Exhibitions

John Taylor Arms (1887–1953), an American etcher who specialized in the depiction of architecture, created prints that astonished viewers with his extraordinary skill in capturing detail. Originally an architect and a great admirer of Gothic architecture, Arms began in 1923 his ambitious project of documenting Europe's major churches through a series of prints. Selected from the Zimmerli’s collection, this exhibition features 26 prints dating between 1919 and 1940. Highlights include remarkable prints of the cathedrals of Chartres and Rouen, and the gargoyles of Notre Dame in Paris; exquisite architectural views of Venice; charming glimpses of picturesque Italian and French towns; and the skyline of New York City as it was in 1935.

Organized by Marilyn Symmes, Director of the Morse Research Center for Graphic Arts and Curator of Prints and Drawings

This exhibition marks the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II. A companion exhibition, organized by the Rutgers Oral History Archives of World War II, is on view in the Alexander Library’s Gallery ‘50.

Born in 1879, Edward Steichen and his family emigrated from Luxemburg to the United States when Steichen was a small child. Settling in rural Michigan, Steichen began taking photographs as a teenager and continued to do so for the duration of his life.

Between World War I and World War II, Steichen became known as a photographer of the American heartland. Having petitioned the Navy to admit him as an official wartime photographer, the 62-year-old Steichen—a successful commercial and portrait photographer, as well as decorated World War I Army veteran—finally joined the air station at Floyd Bennett Field on Long Island in 1941. Late in the year, he was commissioned by the Navy to tell the story of naval aviation. The Navy records state that they “desperately needed Steichen’s photographs to recruit new pilots.” In addition to recording facts, Steichen wanted to prove that photography could be a powerful instrument for showing the human side of complex events. “The camera,” wrote Steichen in 1947, “serves as an instrument for waging war and as a historian in recording that war.” 

Fourteen 19th-century French and American paintings and ceramics exemplify the powerful influence of traditional Japanese art on Western artists. This stunning selection from the Zimmerli’s renowned collection of Japonisme (European and American artworks inspired by the art of Japan) highlights the achievements of some of the key artists and decorative designers of the Japonisme movement.

Featured are several pieces from the celebrated 1866 Rousseau porcelain dinner service adorned with designs by Félix Bracquemond inspired from Japanese prints. The great success of the Japonisme-styled Rousseau service encouraged artists and craftsmen across Europe to create works incorporating Japanese motifs and aesthetics. Joseph-Théodore Deck’s tour-de-force ceramic figure La Japonaise (1867) and Charles Caryl Coleman’s Night Owl (1879) reflect the West’s fascination with Japanese subjects and styles. This display also includes ceramics designed by Emile Gallé, a founder of the Art Nouveau style, and the Bordeaux-based ceramics manufactory, J. Vieillard & Cie.

Organized by Christine Giviskos, Associate Curator of European Art

Into the Garden: Painted Paper Constructions by Takayo Noda presents complete illustrations and selected preparatory materials for Song of the Flowers by children’s book author and illustrator Takayo Noda.

Examples of the illustrator’s preparatory materials provide insight into the illustrator’s creative process in which imaginative landscapes, flower and insect forms are realized as bold painted-paper relief sculptures.

Organized by Gail Aaron, Assistant Curator of Original Illustrations for Children's Books

Inspired by the innovations of the Russian avant-garde, Soviet nonconformist artists took a step further by abandoning conventions that kept word and image in separate categories. This can be seen as an example in the continuation of the strong connection between visual artists and poets particularly in Moscow. Many conceptual artists worked in literary forms while poet-conceptualists appropriated forms typical of visual arts, such as book-objects or card-poems. Nonconformist artists, trained as book designers and illustrators, created word/image art in the form of hand-produced books and journals. More generally, artists explored the relation between form and meaning in the production of texts as images, and texts in relation to images. In some cases, as in the works of Ilya Kabakov and Victor Pivovarov, words and images are of equal visual impact and importance; in others, as in the work of Leonid Lamm and Rimma Gerlovina, the text itself constitutes the entire image.

For the Russian avant-garde of the early twentieth century, crossing the border between visual and verbal was an important element in their quest for artistic freedom. As a result, artists and poets often collaborated closely on books that abound with pictures in dialogue with the text.

In the 1920s, when such media as photomontage and photography rapidly advanced, political texts entered a close relationship with visual arts. Promoting the concepts of function and communication, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Gustav Klutsis, and other constructivist artists designed all forms of printed matter, including posters, books, and catalogues. These artists introduced radical new ideas and forms to graphic design – notably, the value of the diagonal as a dynamic device, the effect of layering letters over each other, and a combination of different fonts.

Lettrisme, a Parisian movement begun in the 1940s, focused on the visual dimensions of language. It was based on the concept that conventional language failed to adequately transmit individual energies and desires and should be replaced by “fluctuating letters” disentangled from their usual meanings and contexts, enabling them to retain “suggestions” and “fleeting evocations.” 

Exploring this notion, Lettriste artists investigated the relationships between spoken, written, and visual codes in a range of visual and literary media that included painting, sculpture, poetry, film, and the novel. Lettrisme began as a poetic movement but ultimately came to serve as the basis of a literary theory that expanded the meaning of the letter, emphasized its visual nature, and released it from its strictly verbal associations.