The Imagination on Edge:
European Prints from 1745 to 1901

October 12–December 22
Graphics Gallery

Gallery Talk
by Stephen Margulies, Curator of Works on Paper
Sunday, November 17, 2 p.m.
In the Museum

The Museum has for many years concentrated on building a distinguished and beautiful collection of old master prints from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. In recent years, however, we have acquired exciting material from the mid-eighteenth century, the Age of Jefferson, through the nineteenth century, the beginning of modernism.

The Imagination on Edge presents works that, in the words of Eugene Delacroix, demonstrate the creative imagination "on edge" -- the risk and intensity of creating or beginning to create a new world of art and understanding. In the mid and late eighteenth century, Fuseli and Piranesi produced powerful images that fused classicism and romanticism. In the early and later nineteenth century such artists as Delacroix, John Martin, Francisco Goya, Carl Kolbe, Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, and Eugene Isabey explored the realms of nature and fantasy, combining new printing techniques with new forms of artistic expression.

From the second half of the century to the beginning of our own period, printmakers like Samuel Palmer, Max Klinger and James Ensor envisioned worlds of psychological or spiritual reality. Charles Meryon created Parisian scenes of scientific precision informed by his own hallucinations of madness, and Felix Valloton and Kathe Kollwitz created powerful expressionistic prints that combined psychological realism with incisive social commentary.

Eugène Isabey, French, 1803–1886
Souvenir de St. Valery sur Somme, from Six Marines
Lithograph on chine collé, 11 7/8 x 9 1/2"
Museum Purchase with Curriculum Support Funds, 1996.25.2
Collection University of Virginia Art Museum