Prints and Printmaking: Past, Present, and Future (2)
3 December 2022 at 2:00:00 am
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Session Convenors
Dr Louise Voll Box, University of Melbourne
Kerrianne Stone, University of Melbourne
Session Speakers
Dr Louise Voll Box, University of Melbourne
Kerrianne Stone, University of Melbourne
Emeritus Professor Richard Read, University of Western Australia
Eliza Coyle, University of Melbourne
Lisa Sullivan, Geelong Gallery
The creation of images through a transfer process — woodcuts, etchings, engravings, screenprints, lithographs etc — has been central to art practice and scholarship over time. Study of the history of printmaking encompasses technical and aesthetic innovation, commercial imperatives, collaborative art making, patronage, and collecting. Prints exemplify the power of images to inspire, influence, and shape ideas.
The two sessions for this panel bring together scholars, curators, and a printmaker who explore the multi-faceted world of prints — historical and contemporary — and demonstrate prints’ important role in art making, exhibition development, and art historical scholarship in Australia and abroad. Prints and printmaking continue to challenge, illuminate, and delight.
This panel celebrates the demonstration of philanthropy by historian, curator, and collector, Dr Colin Holden (1951-2016), whose legacy supports scholarship, publishing, and exhibitions connected with prints and printmaking through the Colin Holden Charitable Trust. Dr Holden’s significant and wide-ranging print collection, now housed at Geelong Gallery, includes important French portrait prints (1640-1770); prints after Rubens and Van Dyck; depictions of cities and architecture; social realist prints (1940s-1960s); and prints by post-WWII émigrés and contemporary Australian printmakers that reinterpret European historical themes or consider social justice issues.
This panel is sponsored by Geelong Gallery in partnership with the Colin Holden Charitable Trust.
Rebellious Intermediation in Anatol Kovarsky’s New Yorker cartoon of Whistler’s Mother, 1957
Emeritus Professor Richard Read, University of Western Australia
Son of an assimilated, urbanized, well-educated Jewish family in St Petersburg, the cartoonist Anatol Kavorsky grew up immersed in European visual culture before publishing cartoons and covers in the New Yorker from 1947. This lecture explores the surprising complexities of a single cartoon that imagines the scene in which Whistler got the idea for his famous painting of ‘Arrangement in grey and black No. 1 (Portrait of the Artist’s Mother) (1871), of which formalist exercise the artist famously remarked: ‘what can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?’ Looking through a window at a deluge of rain with a canvas primed for outdoor painting reversed against the wall beside him, he stands with his back to the viewer pondering his mother’s infantilising observation as she blandly sits in that famous posture: ‘Surely, Son, you can find something to paint indoors.’ Exploiting age-old tensions between exteriors and interiors, versos and rectos, creativity and negation, high art painting and popular printmaking, the cartoon explores the matrilineal origins of the masculine creativity of a rebellious son for whom maturity consists in doing (not exactly) what his mother told him to do in the first place.
Demonstrating Sex: The graphic prints of Jeanne Mammen and the fight for LGBQTI+ rights in 1920s Berlin
Eliza Coyle, University of Melbourne
Jeanne Mammen was a well-known illustrator in the tumultuous period of the Weimar Republic. Her sought-after prints featured on the covers of the most popular magazines and journals of her time. However, due to her role predominantly as a commercial illustrator, she remains an underrepresented figure in the history of German modernism. This paper contests her peripheral status and demonstrates that her prints functioned as an important political demonstration in the revolution of sexual mores that occurred in the 1920s, predominantly through the publications of the institute of sexual science. By examining the serialised reproduction of her prints in the popular press and sexological publications, this paper reveals how print processes furthered political demonstrations at a crucial time in German history as part of the first movement for LGBQTI+ rights.
Manuscripts: The Book Nook Miscellany
Lisa Sullivan, Geelong Gallery
This paper will explore the literary and arts magazine Manuscripts: The Book Nook Miscellany (later, Manuscripts: A Miscellany of Art and Letters), first published in Geelong in the early 1930s by Harry Tatlock Miller (1913–1989). Through his bookshop The Book Nook and editions of Manuscripts, Miller promoted the work of many early 20th century printmakers. Printed images by Edith Alsop, Dorrit Black, Margaret Preston, Ethel Spowers, Eveline Syme, Eric Thake, Christian Waller, and Marjorie Wood, amongst others, were reproduced alongside articles on art and literature, and poetry.
Thirteen editions of Manuscripts were published between November 1931 and May 1935: the complete set was collected by Dr Colin Holden and is now housed at Geelong Gallery.
This paper will consider Miller’s support of Australian printmakers through their promotion in Manuscripts, and his extraordinary life and career. Born and educated in Geelong (graduating from Geelong Grammar School), Miller lived at the bohemian boarding-house ‘Merioola’ in Sydney’s Edgecliff in the 1940s and then spent over three decades in London, where he held key roles at the Redfern Gallery and continued his advocacy of Australian art.
Biographies
Dr Louise Voll Box, University of Melbourne
Dr Louise Voll Box is a Teaching Associate (Art History and Curatorship) at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests include eighteenth-century visual arts; print collecting and display; the English country house; and connections between business and the arts. In 2018, she was the Harold Wright and Sarah and William Holmes Scholar at the Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, and has been awarded a Paul Mellon Research Support Grant and a Francis Haskell Memorial Fund Scholarship to study prints and archives overseas. She is a Trustee of the Colin Holden Charitable Trust which supports print-related scholarship, exhibitions, and publications.
Kerrianne Stone, University of Melbourne
Kerrianne Stone is the Curator, Prints at Archives and Special Collections for the University of Melbourne. She graduated from the University of Melbourne and has worked with several collections across museums and galleries in Melbourne. Her 2014 exhibition and associated publication, Radicals, slayers and villains, toured Regional Victoria. She was awarded the Harold Wright Scholarship and Sarah & William Holmes Scholarship in 2014 to study prints at the British Museum and in 2019 organised Horizon Lines, an exhibition and book marking the 50th anniversary of these awards.
Emeritus Professor Richard Read, University of Western Australia
Richard Read is Emeritus Professor and Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia, Perth. He wrote the first book on British art critic Adrian Stokes, and has published on the relationship between literature and the visual arts, nineteenth and twentieth-century art and critical theory, and complex images in global contexts. Recent books are Colonization, Wilderness and Spaces Between (Yale E Portal, 2021) and Sensory Perception, History and Geology: the Afterlife of Molyneux’s Question (Cambridge University Press, 2022). This paper continues his book project on Intra-Extra-Recto-Verso: The Reversed Painting and its History.
Eliza Coyle, University of Melbourne
Eliza Coyle holds a Bachelor of Art Theory (2012), a Master of Art Curatorship (2018) and is a current PhD student in the department of Art History and German Studies at the University of Melbourne. The project she is undertaking explores the contributions of underrepresented women artists in German modernism and their intersections with sexual science. She also works as an independent curator, interviewer, and Community Programs Officer at Yarra Libraries, where she strives to develop innovative programs that challenge how we see each other and the world we live in.
Lisa Sullivan, Geelong Gallery
Lisa Sullivan is Senior Curator at Geelong Gallery where she leads the delivery of the annual exhibition program and contributes to the development, research and interpretation of the collection which has a strong focus on Australian and international printmaking. She was the Collections Curator at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne (2001–05), and the Grimwade Intern (2000). Lisa completed post-graduate studies in Art Curatorship and Museum Management at the University of Melbourne in 1998 and was awarded the Harold Wright Scholarship and the Sarah and William Holmes Scholarship in 2002.