Peter Paone is an acclaimed Philadelphia artist and teacher who has mastered the mediums of painting, drawing, and printmaking over his seven-decade career.
This exhibition features a selection of 22 prints from a recent major gift to Brandywine from the artist. Known largely as a painter today, Paone is also a talented printmaker. He won a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in the 1960s for his prints and feels that the medium, especially etching, was critical to his artistic development. In Shadows’ Embrace focuses on this early period of Paone’s career, offering a close look at his printmaking practice.
Artists associated with German Expressionism, especially Käthe Kollwitz, are among Paone’s major printmaking influences, as their evocation of the plight of the human condition aligned with Paone’s own concerns. Another major influence on Paone was the Spanish romantic painter and printmaker Francisco Goya. His renowned nightmarish series Los Caprichos (1799) informed Paone’s first major printmaking achievement, a portfolio entitled The Ten Commandments of Ambrose Bierce (1963). This rarely seen portfolio will be shown in full for the first time since 1967, when it was displayed at the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris. Inspired by the poet Bierce’s satirical reinterpretation of Biblical scripture, Paone created witty and disturbing images to bring Bierce’s words to life. The depth of line and rich tonality that the artist achieved through his combination of etching and aquatint amplify the dark visionary quality of these works.
An additional selection of prints with themes drawn from religion, art, history, and poetry reveal Paone’s ability to layer complex meanings onto what may seem to be straightforward subjects, transforming them into meditations on faith, loneliness, and death. Some materials from his studio—including several of his tools and the copper etching plate used to make one of the prints in the exhibition—will also be on display, illustrating the technique that enabled Paone to create the stark contrasts of light and shadow that were key to setting the mood of each image.
In Shadows’ Embrace is curated by Audrey Lewis, former associate curator of the Brandywine Museum of Art.