Artistic Collaborations - 50 Years at Universal Limited Art Editions

NEW YORK, January 16, 2007—The Museum of Modern Art presents highlights from its extensive collection of prints published by Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in the exhibition Artistic Collaborations: 50 Years at Universal Limited Art Editions. For nearly fifty years, through the support of Celeste and Armand Bartos, and continuing through the generosity of Emily Fisher Landau, MoMA has been acquiring one from every edition made at the ULAE print workshop on Long Island. Today MoMA’s collection includes ULAE’s complete archive of over 1,200 prints by nearly 50 artists. This exhibition marks the fiftieth anniversary of ULAE and showcases work by twelve artists from several generations of contemporary printmakers, highlighting the rich variety of ULAE’s publications and the continued relevance of printed art to contemporary artistic thinking. The exhibition is organized by Wendy Weitman, Curator, Department of Prints and Illustrated Books, The Museum of Modern Art, and is on view in the Paul J. Sachs and Tatyana Grosman Prints and Illustrated Books Galleries from January 17 through May 21, 2007.

Tatyana Grosman founded ULAE in 1957. Grosman was passionate about lithography, and she began coaxing leading painters and sculptors in New York to come out to her Long Island workshop and try their hands at this unfamiliar medium. In lithography, an artist draws with a greasy crayon on a flat slab of limestone or metal which is then treated with chemicals and dampened with water so that the oil-based printing ink adheres only where the artist drew. In the early 1960s, artists working at ULAE included Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Lee Bontecou, and Barnett Newman, among many others. The seminal collaborations there led many of them to become prolific printmakers and to embrace the medium as an integral component of their overall practices. By the mid-1960s the artist-printer collaborations at ULAE and at other such print publisher/workshops in the United States had given rise to an explosion of contemporary printed art.

After Grosman’s death in 1982, Bill Goldston, a ULAE master printmaker since 1969, took over the stewardship of the organization. Under his leadership a new generation of artists was invited to create prints at ULAE, including painters Terry Winters, Susan Rothenberg, and Carroll Dunham and sculptors Kiki Smith and Richard Tuttle, who all found new artistic outlets in their collaborations with master printers there. An even younger generation is now working at ULAE, including painters such as Lisa Yuskavage.

Among the outstanding artists who have worked at ULAE, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg are responsible for spearheading a revival of interest in printmaking among American artists. The work of Jasper Johns (American, b. 1930) represents a watershed in contemporary American art. Johns’s artistic practice is marked by repeated interpretations of the same motifs, examining issues of perception and how meaning shifts in new contexts. This strategy found its natural match in printmaking, with its facility for easily re-working ideas—printing the same image in different colors or on different papers, layering additional lithographic stones, or recording the progressive stages of an image’s evolution.

From the first lithographic stone Johns drew on, delivered by Tatyana Grosman to his studio in 1960, Johns immediately grasped the potential of lithography. Within three years he had collaborated on more than 40 lithographs at ULAE and went on to learn the intricacies of etching and offset printing as well. Now a virtuoso printmaker with an oeuvre totaling more than 400 printed works, Johns has completed nearly half his prints at ULAE, making him the workshop’s most prolific artist. Works by Johns on view in the exhibition include Two Maps I and Two Maps II (1966), which explore the concept of doubling through juxtapositions of two renderings of the immediately recognizable U.S. map.

From the next generation of artists working at ULAE, Kiki Smith (American, b. Germany 1954) stands out for her passion for printed art – its democratic nature, its inherent concept of transference, as well as its varied aesthetic possibilities. Collaboration has been at the center of Kiki Smith’s artistic practice and she has been a prolific printmaker since the mid-1980s. She had worked primarily in screenprint until Bill Goldston invited her out to ULAE in 1989 to try her hand at lithography. That experience inspired a flourishing in her printmaking over the next several years, in mediums including wall-sized lithographs and etchings as well as complex photogravures and livres d’artistes. To date she has completed more than 150 prints and books. Included in the exhibition is Smith’s first lithograph, Untitled (1990), for which she used imprints and photocopies of her own hair, face, and neck. This work was one of Smith’s first uses of her own body in printmaking and signaled the uniquely inventive and sculptural approach that would characterize much of her work at ULAE.

In addition to prints by Johns and Smith, the installation will include the complete set of Barnett Newman’s rarely seen 18 Cantos, as well as concentrations of work by Rauschenberg, Marisol, Bontecou, Winters, Rothenberg, Elizabeth Murray, Dunham, Tuttle, and Yuskavage.

Artistic Collaborations
50 Years at Universal Limited Art Editions
Kurator: Wendy Weitman

Künstler: Jasper Johns, Kiki Smith, Barnett Newman, Robert Rauschenberg, Marisol , Lee Bontecou, Terry Winters, Susan Rothenberg, Carroll Dunham, Elizabeth Murray, Richard Tuttle, Lisa Yuskavage ...