“Print by Print: Series from Dürer to Lichtenstein” (review)

Why is the World Series not called a World Tournament? Perhaps because it is a given number of games (seven) between the winning teams of the two major American baseball leagues to decide the championship. There is a beginning, middle, and (with the fourth win) end; the same is true of each game, which is divided into innings. A baseball series is won or lost; but by the logic of the game and the skill of the players, not by the intervention or arrangement of an artist.

A series (Latin serere, to weave together) is a group of related or similar things. By “series” the curators of the Baltimore Museum of Art, in their exhibition “Print by Print: Series from Durer to Lichtenstein,” mean pretty much anything that comes in twos, threes, and on up that has some common element, such as a baseball. A series could also be called a set–a tennis set, a deck of cards, a set of Dickens or Thackeray, or their serializations. As a pack of cards, a series invokes other terms such as sequence, which emphasizes a logical or numerical connection between the elements (1–10, Jack-Queen-King); succession implies one thing following another, Louis XVI succeeding Louis XV; and progression, a movement forward (as regression, back).

John Coplan, in what is still the standard work, Serial Imagery (1968), distinguishes series from serial as, with serial, the repetition of purely formal or structural elements: a deck in which all cards are the Ace of Spades, all “of equal value and all imprinted with the same emblem, which may or may not vary in size, color or position” (Warhol’s Marilyn Monroes, Noland’s Targets). Pure seriality for Coplan, drawing on serial composition in music, is formal variation only—colors in a Warhol (inking), larger formal variations in a Rothko, Noland, or Stella abstraction; but with de Kooning’s Women we are dealing again with both form and content: a shape which bears some relationship to a figural representation. Newman’s Stations of the Cross and Motherwell’s Spanish Elegies, abstractions, depend on the title to connect the repeated forms with a content.

The BMA’s “Print by Print” is a popular outreach exhibition, selected by Johns Hopkins students, and it is arranged according to theme and subject matter in the following order: series of Imagination, Narrative, Design, Places Real and Imagined, Appropriation, and War. I wish that it had been arranged for a more scholarly audience according to types of seriality or, better, types chronologically arranged, but there are also virtues in a thematic hanging.

Better to begin with the category of Narrative, corresponding as it does to the earliest historical sense of series (short of sheer decorative pattern). The prototype would be the Biblical representations of Christ’s life. One could argue that the series began with the dissolution of the single scene containing all the events of Christ’s life, or of a Tabula Cebetis (the most accomplished version is de Hooghe’s illustration for Epictetus’ Enchiridion of 1670) in which temporal progression is rendered by a sequence of figures scattered across a landscape, along paths, moralized as right and wrong ways taken. The single panel exfoliates into the Via Crucis, The Fourteen Stations of the Cross, in which Christ, the common element, is both form and content.

Seriality begins with a second scene, a contrast to (or variation upon) the first, for example an After follows a Before. Serial composition offers us the other, the alternative—as in the memento mori that accompanies each of the outrageous luxuries paraded by Trimalchio in Petronius’ Satyricon: the constant reminder that he will die tomorrow. And so accompanying the story of Christ is the double-image: the Triumph of Death, Death and the Maiden, the beautiful woman being tapped by Death, whether as lover-rapist or the worm-eaten figure (the transi) that lies below the living image of the medieval tomb.

So, life and death, action and consequence, beauty and ugliness...