This hands-on, print-making workshop is designed to complement the exhibition With Graphic Intent, running in The Courtauld Gallery Project Space until 22nd June.
The exhibition presents a selection of works from The Courtauld’s collection of German and Austrian Expressionism, alongside a number of important loans. These works show that from the first decade of the 20th century, artists in Germany and Austria began experimenting with the radical potential of working on paper. The graphic arts provided opportunities to express complex ideas through the manipulation of materials and innovations in both subject matter and form. During this period, artists began depicting subjects that challenged inherited social and class norms, openly expressing anxieties around their threatened and unstable masculinity, and pushing at the very boundaries of what constituted art. In formal terms, they rejected the status of art as decorative, scorned traditional, idealised representations of the subject, and in some cases, dispensed with recognisable forms entirely.
This full-day workshop includes access to the permanent collection at the Courtauld Gallery, a curator’s tour of the project space display With Graphic Intent, and a printmaking session.
Schedule:
10:00 – 11.30: Welcome and curator’s talk in the Courtauld Gallery
11:30 – 13:00: Demonstration session and discussion of technique and materials
13:00 – 14:00: Break (lunch not provided)
14:00 – 16:00: Practical making session (wood cut design, cutting and printing)
Materials and equipment will be provided. Participants must be 18 years or above. Suitable for beginners.
Organised by Dr Emily Christensen and Dr Niccola Shearman, Associate Lecturers, The Courtauld, coinciding with their exhibition With Graphic Intent at the Courtauld Gallery.
This workshop will be led by:
Dr Emily Christensen is an Associate Lecturer at The Courtauld Institute of Art. Emily teaches European 19th and 20th century art, and on issues of empire and representation in Orientalism. Her own research has focused on Orientalism in the work of Expressionist artists Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter, and she has published on these artists in The Burlington Magazine, World Art, Aesthetica Universalis and Manazir and has contributed exhibition catalogue essays on both Kandinsky and Münter for the exhibition Re-Orientations: Europe and Islamic Art, from 1851 to Today at the Kunsthaus in Zürich (2023) and for Tate’s exhibition Expressionists (2024).
Dr Niccola Shearman is an associate lecturer at The Courtauld. She has held academic positions at the University of Manchester and is a regular contributor to Courtauld Short Courses. Her teaching concentrates on art in Germany and Austria to 1945 and her own research into the modernist woodcut print combines theories of empathy and the psychology of vision in questioning the emotional response to the medium in the aftermath of the First World War. Her article ‘Emotional Viewing’ was published in a special edition of the Journal of the Northern Renaissance in 2023. She also contributed to the Tate Expressionists publication, is writing on an émigré Viennese artist and is co-editor of a volume of essays in honour of the late Dr Shulamith Behr (forthcoming, 2025).
Helen Higgins (Head of Learning, The Courtauld) is a printmaker, art historian and curator specialising in printmaking and drawing practices. Following a BA in Fine Art, she completed an MA in History of Art, where her research focused on ‘Exhibitions of Riposte 1937-1942: A British Response to the denunciation and attacks on modern art in Soviet Russia and Germany in 1931-1937’. Helen has undertaken artist residencies and projects involving interventions within museum and gallery collections, catalogued several prints and drawings collections and worked within curatorial and learning departments at the Hayward Gallery, Tate Modern and The Courtauld.
Highlights from the display:
