A Graphic Journey: Prints by Pablo Picasso—the Tim Collins Collection
April 1 – June 11, 2023
Anne Noland Edwards Gallery
Contributed by The Mary M. Torggler Fine Arts Center
The Mary M. Torggler Fine Arts Center on the campus of Christopher Newport University is proud to present A Graphic Journey: Prints by Pablo Picasso, featuring over 50 works created between 1923 and 1972, including etchings, lithographs, linocuts, and one cancelled copper printing plate. Picasso was a major innovator in the medium of printmaking. He made prints throughout his career — from 1899 to his last in 1972, when he was 90 years old. Experimenting all the while, he produced some 2,400 prints.
A special feature of the Collins Collection is the number of proofs, which illustrate the working relationship Picasso maintained with his printers and their ateliers. Their craftsmanship made Picasso’s extensive and revolutionary experimentation with printmaking possible. This exhibition features six proofs of Tete de Femme au Chapeau in various colors, along with the final full color print. Another highlight of the exhibition is a cancelled original copper printing plate from 1948, Femme au Chignon, along with a print pulled from the plate.
This exhibition, drawn from the collection of Timothy Collins of Los Angeles, was organized by Landau Traveling Exhibitions, in Los Angeles.
Also opening are works of Charlottesville-based artist Russ Warren. His artistic inspirations include Spanish masters such as Velázquez, Goya and Picasso, as well as Mexican folk art and contemporary art. Warren melds these inspirations into his own unique synthesis of symbols and imagery, employing line and color as well as wild variations in scale and shadow. Full of both humor and pathos, Warren’s paintings, prints and sculptures run the gamut of emotions, and reflect a lifetime spent contemplating and creating art.
Christi Harris, associate professor in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at Christopher Newport University, will present her poignant installation, Lachrymose, in the Torggler’s Microgallery. This work explores the intersection of grieving and “emotional labor” made tangible in embroidered phrases from condolence letters from a late 19th-century Virginia family. Harris discovered the letters at a flea market, and during the pandemic she spent time painstakingly embroidering words or phrases from the letters onto handkerchiefs in the style of the writer’s handwriting. Dozens of these embroidered receptacles for grief and tears will be suspended around the viewer in the Microgallery, becoming a tangible manifestation of the universal human experience of grieving.
Admission to the exhibit is free. For more information visit thetorggler.org.
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