The Prints of Vija Celmins

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Ocean Surface Wood Engraving 2000, 2000. Vija Celmins (American, b. Latvia 1938). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Gift of Nelson Blitz and Catherine Woodard in honor of Perri and Allison Blitz, 2002 (2002.127). More about This Exhibition Prints of ocean surfaces, star-filled night skies, and desert floors, among other images, by the contemporary artist Vija Celmins are on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through December 29, 2002. "The Prints of Vija Celmins," the first-ever print retrospective by this Latvian-born American artist, features some fifty works including a selection of drawings and artist's books. More about the Objects on View Exhibition Highlights More about the Artist Educational Programs Exhibition Publication Exhibition Organizer

More about the Objects on View
Internationally known for her intensely realistic paintings and drawings, Celmins has worked in the print medium since the early 1960s, meticulously rendering details of the natural environment through a careful exploration of process and mark. Celmins's oeuvre reveals an engagement with the natural world manifest in the history of art from Giotto's night sky on the ceiling of the Arena Chapel to Claude Mellan's intimate engravings of the moon's craggy surface to Martin Johnson Heade's Luminist seas. Her approach to these enduring subjects, however, is the result of a modern sensibility. Derived from photographs rather than direct observation—"the photographs are the subject matter," Celmins has said—her images dispel romantic notions of nature's sublime.

The subject matter, in fact, is secondary to Celmins, whose primary interest is an ongoing investigation of the formal aspects of art making, particularly the representation of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface.

An important group of prints from 1985 called Concentric Bearings is featured prominently in the exhibition. When asked about these, Celmins remarked: "A theme developed around describing space."

In the late 1960s, Celmins moved away from painting to embrace the basic properties of the graphite pencil, shortly thereafter limiting her motifs to contained images of ocean surfaces, nighttime skies, and desert and lunar floors. Her concentrated body of prints evolved naturally from her virtuoso drawing skill.

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Exhibition Highlights
Celmins's prints reflect a keen interest in the traditional methods of printmaking from wood engraving and etching to mezzotint and lithography. Included in "The Prints of Vija Celmins" are two rare examples of the artist's early work in etching and drypoint, View of Quarry (1962) and Utopia (1963); early lithographs made at Tamarind Lithography Workshop and Cirrus Editions in Los Angeles; and several intaglio works made at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles in the early and mid-1980s, such as Constellation—Uccello (1983) and Alliance (1983).

The exhibition also includes examples of more recent works, such as an exquisite woodcut and a wood engraving of the ocean surface made at Grenfell Press in New York in 1992 and 2000, respectively.

Images of delicate spider webs, Celmins's most recent motif, are exhibited along with a number of recently completed prints on view in New York for the first time. The diligent and adept arachnid is an appropriate metaphor for the artist—"Maybe I identify with the spider," she has said. "I'm the kind of person who works on something forever and then works on the same image again the next day."

In addition to the prints, several drawings, books, and woodblocks are on view. Featured among the artist's books is The View (1985), with poems by Czeslaw Milosz. This stunning book contains four mezzotints by Celmins, all of which are on display. A graphite drawing, Drawing—Saturn (1982), served as the inspiration for one of the mezzotints and is exhibited alongside the printed work.

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More about the Artist
Vija Celmins was born in 1938 in Riga, Latvia, and moved with her family to the United States in 1948. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Herron School of Art in 1962 and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1965. Her first solo exhibition took place in Los Angeles in 1966. Celmins has taught at the University of California, Irvine; California Institute of the Arts, Valencia; Cooper Union; and Yale University. From 1992 to 1994, a midcareer retrospective of her work, organized at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, traveled to the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

She also has had one-artist exhibitions at the Newport Harbor Museum, Newport Beach, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, and the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main. Celmins currently lives and works in New York City.

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Educational Programs
The Metropolitan Museum is offering a variety of programs in conjunction with the exhibition, including gallery talks, a reading of Czeslaw Milosz's poetry in the galleries, and a lecture by the artist. See the online calendar for details.

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Exhibition Publication
The accompanying catalogue includes an introduction by Samantha Rippner, assistant curator in the Metropolitan's Department of Drawings and Prints, and an interview with the artist. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press, it is available in the Museum's bookshop and in the online Met Store.

This publication is made possible in part by Mr. and Mrs. Derald H. Ruttenberg and the Mary C. and James W. Fosburgh Publications Fund. It documents "The Prints of Vija Celmins" in addition to serving as the most complete record of Celmins's printed oeuvre to date.

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Exhibition Organizer
"The Prints of Vija Celmins" was organized by Samantha Rippner, assistant curator in the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Drawings and Prints.

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