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  • Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints

    Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints

    Orenstein, Nadine M., ed., with contributions by Nadine M. Orenstein, Manfred Sellink, Jürgen Müller, Michiel C. Plomp, Martin Royalton-Kisch, and Larry Silver
    2001
    One of the greatest Netherlandish artists, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525/30–1569) is best known today for his paintings of peasant life. Yet is was above all through his exceptional graphic work that he achieved widespread fame during the sixteenth century. His drawings and prints made after his designs, while based on traditional sources, are innovative and independent, and they are wide ranging in their subject matter. Among Bruegel's foremost achievements in the graphic realm is the naturalistic rendering of landscapes. In many instances inspired by the Alpine mountains and valleys the artists encountered during a journey in Italy he made as a young man, these views synthesize the imagery of Bruegel's Italian and Netherlandish predecessors at the same time they represent a new and highly influential departure: an independent landscape genre entirely focused on nature. Indeed, a sixteenth-century authors famously wrote of Bruegel, "he teaches us to represent ... the angular, rocky Alps, the dizzying views down into a deep valley, steep cliffs, pine trees that kiss the clouds, far distances, and rushing streams." The master also created a body of peerless figurative designs featuring demons, virtuous souls, fools, and faceless peasants tilling the land. In allegories, portrayals of proverbs, and biblical narratives he dissected the imperfections of human nature, giving free rein to his imagination and wicked sense of humor. Often Bruegel produced what one early observer called "fantasies and bizarre things, dreams, and imaginations" that were closely based on the work of Hieronymus Bosch and inspired his contemporaries to call him the second Bosch. Bruegel's graphic work has recently been the subject of scholarship that has reevaluated the parameters of his oeuvre, assigning to other artists drawings formerly believed to be by his hand and adding some new sheets to the canon. The new Bruegel who has emerged from these studies is the subject of this volume, which accompanies an exhibition held at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York—surprisingly the first major show devoted solely to the master's drawings and prints. In essays of interest to the general audience and scholars alike, an international group of experts discusses the artist's life; his contributions as a draftsman and as a designer of prints; his social and intellectual context; and the posthumous survival of his art. Entries on the more than 140 works included in the exhibition further illuminate the master's genius and reveal meanings hidden in the imagery. Every print and drawing in the exhibition is reproduced and numerous comparative illustrations are offered. Provenances and references for all works, a bibliography, and an index are supplied.
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  • "The Print in the North: The Age of Albrecht Durer and Lucas van Leyden": The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 54, no. 4 (Spring, 1997)
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  • Infinite Jest: Caricature from Leonardo to Levine

    Infinite Jest: Caricature from Leonardo to Levine

    McPhee, Constance C., and Nadine M. Orenstein
    2011
    From Leonardo's drawings of grotesque heads to contemporary prints lampooning American politicians, The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a vast but largely known collection of caricatures and other satirical works. This handsome book offers 165 examples, dating from about 1500 to the present, that reflect the age-old tradition of using exaggeration and humor to convey personal, social, or political meaning. The selection of images is notably broad, ranging from the elevated to the rudely humorous: renowned writers and decidedly unhygienic cooks; elegantly dressed noblemen and victims of outrageous fashion fads; Napoleon as a tidy Lilliputian and Boss Tweed as a bloated Roman Emperor. Stressing the continuity of certain artistic approaches,Infinite Jesttraces the development of the genre across centuries and cultures. The essential visual components of caricature are discussed and illustrated, as are recurring motifs, including exaggerated faces and bodies, people depicted as animals or objects, and processions of bizarre figures. One section is devoted to social satire (eating and drinking, gambling, fashion, several of the Seven Deadly Sins), another to various aspects of political life (British, French, Mexican, and American). Artists as diverse as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, William Hogarth, Francisco de Goya, Thomas Rowlandson, Eugène Delacroix, Honoré Daumier, and Al Hirschfeld contribute their distinctive talents to this fascinating, informative, and very amusing volume.
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  • A Centennial Album: Drawings, Prints, and Photographs The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin Cover

    A Centennial Album: Drawings, Prints, and Photographs

    Orenstein, Nadine M., and Jeff L. Rosenheim, with Stephen C. Pinson
    2017
    The Met’s collection of drawings, prints, and photographs is an expansive work in progress and is considered one of the nation’s greatest repositories of humanity’s creativity. This Bulletin celebrates the centennial of the founding of the Department of Prints. William M. Ivins, the visionary founding curator of the department, had an expansive view of what constituted a “work on paper”—a philosophy that informed much of The Met’s collecting over the next century. The result today is a comprehensive repository reflecting an astonishing diversity of artists, genres, and media. Arranged as a provocative series of pairings—one drawing or print with one photograph—this Bulletin invites the reader to find connections and divergences between works of art that are rarely seen together, ranging in date from the fifteenth century to present day.
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  • Genoa: Drawings and Prints, 1530-1800

    Genoa: Drawings and Prints, 1530–1800

    Bambach, Carmen, and Nadine M. Orenstein, with an essay by William M. Griswold
    1996
    Genoa, well known as a seaport established in ancient times and as the birthplace of Christopher Columbus, emerged as a major artistic center toward the middle of the sixteenth century, sparked by the sea lord Andrea Doria's political leadership and ready patronage and the artist Perino del Vaga's arrival from Rome. The technically masterful, even boldly experimental, drawings and prints in this exhibition illustrate Genoa's growth by the early seventeenth century into an important regional artistic school. Some of the drawings were made as independent works of art, as for instance ones by Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, characterized by rich painterliness and dramatic content. Many sheets are preparatory drawings, which eloquently describe the Genoese tradition of illusionistic fresco painting that unfolded almost in its entirety within the splendid interiors of the new churches and palazzi erected on the Via Balbi and Strada Nuova (now Via Garibaldi). In addition to better-known artists—Luca Cambiaso, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Giovanni Battista Gaulli (Baciccio), Bernardo Strozzi, for example—the exhibition includes less-studied Genoese artists, such as Carlo Alberto Baratta, Giulio Benso, Bartolomeo Biscaino, Bernardo and Valerio Castello, Giovanni David, and Gregorio and Lorenzo de Ferrari, all of whom significantly influenced other artists both in Genoa and elsewhere in Italy. A number of years before his death, Jacob Bean, then Drue Heinz Curator, Department of Drawings, envisioned an exhibition of drawings and prints selected from New York collections that would highlight the work of Genoese artists between 1530 and 1800. Not only was Jacob very much the conceptual force behind the present exhibition, but he and the late Lawrence Turčić, then assistant curator, were also noted connoisseurs of Genoese drawings. Their discoveries are attested to by a large, mostly unpublished dossier of attributions to Genoese artists made during the course of more than a decade and kept in the archives of the Department of Drawings and Prints. It is in their memory that this exhibition has been mounted, with works selected by William Griswold, Nadine Orenstein, and Carmen Bambach, the latter two of whom also prepared the catalogue entries.
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  • Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt in The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Aspects of Connoisseurship, Volumes I and II

    Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt in The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Aspects of Connoisseurship, Volumes I and II

    Von Sonnenburg, Hubert, Walter Liedtke, Carolyn Logan, Nadine M. Orenstein, and Stephanie S. Dickey
    1995
    Rembrandt—the mere mention of his art nowadays raises the issue of authenticity. As famous paintings have been withdrawn from the canon of his autograph work, journalists have played up the sensational news with stories of fakes or lost monetary value. The public, for which the very name Rembrandt has been synonymous with the word masterpiece, may well be perplexed about the processes by which the master's authorship can be established. The purpose of the present exhibition is to demystify the kind of research that goes on at a museum like the Metropolitan by demonstrating the different approaches that art historians and art conservators take in reaching their conclusions. The Metropolitan Museum possesses one of the most significant groups of paintings, drawings, and etchings by the master, his pupils, and imitators—about eighteen paintings ascribed by common consent to Rembrandt, and about twenty-five that were once thought to be by him but are now recognized as works by pupils, followers, or, in a few cases, later imitators, as well as a large number of authentic drawings and etchings along with some problematic examples in these media. We have, therefore, limited the exhibition to the Museum's holdings. This has permitted us to focus more closely upon the works presented than would have been possible with loans from other museums.
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  • Cover of Grand Design

    Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry

    Cleland, Elizabeth A. H. ed., with Maryan W. Ainsworth, Stijn Alsteens, and Nadine M. Orenstein.
    2014
    Pieter Coecke van Aelst (1502 – 1550) was renowned throughout Renaissance Europe as a draftsman, painter, and publisher of architectural treatises. The magnificent tapestries he designed were acquired by the wealthiest clients of the day, up to and including rulers such as Emperor Charles V, King Francis I of France, King Henry VIII of England, and Grand Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici of Tuscany. At the same time, Coecke was remarkable not only for the complexity and unparalleled quality of his tapestries, but also for his fluency in various media: this lavishly illustrated volume examines the full range of his work, from tapestry and stained-glass window designs to panel paintings, prints, drawings, and architectural treatises. Though only forty-eight when he died, Coecke was one of the greatest Netherlandish artists of the sixteenth century. His paintings and drawings, initially wrought in the style of the Antwerp Mannerists, evolved through his enthusiastic response to Italian Renaissance design, and influenced generations of artists in his wake. This comprehensive study explores Coecke’s stylistic development, as well as his substantial contribution to the body of great Renaissance art in Flanders. Featuring twenty monumental tapestries, along with many of their cartoons and preparatory sketches, plus seven paintings, additional drawings, and printed matter—many of them newly photographed for this volume—Grand Design provides a thorough reappraisal of Coecke’s work, amply justifying the high regard in which Coecke’s work was held and its wide dissemination long after his death.
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  • an orange building rendering against a grey wall

    Suspended Moment: The Architecture of Frida Escobedo

    Hollein, Max with contributions by Abraham Thomas, Paola Santos Coy, David Breslin, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Nadine M. Orenstein and Jhaelen Hernandez-Eli
    2025
    An illuminating profile of one of today’s most innovative architects whose materials-based practice explores how space can provoke emotional response.
  • Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart's Renaissance

    Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart's Renaissance

    Ainsworth, Maryan W., ed., with Stijn Alsteens and Nadine M. Orenstein, and with contributions by Lorne Campbell, Ethan Matt Kavaler, Peter Klein, and Stephanie Schrader
    2010
    Jan Gossart (ca. 1478–1532) was among the first Netherlandish artists to travel to Rome to make drawings after antique monuments and sculpture and then, upon his return, to introduce biblical and mythological subjects with erotic nude figures into the mainstream of Northern painting. Often credited with successfully assimilating Italian Renaissance style into the art of sixteenth-century northern Europe, Gossart is the pivotal old master who redirected the course of early Netherlandish art from the legacy of its founder, Jan van Eyck, toward a new style that would eventually lead to the great age of Peter Paul Rubens. Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart's Renaissance offers a much-needed comprehensive reappraisal of the artist's accomplishments—the first in 45 years. It is not only an exhibition catalogue but also a study of Gossart's complete oeuvre as a painter, draftsman, and printmaker. Among the many highlights are the exquisite, gemlike Malvagna Triptych, Gossart's only surviving intact altarpiece; the Carondelet Diptych, one of the masterpieces of early Netherlandish portraiture; the Portrait of an Old Couple, an astonishingly trenchant psychological study; the extraordinary drawing of Adam and Eve from the collection of the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth; and a unique hand-colored etching of the young Charles V. To demonstrate the artistic milieu of which Gossart was a part, antique and Renaissance sculpture, paintings by contemporaries such as Gerard David and Bernard van Orley, and prints and drawings by Marcantonio Raimondi, Lucas van Leyden, and Albrecht Dürer are also discussed and illustrated. The majority of the paintings in this volume have for the first time undergone rigorous technical examination by methods such as infrared reflectography, X-radiography, pigment analysis, and microscopy. As a result, many problems relating to attributions, dating, versions, and copies have been clarified, and a fuller understanding has been obtained of the artist's working procedures, the relationship between his drawings on paper and the underdrawings of his paintings, and the evolution of his technique and style. The results of a valuable dendrochronological study of the panel supports are also presented. Gossart's accomplishments as a draftsman have been enhanced by the acceptance of several additional drawings, while his prints receive their first in-depth evaluation. The text draws on these unprecedented technical investigations as well as on recent original scholarship concerning many issues not adequately examined in the past. Among these topics are Gossart's early career as a proponent of Antwerp Mannerism, the full impact of his sojourn to Rome, the patronage of Philip of Burgundy (including a closer look at the erotic nature of court art), Gossart's dialogue with sculpture, the rationale behind his simultaneous portrayals of Late High Gothic and Renaissance architectural styles, and his experimentation with new modes of portraiture.
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  • The Renaissance of Etching

    The Renaissance of Etching

    Various authors
    2019
    The Renaissance of Etching is a groundbreaking study of the origins of the etched print. Initially used as a method for decorating armor, etching was reimagined as a printmaking technique at the end of the fifteenth century in Germany and spread rapidly across Europe. Unlike engraving and woodcut, which required great skill and years of training, the comparative ease of etching allowed a wide variety of artists to exploit the expanding market for prints. The early pioneers of the medium include some of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, such as Albrecht Dürer, Parmigianino, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who paved the way for future printmakers like Rembrandt, Goya, and many others in their wake. Remarkably, contemporary artists still use etching in much the same way as their predecessors did five hundred years ago. Richly illustrated and including a wealth of new information, The Renaissance of Etching explores how artists in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and France developed the new medium of etching, and how it became one of the most versatile and enduring forms of printmaking.