Catherine Goodman @ Hauser & Wirth, NYC - 'Island' Exhibition

Catherine Goodman. Island 

Hauser & Wirth, New York

13 November – 20 December 2025 

Catherine Goodman

The ULAE Series, 2024

Monotype on Somerset paper

64.8 x 73.7 cm / 25 1/2 x 29 in

Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

© Catherine Goodman

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Catherine Goodman at the ULAE Studio, November 2024

Photo: Jin Young Kim

© Catherine Goodman

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Hauser & Wirth presents its first exhibition dedicated to the prints of noted British artist Catherine Goodman. This body of monotypes named ‘The ULAE Series’ emerged from Goodman’s 2024 residency at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) on Long Island, marking both her first major exploration of printmaking and an expansion of her aesthetic vocabulary. ‘Much of the new language that was evolving in the prints followed me home to the studio in London and was translated into paint,’ she wrote in reflection of the experience—a cross-pollination made visible in a new painting developed from this period, also on view in this exhibition.

Catherine Goodman joins a distinguished lineage of modern and contemporary artists who have expanded their practices through printmaking at ULAE. Among them, Grace Hartigan and Helen Frankenthaler stand out in particular as kindred spirits—artists who, like Goodman, were devoted passionately to daily drawing and guided by instinct. At ULAE, Catherine Goodman immersed herself in the unpredictable process of painting on and printing from copper plates. Working intuitively, she built up highly expressive, densely layered compositions, often laying down a black or grey calligraphic mark as starting point. Catherine Goodman sometimes carried works in progress home in the evening to adjust with an oil stick, forging an unorthodox dialogue between mediums. 

‘Almost everyone I knew in the world was asleep because of the time difference to London, so I spent the evenings alone, drawing into the prints that hadn’t worked out for me that day. It was an extraordinarily intense time navigating my inner landscape, having an opportunity to review my life back home. It seems a time of innocence now.’ — Catherine Goodman

Catherine Goodman

The ULAE Series, 2024

Monotype on En Tout Cas paper

64.8 x 73.7 cm / 25 1/2 x 29 in

Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

© Catherine Goodman

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Catherine Goodman

The ULAE Series, 2024

Monotype on En Tout Cas paper

81.3 x 91.4 cm / 32 x 36 in

Photo: Thomas Barratt

© Catherine Goodman

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Catherine Goodman has long centered her practice on portraiture. Religious icons from her childhood left an early mark, and she often mentions seeing portraits even within her abstractions. This oscillation between figuration and abstraction—a constant in ‘The ULAE Series’—relies in part on the artist’s longstanding daily drawing practice, which she cites as the initial means of harnessing her sources of inspiration, which range from natural phenomena to film. One work on view in the exhibition depicts the titular boy from Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie ‘Ivan’s Childhood,’ gazing through a telescope, a dramatic yet intimate image. 

Each work, Catherine Goodman writes, whether figurative or abstract, is ‘layered with those memories of my time there, the light, urgency and sense of isolation—being cut off from the mainland of our lives while exploring the inner landscape.’ 

Artist Catherine Goodman

Born in London in 1961, Catherine Goodman CBE lives and works in London. Goodman studied at Camberwell School of Arts & Crafts, London, and the Royal Academy Schools, London, where she won the Royal Academy Gold Medal in 1987. Goodman’s lifelong commitment to social justice through education forms a critical aspect of her artistic identity and approach to making. In 2000, Goodman established The Royal Drawing School with HM King Charles III to deliver subsidized and free education to thousands of young and disadvantaged people in the UK. Today, she continues in her role as Founding Artistic Director and Academic Board Member. For many years, Catherine Goodman organized drawing classes for individuals dealing with homelessness and disabilities, and she continues to offer refuge classes to young people with mental health issues on a weekly basis. She is also the primary caregiver of her sister, Sophie, who was born with multiple health conditions and has always been a subject of Goodman’s practice. In 2014, Goodman was awarded Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order (LVO) for services to The Royal Drawing School, and Commander of the Order of British Empire (CBE) in 2024 for her services to art in the UK. Goodman has served as the Artist Trustee at The National Gallery, London since 2019. Her paintings are held in significant private and public collections including the National Portrait Gallery, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, The Rothschild Foundation, and the Royal Collection Trust.

HAUSER & WIRTH

443 West 18th Street, New York City

www.hauserwirth.com

Richard Diebenkorn: Prints from Two Decades @ Crown Point Press Gallery, San Francisco

Richard Diebenkorn 

Prints from Two Decades

Crown Point Press, San Francisco

Through June 30, 2025

RICHARD DIEBENKORN

Spade Drypoint, 1982

© Richard Diebenkorn Foundation

Coutesy of Crown Point Press

I’m making my drawing in spite of the metal. I think I’m going to make a straight line, and it says, ‘Oh, no you don’t!—Richard Diebenkorn, 1962

Crown Point Press presents Richard Diebenkorn: Prints from Two Decades, a radiant exhibition of prints made by the artist during a series of residencies at the Press between 1980 and 1990. Organized with the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation and Crown Point Executive Director, Valerie Wade, the show takes place on the occasion of the highly anticipated release of Richard Diebenkorn: The Catalogue Raisonné of Prints (Yale University Press, 2025), which includes new scholarly essays, more than 850 significantly scaled images, and a richly illustrated chronology of Diebenkorn’s printmaking years. The works on view in the Crown Point Gallery were created in the final decade and a half of the artist’s life, the “high point” in his printmaking oeuvre, writes Starr Figura, Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art. In her essay Richard Diebenkorn, Printmaker, she adds that the objects made during this period “rank among the most extraordinarily luminous and elegantly structured prints ever produced.”

Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993) was highly accomplished in printmaking and worked with professional print shops over a period of more than 30 years (1962–1992). Master Printer Kathan Brown at Crown Point Press published a selection of his earliest intaglio prints in 1965 as 41 Etchings Drypoints. “It was Crown Point Press in San Francisco and the intaglio print processes it offered that captivated him the most: etching, drypoint, aquatint, and related techniques for incising an image into a metal printing plate,” Starr Figura adds, which “provided endless horizons for his work.”

In 1980, the artist began his Clubs and Spades series of works on paper containing symbols and heraldic imagery that had fascinated him since he was a young person; the iconography appeared in his prints as early as 1963. A series of intaglio prints made at the Press in which he deployed clubs, spades, and crosses in the early 1980s is “the first occasion,” Starr Figura writes, “when Diebenkorn’s prints start to rival the saturated color, imposing presence, and painterly ambition of his paintings on paper.” Spade Drypoint (1982) evinces his love of the drypoint process with its aggressive lines, while a shimmering aquatint with scraping made the same year, Green Tree Spade, is remarkable for its vividness and texture.

Ne Comprends Pas and Oui, both from 1990, were made during one of his most productive residencies at the Press. Oui, with its floating, broken detritus, marked a return to reversal techniques, which he had experimented with nearly a decade prior in 1981. Emily York, in Magical Secrets about Aquatint: Spit Bite, Sugar Lift and Other Etched Tones Step-by-Step (Crown Point Press, 2008), recalls that Renée Bott made an aquatint reversal of Ne Comprends Pas, which became Oui. “Diebenkorn mainly drew with asphaltum to make Ne Comprends Pas, a predominantly black image in which the drawn forms come through as the white of the paper. After finishing the print, he wondered what it would look like if the lines were dark on light,” writes Emily York.

The very experimental, geometric Passage I and Passage II were made during the same time as Ne Comprends Pas and Oui and were also created with the reversal process. Richard Diebenkorn added a strip of color to Passage I, as he did with his most celebrated print, Green, published in 1986 by the Press. “It wasn’t the first time that Dick had done that,” and “not a lot of artists that I’ve worked with have done that,” says Renée Bott, from a wide-ranging interview conducted by Karin Breuer, Curator in Charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and featured in the volumes. “He kept looking at it and…it wasn’t complete to him without adding something.”

The exhibition culminates in the weightless 1990 etchings Domino I and Domino II which are, observes Starr Figura, “among the most richly textured and densely composed images that Diebenkorn had ever produced.” As Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park geometries seem on the brink of dissolving…there is the sense of familiar forms and structures being opened up, loosened, and softened.”

Special Film

A new and special film with the late Kathan Brown and Valerie Wade, and together with Andrea Liguori, Executive Director of the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation and Editor, Richard Diebenkorn: The Catalogue Raisonné of Prints, explores the artist’s history with the Press and the “golden era”of printmaking during the 1980s. Andrea Liguori, in a tender interview conducted with Kathan Brown in late 2023, unearths brightly hued paper scraps discovered during filming that the artist had used to construct an iconic print image. The film was produced at Crown Point Press by Matthew Pendergast and is now available on crownpoint.com and diebenkorn.org.

CROWN POINT GALLERY

20 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

crownpoint.com

RICHARD DIEBENKORN: PRINTS FROM TWO DECADES

CROWN POINT PRESS, May 23 – June 30, 2025

Richard Serra: The Final Works @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

Richard Serra

The Final Works

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

Until 26 April 2025

RICHARD SERRA

Casablanca #3, 2022

Hand-applied oil stick, etching ink and silica 

on Igarashi 430gsm handmade paper

Paper and Image: 167.9 x 152.9 cm - 66 1/8 x 60 1/4 inches. 

Edition of 27

© Richard Serra. Courtesy of Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

Marking the first anniversary of Richard Serra’s death at the age of 85, Cristea Roberts Gallery presents the final works made by the artist.

The first complete showing of these works outside the US focuses on two series of prints made using black oil stick. Serra, one of the most significant artists of his generation, was known for monumental steel sculptures. However, his explorations of form, mass and gravity informed every aspect of his art, including his works on paper.

Casablanca 1-6, 2022 and Hitchcock I-III, 2024 mark the culmination of over fifty years of printmaking. Although described as prints, none of these works passed through a press and the methods used are unlike those of traditional printmaking; Serra’s chosen media undermines our understanding of what constitutes an editioned work.

Each work was made using oil stick, a combination of pigment, linseed oil, and melted wax. The mixture was moulded into large cylindrical sticks, then pressed down into a meat grinder and blended in an industrial dough mixer with silica.

The mixture was applied in layers, by a gloved hand, directly onto handmade paper, pushing and rubbing in a downward direction. Each layer required weeks of drying time before an additional coat could be applied. As a result, each impression varies in its construction.

For each work, layer upon layer of black oil stick was built up so that an intensely textured and rich three-dimensional surface emerges, evoking a large void. This imposing effect of black absorbing and reflecting light, dominates Serra’s prints. When making works on paper Serra remained committed to using a single palette of black to investigate weight, stability, and density. 

Richard Serra commented “Black is a property, not a quality. In terms of weight, black is heavier, creates a larger volume, holds itself in a more compressed field. It is comparable to forging.”

The mass of black in each work, which almost fills the entire sheets in Casablanca and Hitchcock, is relieved by thin areas of paper that appear to rise or emerge from curved edges and corners. Serra examines tension and gravity through this unequal balance of heavy mass and handmade Japanese paper. The paper support almost appears precarious; each impression of Casablanca, measuring over 150cm in width, weighs nearly 10 kilograms.

Richard Serra was interested in how an artwork not only exists in space but reorientates it. His sculptures created environments that had to be walked through or around to be fully experienced. Serra’s printmaking extends these investigations, interrogating the physical relationship of mass and the flat surface, and the viewers relationship to it.

The exhibition also features examples of earlier uses of black oil stick and etchings by the artist dating from 2004, and a display of the tools used to create these groundbreaking works.

Richard Serra: The Final Works demonstrates how the artist’s radical techniques and exceptional approach to making editions, remains singular in the history of printmaking.

Since presenting the first exhibition in the UK devoted to Serra’s prints in 2013, Cristea Roberts Gallery has continued to exclusively exhibit the artist’s editions in Europe. The works on show were developed by Richard Serra with Gemini G.E.L., an artists’ workshop and publisher in Los Angeles, where Serra made all his editions, a collaboration that lasted for over fifty years.

RICHARD SERRA - BRIOGRAPHY

Richard Serra (1938 - 2024) was born in San Francisco, USA. He lived and worked in New York, and the North Fork of Long Island, and Nova Scotia. From 1957 to 1961 Serra studied at the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Barbara, and from 1961 to 1964 at Yale University, Connecticut, where he worked with Josef Albers on Albers seminal book, Interaction of Color (New Haven, 1963). His first solo exhibition was held at Galleria La Salita, Rome, in 1966 and the Pasadena Art Museum staged his first solo museum exhibition in 1970.

Serra’s large-scale, site-specific sculptures, featuring monumental arcs, spirals, and ellipses can be found all over the world. Selected solo exhibitions and retrospectives include Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel (2017); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2017); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2014); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2011); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2011); Menil Collection, Houston (2011); Monumenta, Grand Palais, Paris (2008); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2008); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art (2006); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2005); Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples (2004); Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis (2003). His works are housed in major collections all over the world.

 

Richard Serra participated in international exhibitions including Documenta, Kassel (1972, 1977, 1982, and 1987); the Venice Biennale (1980, 1984, 2001, and 2013); and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Annual and Biennial exhibitions (1968, 1970, 1973, 1977, 1979, 1981, 1995, and 2006).

Richard Serra was the recipient of many notable prizes and awards. In 2015, he was awarded Les Insignes de Chevalier de l’Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur, France, and in 2018 he received the J. Paul Getty Medal, which honors extraordinary contributions to the practice, understanding, and support of the arts. Prior to this he was also awarded Orden de las Artes y las Letras de España, Spain in 2008 and Orden pour le Mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste, Federal Republic of Germany in 2002.

Richard Serra passed away aged 85 on 26 March 2024 in New York, USA.

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY, LONDON 

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG 

www.cristearoberts.com 

Related Posts:

In English

Richard Serra: Every Which Way, David Zwirner, New York, November 7 – December 14, 2024

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April 13 – August 28, 2011

Richard Serra: Torqued Ellipses, Dia Center for the Arts, New York, September 25, 1997 - June 14, 1998

En Français

Richard Serra : Casablanca, Galerie Lelong & Co., Paris, 14 mars - 30 avril 2024

Richard Serra : Clara Clara, 1983 , Musée du Louvre, Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, 14 avril – 3 novembre 2008

Richard Serra: The Final Works

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, 13 March - 26 April 2025

Prints and Paintings by Edvard Munch @ Harvard Art Museums: Gift from the Collection of Philip A. and Lynn G. Straus

The Harvard Art Museums announce an extraordinary gift from the collection of Philip A. and Lynn G. Straus: sixty-two prints and two paintings by the Norwegian Master Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Left: Edvard Munch, Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones), 1906–8. Oil on canvas. Busch-Reisinger Museum, The Philip and Lynn Straus Collection, 2023.551. Right: Edvard Munch, Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones), 1899. Woodcut printed in orange, yellow, black, and dark greenish blue on tan wove paper. Fogg Museum, The Philip and Lynn Straus Collection, 2023.602. Photos © President and Fellows of Harvard College

The Harvard Art Museums announce an extraordinary gift from the collection of Philip A. and Lynn G. Straus; the gift comprises sixty-two prints and two paintings by Edvard Munch as well as one print by Jasper Johns. The bequest is a final act of generosity from the Strauses following a relationship with the museums that began in the 1980s and that includes multiple gifts of artworks over the years; the support of a 1990s-era expansion, renovation, and endowment of the museums’ conservation center; and the endowment of specific conservation and curatorial positions. The Spring 2025 exhibition Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking will feature many of the recently gifted works.

The works by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944) in the Strauses’ bequest join an important concentration of paintings and prints by the artist already at Harvard and build upon multiple past gifts and assisted purchases of Munch’s work by the couple—117 works altogether. The total number of works by the artist in the Harvard Art Museums collections is now 142 (8 paintings and 134 prints), constituting one of the largest and most significant collections of works by Munch in the United States.

Lynn G. and Philip A. Straus (Harvard Class of 1937) have been among the Harvard Art Museums’ most generous benefactors. Both were dedicated patrons of the arts and education, supporting libraries, museums, and institutions affiliated with early childhood education, civil rights, and human services. In 1969, the couple purchased their first print by Munch, Salome (1903), an acquisition that marked the start of their passion for the artist’s work. Following a commitment to a $7.5 million gift in 1994, the museums’ conservation center—the oldest fine arts conservation treatment, research, and training facility in the United States—was renamed the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. The couple have also supported vital conservation positions of staff who specialize in works on paper, as well as curatorial internship and fellowship positions in the museums’ prints and drawings departments. Philip, a New York investment advisor and portfolio manager, passed away in 2004, and their bequest comes to Harvard following Lynn’s passing in 2023. In total, the couple gifted or enabled purchases of 128 works to the Harvard Art Museums over their lifetimes, including works by Max Beckmann, Georges Braque, Alexander Calder, Timothy David Mayhew, and Emil Nolde.

“We are immensely grateful to Philip and Lynn Straus for their generosity and stewardship over these many years,” said Sarah Ganz Blythe, the Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard Art Museums. “Their enthusiasm for the work of Edvard Munch ensures generations of students and visitors can experience and study his prints and paintings here in Cambridge. Through their distinct style of collecting Munch’s prints—seeking out and acquiring multiple images of the same theme—they created a collection that affords deep insights into the artist’s practice and is therefore a perfect match for a university museum with a strong teaching and research mission.” Sarah Ganz Blythe continued: “Their support of the conservators and conservation scientists in the Straus Center has had a transformative impact on the numerous fellows who have trained there, as well as provided a facility where every object in our collections can be cared for and scientifically researched.”

The Strauses’ recent bequest includes Munch’s iconic painting Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones) (1906–8) and Train Smoke (1910), both of which are now in the collection of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, one of the Harvard Art Museums’ three constituent museums. These paintings join Winter in Kragerø (1915) and Inger in a Red Dress (1896), previously given to the museum by Lynn in memory of Philip in 2012.

In Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones), a man and woman stand side by side yet still feel isolated from one another, facing toward the sea and away from the viewer, each embedded in a colorfully sedimented landscape. Edvard Munch first painted this subject around 1892 and returned to it repeatedly in his printmaking and painting thereafter. Train Smoke, which depicts nature disrupted but also dynamically animated by the Industrial Revolution, is a landscape unlike those by Munch already in the collection. Both paintings demonstrate Munch’s experimentation with color and surface texture, through his varied use of thick impasto, diluted paint drips, and even areas of bare canvas, a hallmark of Munch’s artistic legacy.

“It is hard to overestimate the significance of Munch’s painting Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones). Capturing the tension between proximity and distance—spatial as well as emotional—the work addresses the universal theme of the human condition,” said Lynette Roth, the Daimler Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum at the Harvard Art Museums. “The Strauses had generously loaned their painting for the inaugural installation of the renovated Harvard Art Museums building that opened in November 2014, and we are thrilled to be able to teach with and display it alongside the other significant paintings from their collection going forward.”

Over the course of 2024, both paintings have undergone cleaning and other treatments by Kate Smith, Senior Conservator of Paintings and Head of the Paintings Lab, and Ellen Davis, Associate Paintings Conservator, both in the museums’ Straus Center. Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones) had been varnished at some point in its history, which is not consistent with Munch’s practice of leaving his canvases without a unified glossy surface. Train Smoke needed paint stabilization and cleaning to remove atmospheric grime. After careful study, removal of the varnish and grime from the paint surface, and treatment of small areas of paint loss, the paintings are now in closer alignment with their original appearance.

The 62 prints in the Strauses’ recent bequest have entered the collection of the Fogg Museum. The majority are highly prized impressions that Munch exhibited in his lifetime, and they speak to the aesthetic he preferred for the display of his prints: some of the impressions are cut to the image, and adhered to larger, heavy brown paper, which Munch signed and often dated. Also included are multiple states of single compositions. They showcase the range of techniques the artist used in his printmaking practice: drypoint, etching, lithography, mezzotint, and woodcut, and innovations through the addition of hand-applied color such as watercolor, crayon, and oil, or printing with woodblocks sawn into pieces.

“With this bequest, the Harvard Art Museums have become an important destination for the research of Munch’s prints,” said Elizabeth M. Rudy, the Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints at the Harvard Art Museums. “There are innumerable ways the collection offers opportunities for teaching, exhibition, and further study. Noteworthy for its groups of versions, states, and variations of single compositions, this collection offers wide-ranging insights into Munch’s innovative practice as a printmaker.”

Highlights from the Strauses’ recent gift of prints by Edvard Munch include:

• Six prints from the series Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones), ranging in date from 1894 to 1917, join an impression that the couple previously gifted in 1991. Together, they showcase the various intriguing woodcut and etching techniques the artist utilized and also show how he manipulated his jigsaw woodblocks to print different parts of a single work in different colors. Closely related to this group is the gift of Young Woman on the Beach (1896), which is a rare example of the artist’s brief exploration of the mezzotint technique.

• Three versions of Vampire II, dated 1895–1902 and all either hand colored or printed in color, join a black lithographic state from 1895 that the couple previously assisted with purchasing. These prints show how Edvard Munch sometimes combined lithographs with hand coloring and also used woodblocks to add color.

• Four impressions of Madonna, dated 1895–1902, join a black lithographic state and a drypoint from 1894 that the couple previously assisted with purchasing. The lithographic prints show a range of examples of hand-applied color (drawn/painted) and printed color.

• One impression of the woodcut Woman’s Head against the Shore (1899) joins two other impressions from the same year, both previous gifts from the Strauses: Woman’s Head against the Shore (1899), printed in turquoise-green and pale and dark orange inks; and Woman’s Head against the Shore (1899), printed in red and three different colors of green ink. These prints show how Munch selectively printed his jigsaw woodblocks, omitting a piece from one of the blocks (the water) in two of the impressions.

• Four different self-portraits are the first such representations of the artist to enter the collection: Self-Portrait (1895), lithograph in crayon and tusche printed in black ink; Self-Portrait with Cigar (1908–9), lithograph printed in black ink; Self-Portrait (1911–12), woodcut; and Self-Portrait with a Bottle of Wine (1930), lithograph printed in black ink.

• There are also rare examples of prints that Edvard Munch printed himself with his small hand-crank press, including Melancholy II (1898), a woodcut (sawn in three pieces) printed in black, red, blue, and yellow inks.

The Jasper Johns print included in the bequest, Savarin (1982), is a lithograph and monotype; it depicts a Savarin-brand coffee can filled with paintbrushes of various sizes. The backdrop incorporates the artist’s signature “crosshatch” work of the 1970s, which is represented in other prints by Johns in the museums’ collections. The arm shown at the bottom of the print is a reference to the skeletal arm shown in Munch’s Self-Portrait from 1895—a connection the couple noted by hanging the two prints near each other in their own home.

HARVARD ART MUSEUMS

32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

harvardartmuseums.org

Updated 06-03-2025

William Gropper: Artist of the People @ The Phillips Collection, Washington DC

William Gropper: Artist of the People 

The Phillips Collection, Washington

October 17, 2024 - January 5, 2025

WILLIAM GROPPER

Self-portrait, 1965

Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 in.

Collection of Craig Gropper, 

Courtesy ACA Gallery, NY

WILLIAM GROPPER

Eternal Senator, 1935

Oil on canvas, 72 x 42 1/8 in.

Collection of Harvey Ross

WILLIAM GROPPER

Construction of the Dam, 1938

Oil on canvas, 27 1/4 x 87 1/4 in.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, 

Transfer from the U.S. Department of the Interior,

National Park Service

WILLIAM GROPPER

“Our present foes are domestic foes, not foreign foes.”, 1942

Ink, crayon, and opaque white paint on paper

15 3/8 x 11 1/4 in.

The Phillips Collection

Gift of Harvey Ross in honor of Elsa Smithgall’s

professionalism and dedicated service to 

The Phillips Collection, 2023

Published in The Illustrious Dunderheads, 1942

WILLIAM GROPPER

Congressional Declaration, 1947

Ink, crayon, and opaque white paint on paper

19 5/8 x 15 5/8 in.

Collection of Harvey and Harvey-Ann Ross

Published in New Masses, July 8, 1947

The Phillips Collection presents William Gropper: Artist of the People, the first exhibition in Washington, DC, dedicated to political cartoonist, painter, and printmaker WILLIAM GROPPER (b. 1897, New York, NY; d. 1977, Manhasset, NY). Featuring more than 40 paintings, cartoons, and caricatures this focused exhibition reveals William Gropper’s biting commentary on human rights, class, labor, freedom, democracy, and the hypocrisy of the American dream. The exhibition spans the artist’s most prolific years and reconstructs his political critiques and commitment to social justice for a contemporary audience. 

The son of impoverished immigrants from Romania and Ukraine, William Gropper grew up poor on the Lower East Side. Witnessing the daily injustices face by the working class during his formative years instilled in him a sympathy for marginalized communities, which greatly influenced his direction as an artist. Gropper contributed thousands of incisive illustrations to Vanity Fair and the New York Tribune, as well as more radical papers like the New Masses, Rebel Worker, and Morning Freiheit. Hailed as the Honoré Daumier of his time due to his sharp criticism of politicians and the government, William Gropper developed a powerful artistic language to catalyze social change.

“Gropper was an artist of, by, and for the people, who fervently believed in the power of art to bring people together and effect change,” says Vradenburg Director & CEO Jonathan P. Binstock. “Over half a century since their creation, Gropper’s work exposes universal human concerns, including the fragility of our democracy, which continue to persist. As an artist who has long been overlooked in the history of 20th-century American art, we are excited to share his work with our guests and spark conversations about its relevance to our contemporary world.”

This presentation of Gropper’s satires and commentary featured examples produced during a fertile period in the artist’s career, between the 1930s and 1950s. During the Great Depression, Gropper, like many of his fellow social realist artists and mentors like Robert Henri and George Bellows, celebrated the importance and inherent dignity of the worker in his art. As a labor activist, Gropper championed unions and defended government programs like the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which provided government jobs for millions of the unemployed and commissioned public artworks by artists who have come to define the American modernist canon including Stuart Davis, Dorothea Lange, Jacob Lawrence, and Jackson Pollock. 

“Gropper was a fierce, lifelong social justice advocate who used art to advocate for a better world. He believed strongly that artists be given a ‘free hand’ to reveal hard truths,” says Phillips Chief Curator and exhibition curator Elsa Smithgall. “In addition to his scathing social and political commentary, Gropper also turned to folk heroes and popular imagery from American contemporary discourse to portray optimistic scenes of his vision for an egalitarian society.” 

William Gropper’s socially conscious work went beyond support for the worker to the condemnation of racism, fascism, antisemitism, and governmental corruption. In 1936, while on assignment for Vanity Fair, Gropper wielded his brush to document proceedings of the US Senate, where he observed firsthand the shortcomings of democracy as a political system. During World War II, William Gropper supported the war effort, creating war bond posters and cartoons condemning domestic and foreign fascists. He produced thousands of cartoons and received numerous commissions for murals throughout the country, including Construction of a Dam in the Department of the Interior building in DC.

In the 1950s, William Gropper found himself in the crosshairs of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “Red Scare,” becoming the first of only two artists to be blacklisted, with his works banned from State Department traveling shows and many museums and galleries. The results were immediate and devastating, yet this did not diminish his belief in democracy and freedom of expression, nor his critical eye and artistic vigor. Following these dramatic events, William Gropper produced his famed 50-print set titled The Capriccios after Spanish artist Francisco de Goya’s series of the same name, drawing a provocative parallel between the Spanish Inquisition and McCarthyism. He channeled this dark chapter of paranoia and political scapegoating into his art and regained popular reception in the final decades of his life. He continued to produce works that speak to themes of war, prejudice, greed, and exploitation into his late seventies. By the year of his death, he had shown at most major museums across the US.

William Gropper: Artist of the People is the first exhibition presented by The Phillips Collection dedicated to the artist. In addition to works on loan, the exhibition features a selection of William Gropper’s paintings, prints, and drawings from the collection of Harvey and Harvey-Ann Ross, many of which recently entered the museum’s permanent collection and will be exhibited for the first time. 

WILLIAM GROPPER: ARTIST OF THE PEOPLE

EXHIBITION CATALOGUE

Edited by Elsa Smithgall, Chief Curator, The Phillips Collection

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated scholarly catalogue published by The Phillips Collection. It includes a foreword by Jonathan P. Binstock, Vradenburg Director & CEO of The Phillips Collection, essays by noted scholars Norman Kleeblatt, independent curator and critic, Allan Lichtman, Distinguished Professor of History, American University, and Lauren Strauss, Senior Professorial Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies for Jewish Studies, American University, a conversation between Harvey Ross and the exhibition’s curator Phillips Chief Curator Elsa Smithgall, and a translated excerpt of Gropper’s writings that appeared in the Yiddish publication Freiheit. The publication is available at the Museum Shop or online on the shop of The Phillips Collection's website.

THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION, WASHINGTON, DC

1600 21st Street, NW, Washington, DC 20009

phillipscollection.org

Kim Lim @ The Hepworth Wakefield - "Space, Rhythm & Light" Exhibition

Kim Lim: Space, Rhythm & Light

The Hepworth Wakefield

25 November 2023 – 2 June 2024

The Hepworth Wakefield presents the first major museum exhibition of Kim Lim’s work since 1999, offering unparalleled insight into the artist’s life and work. Space, Rhythm & Light displays over 100 artworks created over four decades by Kim Lim, alongside extensive archive material, most of which has never been seen publicly before, to show the full breadth of Kim Lim’s work.

KIM LIM (1936-1997) was born in Singapore to Chinese parents. She travelled to the UK in 1954 to study art, first at Central Saint Martin’s School of Fine Art (1954 - 1956) where she was taught by Anthony Caro and Elizabeth Frink and then at the Slade School of Art (1956 - 1960). Kim Lim remained in Britain for the rest of her life, establishing a successful career that has since fallen from view; her work was acquired for museum collections across the globe and she had substantial exhibitions at Axiom Gallery, London, National Museum of Art, Singapore, and Tate Gallery, London. In recent years, Lim’s work has begun to feature more prominently in major group survey exhibitions and publications, bringing her important artistic legacy back into view in British post-war art histories.

Space, Rhythm & Light explores Kim Lim’s focused engagement with abstraction across a wide range of media and materials. Inspired by forms found in the natural world as well as those in global cultures, Lim’s distinct contribution to 20th-century British sculpture and printmaking has been widely overlooked compared to her contemporaries. On display are Kim Lim’s multipart wood and metal sculptures that defined her work between the 1950s and 1970s, as well as her later minimalist stone carvings made in the 1980s and 1990s. The exhibition pays special attention to Lim’s printmaking - a practice she felt was equally important as sculpting, but for which she is less well known. Prints and unique ‘paper cut’ works are displayed with corresponding sculptures to show how methods of carving were interconnected in Lim’s interdisciplinary exploration of nature, light and architecture. Also featured are selected maquettes, sketchbooks, audio recordings, and documentary photographs of Lim’s own personal library of research objects and her studio.

Kim Lim cited travel as one of the most important aspects of her art education and development, and visited Japan, Cambodia, Malaysia, China and India between the 1960s and 1980s to ‘see things in its place where it was meant to be, in the light that it was meant to be’. Rarely seen photographs taken by the artist documenting her travels in Asia with her husband, the artist William Turnbull, will highlight how Lim absorbed diverse cultural and historic references, as well as drawing on her own multicultural background, to develop her minimalist approach to abstraction.

Dr Abi Shapiro, Curator, said: ‘Space, Rhythm & Light is the most comprehensive exhibition of Kim Lim’s work to date. Lim’s contribution is often overlooked in histories of post-war British art, but here, in the context of the legacy of Barbara Hepworth at The Hepworth Wakefield, there couldn’t be a better time or place to showcase the quality and value of Lim’s work. I am very grateful to the Kim Lim Estate for their generosity in allowing us to share so much information which provide visitors with an in-depth understanding of how Lim developed her technical mastery of numerous materials as well as her own unique style and visual language.’

The Estate of Kim Lim commented on the exhibition: ‘We are delighted that UK audiences have the opportunity to encounter the breadth of Kim Lim’s artistic practice through this exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield. Over the last few years, we have felt an incredibly positive response from the public sector in promoting Kim Lim’s work, and rebalancing many of the outmoded and limiting art historical narratives still in play. It seems fitting that Kim Lim’s first major UK museum show since 1999 should be hosted by an institution so closely associated with another artist, Barbara Hepworth, who challenged these very narratives through her practice and life.’

Kim Lim: Space, Rhythm & Light 

Exhibition Catalogue

An illustrated book, published by Lund Humphries and supported by Paul Mellon Centre, accompanies the exhibition. It is the first monograph of the artist and  includes writings by a range of leading academics, artists and curators from across the globe, situating Kim Lim’s work more firmly within post-war British sculpture histories, as well as exploring reasons for her marginalisation in narratives since her death.

THE HEPWORTH WAKEFIELD

Gallery Walk, Wakefield, West Yorkshire WF1 5AW

hepworthwakefield.org

Belkis Ayón @ Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City - Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón (1967–1999)

Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón (1967–1999) 

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City 

January 25 - April 29, 2018 

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art presents Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón (1967–1999). This landmark retrospective is the first in the United States dedicated to the work of Belkis Ayón—the late Cuban visual artist who mined the founding myth of the Afro-Cuban fraternal society, Abakuá, to create an independent and powerful visual iconography.

From the Curator’s Statement:

“Cuban artist Belkis Ayón (1967–1999) died at age thirty-two, leaving behind a body of work of considerable importance for the history of contemporary printmaking. Her death remains a painful mystery for the national and international art community that had witnessed with admiration her successful rise to the most demanding artistic circles of the 1990s. Sixteen years after her death, the artist’s estate presents art lovers and researchers the first retrospective exhibition of the artist in the United States—Nkame—which gathers a wide selection of her graphic production from 1986 to 1999.”

Belkis Ayón, who was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1967, became interested in the Abakuá and their mysterious traditions in 1985, while pursuing art in high school. She was primarily drawn to the figure of Sikán, who according to legend, originally discovered the magic of Abakuá by accidentally trapping a fish who subsequently spoke to her, sharing a secret knowledge – but since women were banned from knowing the organization’s deepest secrets, Sikán was sworn to secrecy. The princess, however, gave in to temptation and divulged this forbidden knowledge to her fiancée; as a result, her life was sacrificed. In Ayón’s works, Sikán is brought back to life, and the myth and mystery surrounding this figure is brought to light, transformed through Ayon’s exceptional collographic prints.

A distinguishing feature of Belkis Ayón’s artwork is her signature use of collography, a difficult and labor-intensive printmaking process whereby materials in a variety of textures and absorbencies are collaged onto a cardboard matrix, applied to a plate that is inked, and then run through a printing press.

“Belkis Ayon’s large-scale prints are captivating in story and technique. We have an opportunity, through her vision, to create a dialogue with mythology, history, culture, and geography while appreciating her printmaking virtuosity,” says Erin Dziedzic, director of curatorial affairs at Kemper Museum.

 Curator: Cristina Vives

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art 

4420 Warwick Boulevard, Kansas City, MO 64111

www.kemperart.org

Jim Dine Prints: 1985-2002 at Akron Art Museum

Jim Dine Prints: 1985-2002 

Akron Art Museum 

January 17 – March 27, 2004 

Ohio-born sculptor, painter and printmaker JIM DINE is one of America’s most famous living artists. Since the 1960s, Dine has transformed familiar, everyday objects such as hearts, bathrobes, tools, owls and skulls into powerful symbols of loss, longing, joy and wonder. The Akron Art Museum presents forty-seven monumental prints by this legendary artist with Jim Dine Prints: 1985-2002.

Born in Cincinnati in 1935, Jim Dine took evening art classes at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and later graduated from Ohio University. In 1958 he moved to New York City where he created performance art pieces, paintings and sculptures that incorporate real-life objects such as tools, lawnmowers and showerheads. Unlike the Pop artists with whom he is often associated, Dine does not use popular imagery to be humorous or ironic. Instead, he depicts objects that hold deep personal significance for him and conceives of each work as a kind of self-portrait.

Jim Dine Prints: 1985-2002 features the artist’s signature motifs of bathrobes, hearts, hands, and the Venus de Milo, themes the artist has recast in inventive ways since 1985. In conjunction with the exhibition, Dine’s Painting Around Mount Zion, a monumental image of four bathrobes owned by the Akron Art Museum, is also on view. The exhibition also features some of his newest subjects such as owls, ravens, trees and the character of Pinocchio, reflecting a more brooding, romantic sensibility.

Over the past four decades, Jim Dine has produced an incomparable body of paintings, sculpture, photographs and prints. Dine recently completed a monumental bronze sculpture of the Venus de Milo for the US Courthouse in Cleveland. Called Cleveland Venus, it was installed atop the new building this past October.

The works in the Akron Art Museum exhibition reveal Dine’s expressive vision as well as his devotion to innovative printmaking techniques. The artist uses power tools to carve images into printing plates, combines multiple techniques within a single print and hand colors many works, using brushes, his fingers and even a straw broom. Like his paintings and sculptures, Dine’s prints are characterized by both technical virtuosity and emotional intensity. They are grand in scale, extraordinary in technique and rich in allusion, with a powerful visual and emotional impact not to be missed.

This exhibition was organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in collaboration with Pace Editions Inc. and Jim Dine. 

AKRON ART MUSEUM

70 East Market Street, Akron, Ohio 44308

www.akronartmuseum.org

The Rival of Painting: The Lithographs of Albert Belleroche at San Diego Museum of Art

The Rival of Painting: The Lithographs of Albert Belleroche

San Diego Museum of Art

February 24 - May 27, 2001

As part of the San Diego Museum of Art's 75th anniversary celebration, a special exhibition of lithographs by turn-of-the-century French printmaker Albert Belleroche (1864-1944) will showcase some never before exhibited works from the Museum's extensive holdings of this master printmaker's art. Heralded by both his contemporary critics and modern art historians, Albert Belleroche's experimental work was at the forefront of the renaissance of lithography, which began to emerge as an independent art form during the artist's lifetime.

Steven Kern, the Museum's curator of European art, has selected forty examples from the 129 Belleroche lithographs owned by the Museum for The Rival of Painting. "The variety of works chosen for the exhibition reveal the entire scope of Albert Belleroche's experimental approach to the medium of lithography. These prints document the process of lithography's transformation from a predominantly commercial medium, to one of self expression in the hands of one of its most innovative practitioners" explains Don Bacigalupi, the Museum's executive director.

Albert Belleroche lithographs: The Collection

With the exception of only two works, all of the Belleroche lithographs in the Museum's holdings were acquired through the generous donations of museum trustee George C. Kenney II, his wife Olga Kitsakos-Kenney, and their daughter Elizabeth. The Kenneys are among a generation of younger collectors and supporters of the Museum and, at twelve years of age, Elizabeth is the youngest donor of a work of art to the collection on record. All nine lithographs recently donated by Elizabeth will form part of the exhibition.

According to Bacigalupi, "The Kenneys are to be commended for making such a remarkable portion of their personal art collection accessible to the community through their generous and continuing donations to our institution. The Museum is now the largest repository of Belleroche's art in North America, rivaling such esteemed collections as those of the Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique in Brussels, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and the British Museum in London."

San Diego residents, the Kenneys are active art collectors, with a special interest in European art. They have donated works of art to museums and art galleries throughout the country. In addition to the Belleroche lithographs, the Kenneys have also given the Museum two paintings by Belleroche, nine etchings by Rembrandt's student Ferdinand Bol as well as many other works on paper by old master and 20th century artists.

Albert Belleroche and the Parisian Art World

Albert Belleroche was born in Swansea, Wales in 1864 to a family of French aristocrats who had fled the persecution of Hugeunot Protestants by the French crown in the late 17th century. Wealthy and international, having spent most of his childhood in Paris, Belleroche was able to focus on his own artistic exploration throughout his lifetime, particularly in lithography, without the hindrance of commercial interest or the desire or need for critical acclaim.

Beginning his artistic career in Paris in 1882, Albert Belleroche was well acquainted with the leading figures and trends in the fin-de-siècle art world. He first studied briefly with that city's premier portrait painter, Carolus-Duran, and subsequently grew friendly with Duran's former star pupil, American expatriate John Singer Sargent (who is featured in the concurrently running exhibition, American Impressionists Abroad and at Home). The two of them traveled together and shared studios.

During that same period, Albert Belleroche encountered fellow aristocrat Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who was born the same year as Belleroche. The two of them shared a passion for drawing as well as for the models that inspired them. Lili, for example, was made famous by Lautrec, though she posed more frequently with Belleroche, and she and Belleroche eventually became lovers.

Albert Belleroche and his Critics

Although he first trained and worked as a painter, it was as a lithographer that Belleroche excelled. His work in lithography was recognized by both his fellow artists and by critics, this in spite of Belleroche's lack of pursuit of critical acclaim. "Belleroche holds a premiere position in the current renaissance of lithography," wrote Claude Roger-Marx in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1908. Roger-Marx, the great turn-of-the-century French critic who had previously championed the Impressionists, continued in his article, "No one... has equaled Belleroche's technique or his understanding of lithography."

Frank Brangwyn, fellow artist and friend of Belleroche, wrote in 1935, "As a lithographic artist, [Belleroche] stands alone. No modern can touch him either in his knowledge or in the quality to be got out of the stone. No one else has succeeded in making lithography the rival of painting."

And finally, a year before Albert Belleroche's death in 1944, noted art historian and print expert at the British Museum, Arthur Hind, provided this assessment of the printmaker's career: "In sensitive draughtsmanship, in variety of handling and in understanding of the possibilities of the medium, his work in lithography is among the greatest achievements [of the medium] since its discovery."

Albert Belleroche and Lithography

Lithography was in fact "discovered" or rather invented in 1796. The technique is based on the principle that oil and water repel one another and consists of printing an image drawn on the surface of a specially prepared stone surface with a greasy material. Because of its durability as a print medium-unlike in etching or engraving where the metal plates wear causing the image quality to degrade-huge editions of prints were possible, making lithography well suited to the world of commerce and industry. Consequently, its artistic application focused at first on the reproduction of paintings and drawings as illustrations for journals and other publications, with the actual printing carried out by trained technicians in commercial studios.

Albert Belleroche was at the forefront of the renaissance of lithography, when artists began to stretch the medium beyond the limits of creativity and technical production as defined by commerce. He drew and brushed directly on the stone, making full use of its grain and finish, varying strokes and touches to maximize effects of tone and modeling. He pulled his own impressions from his own press, sometimes a unique image, other times in editions as small as only two or three. He experimented with different inks and colors, sometimes grinding his own pigments. An avid collector of antique paper stock, he varied effect with sheets of different tones and weights.

With involvement in every stage of the creation of his art, Albert Belleroche challenged the traditional definition of a lithograph and its relation to the other arts. Belleroche, with his lithographs, did indeed rival painting and the selection of forty of his works in this exhibition represent the breadth of Belleroche's technique.

EXHIBITION CURATOR

Steven Kern, the Museum's curator of European art, is the exhibition's curator. Since joining the San Diego Museum of Art in 1997, Kern has overseen new thematic reinstallations of the Museum's permanent collection of old master paintings and of late 19th century European art. He has also coordinated the local presentations of major touring exhibitions including Monet: The Late Paintings of Giverny (1998) and Palace of Gold and Light: Treasures from the Topkapi, Istanbul (2000).

Prior to his arrival at SDMA, Kern was curator of paintings for nearly nine years at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA. Prior to that position, he was curator of European art and exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts and George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum in Springfield, MA. Kern holds a Master's degree in the History of Art from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and bachelors degrees in French Language and Literature and Art History from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

PUBLICATION

A full color, fully illustrated catalogue, published by the San Diego Museum of Art, accompanies the exhibition. The catalogue includes an introductory essay by exhibition curator Steven Kern, which discusses Albert Belleroche's experimental work within the context of the fin-de-siècle art world and the history of lithography. 64 pages, 40 color plates, 6 color illustrations, 9 x 12 inches. Softcover $25.00.

SAN DIEGO MUSEUM OF ART

1450 El Prado, Balboa Park, San Diego, CA

www.sdmart.org

Rembrandt at The British Museum, London - 'Rembrandt The Printmaker'

Rembrandt The Printmaker
The British Museum, London
25 January - 8 April 2001

Rembrandt was the most original printmaker of all time. In no less than 300 etchings he covered the full range of styles and subjects for which he is celebrated as a painter and draughtsman, including self-portraits, scenes from the Bible, vignettes of everyday life and character studies. The well-known Hundred Guilder Print, the Three Trees and the Three Crosses are among his most extraordinary creations. Famously experimental, he often reworked and scratched at his copper plates to improve and extend their expressive power. The results can look startlingly modern and continue to inspire artists today. 

Rembrandt's prints have been avidly collected since the day they were made and over the past two centuries the British Museum and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam have built up the greatest of all collections of these famous rarities. This major loan exhibition, the most ambitious display of Rembrandt's prints ever mounted, will present for the first time the highlights of both collections to provide a fully representative panorama of Rembrandt's achievements as a printmaker, from their beginnings in the second half of the 1620s until his death forty years later. Organised jointly with the Rijksmuseum and curated by leading authorities in current Rembrandt scholarship, the exhibition will show almost 200 impressions of these masterpieces of western art.

The exhibition is also the first to present the results of important new areas of research that have opened up in recent years, allowing us not only to follow the progress of Rembrandt's work on each etching, but also to determine when he revised the images. Many of his etchings can now be dated more exactly, and individual states of his prints are now precisely datable for the first time. The role played by Rembrandt's preparatory drawings and related oil-sketches, several of which are included from collections in Europe and America, is also now better understood. Providing an intimate glimpse into Rembrandt's working methods and a new understanding of his conception of his print oeuvre, these fresh insights will be presented to a wider public for the first time. 

A richly illustrated catalogue, Rembrandt the Printmaker, will accompany the exhibition, with 90 colour and 420 black-and-white illustrations (384pp.), by Erik Hinterding (University of Utrecht), Ger Luijten (Rijksmuseum Amsterdam) and Martin Royalton-Kisch (British Museum), with contributions by Marijn Schapelhouman, Peter Schatborn (both Rijksmuseum) and Ernst van de Wetering (Head of the Rembrandt Research Project, Amsterdam). Exhibition Price £45 (hardback).

THE BRITISH MUSEUM
Prints and Drawings Gallery
Museum's Website: www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk