Museum information
The exhibition will offer a unprecedented opportunity to explore a rarely considered, and even more rarely seen, art form. These genre mezzotints are a rich source of technical, aesthetic, iconographic, and social information. The mezzotint technique, which came into its own at the end of the seventeenth century, allowed printmakers to make meaningful and aesthetic contributions to the dramatic, nighttime scenes that had been a hallmark of Baroque genre imagery since the beginning to the century.
The prints that often reproduced masterful Dutch paintings were more affordable and even more significantly in this age of exploration more portable. Among other places, they carried this venerable tradition to the New World. The Dutch mezzotints in the collections of the National Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art represent the most accomplished and certainly the most beautiful examples of this fascinating art form.
The exhibition will open on September 24, 2008 (during Print Week and the Print Fair at the Armory in New York) and close on November 1, 2008.
Gallery hours are:
Monday-Thursday,12-4 pm
Saturday, 12-3 pm
Opening reception: Wednesday, September 24, 5-7 pm. For more information please call 1-718-982-2553
or visit our website
www.library.csi.cuny.edu/artgallery