US $25 The Global Journal of Prints and Ideas May – June 2017 Volume 7, Number 1 On Collecting (Part One) • Prints and Posters in the Fin de Siècle • An Artist Collects • eBay as Archive Norman Ackroyd • Collecting for the Common Good • Hercules Segers • Prix de Print • Directory 2017 • News Art_in_Print_8.25x10.75_ExpoChicago 4/24/17 12:55 PM Page 1 13–17 SEPTEMBER 2017 CHICAGO | NAVY PIER Presenting Sponsor Opening EXPO ART WEEK by Lincoln Schatz Lincoln by Series Lake (Lake Michigan) (Lake Off-site Exhibition 16 Sept – 7 Jan 2018 12 Sept – 29 Oct 2017 expochicago.com May – June 2017 In This Issue Volume 7, Number 1 Editor-in-Chief Susan Tallman 2 Susan Tallman On Collecting (Part One) Associate Publisher Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho 3 Julie Bernatz Interviewed by Catherine Bindman Small Apartments and Big Dreams: Managing Editor Print Collecting in the Fin de Siècle Isabella Kendrick Jillian Kruse 7 Associate Editor Postermania: Advertising, Domesticated Julie Warchol Brian D. Cohen 11 An Artist Collects Manuscript Editor Prudence Crowther Jennifer S. Pride 14 Secrets of the Real Thing: Building a Editor-at-Large Collection as a Graduate Student Catherine Bindman Kay Wilson and Lesley Wright 18 Design Director Speak with Sarah Kirk Hanley Skip Langer To Serve the Common Good: The Grinnell College Art Collection Roslyn Bakst Goldman and 24 John L. Goldman A Socially Acceptable Form of Addiction Kit Smyth Basquin 26 Collecting a Life Patricia Emison 28 Norman Ackroyd’s Collectors Stephen Snoddy Speaks 32 with Harry Laughland Collecting in the Midlands: the New Art Gallery Walsall Prix de Print, No. 23 36 Juried by Paul Coldwell Recent Antiquities by Cooper Holoweski Exhibition Reviews Robert Fucci 38 Hercules Segers Jason Urban 41 Gfeller + Hellsgård in Austin On the Cover: Fernand Louis Gottlob, detail of Peintres Lithographes (1899), color litho- International Directory 2017 43 graph, Musée Carnavalet, Paris. News of the Print World 50 This Page: Hercules Segers, detail of The Contributors 64 Mossy Tree (ca. 1615–1630). Rijksmuseum, loan from the city of Amsterdam. Art in Print This issue was funded in part with 3500 N. Lake Shore Drive support from the IFPDA Foundation Suite 10A and the Malka Fund. Chicago, IL 60657-1927 www.artinprint.org [email protected] 1.844.ARTINPR (1.844.278.4677) No part of this periodical may be published without the written consent of the publisher. On Collecting (Part One) By Susan Tallman socially acceptable form of addic- scene of the 1960s, through the careful “ A tion” is how print collectors Roslyn construction of a definitive body of Ger- and John Goldman describe the repeated man Expressionist prints, to a renewed consideration, evaluation and acquisition emphasis on contemporary art. Per- of works of art. The phrase neatly cap- haps most unusual is Jennifer S. Pride’s tures the activity’s pleasures and ten- account of using eBay to acquire the sub- sions, as well as a broader ambivalence ject matter of her doctoral dissertation about the role of the collector in contem- on 19th-century pictorial commentary porary culture. Collecting is an activity on Baron Hausmann’s transformation of both celebrated and maligned—seen as Paris. emblematic of thoughtful depth and By luck, the winner of this issue’s Prix assiduous care of culture, but also as evi- de Print, selected by Paul Coldwell, is a dence of unseemly materialist obsessions collection in itself—Cooper Holoweski’s and highbrow one-upsmanship. The psy- Recent Antiquities (2016) adapts eight choanalyst Werner Muensterberger (who, plates from Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s like Freud, was a passionate collector 18th-century Antiquities of Rome (also a himself) made the case for collecting as Norbert Goeneutte, Henri Guérard consulting a kind of collection) and recasts them with pathology, a futile attempt to compensate portfolio with prints (1876), etching in black on more recent abandoned artifacts, from for traumas of early childhood.1 In Finn laid paper, 29.3 x 19.5 cm. Van Gogh Museum, shattered CDs to shuttered Circuit Cities. Amsterdam. Family Moomintroll, Tove Janssen took a Neither of the exhibitions covered in more sympathetic view: when the Hemu- current groundbreaking exhibition, this issue—a Texas screenprint installa- len expresses dismay at having completed “Prints in Paris: From Elite to the Street,” tion by the Berlin duo Resurgo (reviewed his stamp collection, Moomintroll under- while Jillian Kruse concentrates specifi- by Jason Urban) and the majestic Hercules stands: “You aren’t a collector anymore, cally on the transformation of the poster Segers show at the Rijksmuseum and the you’re only an owner, and that isn’t nearly from ephemeral advertisement to prized Metropolitan Museum of Art (reviewed so much fun.”2 collectible. by Robert Fucci)—are overtly about the No art form lends itself as enthusi- Sarah Kirk Hanley’s interview with impulse to collect, yet both have things astically to collecting as does the print. Kay Wilson and Lesley Wright about to say about the human urge to preserve, It combines numismatic profusion with Grinnell College’s art collection, and our persistent habit of using objects as a cultural complexity, a relatively low price Harry Laughland’s conversation with bank against the flood of time. point and frequent beauty. Its multipli- British curator Stephen Snoddy, address “Every passion borders on the chaotic,” city creates communities (“Oh, you also the responsibilities of collecting on Walter Benjamin wrote, “but the collec- own a …”) and reflects shared events behalf of the public, and the specific tor’s passion borders on the chaos of mem- and values, even while the singularity roles that prints can play in providing ories.”3 Each item in a collection is of individual impressions rewards con- historical context and aesthetic breadth. wrapped in personal recollections and also noisseurship and differentiation. Prints Patricia Emison links public and private, tied to the other things on the shelf, on the may be democratic in their distribution, surveying the community of those who wall, in the drawers. Think of it like epi- but unlike monumental sculpture, they own work by one particular artist—the genetics—a changeable code written over ask for an intimacy of acquaintance that British etcher Norman Ackroyd. a permanent one, with an accumulation of aligns with ownership. Several writers offer personal histo- knock-on effects. Writing in 1931, Benja- When Art in Print sent out a call for ries of their own collections, which took min suspected that serious, personal col- essays on print collecting—private or shape from a variety of motivations and lecting was becoming a thing of the past. public, current or historical, personal or resulted in very different outcomes. Kit About this, he was very wrong. encyclopedic—the response was so boun- Basquin examines how specific acquisi- tiful and wide-ranging, we are devoting tions correspond to specific chapters in Susan Tallman is the Editor-in-Chief of two issues to the theme. In July we will her life, marking each through shifts in Art in Print. focus on collecting in North America, style, subject matter and artists. Brian while this issue concentrates largely Cohen writes about collecting from the Notes: (though not exclusively) on European art. vantage point of an artist who admires, 1. Werner Muensterberger, Collecting: An Unruly What Camille Pissarro described as analyzes and also cribs: “This is what Passion: Psychological Perspectives (Princeton: the print collecting “mania” that took we do: we share, we speak to each other Princeton University Press, 1994). hold in the fin de siècle is the subject of across time and place. We appreciate each 2. Tove Janssen, Finn Family Moomintroll (New two articles here: Catherine Bindman other and we desire the best of what each York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1958), 28. 3. Walter Benjamin, “On Unpacking My Library,” interviews curator Fleur Roos Rosa de other has done.” The Goldmans chart Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Carvalho about the Van Gogh Museum’s their voyage from the burgeoning print Schocken Books, 1969), 60. 2 Art in Print May – June 2017 Small Apartments and Big Dreams: Print Collecting in the Fin de Siècle Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho interviewed by Catherine Bindman he Van Gogh Museum in Amster- Tdam, which opened in 1973, has been collecting French fin-de-siècle prints since 2000, when it purchased around 800 prints and artists’ books from Richard Feldhaus, a German pri- vate collector. The print department now holds some 1,800 works from this period. In 2012 the museum’s current curator of prints and drawings, Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho, organized the exhibition “Beauty in Abundance: Highlights of the Print Collection” (with an associ- ated publication, Printmaking in Paris: The Rage for Prints at the Fin de Siècle; see Art in Print May–June 2014). She has now curated the museum’s ambitious show “Prints in Paris 1900: From Elite to the Street,” which spills over two floors of the museum’s exhibition wing; the lower floor is dedicated to the realm of the pri- vate collector and incorporates four rec- reated domestic interiors in which prints would have been viewed, and the upper floor focuses on the role of the print in Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, The Street, poster for the printer Charles Verneau (1896), color lithograph the street life of modern Paris. The exhi- on wove paper, image 234.5 x 296 cm, sheet 242 x 299 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, purchased bition is on view until 11 June 2017 and is with support from the BankGiro Loterij. accompanied by an expansive 192-page catalogue. in the museum. A few other prints came FRRdC When I started working as asso- to us in various ways.