Origins of Modern Print Collecting: A History of Knowledge and Art

Name: Origins of Modern Print Collecting: A History of Knowledge and Art
Start: 2026-04-02T12:30:00-05:00
Location: 700 College St, Beloit, WI, United States, Wisconsin 53511

Schedule

Thu, 02 Apr, 2026 at 12:30 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

700 College St, Beloit, WI, United States, Wisconsin 53511 | Beloit, WI

The Wright Museum of Art cordially invites you to:
Origins of Modern Print Collecting: A History of Knowledge and Art, delivered by James Wehn, PhD

Thursday, April 2, 2026
12:00pm reception, lecture 12:30-1:30pm
Wright Museum of Art, Logan Room (2nd floor)
Generous support from Wanda Hollensteiner'54 funds the conservation of one work annually from the Wright Museum of Art’s collection. This year’s conservation piece is an album of collected prints. Historically, these albums were assembled by print collectors much like a scrapbook and could be used for teaching. A selection of these prints has been conserved by Len Lassandro and include European woodcuts, etchings, and engravings from the 16th through the 18th centuries.
In celebration of the Wright Museum of Art’s conservation of two print albums—objects firmly rooted in this collecting tradition—this presentation traces the evolution of print collecting: from the customized manuscripts of the German humanist Hartmann Schedel and the earliest print cabinets to connoisseurs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and finally to the first catalogues and treatises that shaped modern print collections as we know them today.
James Wehn is the Van Vleck Curator of Works on Paper at the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. He earned his master’s degree in art history at the University of Saint Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and completed his PhD at Case Western Reserve University. Interested in the global history of printmaking, James specializes in the development of
printmaking in Northern Europe from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. He has published articles in Print Quarterly and Art in Print, and curated exhibitions at the Chazen Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.