September 2016 – 23 April 2017
The Whitworth, The University of Manchester
http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/
MILWAuKEE
“Corot, Daubigny, Millet: Visions of France”
5 August – 27 November 2016
And:
“Gods and Heroes: Classical Mythology in
European Prints”
2 December 2016 – 2 April 2017
Milwaukee Art Museum
http://mam.org/
MINNEAPoLIS
“Art of the Print: Recent Work from the
Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers”
28 October – 23 November 2016
Highpoint Center for Printmaking
http://highpointprintmaking.org
MoNTREAL
“ “The Black Sun of Melancholy”: Monsters
of the unconscious, From Goya and Blake
to Redon and Munch”
23 August – 11 December 2016
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts,
Graphic Arts Centre
http://mbamtl.org
MoRAGA, CA
“Social Justice: It Happens to one,
It Happens to All”
18 September – 11 December 2016
Saint Mary's College Museum of Art
http://gutfreundcornettart.com/
NEW BRuNSWICK, NJ
“Circa 1966: American Prints from
the Collection”
3 September 2016 – 29 January 2017
And:
“Circa 1866: European Prints from
the Collection”
3 September 2016 – 8 January 2017
Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University
http://www.zimmerlimuseum.rutgers.edu/
NEW YoRK
“Analia Saban is Broken”
27 October – 3 December 2016
Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl
http://www.joniweyl.com/
“Black Pulp!”
1 October – 3 December 2016
International Print Center New York
http://www.ipcny.org/
“2nd New York International Miniature
Print Exhibition”
1 November – 18 December 2016
Manhattan Graphics Center
http://www.manhattangraphicscenter.org/
“Printing a Child's World”
27 May – 6 November 2016
And:
“Workshop and Legacy: Stanley William
Hayter, Krishna Reddy, Zarina Hashmi”
6 October 2016 – 26 March 2017
Metropolitan Museum of Art
www.metmuseum.org/
“Dubuffet Drawings, 1935–1962”
30 September 2016 – 2 January 2017
And:
“Word and Image: Martin Luther's
Reformation”
7 October 2016 – 22 January 2017
Morgan Library and Museum
http://www.themorgan.org/
“A Curious Hand: The Prints of Henri
Charles Guerard (1846–1897)”
2 November 2016 – 26 February 2017
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building,
New York Public Library
https://www.nypl.org/
“The Art of Politics or Politics in Art”
1 October – 12 November 2016
The Old Print Shop
http://www.oldprintshop.com/
NoRTH FARGo, ND
“Beyond order: Selections from
Highpoint Editions”
17 September 2016 – 27 January 2017
Plains Art Museum
http://plainsart.org/
NoRTHAMPToN, MA
“When in Rome: Prints and Photographs
1550–1900”
30 September – 30 December 2016
And:
“Eric Avery: AIDS WoRK”
12 August – 11 December 2016
Smith College Museum of Art
http://smith.edu/artmuseum
Art in Print November – December 2016 49

PASADENA, CA
“States of Mind: Picasso Lithographs
1945–1960”
14 October 2016 – 13 February 2017
Norton Simon Museum of Art
http://www.nortonsimon.org/
PHILADELPHIA
“Paul Keene: Post-War Explorations in
Painting”
28 September – 2 December 2016
LaSalle University Art Museum
http://lasalle.edu/museum
“Victoria Burge: Penumbra”
19 September – 19 November 2016
And:
“Celestial/Terrestrial”
16 September – 19 November 2016
The Print Center
http://printcenter.org
Syracuse University Art Galleries
http://suart.syr.edu
TRoY, NY
“2016 Screenprint Biennial”
28 October – 23 December 2016
Arts Center of the Capital Region
http://www.artscenteronline.org/
WELLESLEY, MA
“Anni Albers: Connections”
28 September – 18 December 2016
Davis Museum at Wellesley College
https://www.wellesley.edu/davismuseum/
WEST HARTFoRD, CT
“HANGA NoW: Contemporary Japanese
Printmakers”
23 September – 10 December 2016
University of St. Joseph Art Museum
http://www.usj.edu/arts/art-museum/

PoRTLAND, oR WILMINGToN, DE
“Warhol Prints from the Collection “Lasting Impressions: The Artists of
of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Currier & Ives”
Family Foundation” 17 September 2016 – 8 January 2017
8 October 2016 – 1 January 2017 Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library
And: http://www.winterthur.org/
“Corita Kent: Spiritual Pop”
13 August 2016 – 29 January 2017 Auctions
Portland Art Museum
http://portlandartmuseum.org/ LoNDoN
“Prints & Multiples”
SANTA ANA, CA 16 November 2016
“The Virgin of Guadelupe: Images in Bonhams, New Bond Street
Colonial Mexico” And:
8 October 2016 – 29 January 2017 “Prints & Multiples”
The Bowers Museum 30 November 2016
http://bowers.org Bonhams, Knightsbridge
http://www.bonhams.com/
SANTA FE, NM
“Rick Bartow: Things You Know But Can- NEW YoRK
not Explain, a Retrospective Exhibition” “Prints & Multiples”
19 August – 31 December 2016 2 November 2016
IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Christie's
https://iaia.edu/iaia-museum-of-contemporary- http://www.christies.com/
native-arts/
“old Master through Modern Prints Featur-
SHELBuRNE, VT ing Camille Pissarro: Impressionist Icon”
“Hard-Edge Cool: The Routhier  3 November 2016
Collection of Mid-Century Print” Swann Auction Galleries
19 November 2016 – 22 January 2017 And:
Shelburne Museum “Printed & Manuscript Americana”
http://shelburnemuseum.org 17 November 2016
Swann Auction Galleries
SPRINGFIELD, MA And:
“Small Worlds: Wassily Kandinsky’s “Art, Press & Illustrated Books”
Experiments in Printmaking” 1 December 2016
14 June 2016 – 15 January 2017 Swann Auction Galleries
Springfield Museums http://swanngalleries.com
https://springfieldmuseums.org/
“Modern & Contemporary Prints &
ST. LouIS, Mo Multiples”
“Impressions of War” 6 December 2016
5 August 2016 – 12 February 2017 Bonhams
And: http://www.bonhams.com/
“Conflicts of Interest: Art and War
in Modern Japan”
16 October 2016 – 8 January 2017 Events
St. Louis Art Museum
http://slam.org PHILADELPHIA
“Screen Shots: The Print Center
SYRACuSE, NY Annual Auction”
“About Prints: The Legacy of 3 December 2016
Stanley William Hayter and Atelier 17” The Print Center
18 August – 20 November 2016 http://printcenter.org

50 Art in Print November – December 2016

AuSTIN, TX Kate Krasin: Luminous Prints
“PrintAustin 2017” Carmen Vandelin
15 January – 15 February 2017 96 pages, 60 illustrations
PrintAustin Published by Pomegranate Press,
http://printaustin.org Portland, OR, 2016
$29.95.
Fairs
BRooKLYN
“Prints Gone Wild”
4 November 2016
Littlefield
http://www.cannonballpress.com/

NEW YoRK
“IFPDA Print Fair”
2 – 6 November 2016
Park Avenue Armory
http://www.ifpda.org/content/print-fair Copy.Right: Adam von Bartsch:
Kunst, Kommerz, Kennerschaft
“Editions/Artists’ Books Fair” Edited by Stephan Brakensiek, Anette Michels,
3 – 6 November 2016 Anne-Katrin Sors
The Tunnel 352 pages, 264 illustrations
http://eabfair.org Published by Michael Imhof Verlag,
Petersberg, Germany, 2016
“NY Satellite Print Fair” €45.
4 – 6 November 2016
Bohemian Hall
http://www.nysatelliteprintfair.com/

“Buy the Book Fair”

5 – 6 November 2016
Central Booking
PRESENTS
http://centralbookingnyc.com/

“Self Publisher Invitational

Exhibition and Fair”
ME TROPOLI S
3 – 6 November 2016 &

INVISIBLE
Rogue Space, Chelsea
http://spifair.org/

FLINT, MI
“Flint Fine Print Fair”
18 – 20 November 2016
The Print Before Photography CITIE S
Antony Griffiths
Flint Institute of Arts
http://www.flintarts.org/support/events/printfair.
569 pages, 310 illustrations OCT 21 – DEC 24
Published by British Museum Press,
html London, 2016
$75. Artists Books &
New Books Collaborative book projects
Prints in Translation, 1450–1750: Exhibit of artists’ books and folios
Image, Materiality, Space
Edited by Suzanne Karr Schmidt,
for collaborative leporello book
Edward H. Wouk that present new interpretations of
252 pages, 17 color and 93 b/w illustrations urbanity. Over 150 domestic and
Published by Routledge, London, 2016 international artists represented.
$149.95.

FOR MORE INFO

(402) 438-0049
W W W. C O N S T E L L AT I O N - S T U D I O S . N E T
Frank Stella Prints:
A Catalogue Raisonné:
Erratum and Printing Sequences
(Catalogue Numbers 00–315)
Richard H. Axsom with Leah Kolb
184 pages
Published by Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation,
Portland, OR, 2016
Free downloadable PDF:
www.jordanschnitzer.org/s/stellaprintsequences

Art in Print November – December 2016 51

 Arrested Ephemera: Haiga
Ellen Peckham
132 pages, 66 illustrations
Published by Paper Crown Press, Guttenberg, NJ,
2015
$28.50.
Temporarily accessioned
Paul Coldwell
72 page artist book, edition of 150
Published by the artist, London, 2016
£42.
Other News
Call for Entries: Wolfgang Ratjen Award
The Wolfgang Ratjen Award is an annual award
for distinguished research in the field of graphic
arts. Consideration will be given to a PhD dis-
sertation, MA thesis or scholarly article of larger
scope dealing with art historical questions that
involve drawings or prints in Western art. The
winning candidate, chosen by an independent
committee of scholars, will receive €5,000, and
is expected to spend three months conduct-
ing research at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstge-
schichte in Munich. Please go to http://en.zikg.
eu/fellowships/awards-for-emerging-scholars/wolf-
gang-ratjen-award for more information.
Call for Entries: The Print Center 91st
Annual International Competition
The Print Center invites artists who use print-
making and/or photography as critical compo-
nents of their work, or whose work pushes the
boundaries of traditional photographic and
printmaking practices, to enter its annual Inter-
national Competition. Awards include three solo
exhibitions at The Print Center to be held May–
August 2017; inclusion in an online exhibition of
portfolios; a Philadelphia Museum of Art Collec-
tion Award; and more than $2,000 in purchase
and material prizes. The deadline for entry is 15
November 2016. For more information, please go
to http://printcenter.org/100/competition/.
Alan Cristea Gallery opens New Space
The Alan Cristea Gallery’s new space at 43 Pall
Mall, St. James’s opened on 5 October with the
exhibition, “Howard Hodgkin: After All.”
52 Art in Print November – December 2016
IFPDA Announces Recipients of 2016
Foundation Grant Awards
The International Fine Print Dealers Association
(IFPDA) announced the recipients of the 2016
IFPDA Foundation grant awards in support of
exhibitions, scholarly publications and educa-
tional programs that promote a greater aware-
ness and appreciation of fine prints. This year’s
projects range from exhibitions to performance-
based community happenings, to scholarly
research. The seven grant recipients are: Arts
Center of the Capital Region (Troy, NY); Kala Art
Institute (Berkeley, CA); The Lawrence Arts Cen-
ter (Lawrence, KS); RISD Museum (Providence,
RI); Smart Museum of Art at the University of
Chicago (Chicago, IL); University of St. Joseph
Art Museum (West Hartford, CT); and the Win-
terthur Museum, Garden & Library (Winterthur,
DE).
EXPo Chicago 2016
EXPO Chicago returned for a fifth year at Chi-
cago’s Navy Pier, with over 145 galleries and more
than 38,000 visitors over its four-day span (22–25
September). Though EXPO Chicago is a general
art fair, prints featured prominently throughout
the event, brought by print dealers and publish-
ers, by non-specialist galleries and in the curated
“projects” scattered through the venue. In the
main section of EXPO, Alan Cristea Gallery pre-
sented Michael Craig-Martin’s new screenprints,
Fundamentals, along with recent work by Antony
Gormley (see Art in Print Sep-Oct 2016). Right
around the corner, the Crown Point Press booth
featured beautifully delicate new works by Leon-
ardo Drew. Other exhibiting print publishers
included Graphicstudio, Landfall Press, Carolina
Nitsch, Poligrafa Obra Grafica and Tandem Press.
Galleries specializing in prints and multiples,
such as Sims Reed Gallery and Flowers Gallery,
exhibited contemporary and modern works. The
fair also included a specialized section, EXPO
Editions + Books, with smaller booths showcas-
ing artists’ books, editions and prints: Chicago’s
No Coast Editions presented an unusual screen-
print on hand-dyed fabric by Aay Preston-Myint
and offset prints by Math Bass. Finally a number
of blue-chip galleries took the trip to Chicago
as an opportunity to highlight works on paper,
including a wall of Donald Judd woodcuts at
David Zwirner’s booth and a large woodcut
by Martin Puryear at Matthew Marks Gallery.
Finally, one of the most striking EXPO Projects
was Samuel Levi Jones’ 48 Portraits (Underex-
posed) (2012), a wall of black-on-black inkjet
prints recasting Gerhard Richter’s 48 Portraits
(1972) with African-American cultural heroes,
raising questions of visibility on several levels.
Please submit announcements of
exhibitions, publications and
other events to
info@artinprint.org.
The MFA Book Arts + Printmaking Program and
the Borowsky Center at the University of the Arts in
Philadelphia are pleased to announce the release
of two new editions by two exceptional artists,
Lesley Dill [left] and Wardell Milan [below].

For more information please visit: bookprintmfa.uarts.edu

or contact Cynthia Nourse Thompson, Director
cythompson@uarts.edu 215.717.6106

All proceeds from sales support MFA student travel scholarships.

MASTER OF
FINE ARTS:
PRINTMEDIA
Expand the definition of contemporary print
while acknowledging its rich history and
tradition. Work across disciplines to create
prints, artists’ books, three-dimensional objects,
installations, new media, and time arts.

APPLY BY JANUARY 10
saic.edu/gradapp
Learn more at
saic.edu/printmedia

GRADUATE ADMISSIONS
800.232.7242
312.629.6100
gradmiss@saic.edu

Melanie Teresa Bohrer (MFA 2016), Untitled (Memorial), 2016

 Announcing two artist books from Arion Press in Fall 2016

Pedro Páramo
by JUAN RULFO
with 10 color images and a separate print by
ENRIQUE CHAGOYA
In September 2016, Arion Press published a classic of Latin
American fiction, the 1955 novel Pedro Páramo. Hailed by
Susan Sontag as a “masterpiece of twentieth century world
literature,” this haunting novel was a formative influence
on Gabriel Garcia Márquez, who knew it by heart.
Enrique Chagoya has created 10 two-sided color prints
bound into the book so they can be read from both sides.
Signed by the artist, the book is printed by letterpress and
bound by hand, in an edition of 300. A separate 9-color
print is available in an edition of 30.
Arion Press publications can be viewed online and in
New York at the Park Avenue Armory IFPDA Print Fair,
November 2 through 6.

The Little of our Earthly Trust

Poetry by
ELIZABETH BISHOP
selected and with an introduction by
HELEN VENDLER
with 24 prints by
JOHN NEWMAN

In November 2016, Arion Press will publish the poetry of Elizabeth

Bishop (1922–1979), the American poet considered “the most pop-
ular of her generation.” The selection is by Harvard professor
Helen Vendler, a friend of Bishop’s, who also contributed an intro-
duction. Sculptor John Newman, a longtime admirer of Bishop’s
poetry, has made prints based on 24 of his small sculptures.
Signed by the artist, the book is printed by letterpress and bound
by hand, in an edition of 300. A separate hand-colored linoleum
block print is in an edition of 30. The 25 original John Newman
drawings are offered individually for purchase with a copy of the
book. For prospectuses and information use the address below.

THE ARION PRESS

1802 Hays Street, The Presidio, San Francisco, California 94129
415-668-2542 • arionpress@arionpress.com • www.arionpress.com
 Miami Art Fair
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 HUSDON
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 MICHAEL
C E M I N E N C E G R I S E E D I T I 0 N S L L C E M I N E N C E G R I S E E D I T I 0 N S L L C
E M I N E N C E G R I S E E D I T I 0 N S L L C E M I N E N C E G R I S E E D I T I 0 N S L L C E
M I N E N C E G R I S E E D I T I 0 N S L L C E M I N E N C E G R I S E E D I T I 0 N S L L C E M

STEINBERG
I N E N C E G R I S E E D I T I 0 N S L L C E M I N E N C E G R I S E E D I T I 0 N S L L C E M I
N E N C E G R I S E E D I T I O N S L L C E M I N E N C E G R I S E E D I T I 0 N S L L C E M I N
E N C E G R I S E E D I T I O N S L L C E M I N E N C E G R I S E E D I T I 0 N S L L C E M I N E

FINE
N C E G R I S E E D I T I O N S L L C E M I N E N C E G R I S E E D I T I 0 N S L L C E M I N E N
C E G R I S E E D I T I O N S L L C E M I N E N C E G R I S E E D I T I 0 N S L L C E M I N E N C
E G R I S E E D I T I O N S L L C E M I N E N C E G R I S E E D I T I 0 N S L L C E M I N E N C E

ARTS
G R I S E E D I T I O N S L L C E M I N E N C E G R I S E E D I T I 0 N S L L C E M I N E N C E G
R I S E E D I T I O N S L L C E M I N E N C E G R I S E E D I T I O N S L L C E M I N E N C E G R

E D I T I O N S / A R T I S T S ’ B O O K S F A I R 2 0 16

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 Introducing

THE ROOM
Tw e l v e w o o d c u t s b y
Alice Leora Briggs
Poem by Mark Strand
Deluxe artist suite of twelve wood relief prints by Alice
Leora Briggs, each corresponding to a line in Mark
StrandÕs poem of the same title. Housed in a hand-made
box with title page and colophon signed by the artist and
Mark Strand, 1990 U.S. Poet Laureate, MacArthur Fellow
and Pulitzer Prize Winner.
Edition of 24.
Numbers 1-14 are reserved as deluxe boxed suites; 15-24 of each image are available as
individual impressions. Complete suite may be viewed at www.flatbedpress.com.

Image: It is an old story, the way it happens; 22x24Ó

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Brooklyn, NY 11215
junglepress.com
Camp Bedlam lithograph, edition: 25, paper size: 22 x 28 in. mock250@gmail.com

60 Art in Print November – December 2016

 Strike a PoSe: 145 West 58th St., suite 6D
SPectacular imagery of the kabuki theater New York, NY 10019
September 8 – November 8, 2016 tel. 212.585.0474
open viewing during Asia Week & Print Week, 11am – 5 pm info@scholten-japanese-art.com
otherwise by appointment www.scholten-japanese-art.com

During Print Week Visit The

NY
David Allen Fine Arts

The Annex Galleries

SATELLITE PRINT FAIR Armstrong Fine Art
AT THE
BOHEMIAN HALL
Marc Chabot Fine Arts

Davidson Galleries
November 4 — 6 2016 th th
C. & J. Goodfriend
Daily Complimentary Admission Conrad R. Graeber Fine Art
Friday 10 to 8 KADS New York
Saturday 10 to 7
Sunday 10 to 5 Ernest S. Kramer Fine Arts

Edward T. Pollack Fine Arts

www.nysatelliteprintfair.com
Stevens Fine Art
BOHEMIAN NATIONAL HALL M. Lee Stone Fine Prints
321 E. 73rd STREET
between 1st & 2nd Avenues Egon & Joan Teichert Fine Prints
NEW YORK, NY 10021
 a-z

Matthew Carter
portfolio of 26 aquatints with chine collé
14 x 14 inches (sheet)
edition 52
2016

Center Street Studio is pleased to announce the publication of E/AB Fair 2016
a portfolio of 26 aquatints by type designer Matthew Carter. It The Tunnel NYC
will be on view at the Edition/Artist Book Fair booth A7. November 3-6

Center Street Studio www.centerstreetstudio.com

62 Art in Print November – December 2016

Art in Print November – December 2016 63
 SASCHA BRAUNIG

S TAY S , 2 0 1 6
38.75 x 27.75 inches
edition of 25

visit us at
E/AB FAIR
NOVEMBER 3-6 2016

NADA MIAMI
DECEMBER 1-4 2016

WINGATESTUDIO.COM

64 Art in Print November – December 2016

ROBERT KUSHNER
NEW LITHOGRAPH
40 YEARS O
G f
IN

PR
RA

INT
• CELEB

ING • SHA
•
• SH
NK

Om
SI

RK
AR

.C
K’
SI
“Morning, Noon, Night” (2016) ’S
IN

K
NK

K
R
IN
.COm • SHA
color lithograph with gold leaf, 27 x 75¾ inches, edition of 30 K • SHARKS

Dolan/Maxwell @
the IFPDA Print Fair
November 2–6, 2016
Park Avenue Armory
Park Avenue at 67th Street
New York, New York

2046 Rittenhouse Square

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103
215.732.7787 office
Ron Rumford, Director

www.DolanMaxwell.com
Helen Phillips
Judith Rothschild
The estates of Helen Phillips and Judith Rothschild are represented by Dolan/Maxwell.

Left: Helen Phillips, Moving Angles 1952, open bite etching, proof printed in black only, image: 10 9/16 x 8”; sheet: 14 15/16 x 9 5/8”
Right: Judith Rothschild, Greenwich Village 1945, color screenprint, proofs only, image: 8 1/4 x 7 5/16; sheet: 14 x 11”

Art in Print November – December 2016 65

 HAND PRINT WORKSHOP
INTERNATIONAL
PRINTS
1997-2017
The Athanaeum, Alexandria, Virginia
February 27 - April 2, 2017

Hand Print Workshop International

hpwi@mac.com
www.hpwi.org

Mary Judge
New Intaglio Editions

Untitled, 2016
Etching and aquatint
Image: 24” x 24”, sheet: 28”x 28”
edition of 12
Published by Manneken Press

This print & many (309) 829-7443

others will be on ink@mannekenpress.com
view at booth B38. www.mannekenpress.com

66 Art in Print November – December 2016

 Audubon February, 2016, pigment print/hand painted, ed: 25, sh: 21.75” x 29.75”
Goldman
Jane E.

The IFPDA Print Fair • 2-6 November 2016 • Park Avenue Armory (67 & Park) • New York, New York
Flint Fine Print Fair • 18-20 November 2016 • Flint Institute of Arts • Flint, Michigan

Stewart & Stewart

Printer/Publisher & Dealer of Fine Prints Since 1980
248.626.5248 • info@StewartStewart.com
www.StewartStewart.com

THE POWER OF PRINT

Details: Michele Oka Doner, Michael Berkhemer, Casey Rae

wildwoodpress.us artnet.com ifpda.org

Art in Print November – December 2016 67

68 Art in Print November – December 2016
 Crown Point Press
JACQUELINE HUMPHRIES
ten new etcHinGS
DecemBer 2016

:):), 2016. Color soap ground and spit bite

aquatints with aquatint. 20 x 20", edition 20.

20 HawtHorne Street San FranciSco, ca 94105 (415) 974-6273 crownpoint.com

JACOB
HASHIMOTO
Tiny Rooms and Tender Promises
2016 Mixografía® print on handmade paper and archival
pigment print with pushpins
Edition of 27 • 30.5” X 23”

1419 East Adams Boulevard

Los Angeles • CA 90011
www.mixografia.com
323.232.1158

Art in Print November – December 2016 69

 ALICIA McCARTHY
PA U L S O N F O N TA I N E P R E S S NEW LIMITED EDITIONS

2390 C FOURTH ST. BERKELEY, CA 94710 T.510.559.2088 WWW.PAULSONFONTAINEPRESS.COM INFO@PAULSONFONTAINEPRESS.COM

VISIT OUR WEBSITE TO

VIEW NEW PRINTS BY
ANDY BURGESS
SUZANNE CAPORAEL
LESLEY DILL
SANDRA RAMOS
ALISON SAAR

WWW.TANDEMPRESS.WISC.EDU Andy Burgess

INFO@TANDEMPRESS.WISC.EDU Movie Night, 2016
Relief, intaglio, archival inkjet, enamel paint, collage, ed. 15
608.263.3437 24 x 24 inches

70 Art in Print November – December 2016

Back Issues of Art in Print

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Volume 6, Number 1 Volume 6, Number 2 Volume 6, Number 3
 IFPDA Print Fair
Contributors to this Issue
02–06 November 2016 | Stand #424

New Editions

John Armleder
Alix Lambert
Catherine Bindman is an editor and art critic who has written extensively on both old master and
Liza Lou contemporary prints. She was Deputy Editor at Art on Paper magazine and lives in New York.
Bernar Venet
Chang Yuchen is an artist who currently lives and works in New York. She graduated from Central
Tempor ary Tattoo Project #1
Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (BFA) in 2011 and School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA) in 2013.
Brian Alfred Her solo exhibitions include “Chang Yuchen: Barbaric Poetry” at Between Art Lab, Beijing, 2015 and
“Chang Yuchen: Snake and Others” at Fou Gallery, New York, 2013.

World House Editions Ivy Cooper reviews art in St. Louis for local and national publications including Art in America and
Member IFPDA
ArtForum. She received her PhD in Art and Architectural History from the University of Pittsburgh and
www.WorldHouseEditions.com is currently Professor of Art History at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

Lauren R. Fulton is Curatorial Assistant at the Aspen Art Museum. She received her MA in Art His-
tory, Theory and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and holds a BA in Art His-
tory and a BS in Journalism from the University of Kansas (2011). She has worked at the Museum of
Contemporary Art Chicago, Nasher Sculpture Center, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.

Joseph Goldyne came to prominence with his first solo exhibition of monoprints in 1973. Initially
educated as a physician, he went on to earn a graduate degree in art history. A retrospective of his work
was held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 2001, and a catalogue raisonné of his artist’s books has just

Pele Prints
been published by Stanford University Library to accompany an exhibition there.

Paige K. Johnston is one half of the collaborative duo Life After Life, whose work has been featured
at Villa Vassilieff, Paris (2016) and Company Gallery, New York (2015). Through her consulting studio,
MIXED NUTS, she has worked with Theaster Gates Studio. She has curated numerous exhibitions and
public programs as Manager of Special Collections for the Flaxman Library at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago (SAIC), from which she received masters degrees in Art History and Arts Admin-
istration.

Jessie Van der Laan
www.peleprints.com
Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, critic and curator. He was the editor of Black Mountain College:
Experiment in Art (MIT Press, 2002, 2013) and curator of an exhibition on Black Mountain College
for the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid in 2002. He has written extensively on contemporary artists
including Ghada Amer and Reza Farkondeh, Jennifer Bartlett, Rudy Burckhardt, Francesco Clemente,
Red Grooms and Kiki Smith. He was appointed Critic at Yale School of Art in 2015.

Katia Santibañez was born in Paris, France in 1964 and received her degree in 1990 at the Ecole
Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris. Solo exhibitions include Jancar Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), IMC
Lab (New York, NY), and she has participated in group shows at Pace Prints (New York, NY) and Jeff
Bailey Gallery (New York, NY). Her paintings, drawings, and prints are in numerous public and private
collections. Santibañez lives and works in New York City and in the Berkshires.

James Siena is a New York-based artist whose complex, rule-based linear abstractions have situated
him firmly within the trajectory of modern American art. Mr. Siena works across a diverse range of
media, including lithography, etching, woodcut, engraving, drawing, and painting. His work is held in
numerous public and private collections across the U.S., including Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art
and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Julie Warchol is the Associate Editor of  Art in Print  and the Curatorial Associate at the Terra
Foundation for American Art in Chicago. She holds an MA in art history from the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago. She has curated exhibitions of 20th-century American prints, photographs and
artists’ publications at the Smith College Museum of Art and the Joan Flash Artists’ Book Collection
at SAIC.

Susan Tallman is the Editor-in-Chief of Art in Print. She has written extensively about prints, issues
of multiplicity and authenticity, and other aspects of contemporary art.

72 Art in Print November – December 2016

Jim
Editions/Artist’s Book Fair Jim Hodges, , 2016
intaglio, screenprinting, woodcut collé and
November 3 – 6, 2016
pigment printed Gampi sheet with cut outs
Booth: B2

Hodges
41 x 30 inches, Edition of 28
Published by Highpoint Editions and Walker Art Center
Photo Credit: Walker Art Center

Inquiries: 612 . 871.1326 | info@highpointprintmaking.org | highpointprintmaking.org