Installation shot of “Pulled in Brooklyn,”at IPCNY featuring Jackie Saccoccio, Untitled (2017), etching, aquatint, scraping and embossing, 22 x 27 inches, edition of 10. Courtesy Jennifer Melby Editions. Jackie Saccoccio, copper plate for Untitled (2017), etching, aquatint, scraping and embossing, 15 3/4 x 21 1/4 inches. Courtesy Jennifer Melby Editions. Photo: Elisabeth Berezansky.

Talk to most MFA students these days and chances are they will express a desire to move to Brooklyn. Despite rising costs for housing, the borough still attracts the sort of …Read more

Lucien Fleury, L’Envers du Billet (1970), screenprint, 102 x 57 cm, 1 Courtesy of Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole, Claude-Henri Bernadot.

Banknotes have matrices designed by artists, they are pulled by master craftsmen, and the prints vary in value, just like fine art prints. But you don’t need an understanding …Read more

Joan Miró, The Birth of the World (1925), oil on canvas, 8 feet 2 3/4 inches x 6 feet 6 3/4 inches. Acquired through an anonymous fund, the Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Slifka and Armand G. Erpf Funds, and by gift of the artist. ©2018 Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

In Joan Miró’s large canvas The Birth of the World (1925), a handful of solid shapes gambol against a dun background—a red circle trailing a yellow line suggests …Read more

Among his other virtues, Albrecht Dürer was a meticulous book- keeper. His travel diaries are chock- a-block with tallies in now arcane currencies—“8 thaler” for wine, “5 white pfs” for a Lutheran tract, “20 stivers” for an elk’s foot—as well as payment in units still perfectly familiar: a St. Eustace to a servant; a Melencolia I to a secretary; an engraved Passion to a goldsmith. Dürer prints, then as now, were valued as masterpieces of art, not just markers of exchange, but Dürer understood that reproducibility brought fungibility with it. Though banknotes would not become common in Europe until centuries later, Dürer’s unchartered accountancy is a sneak preview of the coming codepen- dency of printing, art and money.

This issue of Art in Print is about money—money as a facilitator, a col- lectible and a designated driver of social and political values. Having no inherent material value, paper currency depends on allusion—connecting what it repre- sents pictorially (heroic raptors, dead statesmen, ponderous monuments) to what it represents notionally (the power of the state, the ability to buy a cup of coffee).

Artists, unsurprisingly, have made the most of it: they have painted its portrait (William Harnett), screenprinted it on canvas (Andy Warhol), and wallpapered the Guggenheim Museum with it to illus- trate just how much space a $100,000 art prize takes up in one-dollar bills (Hans- Peter Feldmann). Ray Beldner, inter- viewed here by Renée Bott, has stitched it together to recreate iconic works of art.

No art form, however, more closely overlaps the forms and purposes of money than the print. As Rachel Stella points out in her article on the screen- prints of the Coopérative des Malassis, artists’ prints and paper currency share a means of production as well as icono- graphic strategies. The value of both forms rests on a communal faith in what they signify—the genius of an artist, the solvency of a nation. Hyperinflationary spirals like the one currently destabiliz- ing Venezuela are periodic reminders of what happens when faith dissolves and all that is left is printed paper. The truth that such printed paper may have its own charms is the lesson of David Storey’s article on early 20th-century German emergency money (Notgeld) designed to be hoarded rather than spent.

More abstractly, the effects of money (and its absence) can be charted through multiple essays here: the correlation between real estate values and creative practice was an underlying theme in the exhibition “Pulled in Brooklyn: 26 Printshops, 101 Artists,” reviewed by Faye Hirsch. David Trigg calls attention to the sheer force of will it must have taken to produce the bright, dynamic world of Grosvenor School linocuts in the midst the Great Depression. Our Prix de Print winner, selected by Catherine Bindman, is the June 4 edition of Dan Wood’s Lino- type Daily, whose headline points to a presidency in which money appears to be the only metric for everything. (A later example of Wood’s trenchant responses to the news of a day occupies the page opposite this one.)

Money is not everything, of course, and elsewhere on these pages Sarah Kirk Hanley surveys Orit Hofshi’s rumina- tions on land, water and time; Re’al Chris- tian introduces two new etching series by Chris Ofili that encompass natural beauty and human tragedy; Catherine Bindman speaks with curators Nadine Orenstein and Freyda Spira about inno- vation, experimentation and the origin of etching; and Nicole Meily looks back at Joan Miró’s leap into imaginary form.

Sometimes, however, money does have the last word. This is the final issue of Art in Print. There is, it turns out, such a thing as being too not-for-profit. Almost nine years ago, I approached Julie Bernatz about partnering to create a 21st-century successor to the Print Collector’s News- letter. This was in many ways a naïvely ambitious goal, but Julie’s clear and grace- ful design actually superseded our model, and the 58 issues of Art in Print we have published stand as a testament to the talent, generosity and good graces of the writers, artists, advisors, donors, board members, staff, subscribing members— and one wildly over-qualified volunteer editor—who care about this particular corner of the art world.

It isn’t wallpapered with dollar bills or even autographed impressions of Melen- colia I, but this corner is one of those remarkable places where people lean in to look closely, and pause to take the mea- sure of what lies before them. We have been lucky to keep such company.