Gallery-Going

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The New York Sun

Today, when phones take pictures and beam them around the world, it’s easier than ever to take the printed image for granted. Two current shows illuminate the history of the print from very different vantage points. “Imagined Worlds,” at AXA Gallery, takes a sweeping look at visionary images and their global influences up to the present, while “Paper Museums,” at Grey Art Gallery, concentrates on the European experience of art in a time when woodcuts and intaglio prints provided the only affordable, transportable images.


The nearly 90 fine art prints, books, and maps in “Imagined Worlds” have been selected for their fantastical imagery reflecting (and also influencing) local cultures. We’re talking lots of cultures: The works were created between 1470 and the present, and hail from four continents and Mars. The provocative mix includes Tibetan wood blocks, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers comic strips, and prints by Redon, Durer, Goya, Blake, Escher, and Rockwell Kent.


Curated by Amy Baker Sandback and organized by the International Print Center, the exhibition opens with a Hokusai print of the seven blind men examining an elephant. This is fitting, as the parable neatly argues for the indispensability of context.


A mixture of prescience and provincialism resonates throughout the show. A 1901 newspaper comic strip, despite its whimsical images, eerily foretells such 20th-century technological advances as trans-Atlantic day trips and crosswalk buttons for street corners. Several 18th century French color etchings, reflecting that era’s rage for chinoiserie, impose frilly details on Chinese scenes. Two 19th-century Japanese woodcuts return the favor, imparting an oriental aspect to portraits of Commodore Perry.


Elsewhere, a wonderfully naturalistic 1530 woodcut from a German book on herbs shows the print’s vital role in sharing scientific knowledge. Four luscious chromolithographs of lilies from 1854 demonstrate the advances in print technology – and also the commercial intentions of a Massachusetts horticulturalist. In another room, a 1587 engraving by Goltzius hangs between two NASA images of Mars’s surface. The clouds and dozens of figures in the Dutch engraving are so vigorously modeled that they resemble knotted ropes, while the panoramic NASA images distort in their own way, severely twisting the perspective of the Martian landscape.


The essays in the handsome catalog help tie together this cornucopia. On the walls, though, it’s mainly the exoticness of the images that connects earnest inquiry and indulgent fiction, piety and commercialism, and naive prejudice and learned wit. This presents a hazard: The sampling of so many encapsulated viewpoints may leave the viewer feeling a little like a cultural gadabout. But the installation is gorgeous – not simply as “eye candy,” but as a stimulating variety of unusual work (and occasional masterpieces) that makes overarching arguments unnecessary.


***


“Paper Museums,” at the Grey Art Gallery, explores the history of the reproductive prints that in the centuries before photography and public art museums provided most people with their only experience of great works of art. The more than 100 woodcuts, engravings, and etchings reflect the impact of evolving technologies and conventions, as well as the temperaments of the printmakers themselves. They also demonstrate the relative quality of “truth” in print reproduction.


Some printmakers took surprising liberties. One engraver faithfully, if prosaically, depicts every detail of Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment,” while another engraver seems determined to out-sculpt Michelangelo, giving such dimensionality to figures that they want to burst from their frame. A 1519 engraving of the Laocoon sculpture goes even further, completely reinventing the figures’ poses.


The fine crosshatched lines in an engraving executed around 1500 after a portion of Mantegna’s “Triumph of Caesar” paintings (begun in 1486) capture the original’s somber majesty, but a century later, in 1599, another artist used the new technique of chiaroscuro woodblock (with separate blocks for black lines and areas of color) to more vividly evoke the original’s illumination by color.


Later copies, like Agostino Carracci’s crisply engraved version from around 1589 of Tintoretto’s painting “Mercury and the Three Graces,” tend to be more respectful of original compositions. This may be a reflection of the Renaissance artist’s change in stature from craftsman to independent genius: The exhibition catalog describes how for another print, Carracci sought permission from Tintoretto before removing the figures’ shoes.


Hanging next to several remarkable Durer prints are almost identical copies by his contemporary, Marcantonio Raimondi. The copies, which don’t quite achieve the originals’ warmth and intimacy, could be interpreted as either honoring or exploiting them. (Durer didn’t feel honored: He sued Raimondi.)


The term “Paper Museum” derives from the print portfolios that served as catalogs for a number of large art collections. Ironically, one such portfolio reproduced the set of drawings Claude Lorrain had produced a century earlier to safeguard against unauthorized copies. The finely blended tones of these mezzotint prints seem generically faithful to the originals, capturing Claude Lorrain’s style but not strictly his energy. With its gilt edges and marbled end papers, this massive book of prints seems as much a declaration of connoisseurship as a means of attaining it.


The exhibition also includes a selection of canvases by present-day painter Andrea Facco, but these are so different in medium and attitude that they don’t contribute much to the issues already illuminated by Durer and Carracci – a tough act for any one to follow.


“Imagined Worlds” until January 28 (787 Seventh Avenue, between 51st and 52nd Streets, 212-554-2015).


“Paper Museums” through December 3 (100 Washington Square East, between Waverly and Washington Places, 212-998-6780).


The New York Sun

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