Exhibition Review 'Prints in Paris 1900' in The Burlington Magazine

PRINTS FEATURED PROMINENTLY in late nineteenth-century Paris: on the street, in the newspaper, at the theatre, in the galleries and in collectors’ portfolios. By 1897, according to the art critic André Mellerio, prints contained ‘the same amount of pure art’ as painting and sculpture. Key to this development was the fact that artists had taken to printmaking, which had previously been mainly practised by craftsmen earning a living from reproducing works of art or illustrating books and journals. The artists, however, explored the possibilities of print techniques in autonomous compositions. Camille Pissarro noticed in 1897 that ‘at the moment prints are the exclusive interest here, it is a mania, the young artists no longer do anything else’. This quotation is an apt introduction to the ‘mania’ for prints at the turn of the century, splendidly exhibited in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (to 11th June).