Martin Lawrence Galleries Announce Etching Art Seminars

Thursday, 25 May 2006 14:18

Philadelphia, PA - The fruits of the Halpern-Rogath Curatorial Seminars are now on view at the University of Pennsylvania.  The head of the Art History Department, David B. Brownlee, states, “There is no doubt that The Halpern-Rogath Seminars have transformed the way we teach art history at Penn”.  Leslee Halpern-Rogath and David Rogath, owners of Chalk and Vermilion Fine Arts and Martin Lawrence Galleries, have given the Art History department's program of curatorial seminars an enormous boost.  Their generosity will support many of these popular and unusual courses for years to come.

In the seminars, undergraduate and graduate students work with faculty to study a subject and mount an exhibition in one of the University's galleries. The latest Halpern-Rogath Curatorial Seminar, “The Early Modern Painter-Etcher”, will run until – June 11th, 2006.

In the early sixteenth century, the etching process made printmaking, long the province of trained professionals or metal smiths, available to artists already famous in other fields but novices in this medium.  The exhibition highlights the distinctive relationship between etching and other media and features prints, from public and private collections, by Brueghel, Caravaggio, Rubens, and Bloemaert, who each only made one etching, and other painters.

Students will study this important but rarely considered material and help to prepare for the exhibition, which will be assembled from major collections in the United States and hung in the Ross Gallery in spring 2006. The exhibition will then travel to the Ringling Museum, Sarasota, and the Smith College Museum.