Printmaking in Paris: The Rage for Prints at the Fin de Siècle Hardcover – September 24, 2013

This delightful book was issued to accompany the exhibition "Beauty in abundance: Highlights from the print collection of the Van Gogh Museum" at the VGM in Amsterdam from February to September, 2012. The VGM may sound like an unlikely place to have a large collection of prints--despite Van Gogh's own work and his delight in the magazine illustrations and Japanese wood block prints that he assiduously collected--but it turns out that this is an area of collecting and research that the museum has been pursuing for some time. In 2000 the VGM received a sizeable collection of fine prints from a private donor, and that focussed the Museum's core collecting area with regard to works on paper on French prints from 1890 to 1905. That core has been augmented by many other works, trial proofs and designs by all the major artists working in the area, so that the Museum is now able to trace developments in printmaking from Van Gogh's predecessors to him and his contemporaries and beyond, to artists whom they in turn inspired. This volume is the first published result of that effort and presents a representative selection of the more than 1300 prints the Museum now owns.To speak of a "rage for prints" at the end of the century is probably not an exaggeration; it is, in fact, how Pissarro described it in a letter to his son in 1897. We are familiar with the occasional forays into printmaking undertaken by the Impressionists and their followers: Manet, Pissarro, Degas, Gauguin, Cassatt, etc. all tried their hand at various print media at some time, but they are rightly known primarily for their paintings. It is only after the death of Van Gogh in 1890 that artists come to the fore in Paris who are known mostly for their prints and posters. And it is so precipitate and pervasive a craze that it gets its own cultural diagnosis of "affichomanie," akin to the "tulipomania" of the Dutch Golden Age: suddenly everyone needs to have the latest poster of Cheret, Ibels or Toulouse-Lautrec. All of this is very clearly laid out in the introductory essay by Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho, the Museum's Curator of Prints and Drawings, who has contributed three of the four scholarly essays that accompany the reproductions. She traces the origins of this explosion of interest and productivity to technological innovations like color lithography, the increasing interest since mid-century in Japanese prints, the activity of publishers and dealers and, generally, the decreasing importance of the basically reproductive function of printmaking (largely taken over by the new medium of photography) that allowed it to blossom into an autonomous art form on its own terms. Her second essay examines the extraordinary revival of the print suite, pioneered four centuries previously by Abrecht Dürer and revitalized for the Paris World Fair in 1889 by Gauguin's "Volpini Suite" and Emile Bernard's "Bretonneries" series, both of which are reproduced here along with samples from suites by Vuillard, Bonnard, Roussel and other Nabis. Her third essay treats the numerous applications of the graphic arts at the time, in advertising posters, birth announcements, illustrated dinner menus, theater programs, sheet music and the like. The fourth essay, by Marije Vellekoop, another of the VGM's curators, takes us into a printmaking workshop, explains many of the procedures used in the production of graphic art, and has explanations and illustrations of the techniques of etching, engraving, woodcut, drypoint, aquatint, etc. These essays are all clearly written and very informative and are well illustrated by reproductions from the collection. And it is of course the reproductions that really make the book. There are thirty-eight entries focussing on specific works, such as Steinlen's well known "Le Chat Noir" and Bonnard's poster for "La revue blanche"; these are backed up by other illustrations, all totaling 164 and all in excellent color, some double-page detail studies as chapter dividers. The volume concludes with some selected bibliography and an index of names.That being said, I must also say that I find the choice of cover image unfortunate and indicative of very poor judgment on the part of the book's designers. We must not forget that the period covered here, 1890-1905, coincides almost exactly with the terribly turbulent years of the Dreyfus Affair, which exposed the toxic undercurrent of anti-Semitism endemic to French society of the time and put its ugly, poisonous stamp on all political and cultural debate. Why then, of all the images from the collection that one could have used, should one have chosen the only overtly anti-Semitic one to put on the cover? The reproduction is that of the 1892 advertising poster by Toulouse-Lautrec (aka _Count_ Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec-Montfa--his origins in the archconservative Catholic aristocracy are not irrelevant in this context) for the novel "Reine de Joie," a Paris low-life potboiler of erotic intrigue by the now mercifully forgotten Victor Joze, in which Alice Lamy, a beautiful Parisian courtesan and the title's "queen of pleasure," and the wealthy Jewish banker "Baron de Rozenfeld" form a "romantic" liason for the usual purposes. So blatant was the caricature that the Jewish banker Baron Alphonse de Rothschild (an outstanding philanthropist and patron of the arts) attempted to block distribution of the book and poster. Anyone even slightly acquainted with the characteristic physiognomic stereotype of the Jew at this time can immediately recognize the slanderous intent of the figure Lautrec has designed, which is, in fact, in complete contrast to the wholly inoffensive cover design by Pierre Bonnard (not reproduced here). Why anyone would choose to put precisely Lautrec's disparaging image on the front of this catalogue is a mystery to me. Fortunately, this is an excellent example of when not to judge a book by its cover. Although it is intended only to highlight the Museum's collection, the selection of reproductions and the texts are comprehensive enough to serve as a general introduction to the heyday of Parisian printmaking. The illustrations are beautiful and the essays illuminating, and it is good to have them in this volume, especially since the prints themselves are too light-sensitive to be kept on permanent display. Highly recommended despite the cover.

I first saw this book in Amsterdam at the Van Gogh Museum. I really wanted it but didn't want to have to lug it around Europe with me. I'm so happy Amazon got it in stock.

I have a huge library of books on most aspects of printmaking, but none like this. It is an in-depth study of works held in the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam by artists other than van Gogh himself – and not only examples of final editions but of intermediate stages in prints' development. As the title announces, its coverage is limited to the end of the nineteenth century and is consequently a most thorough exploration of that period in Paris, managing also to combine both art-historical and social perspectives. This is a book in which original print-making (both artistically and technically) is depicted against a well-evoked sense of time and place.