 | |
| Formation | 1956 |
|---|---|
| Purpose | Foster the creation, dissemination, and appreciation of fine prints, new and old. |
| Website | printcouncil |
The Print Council of America is an organization that seeks to "foster the creation, dissemination, and appreciation of fine prints, old and new." [1] It is primarily a group of museum curators, but also includes university professors, conservators of works on paper, and independent scholars involved in the study of prints. [1]
The Print Council of America was founded in 1956 and was led by legendary print collector Lessing J. Rosenwald. Early members of the group—including Adelyn Breeskin, [2] Harold Joachim, [3] Una Johnson, [4] A. Hyatt Mayor, Elizabeth Mongan, [5] Jakob Rosenberg, [6] Paul J. Sachs, Carl Schniewind [7] and Carl Zigrosser [8] are now known for their leadership in establishing collections, mounting ground-breaking exhibitions of prints, and publishing critical studies of prints and printmakers. The group's leadership has been called "the cream of the cognoscenti" [9] among print experts.
Early in its history, the Print Council of America was focused on advocacy and raising the visibility of printmaking as a fine art medium. The 1961 publication What is an Original Print?: Principles Recommended by the Print Council of America offered guidelines to the complex topic of originality and printmaking during that era. Initially, these efforts at a standard definition were controversial among some print experts, [10] and even provoked "anger" from another organization, the World Print Council. [11] Over the years, the definition became more "widely accepted". [12]
The Print Council of America has published many books. One notable example is The Print Council of America Paper Sample Book: A Practical Guide to the Description of Paper. [13] This book provides a "standardized method of describing paper" that has "proved to be an objective system for describing paper". [14]
Currently, the Print Council of America serves as a professional organization for print curators and has been active in the publication of books and research aids to encourage and professionalize the study and care of prints. Their primary vehicle is the Search Index to Print Catalogues Raisonnes, a free service which directs scholars and students to the oeuvre catalogues of thousands of artists. This search index has been called "a very useful source for identifying print catalogues raisonnés." [15]
The Print Council of America also offers resources to aid in learning about printmaking techniques, authenticity, the care of prints, defining a print, and determining the value of a print. In addition, the council offers links to the collections of major art libraries in the United States and Canada, and a selection of books published by the Print Council of America.
Milton Clark Avery was an American modern painter. Born in Altmar, New York, he moved to Connecticut in 1898 and later to New York City. He was the husband of artist Sally Michel Avery and the father of artist March Avery.
A catalogue raisonné is a comprehensive, annotated listing of all the known artworks by an artist either in a particular medium or all media. The works are described in such a way that they may be reliably identified by third parties, and such listings play an important role in authentication.
Elias Breeskin was a violinist, composer and conductor.
Max Kahn (1902–2005) was a Litvak lithographer, painter and sculptor born in Slonim, Belarus in 1902. He worked until age 100 and died in 2005 at the age of 103. He was one of a small group of lithographers in the late 1940s and 1950s demonstrating the self-expressive qualities of the medium.
Paul Hambleton Landacre was an American artist based in Los Angeles. His artistic innovations and technical virtuosity gained wood engraving a foothold as a high art form in twentieth-century America. Landacre's linocuts and wood engravings of landscapes, still lifes, nudes, and abstractions are acclaimed for the beauty of their designs and a mastery of materials. He used the finest inks and imported handmade Japanese papers and, with a few exceptions, printed his wood engravings in his studio on a nineteenth-century Washington Hand Press, which is now in the collection of the International Printing Museum in Carson, California.
Norma Bassett Hall (1889–1957) was an American printmaker. She was a woodblock printmaker and often depicted landscapes and outdoor scenes.
Charles Percy Parkhurst was an American museum curator best known for his work on the Roberts Commission, tracking down art looted during World War II.
Kenneth E. Tyler, AO is a master printmaker, publisher, arts educator and a prominent figure in the American post-war revival of fine art, limited edition printmaking. Tyler established leading print workshops and publishing houses on both West and East coasts of the United States and made several innovations in printmaking technology. His technical expertise and willingness to experiment on a bold scale drew many famous and influential artists to his workshops, among them Frank Stella, Helen Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg, Anthony Caro and Jasper Johns. Ken Tyler remains active as an educator and promoter of fine art printmaking, and mentor of a younger generation of printers through his various training and collecting institutions in Singapore, Japan, Australia and the US. The largest collection of prints produced at Tyler's successive workshops is currently held by the National Gallery of Australia.
Anne Goldthwaite was an American painter and printmaker and an advocate of women's rights and equal rights. Goldthwaite studied art in New York City. She then moved to Paris where she studied modern art, including Fauvism and Cubism, and became a member of a circle that included Gertrude Stein, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. She was a member of a group of artists that called themselves Académie Moderne and held annual exhibitions.
Adelyn Dohme Breeskin (1896–1986) was an American curator, museum director, and art historian known for her longtime leadership of the Baltimore Museum of Art and Mary Cassatt scholarship.
Gardner (Cassatt) Held by His Mother is a drypoint print dated circa 1889 by the American painter, printmaker, pastelist, and connoisseur Mary Cassatt. The example illustrated is in the collection of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum and is a gift of Samuel Putnam Avery.
Agnes Mongan was an American art historian, who served as a curator and director for the Harvard Art Museums.
Mauricio Leib Lasansky was an Argentine artist and educator known both for his advanced techniques in intaglio printmaking and for a series of 33 pencil drawings from the 1960s titled "The Nazi Drawings." Lasansky, who migrated to and became a citizen of the United States, established the school of printmaking at the University of Iowa, which offered the first Master of Fine Arts program in the field in the United States. Sotheby's identifies him as one of the fathers of modern printmaking.
Anthony Velonis was an American painter and designer born in New York City who helped introduce the public to silkscreen printing in the early 20th century. He married Elizabeth Amidon, with whom he had four children.
The Boating Party is an oil painting by American artist Mary Cassatt created in 1893. It is also known under the titles La partie en bateau; La barque; Les canotiers; and En canot. Measuring nearly three by four feet, it is Cassatt’s largest and most ambitious painting. It has been in the Chester Dale Collection of the National Gallery of Art since 1963.
Adolph Paul Oppé, was a British art historian, critic, art collector and museum official. Born in London, the son of a silk merchant, he was educated at Charterhouse, the University of St Andrews, and New College, Oxford. From 1902 to 1905 he taught Greek and ancient history at the universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh, and from 1905 to 1938 worked as a civil servant in the Board of Education. He also served as Deputy Director of the Victoria & Albert Museum. Oppé was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 1952.
Elizabeth Mongan was an art historian and curator, an authority on prints. She assembled the Rosenwald collection of prints and joined the National Gallery of Art as a curator when the collection moved there. She authored numerous exhibition catalogs, including the seminal The First Century of Printmaking, 1400 to 1500 and the catalogue raisonné of the prints of Paul Gauguin.
The Conference of Women in the Visual Arts was an event held on April 20, 1972, through 22, 1972 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC. The conference was organized by Cynthia Bickley, Mary Beth Edelson, Barbara Frank, Enid Sanford, Susan Sollins, Josephine Withers, and Yvonne Wulff. The impetus behind the conference was anger over the complete lack of women represented at the Corcoran Biennial the previous year, 1971. The three day conference consisted of lectures and panels of women artists and art historians. It was attended by over 300 female artists, art historians, critics and museum curators.
Hyman J. Warsager (1909–1974) was an American artist known for his printmaking.
This is a timeline of 20th-century printmaking in America.
