黑料不打烊

At the 1980 Venice Biennale, Joseph Beuys presented his philosophy on fifty industrial blackboards. Central to his vision was the proposition that art is capital 鈥� Kunst = Kapital 鈥� by which he meant that the value of money is illusory and the only source of wealth is creativity.

The use of blackboards emerged from Beuys鈥� conviction that art should manifest in public, and from his habit of lecturing as an artistic practice. Showing the blackboards in museums and biennials expanded the timeframe of those performances, allowing people not present in the moment to encounter his ideas vicariously. But how to circulate the ideas more broadly? Possibly taking inspiration from currency, Beuys produced multiples and prints. Silkscreened on a blackboard, replicating a slogan on one of the fifty blackboards shown in Venice, Kunst = Kapital instantiates many of Beuys鈥� most radical ideas in a single ingenious artwork.

Editions of prints have provided artists with the opportunity to distribute their imagery for as long as there have been techniques of reproduction. Kunst = Kapital shows that editioning can also provide a novel source of meaning. Whether drawn to the concept of mass-production or the aesthetic qualities of etching, great artists approach editioning with more in mind than mere replication. Inspired by the variety and quality of high-caliber prints, Modernism is pleased to present 42 distinctive expressions of printmaking by twenty-four artists in Impressions: Modern & Contemporary Editions.

For Henri Matisse, printmaking provided a medium in which the directness and intimacy of a pen-and-ink drawing could be transformed into a finished work as autonomous as his great paintings. His prints proved also to be an ideal space for formal experimentation, and the perfection of the aesthetic qualities he most valued. With no margin for error, plate and stone challenged the artist to live up to the standard he articulated in Notes of a Painter: 鈥淭he entire arrangement of my picture is expressive: the place occupied by the figures, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything has its share.鈥�