Here’s another printmaking exhibition I’ve just read about in Art Daily :

Photo Image in American Prints: 1960s-1990s at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, until 18 July 2004.

The diverse range of styles and viewpoints of over 20 contemporary artists will be showcased in Photo Image in American Prints 1968-1998. This exhibition of 30 prints and books explores the use of photographic imagery in creative printmaking, from Andy Warhol’s screenprints of the 1960s, which utilized imagery borrowed from mass media, to Kiki Smith’s 1996 photogravure, My Blue Lake, in which the artist used a peripheral camera to create her self-portrait. The majority of works in the exhibition are selected from the Crown Point Press Archive and the Anderson Graphic Arts Collection.

Also included in the exhibition are hand-drawn prints by Robert Bechtle, Vija Clemins, and Chuck Close. Although these images are inspired by photographic images and despite their distinctly photographic look, these works do not involve the actual use of photographs.

Saving the best for the last, look at this Virtual Exhibition of 35 Years at Crown Point Press, by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Crown Point Press, a community studio in San Francisco founded by Kathan Brown, was a gathering place for artists to share ideas and equipment. Many of the best-known American painters, sculptors, and other artists, collaborated with the master printers here to create printworks. You can see a number of these prints in this virtual exhibition along with some discussion of printmaking techniques and a history of contemporary printmaking.

Art Daily reports:

For the first time in its history, The Frick Collection (in New York) will host a major special exhibition this summer that is devoted solely to prints and the process of printmaking. This special presentation poses questions that have preoccupied artists, critics, and collectors for centuries: When is a work of art complete? and When do further additions detract from the desired result? These issues have a particular history in the graphic arts, where images are developed in stages and often distributed at various points in their making.

Featured artists, European masters from the fifteenth to the early twentieth century, include Albrecht Dürer, Hendrik Goltzius, Parmigianino, Anthony van Dyck, Rembrandt van Rijn, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, August Rodin, Felix Bracquemond, Paul Gauguin, Edvard Munch, and Jacques Villon.

The Frick Collection has a very good website with The Unfinished Print exhibition featured right now.

What follows is a chronicle of the complex workings of the artistic imagination revealed through the unfinished print and the changing estimation of artistic process that it provoked. There are many different ways to define incompleteness in a print.

The online exhibition shows several beautiful examples of some of the artists’ works with descriptions of the techniques and process – very helpful to those wishing to learn more about printmaking.

One historical note I would like to add is that the practise of signing and numbering editions did not begin until near the end of the 19th century, I think it was.

Yesterday I wrote about the Bayly Art Museum exhibition The Power of Woe, The Power of Life.

Another fascinating print exhibition at Bayly is Universes in Collision: 19th Century Japanese Prints, again showing a large number of images.

Curator Stephen Margulies’ background statement is worth reading – some quotes here:

With cynicism, commercial canniness, and sincere poetry, the great color woodblock artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries both exploited and identified with women. They celebrated and advertised “the floating world,” the world of Kabuki theater and the pleasure district (especially in Edo, the capital, now Tokyo).

Role-reversal was the norm in “the floating world,” as courtesans became noble through self-sacrifice and weak males cringed before the necessity of love. On the stage, males took on women’s roles (though Kabuki was founded by a woman). Such men were seductive to both sexes. On stage and in expensive bordellos and in woodblock prints, there was a complexly tender and violent play of identity.

Related to this I discovered Mysterium has just posted about a web companion to a PBS program Japan: Memoirs of a Secret Empire. Features include interactive pages on musical intruments and, just in time for this post, Japanese woodblock printing. Check out the additional links, especially The Production of Japanese Woodblock Prints.