Smart Museum of Art University of Chicago

Exhibitions

• Current Exhibitions
• Upcoming Exhibitions
• Archived Exhibitions

Collection Galleries

• Modern Art & Design
• Asian Art
• European Art
• Contemporary Art
• Sculpture Garden & Reception Hall

Paper Museums: The Reproductive Print in Europe, 1500-1800

February 3 – May 15, 2005

As relatively inexpensive, transportable, and storable objects, prints had an important place in the culture of Renaissance and Baroque Europe. Well before the era of photography and digital images, a variety of print techniques revolutionized the ways in which images could be reproduced and circulated. Reproductive prints—prints that reproduce other works of art—allowed a much broader public to become familiar with paintings, sculptures, and other works that had previously been available only to wealthy travelers or collectors. This exhibition looked at the impact of this expanding visual culture in helping printmakers earn reputations for truthfulness, promoting certain artists and collectors, and increasing familiarity with original works of art. Including prints by or after Dürer, Claude Lorrain, Raphael, Watteau, and J.M.W. Turner, among many other artists, the exhibition also highlighted recent Smart acquisitions, such as an engraving of Michelangelo's Last Judgment and two versions of Rubens' Supper at Emmaus. Far from being "merely" reproductive, these prints are themselves objects of exquisite beauty.

Curators: Rebecca Zorach, University of Chicago Assistant Professor of Art History, and Elizabeth Rodini, Johns Hopkins University Lecturer in the History of Art and former Smart Museum Mellon Projects Curator. The Smart Museum installation was overseen by Anne Leonard, Smart Museum Mellon Projects Curator.

Tour Dates: Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, September 13 – December 3, 2005.

Exhibition Catalogue is available from the Smart Museum Shop.

This exhibition and related programs were generously supported in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Rhoades Foundation, and the Adelyn Russell Bogert Endowment Fund of the Franke Institute for the Humanities, University of Chicago.

Presented in the Richard and Mary L. Gray Special Exhibition Gallery.

Above: Willem Swanenburgh, Supper at Emmaus (after Peter Paul Rubens), 1611, Engraving on cream laid paper. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Purchase, Paul and Miriam Fund for Acquisitions, 2003.84.