On a visit to the British Museum you should not forget to go up to the graphic art rooms. It is good to see the Parthenon frieze again, but it has a habit of always being the same. The prints and drawing galleries have a showcase through which the museum’s inexhaustible paper collections parade, in temporary exhibitions, an inexhaustible image of the world and human inventiveness, and where they have the healthy habit of displaying the latest acquisitions. Many of these purchases correspond to contemporary graphics. Over time, and with exquisite criteria, the London institution has built up an admirable collection.
On my last visit I came across, for example, some recent engravings by Kara Walker. Their anachronistic aesthetic makes them a plastic equivalent to that Toni Morrison novel, “Beloved,” which was said to be the greatest nineteenth-century novel ever written about African American women. Some of these works by Kara Walker are now in Zaragoza, at the CaixaForum, as part of a priceless exhibition that takes advantage of those collections from the British Museum.
The North American graphic not only speaks of terms of spectacularity or exquisiteness, it also allowed the production of economic works susceptible to a wider distribution, which were associated with rebellious and, especially, feminist messages.
North American graphics are explored here from the second half of the 20th century to the present day. It should come as no surprise that we can trace this story from the UK. British public collections have been dealing with the art of their former colony for years. Mark Rothko’s Best Llo, for example, is at the Tate Modern.
The differential and admirable thing about North American art has been its ambition and its lack of prejudice, everything seems to be possible, no matter the size, and any type of complex is left aside, let’s say it is an art without fear of ridicule. This is also the case with your graph. The collaboration of artists with workshops and publishers is part of the European tradition, essentially Parisian, but it learned to achieve the unprecedented, both in the purely physical, due to its dimensions, as well as in procedural and conceptual terms.
–
–
The perfect example is provided by two record size lithographs by Robert Rauschenberg (2.2 meters tall), produced at the Gemini workshop in Los Angeles. In this exhibition we have one of them. It is still significant that this artistic feat illustrates a technological feat. These giant prints are part of the project ‘Stoned Moon’ (Moon in stone) and have to do with an invitation to the artist to take off from Apollo XI, which would take man to the Moon in 1969. “Clouds and fire bloomed in the nest of a bird ”, Rauschenberg noted in his notebook, gaping at the rise of the Saturn rocket, and finding it equivalent in the format of his lithograph.
The flowering of American workshops parallels that of Pop Art. With it, the ancillary relationship between engraving and painting is reversed. As Susan Tallman puts it: “Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol were not concerned that print might repeat painting, but rather that paint and canvas might repeat print.” The earliest and most significant examples of pop graphics can be found at the CaixaForum: Lichtenstein, Warhol, Wesselmann, Rosequist, Mel Ramos … We can also check the similarities in the motifs and the discrepancies in the strategies between these artists and characters such as Rauschenberg, Jim Dine or Jasper Johns. And we will admire the ineffable Ed Ruscha, very well represented, whose works are difficult to choose from, opting, perhaps, for that iconic ‘Made in California’, a label written with liquid words.
Susan Tallman: “Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol were not concerned that print could repeat painting, but rather that paint and canvas could repeat print”
Other movements with Minimalism or Conceptual Art found a propitious medium in printing. They gave a twist to the use of traditional techniques such as etching or woodcut, which will fit perfectly with their desire to delegate production to procedure, calling into question direct authorship. Here we will see excellent works by Sol LeWitt and a set of woodcuts by Donald Judd, an example of what are called ‘multipart’ works, sets of non-individualizable prints.
As I pointed out at the beginning, North American graphics not only speak in terms of spectacularity or exquisiteness, it also allowed the production of economic works susceptible to a wider distribution, which were associated with rebellious and, especially, feminist messages. Pioneers of the sixties or seventies, such as May Stevens or Nancy Spero, creators of iconic images, were succeeded in times of postmodern logic by artists like Jenny Holzer, for whom written language is her main tool, and who found in the graphic media a perfect vehicle.
Regardless of its arguments, the exhibition is simply spectacular, and it will be worth the time. Difficult to raise a selection. It only remains to ask attention to some wonders that should not be forgotten, such as the xylographic night sky of Vija Velmins or the graphic experiments that manifest a moving humanity in the (supposedly) hyper-realistic Chuck Close.
THE TOKEN
‘The American dream. From pop to today ‘. CaixaForum Zaragoza. Until November 14.
– .
