ETH Zürich, the Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, is best-known as one of the world’s leading universities, which has produced Nobel Prize, Fields Medal and Pritzker Price winners, ranging from Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, Alfred Werner, Felix Boch to Wernher von Braun and Philippe Kahn.
Not many people know that Switzerland’s famous ETH also hosts in Zurich one of the most internationally renowned and comprehensive collections of graphic art: the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich. The collection includes works from the Renaissance through to the present day.
From September 10, 2023 until January 7, 2024 the exhibition From Albrecht Dürer to Andy Warhol: Masterpieces from the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich at Museo d’Arte della Svizzera Italiana (MASI) in Lugano provides an opportunity to delve into the wide range of printing and illustrative techniques that artists have utilized and perfected from the Renaissance until today.
The collection, the Lugano exhibition and the catalogue (order the English edition—we earn a commission—from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de) invite you to discover masterpieces by artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Giovanni Batista Piranesi, Rembrandt van Rijn, Maria Sibylla Merian, Giovanni Antonio Canal, Francisco de Goya, Honoré Daumier, Edvard Munch, Edgar Degas, Egon Schiele, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Louise Bourgeois and Andy Warhol, to name just a view.
In his introduction, the MASI director Tobia Bezzola underlines that, due to their reproducible nature, prints have played an important role in the development and dissemination of European art from the Renaissance onwards. For centuries prior to the advent of photography, prints helped spread the knowledge about paintings and sculptures. They were often utilized as an aid in both the teaching and studying of art. Graphic reproductions were one of the few didactic tools available to help facilitate the spread of art-historical and artistic knowledge of both students and artists, as well as collectors and general admirers of art. In 1867, with all this in mind and with a view towards the aesthetic education of future generations, the ETH Zürich began collecting works on paper.
The head of the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich, Linda Schädler, notes that, today, the collection unites some 160,000 artworks. It uniquely provides a comprehensive overview of the history of printmaking, from single-sheet woodcuts through to computer-based techniques, and it includes also drawings, sketchbooks, artist’s books and phographs, The collection is particularly famous for its Old Masters prints (produced between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries).
Joël Mesot, the President of the ETH Zürich, writes that, in his inaugural lecture at ETH Zürich—which at the time was called the Polytechnikum—in 1856, the newly appointed professor for Italian literature Francesco De Sanctis reminded his students that they were human beings first and then engineers. De Sanctis’s maxim, prima di essere ingegneri voi siete uomini, can still be found on a memorial plaque in ETH’s main building today. This motto is an embodiment of the ideal that has distinguished ETH Zürich from the very start: to offer prospective engineers and scientists a holistic education that goes beyond the purely technical.
Joël Mesot underlines that technological change possesses enormous transformative power. Without the invention of the printing press, it is difficult to imagine the Reformation taking place. In our current times, digitalization and artificial intelligence are expanding the possibilities of visual and graphic representation at a staggering pace. Computer Graphics is firmly established at ETH and enjoys worldwide recognition. Developments achieved in the labs in Zurich have led to all kinds of innovations and applications, impacting fields as diverse as medicine and Hollywood filmmaking.
Joël Mesot reminds readers that not everything that is becoming technically possible is also desirable. The ambiguous potential of artificially generated images and videos is evident in phenomena such as ‘deepfakes’. It is for this reason that critical thinking skills are a vital part of students’ education. The Graphische Sammlung, operating at the intersection of art and science, with its diversity of subject matter and time periods, offers the possibility to question the seemingly obvious, to critically engage with questions of scientific representation and imaging.
Joël Mesot concludes that technological progress is only deserving of the name when it serves the needs of human beings. Art can support the necessary dialogue betweeen science and society by asking questions and opening up new and sometimes surprising perspectives.
The head of the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich, Linda Schädler, writes that the collection was initiated by Gottfried Kinkel (1815-182) in 1867 to serve teaching and study purposes. The intial name was Kupferstichkabinett (collection of prints and drawings)—as the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich was known at the time.
Technical universities played a central role in the establishment of art history as a university discipline. In 1855, when the Swiss Federal Polytechnic (as the ETH was known at the time) created the first permanent professorship for art history, the discipline was only beginning to establish itself as a recognized field of study. In addition to several polytechnics, only the universities of Königsberg, Bonn and Vienna offered art history classes.
Gottfried Kinkel remarked that a teacher of modern art needs a large number of illustrations, because all forms of art strike us more closely via the eyes than via the ear. In 1870, Johann Rudolf Bühlmann (1812–1890), who had started as a decorative painting apprentice in Zurich and became a self-taught artist, sold his collection of 10,000 works to the Federal Polytechnic; it can be considered the cornerstone of the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich. The first major donation came in 1894, when the Zurich banker Heinrich Schulthess-von Meiss donated 12,000 exceptionally valuable Old Master prints, engravings, etchings and woodcuts to the ETH.
Linda Schädler stresses that the MASI exhibition is the first comprehensive show of the ETH collection, presenting 300 carefully selected and chronologically grouped works out of a total of 160,000. In the catalogue, Linda Schädler is presenting the history of the collection. In total, roughly a dozen specialists have contributed to the catalogue (order it—we earn a commission—from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de).
Here just a few remarks about the two artworks superposed on the cover: Albrecht Dürer’s Rhinocerus (The Rhinoceros; 1515, Meder, first edition, woodcut and letterpress, 24.3 × 30.8 cm, donated by Heinrich Schulthess-von Meiss in 1894/1898) and Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup – Cream of Mushroom (from the series Campbell’s Soup I, 1968, silkscreen, 89.2 × 58.6 cm, edition: 140/250, purchased in 1976).
The catalogue entry by Linda Schädler states that, when a live rhinoceros arrived by ship in Belém (a suburb of Lisbon) in May 1515, it caused quite a stir. The animal was a diplomatic gift to the Portuguese king. The animal caught the attention of Albrecht Dürer, who immediately set out to design a print of it. He did not see the animal himself. He relied on descriptions from a letter which also contained a drawing of the rhinoceros. These he took as initial inspiration for his own depiction of the animal, which he enriched with elements from his own imagination. Albrecht Dürer’s intention was to follow reports about the animal’s appearance as closely as possible. However, some details such as the small second horn located between the shoulders, are completely invented. His woodcut sold extremely well and was printed in eight editions. According to Linda Schädler, his depiction was so convincing that it shaped European conceptions of the rhinoceros for centuries.
The catalogue entry regarding Andy Warhol’s depiction of a red-and-white can of Campbell’s Soup by Patrizia Keller states that the work came to embody the spirit of pop culture like almost no other work. Andy Warhol, who initially worked as a successful graphic designer in advertising, devoted his time from the end of the 1950s onwards to his own artistic creations, finding international fame as a co-founder of American Pop Art. The Pop artists broke with traditional conventions and found inspiration for their motifs in everyday life—in the mass media, consumer society and popular culture.
Patrizia Keller writes that, in 1962, Dany Warhol exhibited a series of thirty-two paintings of Campbell’s Soup Cans in Los Angeles for the first time. His first solo exhibition provoked vehement reactions from both critics and the public alike. He placed his works on a narrow shelf reminiscent of the long supermarket racks. He portrayed the complete range of flavours offered by the soup company, thus depicting a basic staple found in almost all American supermarkets and likely most households. Neither the product’s label nor its price had changed in decades, making it a classic component of American daily life. For Warhol, it was the perfect object with which to convey the most important information using a minimum of visual imagery. The inspiration for the series came from his own everyday life.
Patrizia Keller underlines that Andy Warhol took the principle of repetition and mass production a step further when he created two silk-screen portfolios of Campbell’s Soup Cans in 1968. With the principle of the series and the technique of silkscreen printing—originally primarily used in advertising—he amplified the eye-catching, poster-like quality of hisworks while at the same time questioning the value of an ‘original’ and the artistic signature.
Patrizia Keller writes that, in 1967, Andy Warhol founded his own business, Factory Additions, under whose name he published various portfolios. This was also the context in which Campbell’s Soup I and II were created, both based on some of his best paintings of the soup cans. Each portfolio comprises ten silkscreen prints which, due to the uniform company branding, can only be distinguished by the names of the different flavours. By expanding his own market via the creation of more affordable prints, Warhol simultaneously democratized the distribution of art.
This and much more can be found in Patrizia Keller, Arianna Quaglia, ed.: From Albrecht Dürer to Andy Warhol: Masterpieces from the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich. Scheidegger & Spiess, September 2023, 312 pages, 309 color and 7 b/w illustrations, 23.5 x 28 cm, ISBN 978-3-03942-155-8. Order the English edition (we earn a commission) from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de.
The exhibition From Albrecht Dürer to Andy Warhol: Masterpieces from the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich at Museo d’Arte della Svizzera Italiana (MASI) in Lugano is on view from September 10, 2023 until January 7, 2024.
For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations in this review of the book From Albrecht Dürer to Andy Warhol: Highlights from the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich have not been put between quotation marks.
Book review added on November 2, 2023 at 18:32 Zurich/Swiss time. Dates corrected on December 19, 2023 at 09:50: the exhibition end on January 7, 2024 (not 2023).
