PDF - Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh

Clockwise from top left:
Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, Self-Portrait with Saskia, 1636, etching, Bequest of Charles J. Rosenbloom
Peter Paul Rubens, Saint Catherine in the Clouds, early 1620s, etching, Gift of Charles J. Rosenbloom
Albrecht Dürer, The Madonna with the Swaddled Infant, 1520, engraving, Bequest of Charles J. Rosenbloom
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SUMMER 2014
Printmaking was a game changer. A new look at its history as
an art form highlights works by some of the best-known artists
of the Renaissance and beyond.
BY JENELLE PIFER
or four consecutive days last March, curator Linda Batis sat in the print
storage room at Carnegie Museum of Art, sorting through a collection
she knew well but hadn’t seen in years. The room, lit softly to preserve the
aging paper, houses the museum’s collection of 8,088 prints—the largest
in oversized drawers and the smallest in four-inch-high boxes on shelves.
Chronologically, Batis looked through a group of works known as “old
master prints,” which date between 1470 and 1750 and come from Western
Europe. It wasn’t long before she pulled out a particularly brilliant print, an impression of Adam and Eve by German printmaker Albrecht Dürer.
Made in 1504 from a copper engraving, the small and sophisticated print is
considered a masterwork by one of the earliest European printmakers. In it, the
idealized pair stands gazing toward each other in nearly symmetrical postures. Eve
holds a fig passed to her from the serpent’s mouth and Adam clutches a knotted
branch from the Tree of Life. Textures of tree bark, snakeskin, and human flesh are
unmistakable. “Momentarily, it takes your breath away,” says Batis.
In fact, the Museum of Art’s impression of Adam and Eve is one of the finest
examples in the world. Now it’s among more than 200 works selected by Batis for
Small Prints, Big Artists: Masterpieces from the Renaissance to Baroque, the first exhibition at the museum comprised exclusively of old master prints. On view now through
September 15 in the Heinz Galleries, the show features a cross section of work that
not only tells the history of printmaking as an art form, but also includes dedicated
sections on two of the greatest printmakers of the time: Albrecht Dürer and
Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn.
Though Batis is not based in Pittsburgh—today she lives and works in Greece—
she spent 12 years as an associate curator in the Museum of Art’s fine arts department
specializing in old master prints. She knows this collection well, perhaps better than
anyone, says Louise Lippincott, curator of fine arts. So when Lippincott hatched the
idea for the show, she contacted Batis and invited her to guest curate. Over a year,
Batis made several weeks-long trips to Pittsburgh to dig in and revisit the works in
person. “It’s like getting to see old friends,” she says.
(continued)
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Peter Galle after Pieter Bruegel The Elder, Hope (Spies), 1559–1560, engraving, Kenneth Seaver Fund
Sifting through the collection last March, Batis kept a
running tally in her mind. Like a judge who scores a
gymnastic event for both artistic merit and technical skill,
she vouched for the beauty of the image and then, with
her nose close to the page, set about ranking each impression for technical quality. Here, it’s important to understand a few distinct terms.
Each item in the collection is an “original,” which is
to say an ink impression taken directly from the artist’s
woodcut or metal plate. Around the world there may be
dozens of surviving impressions of each work. Though at
first they may appear to be duplicates, not all impressions
are created equally. For instance, the first few impressions
taken from a plate have crisper lines. Some are made on
better paper. Others have richer ink. The image on the
plate or woodcut may be beautiful, but for any number
of reasons, the impression may fall flat.
To help viewers fully appreciate these points, a special
section of the exhibition will explain the various techniques by which these prints were made, including
woodcut, engraving, etching, and drypoint. “We’ll show
how printmaking developed from being a really primitive medium into something incredibly sophisticated,”
says Batis.
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THE MASTERS
The earliest prints in the exhibition, dating to 1470, are
pages from a “block book.” In this primitive publishing
style, “the text and pictures were printed from the same
block of wood, and then the print was hand colored after
that,” Batis explains. The imagery appears almost cartoonlike and marks a rare example of color in the collection.
From there the show moves through time, artist, and
region to illustrate the major trends in Western printmaking. There are the Little Masters of Germany and their
tiny prints the size of postage stamps; Mannerism and the
strangely elongated figures of Hendrick Goltzius; and
18th-century Italian printmaking and the large-scale
etchings of Rome by Giovanni Battista Piranesi. But the
greatest highlights of Small Prints, Big Artists come at the
beginning of the exhibition, and again at the end.
Bookending the show are substantial collections of works
by Dürer and Rembrandt.
Separated by more than 100 years, these two productive artists employed vastly different styles. “It’s partly a
question of artistic approach, and partly a question of
how much the technique of printmaking had changed
from Dürer’s time to Rembrandt’s time,” says Batis.
Woodcut
A relief technique in which the spaces
between the lines are chiseled away,
leaving the design at the surface to be
inked and printed.
Engraving
Etching
The design is incised into a metal
plate and the ink is pressed into the
lines to print the image.
A needle is used to incise a design into a
waxy coating on a metal plate. The plate is
dipped in acid to create the design, after
which the plate is cleaned, inked, and printed.
Drypoint
Similar to engraving, a sharp needle
is used to draw directly on a metal
plate, creating a characteristic rich
black line.
“We’ll show how printmaking developed from being a really primitive medium into
something incredibly sophisticated.”
- CURATOR LINDA BATIS
In late 15th-century Germany, Dürer worked primarily in
woodcut, quickly surpassing the established rudimentary craft
of block books to create detailed prints of incredible complexity.
Woodcut is a relief printing technique in which the non-printed
or “white” space is chiseled away, leaving the image at surface
level to be washed with ink. Engraving, a similar practice that
replaces wood with a copper plate, also became a common technique of Dürer’s. With extreme precision and detailed lines, he
compressed vast biblical stories into single pages. These works
were widely collected throughout Europe and garnered the
artist notable fame at a young age. In addition to Adam and
Eve, the exhibition includes fine examples of the three prints
widely considered to be Dürer’s most important: Knight, Death,
and the Devil (1513), Saint Jerome in His Study (1514), and
Melencolia I (1514).
“While Dürer was the master of line, Rembrandt was the
master of tone,” says Graham Shearing, an art collector in
Pittsburgh who owns works by both artists. By the 17th century
in the Netherlands, artists had branched away from religious and
mythological subjects and begun to create landscapes and scenes
from everyday life. The use of woodcut and engraving faded out
in favor of etching, a less laborious technique that precluded the
need for metalworking skills and more closely mimicked the
practice of drawing. Starting with a wax-covered plate, an artist
would use a needle like a pencil, stripping away the wax to
expose lines of metal. The exposed lines were then dipped in an
acid bath, eaten away, and filled with ink to create a print.
“Rembrandt worked almost entirely in etching, and his works
are much more painterly,” says Batis. Using broad strokes that
were possible in etching, his prints appear more spontaneous and
emotional. His experimentation with ink application and different papers adds further nuance. “His works are more dramatic,
more chiaroscuro, and just utterly different,” says Batis.
Albrecht Dürer, Adam and Eve, 1504, engraving, Bequest of Charles J. Rosenbloom
(continued)
Albrecht Dürer, The Apocalypse: The Angel with the Key to the Bottomless Pit, 1498, Gift of Kenneth Seaver; Hendrick Goltzius, Apollo (detail), 1588, Gift of Merlin C. Hamilton, Frederic Schaefer, Kenneth Seaver, Edward Duff Balken,
Bequest of Charles J. Rosenbloom, by exchange; Anthony van Dyck, Jan Snellinx (detail), c. 1610–1640, Gift of Andrew Carnegie; Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, Christ Returning from the Temple with His Parents (detail), 1654,
Bequest of Charles J. Rosenbloom
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Consider Rembrandt’s The Three Trees (1643),
his greatest and most striking landscape. The
scene is dominated by three trees standing on a
small bluff. They are enveloped in sunlight and
surrounded by ominous and swirling clouds.
Within the shadows are elements of man—a fisherman watching over his line, two lovers in the
brush, and a town in the distance obscured by the
storm. Created using a combination of engraving,
etching, and drypoint (in which sharp needles
scratch directly into the metal plate), the print is
richly textural and conveys a sense of nature’s dominance over man.
STOP, LOOK, AND LINGER
Albrecht Dürer, Knight, Death, and the Devil, 1513, engraving, Bequest of Charles J. Rosenbloom
Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, The Three Trees, 1643, etching, drypoint, and burin, Bequest of Charles J. Rosenbloom
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Supplementary materials speckled throughout the
galleries illustrate how printmaking enabled art to
circulate widely throughout Europe for the first
time, gaining new fame for artists and sparking a
catalytic effect on communication.
In the 16th century, “the majority of
Europeans, including the aristocrats, couldn’t
read,” says Lippincott. “But they could understand
a picture, so these prints became incredibly powerful forms of visual communication.” The work of
mid-16th-century Flemish printmaker Pieter
Bruegel is a good example.
In his allegorical series The Virtues, each of the
seven virtues appears as a female figure within a
complex scene of grotesque and fantastical subjects.
The series is filled with symbols, proverbs, and
lessons for living, says Batis. “To us they look
weird and bizarre, but to contemporary viewers
they would have instantly meant something.”
A set of iPads stationed nearby helps visitors
decode these hidden symbols. “Like when you see
that Nike swoosh and it triggers something in your
memory,” Batis notes, “they would have seen the
woman with a bird on her head and known that
she was Charity.”
In this way, Small Prints, Big Artists is an exhibition that asks viewers to linger. “What is kind of
difficult about a print is it requires an extraordinary
attention to detail,” says Shearing, who has also
spent time in the museum’s collection room. To get
the very most out of an old master print, he says,
“imagine viewing a print in a darkened room using
one of those little pen lights. You hold it at a distance and see the entire print, and then you move
the pen light onto little individual elements.”
Surely a knowledge of history, technique, and
the elements of allegory will add interest for any
viewer. But for Batis “the most important thing is
to look,” she says. For her, the most striking details
in the show are textural—the contrast between the
metal shield and a young woman’s skin in Dürer’s
Coat of Arms with a Skull (1503), and the spare sky
in Rembrandt’s The Goldweigher’s Field (1651),
which portrays the wet atmosphere of Holland.
“These prints have tremendous power as
images,” she says. “And that’s the first level on
which they should be appreciated.” 