NEW YORK.- The Museum of Modern Art presents Eye on Europe: Prints, Books & Multiples/1960 to Now, an exhibition that identifies major developments in the mediums of prints, books, and multiples in Europe over the past 45 years. The exhibition begins with the explosion of the Pop art screenprint in the early 1960s, and the introduction of artist’s books and multiples in that decade. It then proceeds to recent years and highlights strategies embraced by European artists working now, with their subversive approaches to the poster, reinterpretations of the traditional woodcut, and renewed fascination with wallpaper. Eye on Europe is the first major museum exhibition to explore this highly significant but lesser-known facet of contemporary art.

Eye on Europe: Prints, Books & Multiples/1960 to Now—comprising over 350 prints, books, and multiples by 118 European artists, collectives, and journals—draws work from both domestic and international collections, and includes many new MoMA acquisitions on view for the first time. The exhibition is organized by Deborah Wye, The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Chief Curator, and Wendy Weitman, Curator, Department of Prints and Illustrated Books, The Museum of Modern Art. Eye on Europe is on view in The International Council Gallery, sixth floor, and The Paul J. Sachs Prints and Illustrated Books Galleries, second floor, including adjacent public areas, from October 15, 2006, through January 1, 2007.

As Ms. Wye explains, “This exhibition focuses attention on artistic developments in Europe since the 1960s, highlighting a change in sensibility at that time and demonstrating ways in which the mediums of prints, books, and multiples enriched this artistic discourse.” Ms. Weitman continues, “With a long and distinguished tradition of printmaking to reflect upon and respond to, European artists’ innovative approaches to the artistic ideas of this dynamic period challenge preconceptions about printed and editioned art in particular, and contemporary art overall.”

The 1960s in Europe marked a turning point in contemporary art that was distinguished by a challenge to the dominance of gestural abstract painting and by the rise of alternative art practices, including a variety of accessible, multiple art forms that fostered new distribution systems. Artists across national boundaries turned to popular culture for fresh subject matter and approaches, as seen in Richard Hamilton’s screenprint Release (1972), based on a newspaper photograph depicting his art dealer and The Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger. Many artists were also attracted to new mediums that allowed for greater interaction with a broad public—as with the mass-produced Art & Project Bulletin, an artist-designed flyer distributed free by mail from a gallery in Amsterdam; French artist Daniel Buren’s striped posters mounted on walls in the street outside his gallery exhibition; the artist’s books that documented performance-based activities, such as British artist Richard Long’s walks in nature; and Czech artist Milan Knizak’s inventive multiples in the Fluxus mode.

The exhibition looks at vanguard European artists of this period and presents concentrations of prints, books, and multiples by Marcel Broodthaers, Joseph Beuys, Hanne Darboven, Bridget Riley, and Dieter Roth, among others, showcasing bodies of work rarely shown in the United States. It continues up to the present, following contemporary artists who have enriched these mediums, including Martin Kippenberger, with his outrageous self-promotional posters, and Damien Hirst, Peter Kogler, and Sarah Lucas, with wallpaper projects that exemplify the creative thinking generated by this populist printed format. Other artists, such as Christiane Baumgartner and Jean-Charles Blais, have redefined traditional printmaking mediums like woodcut and lithography by creating works of enormous scale or introducing digital applications.

Six thematic sections highlight dominant areas of investigation in Eye on Europe. Mass Mediums examines the rise of commercial techniques like screenprint and offset. Language concentrates on words, text, and symbolic codes, as well as artist’s books and ephemera. Confrontations focuses on radical approaches to content and materials, and on work influenced by the political upheaval of the 1960s. Expressionist Impulse considers art that responds to primal forces, with an emphasis on woodcut and etching. Recent Projects looks at present-day themes such as the subversion of the poster, cartoon imagery, ironic abstraction, and dystopic nature. British Focus reflects the outpouring of printed art in Britain since the 1990s, including work from a dynamic group known as the Young British Artists (YBAs)—this section will occupy its own gallery on MoMA’s second floor.

Mass Mediums
In the 1960s, artists embraced the mediums of screenprint and offset, techniques usually found in mass media and advertising. This phenomenon manifested itself in both hard-edged abstraction and photo-based imagery by such artists as Daniel Buren, Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, and Bridget Riley.

In London, Hamilton (British, b. 1922) and Paolozzi (British, 1924–2005) made Pop art collages of photographic images lifted from magazines, wrapping paper, and comic books. Hamilton’s first screenprint, Adonis in Y Fronts (1963), is a collage of clippings from the popular press, while each print in Paolozzi’s illustrated book As is When (1965), displays an amalgam of found printed imagery drawn from the artist’s voluminous scrapbooks.

In Germany, offset lithography and its ability to cheaply reproduce images in large editions appealed to artists Richter (German, b. 1932) and Polke (German, b. 1941). Newspaper photographs that were enlarged and manipulated to emphasize the artificiality of their dot patterning appear in Richter’s Elisabeth II (1966) and in Polke’s Girlfriends I (1967). Polke later enhanced his own photography in the series Cologne Beggars (1972), ultimately produced in offset. Buren (French, b. 1938) created posters for an exhibition held annually from 1969 to 1974 at the Wide White Space gallery in Antwerp. These offset works were mailed out as exhibition announcements, pasted in the streets, and installed on the walls of the gallery.

Language
Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, coinciding with the rise of Conceptual art, language re-emerged as a potent tool for artists that still resonates today. This section explores works that use words, texts, and symbolic codes, such as those by Marcel Broodthaers and Joan Brossa, as well as artist’s journals, books, and ephemera by Christian Boltanski, Hanne Darboven, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Richard Long, and A. R. Penck.

Broodthaers (Belgian, 1924–1976) and Brossa (Spanish, 1919–1998), both poets, began making visual art that incorporated text. Broodthaers’s book Pense-Bête (1964) consists of a volume of his own poetry covered with collaged additions obscuring the text. Brossa’s lithographs Rails and Convoy (both 1989) are pictorial puzzles that incorporate typographic fonts. Penck (German, b. 1939) devised pictographic symbols he called “Standart,” which he employed for prints, books, and even record jackets for jazz recordings.

New formats arose during this Conceptual period as artists explored alternatives to conventional painting and sculpture. Darboven (German, b. 1941) worked with artist’s books and journals, among other formats, including her page-project for Studio International, (July–August, 1970), tracking the passage of time with numbers, dates, musical scores, and cursive writing. Exhibition catalogues were reinterpreted as artist’s books as seen in the inventive series Kassettenkatalog issued by the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, beginning in 1967 with Joseph Beuys’s (German, 1921–1986) cardboard box containing a felt object and an essay.

The Art & Project Bulletin, a flyer dist