Contact: Margaret Blagg 325/ 762-2269; director[at]theoldjailartcenter[dot]org
Digital images available on request.
The Old Jail Art Center celebrates the 400 th anniversary of Rembrandt's birth by exhibiting an etching by the artist along with etchings by eight other artists from the 18 th to the 20 th centuries. All works are in the museum's permanent collection. This small focus exhibition will appear in the Reilly Nail Gallery September 30 through December 31, 2006. Executive director Margaret Blagg commented, "Rembrandt would no doubt have been pleased that the medium he so enjoyed manipulating continues to engage the minds and talents of artists some four hundred years later."
Following is label copy for the exhibition:
Rembrandt van Rijn (Dutch, 1606-1669) is a painter without peer in the history of art. He was also the artist responsible for experimenting with and perfecting the etching, a multiple-original fine art printing process that was fairly new in his time. In the 17 th century, etchings were seen as an alternative to engravings, which are made in an exacting process by cutting lines into a copper plate with a tool called a burin. Etchings are made by drawing with a pointed tool on a waxy ground that coats the plate, which is then put into an acid bath so that the acid "bites" into the plate where the lines have been drawn. In both cases, the plates are then inked and run through a press. Rembrandt's etchings are masterful, contrasting areas of light and dark to reveal insights about his subjects, just as he did in painting.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Italian, 1720-1778) was trained as an architect but quickly defected to the art of engraving and etching as soon as he came to Rome from his native Venice. There he produced some of the most incredible vedute to be found. These romanticized "views" were popular with the tourists on The Grand Tour.
Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828), also famed as a painter, produced four main suites of etchings, of which Tauromaquia, the bull fighting series, is one. A devoté of bullfighting, Goya began the series when he was 69, producing 33 etchings initially, then another seven. All are documentary in nature, though the veracity of the reporting in no way diminishes the dramatic visual effects Goya achieved through etching.
Artists have continued to experiment with the etching process, which though perhaps more forgiving than engraving is still a demanding art. For example, since the images are reversed when printed, any words drawn into the plate must be written backwards. John Sloan (American, 1871-1951) used the medium to record an historic occasion-the figure drawing class at the New York School of Art in which his former professor at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Thomas P. Anshutz, lectured on anatomy to the co-ed crowd. Etching allowed Sloan to obscure figures in the shadows and cast focused light on the main figures. Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973) used exactly the opposite approach a few years later, trailing his faultless line through the wax ground to create another studio view.
In the latter part of the 20 th century, Salvador Dali (Spanish, 1904-1989) experimented with different etching techniques to simulate painterly effects and the ink blots of pen drawing, all in service of the Surrealist content of his art. Mark Tobey (American, 1890-1976) introduced color into the process in a complicated printing method that allows the white of the paper to appear as drawn line.
Contemporary American artists Terry Winters (b. 1949) and Kiki Smith (b. 1954) take the medium further. Winters used successive printings to achieve contrast in the deep washes of ink central to his abstract image. Smith expertly overprinted with color, accenting some areas and removing color in others, to create an evocative emotional space for Emily B.