Print Matters: Big names like Albrect Dürer, Pablo Picasso, and Marcel Duschamp hang side by side with contemporary printmakers in the BMA’s new exhibit, Print by Print. by Cara Ober
If you’ve ever shopped for real estate, Andrew Raftery’s Open House: Five Engraved Scenes, 2008 are all too familiar. Or are they? The large McMansion interiors have been adorned with fresh flowers and the countertops sparkle. Window light streams into the large rooms, while attractive couples inspect the appliances and open closet doors. In one scene, a man wears a smiling baby on his chest, and, in another, interested buyers converse and linger near a gleaming grand piano. It’s all too perfect, and Raftery’s clean, engraved lines and photorealitic detail reinforce the over-idealized scenario. Reminiscent of the Stepford Wives, Raftery’s images are eerie in their perfection and oddly plastic. More importantly, they serve as a fractured mirror for the housing market in America today. As the American Dream of home ownership becomes more and more remote for many, Raftery’s sleek environments become, more and more, a bittersweet fantasy.
Raftery’s series of five disparate images are in good company in the Baltimore Museum of Art’s newest survey exhibition from the permanent collection, titled Print by Print: Series from Dürer to Lichtenstein. The exhibit examines the practice of serial printmaking, a process that has stayed remarkably consistent over the past five hundred years. Like last year’s huge photography exhibit, Seeing Now, this show covers a lot of ground. However, while critics of Seeing complained of overcrowding and a surface approach to certain individual works, this exhibit is limited to just twenty-nine artists and emphasizes a breadth of expression from each. Displayed in one complete series, their works include historical approaches to printmaking like woodcut, engraving, etching, as well as more contemporary practices, like lithography and screen-printing.
There are a variety of reasons why printmakers throughout history have worked in series. Sometimes the intent is narrative, with each consecutive print illustrating scenes from a story. Other reasons for creating multiple images around a common theme are purely visual. As the artist works out an idea, testing out different versions and approaches, the idea transforms and grows. Each complete series, whether it includes five versions or fifty, allows the viewer a unique insight into the artist’s process. While serial printmaking is not unusual, exhibiting in series is. It is much more typical for an artist to select the strongest image or two for exhibit, so it is a real treat to see a few clunkers in the mix—and to gain a more complete picture of the way artists work through their ideas—rather than giving the impression of simply arriving at a masterpiece.
The exhibit starts out on a curious note, with two series composed of experimental materials. Ed Ruscha’s six color screen prints, News, Mews, Pews, Brews, Stews, and Dues, 1970, depicts each word in an Old English typeface on a blank background. These particular words were chosen by the artist to communicate essential English qualities. What is particularly unusual about this series is Ruscha’s use of food items as pigment, including axle grease over caviar, blackcurrant pie filling over red salmon roe, Bolognese sauce, mango chutney, daffodils, and Branston pickles. Like the words they depict, the materials directly represent what it means to be British. The colors created by these “inks” are subtle, ranging from tan, to beige, to yellow, to almost black. A counterbalance for Ruscha’s series, Marcel Duschamp’s circular discs, Twelve Rotoreleases, 1935, were originally intended to be spun, creating a sense of three-dimensional space. Record-sized and emblazoned with colorful, swirling patterns, the discs were not a critical success at the time, but Duschamp’s offset lithographs were successfully used by doctors to help restore three-dimensional vision to patients who had lost sight in one eye.
Along more traditional lines, Albrecht Dürer is possibly the most significant name in the history of printmaking. His sixteen-part series, The Apocalypse, printed in 1511, embodies all the techniques that established his fame. Initially intended as illustrations for an original book, Dürer’s woodcut prints interpret the Book of Revelations with such innovation, both technical and creative, it is not difficult to understand how they have achieved such an iconic status. Despite their age, Dürer’s prints retain a contemporary feel. Like many artists today, the artist blends fantasy with reality in intricate detail, and mixes the illusion of three dimensionality with flat, illustrative space.
However famous the Dürer prints, the centerpiece of Print by Print is a wall of forty pochoirs, or color stencils, titled Compositions, Colors, Ideas by Sonia Delaunay. The portfolio of prints was commissioned by Editions d’Art Charles Moreau in 1930. Displayed in a vertical grid on a tall museum wall, it’s a charming array of visual movement and color. The artist, along with her husband Robert Delaunay, used this series to develop the concept of simultaneity, which used bright color contrasts to create a sense of visual movement. These simple, lyrical abstractions became a popular pattern book, and have been used by countless textile designers as a basis for fabric and wallpaper designs.
Another standout series of prints, and there are many in this exhibit, are eight Drypoint Etchings by contemporary artist Daniel Heyman. Titled The Amman Project, 2006, each print depicts a different man in a spindly, cartoonish style and includes rambling handwritten texts in the background. When you read the quotes, their initial light-hearted impression changes drastically. “We were asked to undress, and stayed under the hot sun for hours, hand-cuffed,” reads one titled Our Eyes Were Covered With Plastic Wraps. “We were not guilty of anything. If I had done something, I would have been proud, but we had not done anything.” The artist created these portraits on site in Amman, Jordan, during interviews between American lawyers and former prisoners of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. As each man gave graphic accounts of their torture by U.S. guards, the artist struggled to capture not only their physical likeness, but also their words. This series of prints gives a voice to the victims of torture, and also educates Americans about the atrocities committed in their name.
Much of Print by Print includes more traditional topics, like landscapes, classical allegory, and historical narratives. There is enough variety to satisfy a diverse public, and famous names, like Pablo Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein, and Julie Mehretu, are present along with new discoveries, like Italian soldier Lorenzi Fabius and German pianist Max Klinger.
Prints, in general, tend to be small and this exhibit could have been a dizzying array of small, same-sized frames. However, by physically grouping each series into a larger body, this pitfall was neatly avoided. Another potential problem this exhibit carefully sidestepped is a chronological approach, which would present works as a timeline and allow viewers to focus on their comfort zones, while ignoring the rest. Instead, curator Rena Hoisington used a thematic approach, where prints from different time periods gain depth and relevance from one another, enhanced by the general themes of narrative, design, places, imagination, appropriation, and war.
Top Image: Roy Lichtenstein. Haystack #3. Screenprint.
As a follow up, contemporary printmakers Daniel Heyman and Andrew Raftery will be at the BMA Saturday, December 3, at 2 p.m. to discuss their work with master printer Brian Garner and BMA visitors.
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