Portrait Printmaking

Compare these two printmakers. What do they have in common and how do they differ? Look at their lives, time they lived, what they were influenced by and their artistic style. Which do you like better? Explain your answers fully.

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Käthe Kollwitz, Superprintmaker

Woman in the Lap of Death, woodcut by Käthe Kollwitz, 1921

Speaking of making the world a better place, Käthe Kollwitz was an artist who tried to do just that…  And unfortunately, her world was in need of an awful lot of bettering.  Born in Germany in 1867, one of Kollwitz's sons was killed in World War I and a grandson was killed in World War II.  Her husband was a doctor who worked with the poor, providing her with a constant view of the suffering caused by social injustice, as well as a respect for the beauty and bravery of these hard-working people.  In 1920 she became the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts, but she

Hunger, woodcut by Kollwitz, 1925

was forced to resign by the Nazis when they came to power.  She died in 1945 just before the end of World War II.

Kollwitz's radical father encouraged his daughter's drawing talent and arranged for her to have art lessons.  When she went to an art school for women in Berlin she decided that painting was not her strength, and began doing etchings and other printmaking techniques.  A little later, looking for more strength and power in her images, she also took up woodcuts.  Her prints were widely acclaimed, and her international fame and popularity were such that although the Nazis threatened her, they did not arrest her.

Mary and Elisabeth, woodcut by Kollwitz, 1928

        

Although so much of her work focusses on tragic themes, Kollwitz's art is not unrelieved doom and gloom.  Here is a lovely one showing Elizabeth and Mary from the gospel of Luke, two pregnant woman greeting each other and sharing their profound awe and joy.  (Of course, both these mothers lost their sons, a theme Kollwitz knew all too well.)

Self-Portrait, woodcut by Kollwitz, 1924

        Kollwitz also made self-portraits throughout her life, so that we can see her in different moods and as she ages.  Sometimes she looks beautiful, sometimes bleak.  I particularly like this one, done in 1924 when she was around 57.

        Although Kollwitz suffered from periodic bouts of depression and had so much cause for despair in the world she saw around her, she never stopped trying to use her art to wake people up to the tragedies of injustice and cruelty.

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Andy Warhol

American painter, printmaker, sculptor, draughtsman, illustrator, film maker, writer and collector. After studying at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh from 1945 to 1949, he moved to New York and began working as a commercial artist and illustrator for magazines and newspapers. Warhol continued to support himself through his commercial work until at least 1963, but from 1960 he determined to establish his name as a painter. Motivated by a desire to be taken as seriously as the young artists whose work he had recently come to know and admire, especially Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, he began by painting a series of pictures based on crude advertisements and on images from comic strips. These are among the earliest examples of Pop Art.

In the 1960s a new artistic style overtook New York. Known as Pop Art and defined by its cool impersonality, this style embraced American popular culture, utilizing comics, tabloid photographs, and movie stills as artistic inspiration. Perhaps the best-known Pop artist was Andy Warhol, who conceived a new idea of the artist as celebrity.

Andy Warhol

1966. Silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on nine canvases

Each canvas 22 1/2 x 22 1/2" (57.2 x 57.2 cm), 

overall 67 5/8 x 67 5/8" (171.7 x 171.7 cm)

Self-Portrait (1966) was constructed in what would become one of Warhol’s signature styles—a grid of bright, repeated silkscreenedprimary and secondary colors as well as different shades of the same color. portraits. An expert colorist, Warhol paired

ANDY WARHOL
American, 1928 - 1987
Self-Portrait , 1986
Acrylic screen print on canvas 80 x 80 inches

In the latter part of his career, Warhol focused more and more on portraiture.  He created portraits of people he admired—musicians Michael Jackson and Grace Jones, athletes O.J. Simpson and Muhammed Ali—as well as wealthy socialites he met on the New York social circuit. By the mid-1960s, Warhol had amassed a huge public following of artists, filmmakers, performers, writers, and art patrons seduced by his persona. Engaging in the painting of self-portraits only further cultivated his fame. In time, Warhol’s self-portraits became as famous as the iconic portraits of Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor. The artist had himself become a celebrity. He used these portraits not only to question the originality of the artistic image but also to explore themes of death, celebrity, and postwar culture.

In this ghost-like self-portrait, produced a few months before his death, Warhol stares out at the viewer with an impenetrable glare. The artist’s disembodied head floats against an inky black background, his image silkscreened in a pale violet. Slack-jawed and wearing a platinum fright wig, Warhol likens his face to a skull or death mask.

Recovering Gardner Heist Stolen Artworks Is Likely, Experts Say 

By DENISE LAVOIE 

BOSTON -- Now that authorities believe they know who stole $500 million worth of art from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in the largest art heist in U.S. history, what are the chances they'll actually recover the stolen works by Rembrandt, Vermeer and Manet after 23 years?
Surprisingly good, art recovery experts say.

Christopher Marinello, general counsel for The Art Loss Register, a London-based organization that keeps a database of stolen and missing artwork, recently recovered a Matisse oil painting stolen from a Stockholm museum in 1987.

"A quarter of a century is not that unusual for stolen paintings to be returned," Marinello said. "Eventually they will resurface. Somebody will rat somebody else out. It's really only a matter of time."

The FBI announced Monday that it knows but is not disclosing the identities of two men who posed as police officers and stole 13 works of art from the museum in 1990. The theft remains the largest art heist in U.S. history.

Bob Wittman, a retired FBI agent from Philadelphia who specialized in art crimes, said he helped recover a set of seven Norman Rockwell paintings stolen from a Minneapolis museum in 1977. The paintings were found in Rio de Janeiro in 2001. Wittman said he also helped recover an original copy of the Bill of Rights that had been stolen more than 130 years earlier.

"I think that the chances are that if they still exist, there's a 95 percent chance they are going to get the paintings back," Wittman said.

"At some point, they are going to come back to market. Whoever is holding them illicitly is going to get old. An heir or a child is going to find it and try to sell it."

The FBI, which made its announcement on the 23rd anniversary of the heist, also launched a new publicity campaign aimed at generating tips on the whereabouts of the artwork, including a dedicated FBI website on the heist, video postings on FBI social media sites and digital billboards in Connecticut and Philadelphia. They also re-emphasized a $5 million reward being offered by the museum for information leading to the return of the artwork.

Damon Katz, a spokesman for the FBI's Boston office, said tips were already coming in Tuesday. He would not say how many.

"We are analyzing them and we will act on those as appropriate," he said. "The goal is not to generate the largest number of tips, but to generate the best tips that will lead us to the art."

Richard DesLauriers, an FBI agent in Boston, said investigators believe the thieves belonged to a criminal organization based in New England and the mid-Atlantic states. They believe the art was taken to Connecticut and the Philadelphia region in the years after the theft and offered for sale in Philadelphia a decade ago. After that, the FBI does not know what happened to the artwork, DeLauriers said.

Empty frames still hang on the walls of the museum as a reminder of the loss of precious works of art, including "The Concert" by Johannes Vermeer and several Rembrandts, "A Lady and Gentleman in Black" and "Storm on the Sea of Galilee," his only seascape.

The statute of limitations has expired on crimes associated with the actual theft. But prosecutors say anyone who knowingly possesses or conceals the stolen art could still face charges.

Second brazen art theft in one week 

3:04 PM Thursday Mar 21, 2013

The sword thief was captured on camera. Photo / supplied

A second brazen thief has struck at a New Zealand museum this week, with police now looking for a man who stole a sword from an art installation.

Police are looking for a man who made off with the plastic letter opener made to look like a sword from a statue at Pataka Art and

Museum on Tuesday afternoon.
Museum staff noticed it was missing soon after and went back through their CCTV security footage to find out what happened.

They found vision of the man swiping the sword from the Apocalypse Vanitas - an artwork showing a human skeleton riding an animal skeleton while carrying a sword and shield by artist Niki Hastings-McFall.

He put the sword in his pocket and left through the front doors. A group of art students were in the gallery at time of incident, police say.

Police were told on Wednesday and were now asking if anyone recognised the man in the CCTV footage, or had any information, to phone them on 04 238 1401 or Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.

The plastic letter opener was 10cm long, Porirua City Council spokeswoman Barbara Bercic said.

The theft comes after an English tourist stole a silk kimono from the Lakes District Museum in Arrowtown on Monday.

She was arrested in Te Anau last night.

Police say the tourist, who had been travelling on a bus trip, admitted stealing the kimono but says she put it in a rubbish bin in Arrowtown.

It's not yet been found.

She's paid reparation over the theft of the $625 work and will leave the country tomorrow.
The case had widespread coverage after police released CCTV footage of the woman stealing Alison Naylor's one-off, handmade piece. The cameras showed her touching several of the pieces on display before lifting Mrs Naylor's piece from the wall.

She then rolled it up and put it in her bag before casually leaving the museum through the front doors.
- APNZ

Learning From the Gardner Art Theft

By ULRICH BOSER

Published: March 21, 2013

Earlier this week, the F.B.I. announced that it had identified the two men who robbed the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in March 1990, in the biggest art theft in American history. The F.B.I. said the criminals, whom it did not identify, had most likely moved their loot to Connecticut or the Philadelphia area.

Twenty-three years may seem like an inordinate amount of time to solve a burglary, but the Gardner case has actually come a long way from the days when it sometimes seemed to sit on the F.B.I.’s investigative back burner — and the robbery has done a lot to change the way that museums protect their art. 

The robbery occurred just after midnight on March 18, 1990, when two men dressed as police officers appeared at the side entrance to the museum. There had been “a disturbance on the grounds,” the men told the night guard through an intercom. 

One of the guards buzzed the men into the building, and after tying up the two watchmen, the thieves essentially had the run of one of the world’s most beautiful museums for more than an hour. Mrs. Gardner, the art collector and philanthropist who founded the institution, was devoted to the idea that art was powerfully redemptive, and she built intimate galleries to showcase her collection. She felt so strongly about the museum that in her will she insisted that nothing be changed in the galleries, not even the plaster cast of the composer Franz Liszt’s hand. Today the galleries are arranged just as they were when Mrs. Gardner died, in 1924. 

"La Gitana"

On that evening, the thieves moved through the narrow hallways, past the Han dynasty bears and Louis Kronberg’s oil painting “La Gitana.” They ignored the 18th-century Indian bookstand and the 15th-century Italian fresco of Hercules.

"Concert"

They went for some of the museum’s crown jewels, snagging Vermeer’s “Concert” along with three Rembrandts, a Manet and a Degas. The two thieves didn’t seem to be particularly respectful toward art — they sliced two of the Rembrandts out of their frames — but they did manage to sneak away with a haul worth as much as $500 million today. 

Over the years, it hasn’t seemed as if federal investigators have always made the case a top priority. When I first started reporting on the theft, for instance, the museum’s director, Anne Hawley, suggested that she had not always been satisfied with the bureau’s commitment to the case. Ms. Hawley, the director since 1989, said that the first agent assigned to the case seemed very green. “Why didn’t the F.B.I. have the capacity to assign a senior-level person?” she asked me in 2007. “Why was it not considered something that needed immediate and high-level attention?”

When the theft occurred, the museum’s security was lax by today’s standards. While the Gardner’s protections were not particularly bad for a modest-size house museum at that time, one of the guards who worked the night of the theft later admitted to having smoked marijuana before arriving for work. The museum also lacked theft insurance, which prevented it from offering a major reward immediately after the burglary. 

But these problems were not limited to the Gardner. The idea that art theft is not quite a serious crime has a strange hold in some quarters. Over the years, the F.B.I.’s prioritization of terrorism after 9/11, not to mention numerous violent crimes, also may help account for the length of the investigation. But when crooks steal masterpieces, they steal part of our culture and civilization. 

You can replace a wallet, an iPod, even a diamond necklace, but not a Rembrandt. The art world knows this. The Gardner offered a $1 million reward a few days after the theft occurred, and in 1997, it raised the reward to $5 million, believed to be the largest ever offered by a private institution. A few years ago, the museum also brought in a new head of security, Anthony Amore, who has become obsessed with the case. He keeps an electronic copy of his investigation files with him at all times, even outside of work. 

Museum security has changed too. The Gardner has significantly upgraded its protections, and because of the theft, the American Association of Museums revamped its guidelines, recommending that institutions be more careful about whom they let in after hours. In 1994, at the museum’s urging, Senator Edward M. Kennedy helped pass a law that made it a federal crime to steal, receive or dispose of any cultural object worth more than $100,000. 

The statute of limitations for breaking into the museum has expired, but prosecutors could potentially use the 1994 law to convict someone for possession of the stolen art today. (That said, the museum’s top priority is recovering the art.) 

The F.B.I. has also significantly ramped up its efforts to recover stolen art. In 2004, the agency created a national art theft team, which has more than a dozen agents assigned to regions across the country. The bureau also has two agents working on the Gardner case, and last year, they made a high-profile raid on the house of a Connecticut mobster. Since the announcement on Monday, and the increased attention on an F.B.I. Web site devoted to the Gardner theft, tips and new leads have been pouring in. 

As for the men who robbed the museum, there’s been some good evidence over the years regarding their identities. In my book on the theft, I pointed the finger at the Boston mobster David Turner. As part of my reporting, I examined F.B.I. files that indicated that Mr. Turner was an early suspect, and he bears a strong resemblance to the composite drawing made of one of the thieves. In a letter to me, Mr. Turner denied any role in the theft, but he also told me that if I were to put his picture on my book’s cover, I would sell more copies. 

More important, there are signs that the paintings may hang on the walls of the museum again. At the news conference on Monday, the F.B.I. announced that in the years after the theft, someone took the stolen Gardner art to Connecticut and Philadelphia and offered it up for sale. This suggests that the canvases might still be in good condition. 

“I think we’re all optimistic that one day soon the paintings would be returned to their rightful place,” the United States attorney for Massachusetts, Carmen Ortiz, said. Let’s hope she’s right.

Ulrich Boser, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, is the author of “The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World’s Largest Unsolved Art Theft.”

Ulrich Boser, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, is the author of “The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World’s Largest Unsolved Art Theft.”

The dark arts of art forgery

By Jordan Green

Those who investigate art fakes, forgeries and fabrications operate in a realm where – similar to espionage and counterintelligence – a certain degree of paranoia is healthy.

James Martin, a trained painter who has studied art history and chemistry to become a consultant in demand by both the FBI and a number of prominent art museums, began his talk on forensic art history at Reynolda House Museum of American Art on Sunday by asking if there were any artists in the audience. Then, he asked if there were any attorneys present. There were a couple.

“Attorneys working for parties adverse to me?” he asked. One senses that this guy has accumulated some enemies. “Any experts on faked and forged artwork?” he asked. “Any producers of faked or forged artwork?” Martin noted that materials such as Phillips-head screws (developed in 1936) and polypropylene paint (invented in 1958) can establish a fake if the original artwork dates back to an earlier period. After describing how some people harvest the powder inside fluorescent tube lamps, mix it with varnish and apply it to the surface of paintings to defeat an ultraviolet examination, he half-joked, “I’m giving tips to forgers, but only because you’ve told me there are none in the audience.”

And similar to the burgeoning industry of cyber-security where the best in the business hold some experience in hacking, the best artfraud detectives hold the same skill sets as the fraudsters.

“Before I studied chemistry and art history, I studied art,” Martin said.

“And one of the things I did was to copy the old masters. And I’m really, really good at that. Which makes me really good at catching people who fake paintings, too.”

Martin described scholarly art authentication “as like a three-legged stool” that relies on connoisseurship, provenance — defined as the documented history of the art — and testing, which includes “technical examination and scientific testing.”

The audience of upwards of 50, including members and guests of the museum, ate it up.

Martin’s firm, Orion Analytical, owns a Raman microscope worth more than most cars that can analyze a speck that is a thousandth of a millimeter. He worked on an investigation that determined a purported Jackson Pollock painting purchased by a hedge-fund investor for $17 million was, in fact, a fake.

Art forgers can go to extraordinary and creative lengths to perpetrate hoaxes. Martin laid out the scenario of a forger intent on defeating a thermo-luminescence dating process by collecting bricks from a 1000 AD Chinese archeological site to assemble a fake antiquity dog sculpture. The forger might grind up one of the bricks, mix the powder with Elmer’s glue and smear it over the surface to cover the joins.

“So if you took a sample of this and submitted it for thermoluminescence dating, it would tell you that the brick, or that the ceramic, was a thousand years old,” Martin said. “But it wouldn’t tell you that the dog was created about five years ago. So one of the first things we do is put a drop of solvent on it to look for the Elmer’s glue.”

Then there’s the real-life case of Wolfgang Beltracchi, a German forger who created an entire fake collection purported to be assembled by the late art collector Werner Jaeger. The scheme, which Martin helped bring down, involved Beltracchi posing his wife in period clothing as the Jaeger matriarch with the paintings in the background to make it appear as though the collection had been in existence in the 1920s.

Similarly, John Drewe, working with forger John Myatt, created false exhibition catalogues that he planted in the research library at the Tate Modern museum in London to create a fraudulent provenance for the purpose of throwing off investigators.

But art criminals, like all criminals, make dumb mistakes. Case in point: William Toye, who faked the paintings of Clementine Hunter, a 20th century Louisiana folk artist whose paintings have appreciated from about $10 to about $10,000.

“Toye loved cats,” Martin said. “He had lots of cats. And his cats had a habit of standing on the table where he made all of his fakes. So, as you might suspect, every one of his fakes had cat hair embedded.”