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Impassioned Images: German Expressionist Prints

2008 Ford Scholars Project Description

Description of the Project:

Organized by the Syracuse University Art Collection, Impassioned Images: German Expressionist Prints presents fifty woodcuts, lithographs, and etchings by many of the seminal German artists of the early twentieth century. The exhibition takes place at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center from August 22-October 26, 2008. Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, George Grosz, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, and Käthe Kollwitz are among the artists represented in this traveling exhibition. These painters and printmakers experimented with the expressive potential of their print mediums and often emphasized emotional lyricism as well as the real-life turmoil of a period quickly transformed by industrialism and world war. By rendering brittle lines into copper, gouging bold shapes into wood, or drawing quick marks onto plate or stone, they responded in their styles and subjects to a new, fast-paced, and increasingly materialistic age. The Blaue Reiter, Die Brücke, and Neue Sachlichkeit are all represented by a range of vital works.

German Expressionists engaged with the changing social and political worlds surrounding them, but they also looked back to earlier periods and non-European cultures where the life of the soul appeared to have more importance in day-to-day events. They were aware, for instance, of the lauded traditions in German Renaissance printmaking, particularly the highly influential, virtuosic woodcuts and engravings of Albrecht Dürer early in the sixteenth century. These artists also looked to earlier, medieval woodcut traditions, and they also admired recent European prints, including woodcuts by Munch and Gauguin. Many also sought out Japanese woodblock prints with their flat shapes, saturated colors, and decorative patterns. Indeed, the print during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries became a major part of the working life of these artists in the exhibition. All in all, they advanced their ideas and artistic vision and found wider audiences through using this original art form created in multiples.

Anticipated Summer Activities:

The student would assist the curator in the organization of Vassar’s showing of this exhibition on loan from Syracuse University. Assistance would center around the design of the installation in the Prints and Drawings Galleries at the Art Center and the writing of didactic wall labels to accompany each work.

Early on the curator would assign readings on German Expressionist prints and then view and discuss key German Expressionist prints from the collection with the student. The student would also study prints by artists who inspired the German Expressionists, including Dürer, Munch, and Japanese woodblock printmakers.

The student would then be hands-on involved in working with images of the prints in the exhibition and reducing and replicating those images for use in a model of the exhibition space. The curator would explain strategies for designing the installation to the student, and the student would follow through with a preliminary design. Mentoring the student through this process would provide invaluable experience in learning key points about installation design.

Finally, the student would write didactic wall labels for the prints in the exhibition. An art as well as a craft, label-writing concisely explores the “who, what, where, when, why, and how” of a work of art. Under the close supervision of the curator, the student would strive for pithy words and sentences that immediately engage a viewer. Thinking and writing in this way can have a rewarding impact on the way one writes in general.    
    
Preferred Student Qualifications/Skills:

The position would be ideal for a student who is very interested in learning about being a curator in an art museum. Some knowledge of printmaking and of early twentieth-century European art is preferred. Brief writing samples are required during the interview process. Knowing German would be useful but is not required.

Anticipated  Follow-up Teaching/Professional Activity for the Student:

Since the exhibition would actually take place during Fall Semester 2008, the student would be able to see her/his work come to fruition by seeing the exhibition and touring it with the curator.