The articles selected here are available as public service. To have access to all articles, please subscribe.
Enrique Chagoya’s codices are the most intricate and sustained articulation of the artist’s concept of “reverse anthropology,” documents of an alternate world in which the Spanish conquest of the New World failed, and the normative culture of the 21st century is Meso-American rather than Anglo-American.
In the late 1990s, the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago discovered a lost group of 157 enormous hand-stenciled propaganda posters produced during World War II by an art collective of working under the umbrella of the news agency TASS. Intended to boost morale and report on the war, the posters were designed for temporary window display—TASS almost produced one for each day of the war. After more than a decade of study and restoration, the posters went on view this fall in a mammoth exhibition— the first on its subject in English.
As long as there have been prints, they have always been a feature of street life, infiltrating the public arena and playing a part in the urban exchange of information. Graffiti, street art, and their printed progeny, now ubiquitous, may appear to have sprung fully formed from the spray cans and stencils wielded by a new breed of artist, operating outside the system and eschewing the traditions, but like any other art form, street art has a rich vocabulary of sources and precedents that includes not only older print imagery and styles, but an earlier print culture itself.
Matrices, and by extension the prints they produce, have a unique and curious identity in relation to other classes of art objects. In the first exhibition of its kind, “Drawing and Its Double,” presents 58 intaglio printing plates made between1528 to 1988 that prompt a reconsideration of matrices as art, and as objects of value to 21st century scholars, artists and general viewers.
Christiane Baumgartner is that unique figure, a primary printmaker with an international and substantial reputation in contemporary art. British artist and scholar Paul Coldwell discusses Baumgartner’s woodcuts, videos, and her visceral enactment of surveillance.
By Adam Lowe
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, famous for his eminently tasteful Views of Rome, was also a brilliant designer of wildly eclectic decorative objects. Now, some 200 years after his death, these designs have been given three-dimensional form through 21st century scanning and 3D printing technologies. Adam Lowe, of Madrid’s Factum Arte, discusses the thinking and the processes employed and their implications for the ways in which we understand our cultural heritage.
By Deborah Wye
Deborah Wye recently left the Museum of Modern Art after 31 years in the Department of Prints and Illustrated books. In this interview she discusses artists from Picasso to Swoon, and the changing role and understanding of prints, both within the museum and the art world at large.
Lucas Kilian’s 1613 lift-the-flap anatomy prints are some of the most intricate and elaborate examples of early interactive printed objects we have; they allowed Renaissance viewers to (virtually) dissect male and female corpses.
Leo Steinberg put it best: “without prints you don’t understand the culture of the world.” Steinberg, who died in March, wrote about everything from Christ’s genitalia to Jasper Johns’ targets, but he collected prints because he was as interested in the ideas that connected these things as he was in the things themselves.
