My “Aha!” moment came one day in a lecture class devoted to the art of Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828). Slides of Goya’s prints appeared on the screen, including etchings from two of his most famous series, Los caprichos (The Caprices) (1797-1798) and the Los desastres de la guerra (The Disasters of War) (1810-1820). I was dumbfounded—never before had prints been featured in my art history classes, and never before had I seen such a damning artistic treatment of war and the ruling elite. After the lecture, the professor invited students to visit a display of Goya’s prints installed in the auditorium hallways. I learned that these were etchings, issued in multiple editions with impressions that were accessible and affordable then, as now, to everyone, not just the wealthy.
Determined to better understand the history of prints, this egalitarian art form that had existed for centuries, I attended graduate school with a focus on print studies and worked to develop expertise in the field of graphic arts. (You can imagine my delight when, as a new curator at the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, one of my first duties was to catalogue and label several portfolios of Goya’s prints!)
Since then, I’ve enjoyed the work of contemporary artists who have, at one point or another, been engaged with political themes in their prints, and I am pleased to say that many have been acquired by the Achenbach in recent years. (Enrique Chagoya’s series The Return to Goya’s Caprichos [1999] is a favorite.) So, it was with great delight that I found the etching Mendacia Ridicula (The Wheel of Ixion), by David Avery, in The de Young Open, and was able to acquire it for the Achenbach collection. Avery’s piece was one of ten works on paper that was purchased from the show, an incredible opportunity that was also enthusiastically supported by my curatorial colleagues Tim Burgard and Jill D’Alessandro, who also selected works to add to the collections.