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15 February 1998
Dear Fogg Print Fans,
At least two among you have had trouble with your vision lately, and I have sent along large-type copies of this newsletter. If anyone else would like to take advantage of the wonders of computerized font size changes, let me know. I realize that ordinarily I print in a very small type, in order to save photocopying costs, which may be difficult, or just aggravating, for some of you.
And speaking of computerized enhancement... I am teaching my usual spring seminar on the history of prints, which usually features as its final assignment a student organized exhibition. Unfortunately, I have been unable to secure gallery space for this year's class. It's not that we don't have print shows, and even some organized by students. Upcoming, for instance, is an extremely interesting presentation by a graduate student on the development of artists' rights to protect their images, the predecessor of copyright, in 16th-century Italy. With the help of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, she will reunite in our gallery the huge Titian woodcut of Pharoah's army drowning in the Red Sea with the even bigger bird's eye view of Venice by Jacopo da Barbari. We own the former, the MFA owns the latter.
But for the exhibition that my class will organize, we shall have to resort to the internet. I have proposed to them that they mount an electronic exhibition on the world-wide web. You lose a lot this way, of course: pixels will never simulate the actual presence of the work of art. Already the students are beginning to appreciate the beauties of print surfaces unobscured by glass, and for them as well as myself it will be a jolt ultimately to view their selections at a much greater remove from tangible reality.
There will be certain restrictions on their choices. Our scanner accepts works only up to about 10" x 16", and so the images of larger prints would have to be captured from photographs -- yet another layer interposed between reality and representation. Also, I am just not up to coping with modern-day copyright issues. Even if we were only reproducing prints in a catalogue, securing permission from artists, their agents, or their estates entails correspondence and costs; and we have found that while agreement is readily secured for old-fashioned ink-on-paper reproductions, putting copyright-protected images on the web is another matter entirely. The artists' justifiable concern is that whatever we put up someone else could load down -- down and out, for purposes over which we and the artist would have no practical control. And so the students will be restricted to works by the safely dead.
Yet there are advantages to an electronic exhibition, in compensation for these restrictions. In thinking about what would distinguish such an exhibition from whatever you might see hung in a gallery, it occurred to me that we should exploit the computer's capacity to manipulate scale. Rather than reducing gargantuan Venetian woodcuts to postage stamps, which is usually what happens in books, we'll move in the opposite direction. I have found the best use of scanned images is to exploit the technology's capacity to magnify details and, especially, to present more than one of these details on the screen together. The advantage is obvious for studying changes of state, impression quality, distinctions among different techniques, and variations among artists in the representation of comparable forms. I've asked the students to think of yet more ways that magnification would be advantageous, and I welcome suggestions from you, too.
While thinking of questions of scale, I have made another decision which will result in an odd publication but one of greater value (I think) than if I were doing the conventional thing:
The lithography exhibition on which I've been working on for three years was at one point delayed till 1999, but now has been moved back again to 1998, and so I have been writing furiously. The exhibition focuses on the artist's touch and on issues surrounding the use of lithographic transfer paper. These entail close looking, and I have decided that in the catalogue I should reproduce actual-size details from many prints, to convey effects that I describe verbally. We have only a limited budget, and this may mean that I'll have to make a choice between the full composition (reduced) or the actual-size detail. If necessary I'll opt for the detail, though I suspect this will frustrate many readers. I have already decided that budgetary limitations mean that everything cannot be reproduced, and I have chosen for illustration, in large part, the prints that are less than famous. Who needs another reproduction of Delacroix's Royal Tiger, especially since he glowers so effectively from the lithography catalogue published a couple of years ago by the Museum of Fine Arts? I bet only one or two of you have ever seen the lithograph that will be featured on my catalogue cover: James Kelly's Red Wednesday. And inside there will be equally obscure but wonderful oddiments, such as Joyce Wieland's lip prints...
Back to electronic images: my posting of postcard options has resulted in almost universal approval of the landscape woodcut by Arthur Dow. The significant exception in this vote was cast by the metaphorical 500-pound gorilla: the woman who heads our sales and shop department, who is enthusiastic about the Sol LeWitt Complex Form (which, I realize just now, I mounted on my web site without asking the artist's permission! Quick: delete!). So I'll write to LeWitt immediately, to request permission to reproduce the print as a postcard. It will be handsome in itself and also will have a natural association with the stunning LeWitt wall drawing newly installed in the Sackler Museum lobby.
The shop's budget will carry the LeWitt, but I am tempted to fund the Dow out of my discretionary funds, and also perhaps a card of the 15th-c. damned souls toasting in the flames of Hell. Several of my web site voters suggested appropriate occasions and recipients for that image -- definitely not a Valentine!
15 December 1997
Dear Fogg print fans,
Here's a tangled tale of acquisitions, which raises all the questions of price and value, propriety and property that are normally elided in polite curator- and collector-speak.
It started with my receipt of a London auction catalogue of an 18th-c. collection of British prints in which, among all the works offered, the one the Fogg needed most was a mezzotint of a horse. We already hold excellent examples of the big Earlom and Pether mezzotints after Wright subject pictures, and we also have some of the elegant lords and ladies. We do not have any horse portrait prints, and although they occupy a well-filled niche in British printmaking, ordinarily I'd not think we needed one. But in this sale was what looked from the dim reproduction to be an absolutely stunning horse with groom by George Townly Stubbs after a painting by his father. The horse was (and the print is) named Gimcrack, which I thought ironic for an animal that won at Newcastle (and for a print that would turn out to be a pricey work of art -- you'll see).
Several years ago, when we had a bequest from Alvin Whitley for the purchase of British prints and drawings, I was able to acquire a superb, and expensive, impression of Stubbs Senior's Horse Attacked by a Lion (see my postcard page). The expense was justified, however, because we had no Stubbs at all in the collection, and this was the ultimate statement of his proto-Romantic anthropomorphic animal dramas. As you know, I am working on improving our 18th-c. collection (and there's more below about that, too). The Stubbs, together with our Earlom after Wright Blacksmith Shop and Cunegos after Gavin Hamilton, recently received from the Philip Hofer bequest, are spectacular in their own right and set the stage well for what would evolve a generation later in France. And the Stubbs Senior print really needs the Stubbs Junior print to express the dichotomy in Stubbs horse imagery, as well as the dominance of horse culture, in aesthetic, upper-crust Britain at that time.
But how much to bid? The estimate was 800-1000 British pounds -- too low! especially considering the distinction of the collection as a whole, which would certainly draw specialists' attention. And so I authorized a high bid of 2600, which when you add in the house and agent commissions would be, I thought, more than enough for a reproductive mezzotint of a horse and groom. But it sold for 2800. I was terribly disappointed, but I rationalized that, no matter how instrinsically lovely it might be, I should not spend more Fogg dollars on a print that would be used in our context primarily for its association with another print.
And anyhow, by the time of the sale I had in hand another auction catalog, this one from Berlin, where there appeared a print that I wanted for the Fogg collection even more than Gimcrack: a first state of Jan Lievens' Raising of Lazarus of 1630. This composition is considered to be the most important single document of the provocative and intense relationship of Lievens and Rembrandt, when they worked together in Leiden prior to Lievens' departure for England and Rembrandt's relocation in Amsterdam the following year. If you want to pursue this, the entry by Martin Royalton-Kisch in Drawings by Rembrandt and His Circle in the British Museum (1992, no. 15) on a Rembrandt drawing of The Entombment, reworked from a Raising of Lazarus, makes the most sense of the complicated tale (of three prints and two paintings, as well as the drawing).
In 1631 Constanijn Huygens, a contemporary who appreciated the talents of the two young Dutch painters, compared them and found Lievens "better than Rembrandt because his magnificent inventions and daring subjects and designs were greater..." Lievens' Raising of Lazarus justifies his analysis, at least in comparison to any of RembrandtŐs etchings to that date. Rembrandt would respond with his own Raising of Lazarus (The Large Plate) a few years later, and even then his Christ's grandiloquent gesture cannot match the Lievens. Whereas Rembrandt restaged the miracle entirely in terms of bodily command -- Christ's arm rises, and the corpse of Lazarus responds -- in Lievens' etching, a spiritual force-field shivers through the mute, motionless Christ in a passage from the radiant halo above across empty space to the rising hands of the otherwise invisible Lazarus below.
The print is incredibly rare in the first state, but only in this state can the revolutionary aspect of Lievens' etching style be appreciated. The artist drew with his needle in complete freedom, entirely indifferent to contemporary graphic conventions. Rembrandt, too, at this time was developing his scribbling hand in printmaking, and in his St. Jerome Kneeling in Prayer, which is dated ca. 1629, he supplied a precedent for Lievens' large scale, loose open line, and dependence on blank paper to communicate the isolating radiance of spiritual illumination. Lievens' Raising of Lazarus is the next natural step in the line of development that would find its conclusion back with Rembrandt, in prints such as his late Resurrected Christ Appearing to the Apostles; but in its later states the Lievens is reworked in engraving, and it cannot be understood as the radical technical statement that it truly is.
The German auction house gave an estimate of DM7500. I was still smarting from losing out on the Stubbs, and in any case it seemed to me that a print such as the Lievens that occupies such a vital turning point in the history of Western art should be worth considerably more, both in monetary terms and to our collection. And so I bravely told the dealer who would vet the print for condition and impression quality and, if it passed muster (it did), would bid for us, that we would pay a total, with all commissions included, of $31,000. This committed almost all of our available funds for the purchase of old-master prints, which for this print I was glad to do.
Dear Fogg Print Fans,
Among my miscellaneous services at this institution is membership on the shop committee: I am the curatorial representative to the group that considers what will be sold in the museum's two little boutiques on either side of the Straus Gallery. (Forward your comments and criticism to me, but be warned: I am a staunch defender of those shops' placement, though not of all their wares.) At our September meeting the woman in charge of the shop presented the list of proposed new postcards, which to my dismay includes NO PRINTS. It wasn't very constructive to grumble, however, and the proposed cards are all ones I'd want to send. Still, we do need another print postcard. Voet's Fool with a Cat, my last proposal years ago, a slow but steady seller, is a meager representation of our depart,memt, and I suspect it appeals to only a small sector of the population: me and other cat fanciers who have a somewhat mordant view of their pets. This year's postcard budget will be exhausted by the cards already proposed, but a new card line is not very expensive: $760 for an edition of 3000. But what to reproduce?
My first thought: poll the print fans!
Some of you have a good idea of what's in the Fogg print collection. For those of you who don't, I can assure you that we have impressions of most of the famous old master prints that are not exquisitely rare: we have no Seghers, unfortunately, but with the vexing exception of Six's Bridge, we have practically every one of the better known Rembrandts, and we certainly have all the Durers, Callots, Canalettos, Piranesis, etc. These are black and white, and I do get the feeling that the shop prefers color, for which we can offer many of the best Toulouse-Lautrecs and Bonnards, as well as some of the better post-WW II American color prints. Somehow these seem rather conventional choices, yet I don't trust my own ideas. I am always most in love with my latest acquisitions (who isn't!), and the Goltzius Dragon Devouring the Companions of Cadmus, the first purchase from our new Anonymous Fund for Prints Older than 150 Years, is not only spectacular Grand Guignol, it is also perfectly proportioned for a postcard. But how many people want to send a card of a dismembered Schwartzenegger whose face is clamped in the jaws of a sloe-eyed monster with a cockleshell mane? Even I cannot imagine what I'd write on that one.
So saying, I dug out the cards I bought at the High Museum in Atlanta last week, where I participated in a workshop on print collecting (hard to do in Atlanta: few prints and fewer print dealers). I didn't know then, of course, that the subjects of postcards would preoccupy me, and these are what I purchased unconsciously, so to speak:
- an American still-life painting of peaches on a plate (perfect for Georgia, and also a good bread-and-butter note card); - Girodet's The Funeral of Atala (a lugubriously chaste Romantic death scene; I don't know when I'll send it, but it's beautiful); - Bierstadt's Pioneers of the Woods (big trees; I guess I was thinking hopefully of the very young oak I planted last summer); - Bearden's Noah, Third Day (colorful, charming, positive-minded, and thus appropriate for almost any occasion).
All in color and not a print among them. In fact, I do not recall seeing a single print postcard on sale in Atlanta.
My mention of the Goltzius engraving's proportions was not casual, by the way: anopther part of the meeting considered what works of aerr should represent the Fogg, Busch-Reisinger, and Sackler museums in the new store that will hawk Harvard wares in the arcade under Holyoke Center. (The arcade is named after Edward Firbes, the Fogg's beloved director for thirty-five years, who had the foresight to acquire for Harvard the land that lies between Massachusetts Avenue and the river, when the university was too short-sighted to realize its eventual value. I wonder what Forbes would have thought of such a shop, which is right by the plaque bearing his name!) The designer of this store has stipulated square images, and at our meeting we spent some time conjuring up works of art in our collections by their quadrilateral symmetry. Here again, of course, color rules, so I couldn't even whisper about square old master prints (there aren't many), or even about our Sol LeWitt of a white square on a black ground.
Back to postcard proportions. Is it fair also to insist that the image be horizontal? I doubt that vertical cards sell as well as horizontal ones, simply because of our tidy instinct to favor fronts and backs in the same orientation. My Atlanta postcard purchases were horizontal three to one. But now we are narrowing the field radically: color and 2:3 proportions (approximately), sideways. If you have an inspiration that violates any or all of these conditions (a great portrait print?), feel free to submit your suggestion, because graphic designers can always cope.
What I would like is a lot of suggestions, with the aesthetic and amusement quotients winning out over marketability. Still, the shop's needs have to be kept in mind. I am not sure that they would accept a plate from Dix's Der Krieg, though the proportions are perfect; and while there are more wonderful cat prints in the collection -- Visscher, Marcks, and even a color woodblock by Grace Norton -- we probably should stop at one. But I do want to hear from you if you have strong feelings about any print that you even suspect we hold. Now that I have my web site and can scan the prints, I can even mount images -- the finalists, so to speak -- for your consideration. And remember, you can e-mail me directly and even make your connection from my web site.
By the way, only a small number among the Fogg print fans have said that they would be willing to receive this newsletter via e-mail, even though I know that many of you are linked up electronically. I am sympathetic: would a true print fan substitute phosphors for paper? (Maybe that's the wrong question for the next generation...)
Very best,
Marjorie B. Cohn
Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints
Dear Fogg Print Fans,
Every print collection has its gaps, according to any given curator. Retrospective lacks are more specific than contemporary, in that in a manner of speaking the absolutely contemporary collection is a universal gap: the prints are being made as we speak and so we have yet to acquire any of them. Yet we won't need or want every single one, and this curator, at least, usually feels a little more secure in her choices if a few years (or decades) have passed for the styles to ripen. Now that the 'sixties and 'seventies have sorted themselves out, I can say authoritatively that we need as a genus more Fluxus material, as a species more Oldenbergs, and as a variety even one late Guston, to give a few examples. But for the curator -- for any collector -- these general, intellectual decisions aren't where the fun lies.
All of us have had the thrill of seeing for the first time a single, particular print that has instantly aroused our acquisitive lust. Alas if it is already irrevocably owned elsewhere! Alack if the price at the dealer's is beyond our means! But these obstacles often do not apply with the contemporary print (unless it is the latest Jasper Johns). It may only be a few hundred or a thousand dollars, and the edition may not be sold out.
This flash of recognition occurred for me several years ago when I saw a print called Chimera (Our God of War), a huge linocut and screenprint done in 1991 by Eric Avery, a printmaker then totally unknown to me. It was based on Jean- Louis Deprez's Chimre, an 18th-c. French etched multiheaded monster which harked back to 15th-c. Apocalypse blockbooks. In some way or other that I have now forgotten, I obtained a postcard of the giant, gaudy, horrific, and savagely funny Avery Chimera and I learned that he -- Avery -- lived in Texas, so I sent him the card via a friend in Houston who knew him, beseeching an impression for the collection. No response for years, literally, and in the interim I found my monster for the Fogg at a New York gallery and also a monoprint by Avery that was equally appealing through the Provincetown Print Workshop. I also discovered that David Becker, chairman of the print department's sub-committee of the museums' collections committe and an old friend with 100% compatible print tastes, owned a fabulous Avery, a linocut skull printed on cheap rose-strewn wallpaper that would fade to brown if exposed to light (as one would want to do with such a stunning image) -- the perfect metaphor at that time, only a few years ago, for the AIDS victim condemned to inevitable wasting and death.
In 1993 I learned from David that Eric Avery would be the impresario of an art/medicine action at the Mary Ryan Gallery in New York, where art-world figures, including David, would be tested for HIV in public, both to demystify the process and to accent its importance. (If any of you out there are curious, I can lend you slides or a videotape of this event.) It turned out that Avery, whom I thought of as a printmaker, in fact was a physician, the head of the adult psychiatric service at the AIDS clinic of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. And so I solicited from Avery 'impressions' of the prints that he had created to form his gallery clinic environment, which evoked an virtual immersion in an HIV-infected bloodstream. There was linocut wallpaper of his blood smear (dinner plate-sized red and white corpuscules) and woodcuts of viral bodies (paperpulp pressed into drilled and inked salad bowls, the hemispheres glued together into balls and hung on monofiliment line within the wallpapered chamber. He also constructs them as condom- filled piatas!).
Early in 1996 an idea started forming in my mind: the Fogg has each year marked World AIDS Day with some presentation; why couldn't this man, this doctor, this artist, whose imagery I found so compelling, do something here? He was eager, but I had worked at Harvard long enough to know that only if I were very persistent and lucky, could we pull this off even in time for December 1, 1997. The Harvard folks involved with AIDS were enthusiastic (Harvard AIDS Institute, HU Arts Committee on AIDS) but otherwise, sure enough, although I kept reminding the curators, administrators, lawyers, etc., with whom I spoke that this would be a new creation by an artist and not a repetition, the only model that I could present, the action at the Mary Ryan Gallery and its wallpaper, inevitably generated the association in their minds: blood on the museum walls! Indeed, the concept of medicine practiced in the museum seemed utterly unintelligible to almost everyone, although this concept is exactly what Avery and I found so compelling: art as healing = medicine as a healing art.
There are so many points and levels of contact. Imagine, for example, how many of those paintings of madonnas and saints now captured in our galleries in their first lives had received prayers for health? Think of the mind/body links that Harvard's Dr. Benson has developed, which parallel, in my eyes at least, the effect produced by the recent exhibition in the Busch-Reisinger Museum of the paintings of Gnter Umberg, in which simple rectangles coated with imperceptibly powdered layers of intense matte color -- black or green or... -- draw one's entire being into a still, spacious substance.
Eric Avery has a word for this interim of passage and suspension combined, which he learned from an anthropologist friend. In initiation rites, when the subject leaves his past personna and becomes another, the period and place of transition is a 'liminal' space, at the limen, the threshold: no longer what he was and not yet what he will be. At the Fogg, the liminal space will be the center of the Straus Gallery.
An 8' x 12' slab-sided room, open to the front and back and with an open gabled roof formed by trusses in the standard form of joists and rafters, will be built on a low platform. The two outside walls will be papered with Eric's wallpaper, based not on blood but on Piranesi's Prison VII. Treatment of the HIV-positive patient has so improved since 1993, the levels of ramps and windings of stairs in the Piranesi print can be adapted into a metaphor of the staged administration of the new, effective drug complexes and complementary viral load testing. The actual etching from which these wallpaper motifs will be derived will hang on one wall, and Eric will write a text to be mounted on the other one, to explain why this miniature temple inhabits the center of an exhibition entitled "Rome and New York: A Continuity of Cities."
The association is not, in fact, so far-fetched. For one thing, a second Piranesi will be among the prints hanging on the peripheral gallery walls. For another, this exhibition is the product, you will remember, of a seminar entitled "Prints in Use," and many of the objects on view will be prints with an explicit non-fine-art function (maps, advertising circulars, peepshows). The wallpapered room in the center of the gallery and the activities they will embrace on December 1st, Worlds AIDS Day, are just another usage of prints.
The medical aspect of the event will be the moving of the usual consultations in the Zinberg Clinic, the AIDS facility of Cambridge Hospital, for that one day and the previous Sunday afternoon to the Straus Gallery. Patients will see their medical doctor, psychiatrist, nurse practictioner, nutritionist, social worker, and even perhaps an acupuncturist. These will be one-on-one consultations, and the other health care professionals will rotate out to the study room to lead public discussions of the significance of their specialty to the HIV-positive person. Yes, blood will be drawn, for viral load testing, but under no more exotic conditions and by the same sort of professionals that are present for the blood drives that are mounted in Harvard Yard buildings year in and year out.
HIV testing would not be useful in these cases, of course, because all of the clinic clients are already known to be HIV-positive, but Eric wants to stress the importance of testing for everyone, especially now that drug therapy started early is so effective in changing AIDS from a terminal to a chronic disease. And he does mean everyone: he eyed my gray hair and said he wanted to emphasize that AIDS is not merely an affliction of the young. He has a great- grandmother as a patient in Texas! I'm not quite that old but yes, I'll be tested.
Of course I am concerned that the usual museum goers will not see the purpose of a clinic in a museum, even if it does have Piranesi wallpaper, and also that doctors and patients will just think the Fogg a cool change of scene. What I hope is that we rupture the protective shield constructed by museums against the existence of the disruptive, transitory, and debilitating facts of human physical life, and also remind our visitors that art and healing have only been sundered in this century and culture. Likewise, I hope medicine, usually confined to hermetic spaces such as clinics and hospitals, can be reintroduced as a healing art in the unexpected context of beauty and human creativity.
With best wishes,
Marjorie B. Cohn
Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints
Yes! I am on the Web! My homebody resident webmaster
invented a page for me, which I have yet to learn how to
modify, so everything you see is Marty's doing (I blush). I
am now in a position to ask, however, who among you are
willing to receive your newsletter as e-mail or to read it on
my webpage? This would save postage!