It struck me as a little ironic that the Israel Museum should choose this very day and age to unveil a veritable cornucopia of print gems.
This at a time when sales of hard copy newspapers and magazines continue to plummet in this ever-more digitized virtual world of ours. When British-American novelist Jane Green posited that “today’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip wrappers,” she was referring to the brief sell-by date of media revelations, but the observation could just as easily be attached to any corporeal visual format that, sadly, is increasingly dispensed with in favor of an ethereal on-screen rendition.
The Medium and the Message: Six Centuries of Printmaking exhibition, devised by Tanya Sirakovich, who serves as the Israel Museum’s chief curator of fine arts, opened last week as yet another installment of the museum’s ongoing diamond anniversary events. The collection, as the title spells out, covers centuries of endeavor in the discipline.
There are delectable deftly crafted works by the likes of late 15th- and early 16th-century painter, printmaker Albrecht Durer, and 17th-century Dutch master Rembrandt, through to darkly humorous prints with heavy political messages by 19th-century French painter, printmaker, and sculptor Honoré Daumier, a haunting lithography by Pablo Picasso, and the instantly recognizable polychromatic screen print of Marilyn Monroe by pop art pioneer Andy Warhol.
The show covers expansive historical, cultural, and stylistic ground. It also goes some way to setting the genre record straight, given that print is generally considered a poor relation of the painting domain.
“This exhibition celebrates the museum’s 60th anniversary,” Sirakovich notes. “All the works come from a single department.” The curator was spoiled for choice when she got down to sifting through the storage facilities for the exhibit lineup. “The department has a collection of 60,000 items,” she advises.
She says she was determined to unfurl the department’s finest for the public’s viewing delight. “We wanted to show off and make the statement that only we can do something like this. And we wanted to do it with the most avant-garde and revolutionary medium – print. Our collection has no [chronological] gaps, and we received gifts ahead of the 60th anniversary.”
That offered the museum a scoop or two. “Thirty percent of the works here have never been exhibited before,” the curator adds with more than a smidgen of pride.
It is not just about the talent, vision, and skill of the artists in question. According to Sirakovich, there is a sociopolitical element at the core of the discipline.
Democratization of art
“This medium generated the greatest degree of democratization in the history of art. It made visual culture accessible to different and diverse sectors of the public.” The political plot thickens. “It began with paper, which facilitated all kinds of propaganda, and it reached the highest level of art. For Picasso, for example, print became the most prominent and significant element in his career.”
There is no disguising the strident political statement in, for example, Storming the Gate from Käthe Kollwitz’s A Weaver’s Revolt etching series from the 1890s. That was inspired by a play about an event that took place in Silesia in 1844, when a protest of weavers whose source of income had been summarily slashed by the introduction of industrialization was violently suppressed. The protesters’ desperation is conveyed in the starkest fashion and in great detail through the skilled use of astoundingly intricate lines.
Kollwitz was also a standard-bearer for women in general and was the first woman to gain a professorship at the Prussian Academy of Arts.
The work of other female printmakers also has pride of place at the museum. Prints by 20th-century French-American sculptor and installation artist Louise Bourgeois, 71-year-old German-American artist Kiki Smith, and 48-year-old Israeli artist, filmmaker Maya Zack examine issues of identity, corporeality, and the politics of representation.
While most people naturally identify the term “print” with a paper underpinning, that has not always been the case. The exhibition features works with various substrata through the ages. We then get a crash course in some of the basic techniques of the print domain.
“The foundation can be wood,” the curator advises. “You can have a woodcut, whereby there is etching and carving in wood, topped by an ink or paint covering layer. The areas that protrude then transfer to paper. That’s [called] relief printing.
“There is also intaglio printmaking, which is a little more complex. You can etch, whereby the ink seeps into the recesses, and then transfer to the print. But there is a range of intaglio printmaking techniques, such as acid used with varying timing durations.”
Thoughtfully, the exhibition organizers have incorporated a group of screens in a cozy corner with video clips that illustrate the various print techniques featured in the show.
“We made clips lasting only a minute and a half each which show how to do it,” says Sirakovich. “If you don’t come from the field, it is very difficult to grasp how it all works.”
Lithographs also get a substantial shout in The Medium and the Message. “That involves a polished stone surface with a dialogue between oily surfaces and water. That allows printing runs of enormous proportions. That was a revolution,” Sirakovich explains. “The most prominent technique is screen printing. There are all sorts of variations.”
‘So many gems’
That much is front and center any which way you look in the voluminous exhibition. It includes 240 works and takes the viewer across centuries of momentous and compelling artistic, sociopolitical, and cultural evolution. Museum Director Suzanne Landau is deservedly proud of the current rollout and the accrued backdrop to the items on display.
“We have so many gems at the museum,” Landau notes. “We could just as easily have a drawing exhibition, and so many other things. We want to show what treasures we have, of such high quality. We have so many, and on such a high level. That makes this museum so special in the whole world.”
One can forgive the director for indulging in a little chest puffing at this auspicious milestone juncture of the museum’s timeline, particularly in the midst of the visual print collateral.
Sirakovich says the wealth of topnotch wares she had at her disposal in the run-up to the print show demanded not only a good eye but also a highly meticulous take on the vault offerings. Some guidelines were required. “We chose artists for whom print forms a major part of their oeuvre. And each artist here [in the exhibition] is identified with some technique innovation.”
That overarches the full chronological span of the show. “We began with Durer, from Nuremberg, and the breakthroughs in the paper industry, and what Durer did with engravings. That was a major revolution. And then we have Rembrandt with his etchings. Each of them achieved amazing perfection within the technique. And there is Goya with his aquatints [using etched copper plates]. And then we have Toulouse-Lautrec and Daumier with their lithographs.”
Medium as message
There are game-changer slots aplenty. “We also have the Die Brücke movement with woodcuts,” says Sirakovich, referencing the early-20th-century seminal German art group which favored a more primitivist approach. The relevant section in the exhibition features some delectable prints by the likes of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Emil Nolde, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
One of the tenets of the school of thought was to arrive at an artistic language that would form a bridge between the past and the future. The result is arrestingly graphic. It is not difficult to appreciate the impact their bold philosophy and artistic endeavor had on the scene of the day, and later generations.
“There were individuals and, more often, movements whereby the medium became a message,” says Sirakovich, with a nod to the exhibition moniker. “With Die Brücke, that expressed the anxiety they felt at the time, and it came across in the technique they employed.”
The print medium allowed artists to try their hands at new aesthetic and material ventures, allowing them greater room for creative maneuver. “Many artists, like Gaugin with his abstractions, and Toulouse-Lautrec with his influences from Japan, did not dare to do things like that with their painting. Print gave them freedom, and allowed them to conduct daring experiments. That is why print was part of the avant-garde.”
That, she says, was partly down to the medium’s under-the-radar standing. One of the advantages of using a then left field form of expression was that there was simply less to lose if the print works did not gain consumer or critical approval. Hence, artists often threw caution to the wind and could happily stray from their tried and trusted visual line and chance their arms. “It is a more open medium and has less of the profile of high art,” Sirakovich adds.
Explosions of color
There are explosions of color alongside the monochromatic exhibits. None less than Henri Matisse’s stencil print Jazz series. As physical infirmity encroached on his mobility, Matisse developed more personally user-friendly techniques such as paper cutouts. His work tended increasingly more to the abstract, proffering the spirit and essence of objects rather than trying to depict them in reality. He produced a much-lauded piece called Jazz, with cutouts that called on a range of subject matter, such as music, folklore, the circus, and travel. The prints come with texts handwritten by the artist, which serve as an autobiographical accompaniment.
Joan Miró’s La Meneuse de Lune (The Moon Leader) is not far behind in the polychromatic stakes. The 1975 lithograph imparts a somewhat hallucinatory effect in a flourish of symbols, lines, and shades which proffer much food for thought and inspection.
Home-based artists also feature in The Medium and the Message with, for example, Moshe Gershuni’s eight-parter Kaddish series from 1984. Each of the etchings contains one of the times God is praised in the kaddish prayer recited by mourners. It is a mostly dark, dense, and intense set, with a couple of pictures allowing more light into the cramped context.
The Holocaust also crops up on a couple of occasions, such as a woodcut by Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor Moshe Hoffman chillingly named 6,000,001 (Selection), which catches the eye and squeezes the heartstrings.
Naturally, you can’t have a print exhibition that spans the ages up to contemporary times without a mention of the pop art movement, which gained traction in the UK and the US in the 1950s and 1960s. Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe and the iconic banana print – made famous by its appearance on the album cover of 1967 rock release The Velvet Underground & Nico – are in the display mix, as is the stunning 2015 Self-portrait by Chuck Close, which comprises no less than 84 separate woodcuts.
Notwithstanding the ever-pervasive presence of virtual imagery in our lives, printmaking appears to be holding its own as a dynamic and flexible platform for individual expression and creativity. As such, it maintains its position as a powerful means for conveying incisive messages and inspiring aesthetic adventure.
“The Medium and the Message: Six Centuries of Printmaking” closes on June 6, 2026.
For more information: www.imj.org.il/en