Krannert Art Museum will present an exhibition of some of the finest early modern European prints held in U.S. collections.
The exhibition "Imagination, Faith, and Desire: Art and Agency in European Prints, 1475-1800" will have more than 100 prints on view. They illustrate how prints were the first form of visual mass media in Europe, dramatically shaping society. The exhibition opens Sept. 25 and runs through Feb. 28.
The prints are of a number, significance and quality generally reserved for top-tier museums in major metropolitan areas, said Maureen Warren, the museum's curator of European and American art and the organizer of the exhibition. All prints on view are borrowed from private collectors, offering a rare opportunity for the public to enjoy them, she said.
"These are some of the most important European prints ever made. They are a precious commodity, extremely fine impressions, the rarest of the rare. To be able to bring together 100 of these prints is a once-in-a-career opportunity," Warren said.
The period covered by the exhibition begins when printing presses had spread throughout Europe. The invention of the Gutenberg press and moveable type transformed society, but printed images were equally as transformative as printed text in shaping people's beliefs and actions, Warren said.
"We live in a society supersaturated with texts and images that have been replicated over and over. This was the first time that was happening in Europe. It completely transformed all aspects of society - politics, knowledge and faith," she said.
Printing technology allowed the development of art history as a discipline, enabling printed images of sculpture, paintings and tapestries to circulate widely so people who would have no way of seeing the artworks in person could discuss them. It changed views on artistic creativity, which was believed to be God-given but now also was seen as an individual accomplishment, Warren said. Artists began signing their works at the same time that compendiums of artists' biographies were first published.
"You had artists who aggressively took advantage of printmaking to spread their reputation and name, like branding," Warren said.
One such artist was Rembrandt, who produced more self-portraits than any of his peers, Warren said. The exhibition includes three self-portraits from different times in his life. One that he made late in his career shows him looking into a mirror as he works by the light of a window.
"This print acknowledges his brilliant use of self-portraiture to craft his fame and legacy internationally. When you can envision how an artist looks and you know their biography, it really enhances how you see the works of art they make," Warren said.
Many of the prints have a religious theme because the Catholic Church was an important patron of the arts and because the exhibition's timeline spans the Protestant Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Both sides were aggressively using images as propaganda, Warren said. The six thematic sections of the exhibition examine artistic excellence; imagination and creativity; how prints transmitted artistic styles and ideas across space and time; images of everyday life; religious prints; and how prints spread ideas about sexuality and gender.
The exhibition includes five depictions of Adam and Eve, contrasting how different artists portrayed them.
"That subject was one that artists used to showcase their conception of ideal male and female bodies. It was a kind of proving ground for their capability for rendering the human form. You can look at someone's Adam and Eve and know a lot about their ideas about gender and sexuality and their notion of the perfect body," Warren said.
A print by Albrecht Dürer reflects his knowledge of classical sculpture, she said. His figures are lean and well-muscled, and they stand with their weight on one leg, the other relaxed, forming a sinuous S-curve with their bodies. An enlarged image from the print shows Dürer's highly detailed engraving style and use of different weights of line to provide texture and dimension to the scene.
Rembrandt's portrayal of Adam and Eve is very different, showing an older couple with dimples and imperfections in their flesh, rather than idealized godlike figures.
"They look like people you know. For Rembrandt, we all have to decide whether to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, or whether to sin. He doesn't want these figures to be too distant from us. He wants them to be frail and human, like we are, so we identify with them and they inspire us," Warren said.
The exhibition examines the imagination and creativity of printmakers by looking at their visual solutions for portraying a common story, theme or character in a different way.
Dürer's woodcut of "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" was made at a time when there was real apprehension about the end of days, Warren said. Death was often portrayed as a skeleton, but in Dürer's scene, the horseman representing death is an emaciated old man riding an emaciated horse and using a trident to shovel people into the mouth of hell. The crown on a doomed man's head tells the viewer that death comes for everyone, even kings, Warren said.
"It's a huge jump from a skeleton to this dynamic composition of four riders galloping across the landscape, crushing all these figures," she said.
Jacques Callot's "The Temptation of St. Anthony" depicts a familiar story of this saint praying in the desert and being alternatively tempted and terrorized by the devil. Artists have given different forms to the demons in the scene; often they are an amalgamation of animal parts, Warren said. Sometimes artists referenced the creations of earlier artists in their work, like Easter eggs in a movie.
"There's limitless comparisons to mass media now," she said.
The museum will host a symposium, "Envisioning Gender and Sexuality in Premodern European Prints," on Oct. 17. The daylong symposium will explore how concepts of gender and sexuality were changing, as illustrated in the exhibition's prints.
