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Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life is the elegant companion to last summer’s exhibition of the same name at The Art Institute of Chicago. Thoughtfully and cleverly assembled, the show revealed unexpected uses for prints of the 15th- and 16th-centuries. The catalogue carries on this work and helps to illuminate the ephemeral qualities of print, as well as the more lasting concepts that printed multiples can convey to a broader, contemporary audience.
Alex Katz’ detractors see him as a stylish but ultimately decorative chronicler of a certain kind of privileged American life; his supporters see him as a profound investigator of perception and the emotional resonance of form—Ellsworth Kelly with figures. For those who have yet to stake a position, the Albertina catalogue, covering 64 years and including many of Katz’ most famous images, this beautifully produced catalogue raisonné documenting nearly 500 prints made over 64 years offers a profusion of material for consideration.
Wallpaper is constantly adapting to fashion, economies and society. This book describes its development from single sheets to paper rolls, from hand printing to mechanical rotary printing, from a luxury affordable only by the elite to a product for everyone. At Prangins, roughly 100 different motifs were found, dating back over the course of 150 years.
The book, and by extension the print, was critical to Mallarmé‘s most revolutionary projects. In her recent study, The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, The Artist’s Book, and the Transformation of Print Culture, Anna Sigrídur Arnar convincingly argues that the writer both informed, and was informed by, the transformation of printmaking and book culture to a much greater extent than has been previously acknowledged.
“Printmaking,” Joan Snyder says, “is magical, though a lot of work… You don’t know what you’re going to get.” This book and its attendent exhibition are the first to survey the breadth of Snyder’s printmaking, and they are critical for any understanding of who Snyder is as an artist, revealing a more complex, subtle, and layered body of work than the paintings alone suggest.
What happens when arguments about the nature of representation become the thing being represented? Primary Information is an imprint best known for the hands-off fidelity of its reprints of critical art writing of the 60s and 70s. Its anthology of writings from the 1980s periodical REAL LIFE, however, is an editorial creation with interesting implications.
Visual culture has never figured prominently in accounts of Early Modern England, but Malcolm Jones’ new book uncovers a secret history of image use (if not image creation) that permeated the world of Shakespeare and Johnson.
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Paul Gauguin’s woodcuts and monoprints are famous for their radical departure from Western pictorial norms, but a new examination of Gauguin’s first, experimental woodcut series argues that the real radicality of Gauguin’s prints lies not in their ‘originality’, but in the artist’s recognition that originality and authenticity were, in fact, unattainable.
It is Almost That is a coverless, inventive and poignant collection of twenty-six visionary works by women artists and writers, from Charlotte Salomon’s remarkable autobiographical 1940s graphic novel, to a 2011 photo and prose piece by Bhanu and Rohini Kapil, with space between for the comic, the tragic, and the incomplete.
Impressions From South Africa 1965 to Now examines the social role of prints in a tumultuous time and place as evidenced through the work of 24 artists, 8 artist collectives, and 22 print-producing organizations, from William Kentridge to Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).
