Artist & Book: 100 Years

June 22 – September 1, 2013

Portland Art Museum

The livre d’artiste, or artists’ book, offers a rich field for experimentation and collaboration. Blending art with illustration, text, typography, and bookbinding, the livre d’artiste challenges artists in new ways.

Artist & Book celebrates the range of achievement and innovation in livres d’artiste at the Museum and highlights several important recent acquisitions and gifts of work, new and old, including work by Henri Matisse, Leonard Baskin, and Jacob Lawrence. Of special note is a new acquisition on view for the first time, the stunning suite of lithographs Les Trente-six vues de la Tour Eiffel (Thirty-six Views of the Eiffel Tower) created by fin-de-siècle printmaker Henri Rivière from 1888 to 1902. Select loans, including Wassily Kandinsky’s landmark Klänge (Sounds) of 1912 add breadth and depth to the display.

Organized by the Portland Art Museum and curated by Mary Weaver Chapin, Ph.D., Curator of Graphic Arts. The exhibition is supported in part by the Vivian and Gordon Gilkey Endowment for Graphic Arts.