On Beauty and the Everyday: The Prints of James McNeill Whistler is a new exhibition opening this Saturday, August 21, 2010, at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, which has one of the most extensive collections of Whistler’s graphic work in the U.S.

The collection, which you can preview here, contains examples of some of Whistler’s finest and best known etchings.

Unfortunately, both the exhibition page preview (link for “More Images” at bottom) and the above images of the collection (meant to facilitate ordering slide sets) are small.

Etchings by their nature are subtle, with delicate lines against toned papers. This is part of their unique visual charm, but it makes them difficult to do justice in reproduction. There are some larger images on the site of the Frick Collection in New York. You can find impressions of some of the same etchings in both collections.

Some of the best online reproductions I’ve found are on the University of Glasgow’s site for James Mcneill Whistler: The Etchings, A Catalog Raisonne. Unfortunately the Catalog Raisonne mentioned is a book project, and the online resources are from from complete, but what is there is large enough to appreciate some of the subtlety of Whistler’s touch. You have to drill down a bit. Go to “Exhibition”, scroll down, click on the thumbnail to access the detail page, then click again on the image for the large version.

Next best may be the online images from the Freer Sackler Online Collections.

You will sometimes find the same etching in different “states”, impressions pulled form the plate at various stages of the artist’s work on the image.

Whistler was inspired by the etchings of Rembrandt, likely the finest practitioner of the art in history, and to a great degree revitalized the art in his time and placed himself high in the canon of the world’s great etchers and lithographers.

The exhibition at the University of Michigan Museum of Art continues to November 28, 2010.

For more information and links to resources, see my previous posts on James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Whistler’s Etchings. In the latter I give a brief overview of the process of creating an etching.

Etchings of James McNeill Whistler is wonderfully inexpensive Dover book.

I haven’t seen Etchings by Whistler: Sixty Photographs from Original Prints. It’s a facsimile of a book published in 1923 and I don’t know how well it’s fared in the reproduction.

One is her choice of wood. Woodcut a painstaking relief printmaking process in which the “negative” areas, those not to be printed, are carved away leaving the parts to be inked raised as part of the original surface (as opposed to intaglio processes, like etching, in which the lines that receive ink are lower than the surface).

Most artists working in woodcut choose wood with an even grain and smooth surface, commonly beechwood, cherry or walnut. Brawn has worked that way, but she responded to the opportunity a couple of years ago to by five truckloads of salvaged douglas fir beams from dismantled grain elevators and the restoration of the Alberta Block in Calgary, wood that has knots, holes and gouges and is often peppered with rusty nails, wood with a history, as she puts it.

Brawn has matched her quirky choice of materials with a quirky range of subjects, largely portraits of figures from history and pop culture, as well as several series of animal subjects. When searching through her online gallery of woodcuts, which you can do by year or alphabetically by subject, you can have a single page in which the subjects include Da Vinci, Dirty Harry, Dorothy Parker, David Suzuki, David Bowie, Don Cherry, the Dalai Lama, a deer and a duck.

Another aspect of her work that is unusual is the role of the woodblock itself. Usually prints are pulled from the block until it is retired at the end of the decided upon run. While Brawn pulls a small run of monochromatic prints from her blocks, it is the blocks themselves that stand out and are presented as art objects, with the raised areas painted black, as though inked, and the recessed areas painted in bright colors.

The other unusual feature of Brawn’s work is her use of patterns and decorative elements in the backgrounds, and sometimes within the faces, of her subjects.

She follows up on her other eccentricities with a penchant for alternative display spaces and unusual venues for her work, including Surgarmobile, a 1935 silver travel trailer that she used for a time as a mobile gallery.

[Via Metafilter]

Young was born in Hawaii, moved to Florida with his family at the age of 14, and studied printmaking at the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota. His watercolor technique, which frequently makes use of drybrush, is self-taught, and based on his admiration for artists like Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth and Thomas Eakins.

Young lives part time in Florida and part time in the Bahama Islands, where he finds subjects for many of his well known paintings of children. This was also a place where Homer came to paint, and Young has even done compositions that are essentially recreations of Homer paintings.

Whether at play, moody and contemplative, or even formally posed, his images of children seem to see past the surface into a moment in their lives.

The refined technique and precise draftsmanship applied to his subjects are often set off against loosely suggested backgrounds, rendered together in a muted palette with accents of brighter color.

Young also works in etching, drypoint and silverpoint drawing.

[Via Artist Daily]

He was also a drawing teacher at Kennemer Lyceum in Bloemendaal until he retired in 1960. Pieck was born in 1895, when the “Golden Age” of illustration was in full force. One can only assume that he was exposed to the work of the great illustrators of the time, like Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Kay Neilsen, John Bauer, and in particular, Gustave Tenngren (also here and here).

Pieck’s more popular work has a wonderful visual charm, crafted from fine detail, deft control of color and atmospheric perspective, and fascinating compositions. His illustrations for 1001 Arabian Nights are marvels of book illustration in the classic Golden Age style, vibrant with adventure, moody and evocative in their rendering, and ripe with the sublime enticement of distant lands and exotic cultures.

[Via One1more2time3's Weblog]

Orosz is a graphic designer, illustrator, printmaker, poster artist, animator, stage designer and painter. He has a fascination with anamorphosis, and has several examples of his own in the gallery on his web site.

Unfortunately the site is inconvenient to deal with, one of those web site designs that is too “clever” for its own good (see my rant on How Not to Display Your Art on the Web). It opens in a pop-up, you have to wait for the white square to fill to indicate the site is loaded, and then deal with a difficult navigation system that is hidden until you roll over it and search out the links. Hints: main navigation is at the bottom, portfolio sections at the top, individual pieces in a band over the image in the center that you have to scroll through.

If you’re willing to work your way through, however, there are many interesting pieces in the section of Anamorphoses, along with illustrations, posters, paintings and Escher influenced etchings that explore the realm of impossible figures (see my posts on M.C. Escher and Andreas Aronsson).

You may find it easier to view Orosz’s work on Gallery Diabolus or Marlena Agency.

Orosz wrote an article titled The Mirrors of the Master in the book M.C. Escher’s Legacy: A Centennial Celebration.

Some of Orosz’s anamorphoses are particularly well done, in that the flat image makes perfect visual sense in itself, as in the image at top, with it’s anamorphic component hidden until revealed in the proper curved reflective surface (above, middle), as opposed to the somewhat easier paradigm of a flat image that simply appears distorted until viewed in the reflective surface.

Orosz also explores illusionistic double-images, as found in the work of Dalí and earlier artists, in which a secondary image can be seen in the main image (e.g. a face in a landscape).

I particularly like his poster designs, in which his playfully brain-teasing themes are presented in strong, simplified graphics.

That devotion is evident not only in his own work, but in his study of the art, and in the efforts he has made in assembling and disseminating information about the process. He has presented that information for a number of years in his extensive and highly informative website, woodblock.com, and is now extending that through a series of eBooks as part of a new publishing venture, Mokuhankan.

For background on the artist, his process and work, please see my previous post on David Bull.

Your First Print is an offshoot of the Mokuhankan venture, the primary purpose of which is to publish woodblock prints by other artists. Bull points out that though the devotion to making woodblock prints, a strong tradition in Japan, is very much alive among devotees of the art, the publication and sale of prints has faded. However, those exposed to woodblock prints for the first time are often dazzled by how beautiful they are and and how fascinating they can be.

Likewise, even those knowledgeable about western printmaking may be surprised and fascinated by the differences in the traditional methods of Japanese Woodblock printing. For example, no press is used in making an impression. The traditions of Japanese and European printmaking (which began to cross-pollinate in the 19th Century, see my post on Hokusai), have fascinating parallels as well as divergences.

Your First Print is an elegant and painstakingly crafted electronic book, in rich media PDF format, that introduces the reader to the process, providing an introduction to both those interested in pursuing the art and those who simply wish to deepen their appreciation of the process behind the art.

The eBook is divided into chapters and subchapters, taking the reader through the entire process, from selecting the materials to final printings and even troubleshooting things like misregistration and chipped or damaged blocks.

The text and photographs are supplemented with audio and video files. There are two versions. The downloadable version calls its multimedia files from the internet, the CD-ROM version is self contained. Both require version 9 of the free Adobe Reader in order to access the multimedia content (and convenient drop-down navigation). Those Mac users who, like me, prefer Preview as a PDF reader will need to use the Adobe reader if you want to access the video and audio.

There is a Sample Download PDF available (toward the bottom of this page) that gives you a preview of 24 pages from the the book (”pages” in this case actually refer to horizontal screen-wide spreads). There is also a Support Forum on the Woodblock.com site, in which readers can compare notes, ask questions and generally discuss the process of traditional Japanese printmaking.

In addition to Your First Print, there is a Catalogue of other items, with gems like classic texts by great Japanese printmakers, including Japanese Wood-Block Printing by Hiroshi Yodhida, one of my favorite printmakers.

For more on David Bull’s own work, you can view a number of his print series on the site, including his Hanga Treasure Chest small print series and the 12 prints for My Solitdes. The latter has a fascinating companion page, in which you can view interactives that allow you to click through the stages of printing impressions for the individual pieces. It is in pieces like these that I enjoy Bull’s work most, where European and Japanese visual traditions meet and blend, as in the image at left, The Seacoast in Autumn (original here).

For more on traditional Japanese woodblock prints, see some of my previous posts on Hiroshi Yoshida, Kawase Hasui, Katsushika Hokusai, Ito Shinsui, Utagawa: Masters of the Japanese Print 1770-1900 at the Brooklyn Museum and Exquisite Visions of Japan.

Since then, more resources have become available on the web, and I’ve listed some of them below. Though no new books have become available there is a wonderful new portfolio of some of his best graphic work.

Auad Publishing, a small imprint that specializes in beautifully produced books of the work of classic illustrators and comics artists (see my post on Franklin Booth), has created a faithful reproduction of a 1935 portfolio of lithographs, Frank Brangwyn, R. A.: The Way of the Cross.

This is a lovingly produced set of 20 plates, printed in letterpress (rare these days except for high end art reproductions) on 11″x14″ 80lb textured stock, in a deluxe fourfold portfolio.

The beautiful production values are quickly overshadowed by the power of Brangwyn’s drawings; powerful both in the sense of the emotional drama of their depiction of the Stations of the Cross, an in Brangwyn’s masterful drawing style and striking compositions.

In his work as an illustrator, Brangwyn acquired a great sense of design, and his classical training gave him the solid, finely honed draftsmanship that is the foundation of his influential style, but it is his own emotional investment in the subject, and his remarkable mastery of chiaroscuro, that bring the drawings to life.

The portfolio has an essay by Dr. Libby Horner, who is probably the world’s foremost authority on Brangwyn and his work. Dr. Horner created the frankbrangwyn.org web site (which is not heavy on images, but has lots of useful information about the artist, including a list of books he illustrated and links to other Brangwyn resources).

In Brangwyn’s drawings you can see the influence of Rembrandt and other great printmakers, and the drama of his own style that so heavily influenced the great illustrator Dean Cornwell (also here) and many others.

There is a small preview of the Way of the Cross portfolio on the Auad Publishing site, from which I’ve borrowed the images above (click on the image in the page for a pop-up gallery).

The small images here and on the Auad website don’t do the portfolio justice, but those who are already aware of Brangwyn’s accomplishments will want to be aware that the portfolio is limited to 700 numbered copies.

Stöer seems to be obscure except for a published folio of 11 woodcuts titled Geometria et Perspectiva, of which the image above is an example. But an unpublished portfolio of color drawings discovered at the Munich Library has in recent years been attributed to him.

Peacay has provided not only examples from both on the BibliOdyssey page, but a Flickr set which features the images in high resolution.

There is also a reproduction of the folio here, but peacay’s sets are much better quality. You may want to supplement your enjoyment of the woodcuts with some background about polyhedra here and here (for some reason, I just love this stuff).

Stöer’s fascination with geometric solids was apparently the inspiration for other artists, like the creator of the intricate marquetery on this Collector’s Cabinet from the same time.

I would also have to assume that his polyhedral fantasias, oddly arranged architectural facades and stacked stairways were a direct influence on the fantastic geometry and math inspired works of M.C. Escher.

A case in point is Winslow Homer, widely regarded to be one of the most prominent American artists and renowned as a master of watercolor, whose career as an illustrator is largely glossed over.

Homer worked for over two decades as an illustrator and visual journalist, reporting from the front lines of the Civil War and portraying more bucolic domestic scenes for popular periodicals like Harper’s Weekly.

His powerful and sensitive drawings, full of sunlight and shadow, emotion and atmosphere, were captured for print in astonishingly intricate wood engravings made by professional wood engravers (who are unsung artistic marvels to my mind), who reproduced the artist’s drawings with a beautiful range of tones made from delicate linework.

Wood engraving is a process that takes the age-old concept of woodcuts a step further, using harder wood and cutting into the end grain instead of the normal block surface. That and the use of tools initially developed for metal engraving, notably the burin, made for a super-fine line that gave an almost photographic appearance.

Homer’s wood-engraved illustrations are the focus of Winslow Homer: Illustrating America, an exhibition organized by the Brooklyn Museum (and taken largely from their collection) and currently showing at the Jersey City Museum in New Jersey.

The exhibition runs until December 23, 2009, and is accompanied by a complimentary exhibit called Hudson Views: A Celebration of the River that features wood engraved illustrations by other artists from similar periodicals.

There isn’t an online gallery for the exhibition, but you can view many of the illustrations in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection.

As these illustrations were mass produced, many are available from dealers in prints and etchings. I’ve listed a few other resources below.

There are actually several versions of The Scream, including both paintings and prints, more than one of which have been the target of high-profile art thefts (later recovered).

The theme of suffering and mental anguish carried through much of Munch’s work, however.

His formative years were marked by a father who was fanatically religious and obsessed with sorrow and death. His Mother and beloved elder sister died of consumption, now known as tuberculosis, when Munch was five and fourteen, respectively; and one of his younger sisters developed a mental illness at an early age.

Munch himself was a sickly child, often in bed for long periods where he would draw to keep himself amused. In addition to religious subjects, his father schooled Munch and his remaining children in literature, including frequent readings of ghost stories and the work of Edgar Allen Poe.

Munch’s later life was torn by dramatically unhappy love affairs, alcoholism, associates with morbid philosophical influences and restless traveling.

The expressions of anxiety, unhappiness, fear and grief resonated with those who viewed his art, and he became a widely sought out and influential artist, beyond his native Norway and particularly in Germany, where he lived and worked for many years.

He was one of the founders of the Expressionist school, in which color, line and the delineation of recognizable objects are distorted at will for emotional effect; often, as in Munch’s case, centering on anxiety, fear, despair and spiritual angst. As in many expressionist works, the dark emotional tone is often belied by a palette of intense colors.

Not all of his works are as negatively charged or emotionally dark as his signature pieces, many are more straightforward and representational, and in his early years, even impressionistic.

There is a series of galleries on edvard-munch.com that gives a good overview, arranged by subject. edvardmunch.info has a list (no thumbnails, but links to images) arranged roughly chronologically.

In addition to his work as a painter, Munch was a printmaker and created etchings, wood engravings and lithographs. There is an exhibition of 40 prints that will be at the National Gallery of Scotland from 19 September to 6 December, 2009. The exhibit is from from the Munch Museum in Oslo, which is dedicated to his prints.

In his paintings, Munch was concerned with the effects of color, and the way one’s perception of a scene could change with time of day or emotional state; saying: “The fact is that at different times you see with different eyes. You see differently in the morning from in the evening. The way in which one sees also depends on one’s mood…”