Proposed Exhibition
Stone Upon Stone: Construction, Destruction and Evolution in the Built World.
Over the last few centuries, the development of new materials and power sources has allowed architects and engineers to expand their ambitions on a drastic scale.
Stone upon Stone, an exhibition of 84 prints from the John P. Eckblad Collection curated by Timothy Riggs, explores the artistic response to this revolution: its heart is a constellation of images crafted between the 1890s and the 1930s, a heroic age of construction when engineering projects like bridges, dams, the Panama Canal and the first generation of skyscrapers were particularly visible emblems of human progress.
The exhibition presents the built world as a continuous cycle of growth, decay and renewal. It begins with the essential resources for large-scale construction: capital and labor, materials and tools. It covers the construction process itself, emphasizing elements that have particularly attracted artists: extraordinary human effort, scenes of demolition and excavation, the latticework of scaffolding and the bold verticals and diagonals of giant cranes. It shows how artists have celebrated the results of construction: the architectural embellishment that turned office buildings into palaces and skyscrapers into cathedrals, and the poetic evocation of natural wonders in cavernous excavations and cliffs of concrete. Whether guided by the language of the architect or their own symbolism, artists have presented the achievements of building as emblems of national power and, more broadly, of human progress.
In its last phase the exhibition offers a vision of the effects of time on the built world, as economic and social forces transform countryside into city, or flourishing industrial plant into a complex of abandoned buildings. Is this progress? Sequential views of a given place are supplemented by individual emblems of decay or recovery.
Artists have presented the themes of the exhibition with meticulous realism or near-abstraction, and with heroic or “neutral” overtones. Styles, print types, and artistic perspectives vary widely. “Fine prints” such as hand-printed etchings and lithographs, traditionally accepted as works of art, go side by side with images where photomechanical processes enable the mass-production of magazine covers and posters. Political messages are juxtaposed to commercial advertisements. Joseph Pennell, C.R.W. Nevinson, Craig McPherson, Jean-Baptiste Secheret, Louis Lozowick, Fernand Leger, Martin Lewis, Pascale Hemery, George Cruikshank and Robert Crumb are among more than 70 artists who offer varied perspectives on the built world.
- Number of prints and posters – 84
- Approximate number of linear feet – 302
- 68 page color catalogue – paper & electronic versions
- Exhibition text panels
The John P. Eckblad Collection
Stone upon Stone is selected from the collection of prints formed over the last 40 years by John P. Eckblad to survey artistic responses to industry and labor. From the arrival of printing in Europe around 1400 to the twenty-first century avalanche of digital imagery, printed pictures have covered a broader range of subject matter than any other form of art. Some have been consciously created as works of art equivalent to paintings, destined for the wall of the collector or museum. Others were conceived as a means of communication: elements of a news story or instruments of propaganda. Like construction, printing was transformed by the industrial revolution. While a “fine artist” could produce an etching in an edition of fifty or a hundred, a magazine or newspaper could use new printing processes to issue pictures in thousands and millions. In forming the collection Eckblad has made no distinction between “fine-art” prints and prints of other types, recognizing both artistic and documentary value in all of them. They record the materials, mechanical operations, and results of construction, but they also express artistic attitudes – from admiration to condemnation.
Stone upon Stone reflects the diversity of the collection. Its methodology was tested in a previous exhibition, At the Heart of Progress: Coal, Iron and Steam Since 1750, which opened in 2009 at the Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and has traveled to venues in the United States, England, France and Belgium. A 52 page English and French language catalogue in color was produced for At the Heart of Progress. Timothy Riggs, curator emeritus at The Ackland Art Museum provided the catalogue text for both the At the Heart of Progress and Stone Upon Stone catalogues.
Fully illustrated checklists for both the Stone Upon Stone and At the Heart of Progress exhibitions are available. Please indicate your interest on our site, Art-In-Industry.com.
Biographies
TIMOTHY A. RIGGS, curator
Timothy Riggs received his Ph.D. in the history of art from Yale University in 1971, with a specialization in the history of printmaking. In a career of forty years at the Worcester Art Museum (1973-1984) and the Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1984-2014) he mounted more than a hundred exhibitions of various sizes. He has been particularly interested in the relationship between form and message in printed pictures of all types.
Selected Publications:
- Visions of City and Country: Prints and Photographs of Nineteenth-Century France, (with Bonnie L. Grad). Worcester Art Museum and American Federation of Arts, 1982.
- Three Sides to a Sheet of Paper: How Prints Communicate, Represent and Transform, Chapel Hill: Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2005.
- At the Heart of Progress: Coal, Iron and Steam since 1750; Industrial Imagery from the John P. Eckblad Collection, Chapel Hill: Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2009.
JOHN P. ECKBLAD, collector
John Eckblad received his Ph.D. in organization behavior from Case Western Reserve University in 1972. His 20 year professional career was largely spent in Europe in the heavy chemical industry and was focused on developing union-management relationships and employee commitment in large organizations. During this period, he began and built a multinational collection of more than 700 prints depicting industrial activity, worker life and commercial development.
To view the prints exhibited in Stone Upon Stone, download the .pdf OneStone.pdf. Please note Adobe Reader is required to view this document.
For those interested in having more information about this exhibition please contact us at stoneuponstone@art-in-industry.com