GRAPHIC REVOLUTION

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GRAPHIC REVOLUTION

AMERICAN PRINTS 1960 TO NOW

SAINT LOUIS ART MUSEUM

The story of “modern American print” is about the permutations of a dizzying array of artistic and cultural movements: advertising, POP, abstraction, civil rights, appropriation, war and more — a lot more. Take all of that and add to it the science of print, and you start to grasp the task of putting together a narrative exhibit. Graphic Revolution: American Prints 1960 to Now, at the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM) did exactly that. It told the story of print while captivating art lovers like me with a definition-expanding group of artworks representing the "graphic boom" and the evolution of the discipline. The roster of artists chosen for this exhibition is diverse, revealing ways that printmaking continues to produce new methods and materials, and demonstrating how the print artform responds to a dynamic culture.

Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup II, (image courtesy of the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Andy Warhol Foundtion for the Visual Arts)

Robert Rauchenberg, Passport from the portfolio Ten from Leo Castelli, (image courtesy of Saint Louis Art Museum)

Rosa Lee Lovell, Figure Group Series (image courtesy of Saint Louis Art Museum)

When curators Elizabeth Wyckoff and Gretchen L. Wagner organized Graphic Revolution, they included well-known artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella and Elizabeth Murray, but they also included several lesser-known artists such as Enrique Chagoya, Lorna Simpson, Sol LeWitt, Edgar Heap of Birds and Ellen Gallagher. With more than 100 prints drawn from the museum's holdings and local private collections, Graphic Revolution highlights decades of art interest in our region.

The diverse and robust collection of prints could have suffered from a sense of feel-good-inclusion, but it didn’t. Separated into seven sections, each grouping had a near perfect balance of familiar and esoteric work. On my first visit, I was excited about Warhol’s Soup Cans, Josef Albers’ White Line Squares, Lichtenstein’s woodcuts, and Rauschenberg's very first prints, License and Breakthrough I. On later visits, I spent more time checking out the methods and materials used by artists who weren’t household names.

Missouri-born Nick Cave (a SLAM favorite) broke out from the expected print form. In keeping with his reputation, Cave put aside traditional techniques and mediums when he accepted an invitation to work at Washington University’s Island Press in 2000. He expanded the definition of what we call a print by combining it with textile and sculpture. Cave’s MASS 2000, a collagraph on two sheets and the collagraphic plate used to create it, hangs as a triptych and homage to those affected by HIV/AIDS. The plate was produced by sewing together button-down shirts collected from Goodwill Industries stores around St. Louis and coating them with acrylic. Analogous to the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, the work represents the often silent (and in this project anonymous) suffering brought by HIV/AIDS.

Cave’s contribution to this massive collection of artworks labeled “print” is hardly the most unorthodox. Richard Artschwager’s Locations Hair Blp consists of rubberized horsehair laminated in Formica. With a wry nod to the dry art humor in Artschwager’s conceptual art conceit, his artworks were hung in strange places throughout the galleries.

Rosa Lee Lovell lived on Delmar in University City during the 1960s. Her screen print, Figure Group Series, captures the defining spirit of the mod movement with a silhouette of three on-the-move people on a taupe background framed by orange, red and green bands. Inside each frame are dusk-blue photographs. Some of the photos are of that era’s trendy “mods.” Others are of urban details including the old Tivoli Theater sign. Figure Group Series is an excellent example of the juxtaposition of geometric design with photography that was common in the 1960s print movement.

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Claes Oldenburg, Tea Bag (image courtesy of Saint Louis Art Museum)

One stunner — Epigraph, Damascus — a photogravure aquatint in six panels by Julie Mehretu, is ostensibly a landscape of Damascus referencing the Syrian civil war. I didn’t know that when I first saw it. I was simply struck by the extremely deft, bold, gestural marks reminiscent of Philip Guston’s best abstract expressionism. Then I saw the perfectly rendered architectural details of Damascus underneath all the gestural work and the nature of the abstraction changed. The marks became flying debris, figures fleeing, embers, the trails of bombs and ghosts. Mehretu says, “There is no such thing as just landscape.” I take her to mean that landscape, at its best, holds a narrative.

In that sense, Graphic Revolution set forth a modern landscape of print. With all the intrinsic malleability that makes the medium uniquely suited to capture the zeitgeist of any time, the story of print could have been told countless ways. That SLAM chose to tell it the way it did, an inclusive and forward-thinking way, was a win for St. Louis.

Exhibition was open Nov. 11, 2018 - Feb. 3, 2019

-Tim McAvin

www.slam.org

ALLTHEARTSTL.COM SPRING 2019 IN REVIEW