Catherine Daunt is the Hamish Parker Curator of Modern and Contemporary Graphic Art in the department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum.
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Making a small selection of prints from the many treasures in the LOPF’s Viewing Rooms has been both a delight and a struggle. I began with a very long, long list, which I have somehow managed to edit down to this group of just fifteen. I set no particular criteria but just followed my eye through the rooms to works that interest me, with the freedom of not having to consider what would be best for the museum. Essentially, I have chosen prints that I would be very happy to add to my own (currently very tiny!) collection. It is an eclectic group, reflecting both the broad range of prints at the fair and my own diverse tastes, but there are, I hope, some interesting threads that can be followed from one work to another.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Weary, 1863. With the exception of this print, I have remained in the 20th and 21st centuries, but I had to include this drypoint by Whistler, an artist whose influence as a printmaker has been profound. Looking at this image, I can almost hear the sigh as Whistler’s model, Joanna Hiffernan, sinks into her armchair, her hair undone, her limbs heavy. It is a fleeting, intimate moment, captured with urgent drypoint lines. At the bottom left, a ghostly head from a previous composition provides a tantalizing insight into the history of this particular copper plate.
Edward Hopper, East Side Interior, 1922. A young woman takes a break from her sewing to watch the world outside her window. Perhaps her baby is asleep in the carriage beside her and this is a rare moment of calm. Hopper had been focused on etching for several years when he made this print and he received two awards for his printmaking the following year.
Louise Bourgeois, La Réparation, 2003. I love the simplicity of this drypoint, which was published by Harlan & Weaver, New York in a portfolio also titled La Réparation. This is the third of seven plates, which explore recurring themes in Bourgeois’ work including her experiences of motherhood. According to the artist, this print was inspired by memories of her own mother repairing textiles, but also her self-declared tendency to break things, including relationships, and the subsequent need for reparation. The fourth plate in the series is called M is for Mother.
Lucian Freud, Girl holding her foot, 1985. This is one of four, relatively large ‘naked portrait’ etchings that Freud made in 1985. The stark, empty background encourages us to look at every curve of the woman’s body, while her position in the top half of the paper seems to suggest a vulnerability as if she is trying to retreat into a corner. Having read accounts by Freud’s models, however, I can’t help but be distracted by thinking about the discomfort holding that pose must have caused!
Pablo Picasso, Faun revealing a sleeping woman (Faune dévoilant une dormeuse), 1936. This is plate 27 from Picasso’s epic Vollard Suite, a series of 100 prints made by the artist between 1930 and 1937, which the British Museum acquired in full in 2011. In his prints Picasso frequently references his artistic heroes. Here it is Rembrandt, whose Jupiter and Antiope etching from 1659 inspired this composition. It is an unsettling scene, as Jupiter in the guise of a satyr preys upon the as yet oblivious sleeping Antiope.
Richard Hamilton, Picasso’s Meninas, 1973. Picasso also paid homage to Velázquez in his prints, so it is like stepping into a hall of mirrors here to see Richard Hamilton’s homage to Picasso framed through the composition of Velázquez’s famous painting Las Meninas (1656). Hamilton’s print was published in the second of six multi-artist portfolios titled Hommage à Picasso. It was made with the master printer Aldo Crommelynck, with whom Picasso worked towards the end of his life.
Paula Rego, Getting Ready for the Ball, 2001-2. Colour! This triptych is from a series of 25 lithographs based loosely on Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, which Rego produced over a six-month period at the Curwen Studio, Cambridge. In this scene, Jane is an outsider watching Miss Ingram and a group of girls getting ready for a party, while Rochester can be seen with Bertha, his first wife, in another room. A second, younger, Jane sits drawing pictures at the bottom left. Again, the scene seems to reference Las Meninas, with the girls in their bustling dresses in the foreground and the glimpses of action through open doorways and in a mirror behind. It is a complex print, both in its multi-layered narrative and technically, as printing the colours required around twenty separate plates.
David Hockney, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, 1961. Hockney’s early black and red etchings are among my favourites of his graphic works. This example was made when the artist was still at the Royal College of Art. It references two poems by C.P Cavafy, whose work was to inspire a whole series of etchings by Hockney in 1966. In Cavafy’s poem The Mirror at the Entrance, an ancient mirror is elated when a beautiful boy stands before it for a few minutes. This print also includes an empty chair, a motif that I enjoy spotting in art.
Larry Rivers, Frank O’Hara Reading, 1967. Rivers made a series of works in 1967 memorializing the poet and curator Frank O’Hara, his friend and former lover, who had died in a tragic accident the previous year. The text is taken from O’Hara’s To a Poet and the image is based on a photograph of O’Hara at a reading in 1959, watched by other poets. Rivers made this print at ULAE on Long Island, where he previously produced the lithographs for Stones, a book containing prints by Rivers and poems by O’Hara.
Erich Heckel, Mann in der Ebene (Man on the plain – Self-portrait), 1917. My selection so far has comprised intaglio prints and lithographs, but I noticed when I was looking through the viewing rooms that I am often drawn to relief prints. Woodcut is the perfect medium for this anguish-riven self-portrait by Erich Heckel, which was made when the artist was serving as an ambulance driver in Belgium during the First World War. The psychological trauma of the experience is expressed through the deep lines in the face and the tense, elongated fingers, while the surrounding landscape seems almost to be collapsing inward.
Elizabeth Catlett, American Women Unite (Unidad de la Mujer Americana), 1963. Relief printing often seems to suit sculptors, which is perhaps why Elizabeth Catlett was attracted to the woodcut technique. Catlett made this colour woodcut at Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) in Mexico City, where she worked for twenty years from 1946. She has signed it ‘EC-TGP’ on the block, acknowledging the collaborative process of printmaking. A year before, Catlett had renounced her US citizenship having been investigated by the US House Un-American Activities Committee because of her connections with Communist Party members who were also members of TGP.
G.W. Bot, Glyphs – Portrait III, 2020. I saw this Australian print at Rebecca Hossack’s gallery earlier this year in one of the first exhibitions I went to see after the initial lockdown was eased. It is a beautifully delicate work and the perfect marriage of ink and support, which in this case is tapa cloth, a material made from tree bark on the islands of the Pacific.
Emma Stibbon RA, Sea III, 2021. I find that Emma Stibbon’s work can be quiet and calming to look at, but it can also be deeply unsettling and at times alarming. The environments that she portrays are often awesome in scale, and like this one, dangerous and hostile to humans. I have always been slightly terrified of the sea, so I would like to look at this print from the safety of nice warm room.
Morgan O’Hara, Romy at Play in Frühlingstrasse, Gräfelfing, Germany, 2015, screenprint in five colours (Aspinall Editions New York). O’Hara’s prints derive from pencil drawings that she makes with both hands, which chart sound and movement in real time. This composition records the movements of a five-year-old girl playing at home with her toys and her cat and includes moments of jumping and dancing. The lines were printed on black paper in various tones of silvery-white-grey.
Glenn Ligon, Black Rage, 2015. Finally, I include a print that has a special resonance for museum professionals. Ligon has taken the 1969 Bantam cover of the book Black Rage by the psychiatrists William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs (1968) and annotated it in the manner of a museum conservator’s condition report. Illustrated by an image of a black man with clenched fists, the book examined the anger felt by African Americans as a result of persistent racism. In exacting detail, the ’museum’ notes the physical flaws that have developed over time, while perhaps failing to fully engage with the content of the book.