The department is pleased to announce “Romantic Prints on the Move,” a symposium organized by Cordula Grewe (Indiana University Bloomington) and our own Catriona MacLeod. This symposium, hosted by both the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, takes its lead from the 2013 PMA exhibition and corresponding collection catalogue, The Enchanted World of German Romantic Prints (Yale University Press, 2017). The series of public lectures in the afternoon is preceded by two object-based study sessions, which will enable students of various fields — from art history to German studies to studio arts — to gain first-hand knowledge of this remarkable era of printmaking (for the CFP, geared toward graduate and advanced undergraduate students, see here).

Inspired by recent debates about the circulation and pricing of contemporary art, “Romantic Prints On The Move” sets out to bridge the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries. To that end, the conference creates a stimulating conversation among academics, curators, and contemporary collectors. In particular, this conversation will focus on connecting nineteenth-century technologies with the current media revolution, thus bringing material history into the digital present. The goal is to shed more (and new) light on the economic, aesthetic, and geographical aspects of the production, dissemination, and collection of these prints in an era of burgeoning new printmaking technologies, while discussing their continuing appeal and marketability.

For more information, please visit the symposium website here.

Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Woman Seated Under a Spider's Web (Melancholy), woodcut, c. 1803 (detail), Philadelphia Museum of Art 1993-128-1