HOUSTON, TX.- Singular Multiples: The Peter Blum Edition Archive, 1980-1994, organized and presented by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, opens in three segments in the Caroline Wiess Law Building on April 23, May 21, and July 23, 2006. Consisting of more than 400 works owned by the MFAH, including preparatory drawings, early proofs, and various printing surfaces, as well as finished prints, by an illustrious group of international artists, Singular Multiples will be the largest museum exhibition ever devoted to the graphic arts of the late 20th century. A total of 44 finished projects by 23 artists are included. Parts one and two will remain on view through September 24, while the third and largest segment of the exhibition will be shown through October 15, 2006.

In 1980, Peter Blum, an American-born art critic, art dealer, and filmmaker, who had lived most of his life in Europe, decided to publish prints by European and American artists of his own generation. Rather than producing single prints, he envisioned creating coherent, multisheet portfolios that would function as “exhibitions in boxes.” His first projects included portfolios by the young Italian artists Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia, and Enzo Cucchi; the Swiss artists Martin Disler and Rolf Winnewisser; the German artist A.R. Penck; and the American artists John Baldessari, Jonathan Borofsky, and Eric Fischl. He later published such internationally renowned artists as Louise Bourgeois, Alex Katz, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Brice Marden, and James Turrell.

In 1996, the MFAH purchased all the prints and books that Blum had published from 1981 through June 1994 with funds provided by the Alice Pratt Brown Museum Fund. Blum himself and Blumarts Inc., the parent company of Peter Blum Edition, enriched this already powerful collection by donating all the related preparatory material that Blumarts owned, providing a complete record of many of the print projects from initial concept drawings through early, tentative proofs of the prints, to their finished states. With this wealth of background material, viewers of Singular Multiples will have an experience akin to looking over the artists’ shoulders, tracing the evolution of projects for the Peter Blum Edition.

“Peter Blum is the most important print publisher of the last two decades of the twentieth century,” said Peter Marzio, MFAH director. “He selected a wide range of artists, from figurative to conceptual, encompassing all of the significant movements of the era. The unifying link is his unswerving determination to achieve previously undreamed of heights of aesthetic and technical quality in his publications. Singular Multiples dispels the notion of printmaking as a secondary art form. This archive contains some of the greatest works of art created in the 1980s and 1990s, regardless of medium.”

Installation III: July 23-October 15, 2006

The third and largest part of Singular Multiples, installed in Upper Brown Pavilion, a space of approximately 25,000 square feet, will open on July 23, 2006. The first grouping includes neo-Expressionist artists not shown in Cullinan Hall: Disler, Anselm Stalder, and Winnewisser, all Swiss artists. Inspired by early 20th century German Expressionist artists, the neo-Expressionist painters of the 1980s depicted emotional subject matter in a deliberately unrefined style.

The next section pairs two American representational painters, Katz and Fischl. Katz’s insistence on figuration set him apart from his contemporaries who worked in a more abstract vein. His stark, vibrantly colored images emphasize the flatness of the picture plane, particularly in his portraits Tremor in the Morning (1986) and 3 PM (1988). Blum published Fischl’s most complex and innovative print, Year of the Drowned Dog in 1983, a key event in the careers of both artist and publisher. Rather than a conventional portfolio, Year of the Drowned Dog is a single, built-up image. Three large sheets are butted to form the background of a Caribbean beach. In the left sheet, a native boy bends over the dog of the title. The middle sheet is unpopulated, while in the right sheet, a young man removes his swim trunks. Three smaller sheets are meant to be overlaid, each adding more characters and pictorial complexity. In a computer kiosk next to the framed, fully assembled print, visitors will be able to assemble the virtual components of the image, adding or removing the “incident” prints. In March, 1984, in recognition of the importance of Year of the Drowned Dog, Artforum, the most influential art journal of the 1980s, devoted a full-length article to the work. Never before or since has Artforum published a feature article devoted to a specific work of graphic art.

More abstract work follows: the linear Minimalism of the Swiss draftsman Helmut Federle, the biomorphic abstraction of Terry Winters, and the calligraphic abstraction of Marden, both Americans. When Blum proposed an etching project to Marden, the artist was in a period of transition. His earlier paintings had been austere monochromes enlivened by rich surfaces of pigment suspended in beeswax. Marden saw a new direction in the calligraphic drawings he had recently been executing in his workbooks, but was not yet ready to translate the sweeping, linear compositions into paintings. Working in a relatively unfamiliar medium enabled him to make the transition. Although he had initially conceived the project as six etchings, Marden, sensing that he was making an aesthetic breakthrough, continued working on more plates. The resulting portfolio of 25 sheets, Etchings to Rexroth (1986), is the artist’s most important graphic statement.

Conceptual artists, who were more concerned with the idea behind the art than in its execution, comprise the next portion of the show. In his portfolio 2740475 (1982), the painter/sculptor Borofsky interleaves seven screenprints of his signature man-with-a-briefcase image with seven small color etchings. The three-man Canadian collective General Idea translates eight of their tongue-in-cheek shield paintings into screenprints on lush, hand-painted paper in Fear Management (1987), while the young Japanese Conceptualist Yukinori Yanagi deconstructs his nation’s flag in a suite of lithographs, Hinomaru (1991). The German artist Rosemarie Trockel treats the phenomena of severe weather conditions in a suite of embossed etchings based on old weather maps. Each of the large plates of White Carrot (1991) has a cut-out section to accommodate a photo etching plate with a partially obscured image of actual weather conditions. The portfolio includes an unglazed porcelain sculpture, cast from an icicle, of the portfolio’s title.

In the following grouping, three American artists—Baldessari, Kruger, and Levine—deal with appropriated photographs altered and manipulated in different ways. Baldessari started from a found photograph, a still shot from an obscure 1940s B movie, which he divided into nine equal parts, then photographically transferred to an etching plate on which he obscured certain elements and enhanced others by hand. Black Dice (1982) represents the first time that Baldessari had used a paint brush since 1965. In Kruger’s suite of nine lithographs, Untitled (We will no longer be seen and not heard) (1985), the artist pairs each word from the title with a found studio photograph that appears to be from a sign language manual, but in fact is not. In Meltdown (1989), Levine used a computer to break up four famous images from art history into pixilated squares of predominant color. She recreated those colors on a jigsaw woodblock, creating four severely formal geometric abstractions.