Met Museum: The Power of Prints

For those with an interest in the graphic arts there is currently on view a fascinating exhibit at the Met Museum entitled The Power of Prints: The Legacy of William M. Ivins and A. Hyatt Mayor.  The show celebrates the centenary of the museum's Department of Prints of which Ivins was the founding curator and Mayor his assistant.

This is a relatively small exhibit that takes up only three galleries on the second floor, and the quality of the works shown is uneven as the show sometimes tries too hard to be eclectic in its presentation rather than focusing on the finest examples of the printmaking process.  As the curator's website statement explains:

"It [the exhibition] will display the most beautiful, rare, and exceptional prints alongside the equally important popular and ephemeral works that were collected in the first fifty years of the department's history."

The first gallery (if one enters from the right) contains nineteenth century works that are more representative of popular culture than fine art.  These include everything from playing cards manufactured by Kinney Brothers Tobacco to an 1897 calendar cover by Edward Penfield to an advertisement for Hassan cigarettes ("The Oriental Smoke").  While colorful enough, these are of limited interest.  The best works here are the examples of fin de siècle Parisian poster art by Toulouse-Lautrec, Jules Chéret and Georges de Feure.

One quickly moves on to more important works.  For example, there are an impressive number of illustrated books on display from the fifteenth century that include Underweysung der Messung (Nuremberg, 1538) with woodcuts by Dürer and Bernhard von Breydenbach's Peregrinatio in terram sanctam (Mainz, 1440-1497?).

The real highlights of the show are in the third and final gallery.  Here one finds some of the greatest graphic works ever created.  These include a number of engravings by Dürer, some of them well known such as the 1504 Adam and Eve and some less familiar such as the 1501 Saint Eustace that depicts in the background what looks like the same castle that appears in the artist's famous woodcut Knight, Death and the Devil (not on display).  Nearby are equally impressive engravings by Lucas van Leyden and Andrea Mantegna.

The prints I spent the most time examining were those by Rembrandt and Goya.  The Rembrandts included three large drypoint etchings of the same subject, Christ Crucified between the Two Thieves: The Three Crosses, to which the artist returned over a period of several years.  It was intriguing to see how Rembrandt's visualization of the scene and its subsequent execution evolved over time.  By far, the best was the final depiction completed in 1660.  From a purely technical point of view, though, the most interesting print was the 1658 Reclining Female Nude in which the subject is so heavily inked that it almost entirely recedes into the shadows surrounding it.

The Goya etchings were not only masterpieces of execution but were equally significant for their subject matter.  Goya anticipated twentieth century photojournalism by more than a century in his 1810 Los Desastres de la Guerra series that unflinchingly portrayed the war crimes committed by Napoleonic forces against the Spanish guerillas who opposed them.  Even today when we have become desensitized by the flood of media images with which we are daily bombarded, such works as Y no hai remedio are still deeply unsettling as is the horrific El agarrotado completed several decades before (1778-1780).  Another work, A Giant Seated in a Landscape (sometimes referred to as The Colossus) prefigures the style of the artist's late "Black Paintings."

In addition to the classics, there were many modern works of interest on display in this same gallery.  I was particularly impressed by Joseph Pennell's 1903 Rainy Night, Charing Cross Shops in which the artist somehow managed to create in the etched lines a sense of figures actually blurred by the evening's falling rain.  I found it in this regard superior to the nearby 1883 work by Camille Pissarro, Impressions of Rain, Rouen.  Whistler was represented by several etchings, most notably Nocturne: Palaces, and Edward Hopper by Evening Wind and Night Shadows, both from 1921, the latter of which appeared to have influenced Martin Lewis's later 1928 Relics, Speakeasy Corner.  There were also works on view by John Sloan (Turning Out the Light, 1905) and Reginald Marsh (Tombs Prison, 1929).

The exhibit continues through May 22, 2016.