Framing a Decade: Acquisitions of Prints and Drawings, 2001–2011

It is inspiring to see what can be accomplished in a decade. And the approaching ten-year anniversary of the Santiago Calatrava-designed Quadracci Pavilion provided the perfect opportunity to look at the prints, drawings, and artists’ books acquired for the Museum’s Collection in that time. Framing a Decade highlights those works that are among the finest and most rare, from a selection of nearly three thousand that are new to the prints and drawings collection since 2001. This exhibition, in turn, is a celebration of not only the artwork acquired, but also the donors and Members who helped make the acquisitions possible through gifts and bequests.

Framing a Decade spans over four centuries of graphic achievement in Europe and North America, and has three main areas of concentration: Old Masters, nineteenth and early twentieth century, and contemporary art. Among the artists represented are Old Master artists Jacques Callot, Claude Mellan, and Rembrandt van Rijn; nineteenth-century French artists Félix-Hilaire Buhot, Paul Gauguin, and Henri Rivière and twentieth-century German artists Max Beckmann, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Gustav Klimt; and contemporary artists Leslie Dill, Sol LeWitt, and Terry Winters. The breadth of the exhibition provides rich viewing and an invigorating trip through time.

Thanks to countless individuals for the works in the Museum’s Collection on view in this exhibition, to all the donors for their recent gifts, and especially to the Maurice and Esther Leah Ritz Collection; the Hockerman Charitable Trust; the Sam Francis Foundation, California; and Landfall Press Archive, gift of Jack Lemon.