This exhibition explores nocturnes–images that evoke the night. Luminous apparitions of the divine, dazzling fireworks, lamplit urban streets, and twilight’s soft glow over the natural landscape are all subjects that have intrigued and challenged printmakers across the centuries.

Nocturnes by European and American artists reveal the dark hours to be as lively as they are quiet. Nightfall demonstrates how these artists employ a range of printmaking techniques—mezzotint (a tonal method called the “dark manner”), etching, engraving, woodcut, and lithography—to render contrasts between light and shade as well as the atmospheric effects of light emanating from the night sky or electrical sources.

 

Download The Nightfall Exhibition Checklist

Nightfall artwork dimensions as well as credit lines for all the works in the exhibition.

ROCKWELL KENT American, 1882-1971
Twilight of Man, 1926
Wood engraving on maple
Overall: 8 1/2 × 11 1/8 in. Plate: 5 1/2 × 8 in.
Promised Gift of Frank Raysor, L.139.2010.72

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Nightfall: Prints of the Dark Hours is largely drawn from the Frank Raysor Collection, a generous promised gift to the museum.

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CURATOR’S INTRODUCTION

As the curator responsible for the Frank Raysor Collection of Works on Paper, a generous ongoing gift to VMFA, I am presented with the happy challenge of producing print exhibitions on a regular basis. The inaugural exhibition celebrating the announcement of the gift in 2011 was a survey of the entire history of the medium from its early beginnings to Post-Conceptual art. Read More.

Dr. Mitchell Merling
Paul Mellon Curator
Head of the Department of European Art

NIGHTFALL: SELECTIVE PERCEPTIONS
Over the next months during the run of the exhibition we will also be posting a series of short informative and critical essays first on the blog and gathering them here – their titles are given below so that you may know what ground we will be covering.

They were commissioned from Bailey Goldsborough, now a Senior Art History major at Virginia Commonwealth University, who spent the summer of 2015 as the Nightfall Exhibition Intern, observing the curatorial process from inception to implementation and researching the exhibition contents with the directive to take a strong critical perspective as well as to provide historical information in the eight essays he produced.

Nightfall Blog

Bailey Goldsborough
VCU Art History
Nightfall Exhibition Curatorial Intern,
VMFA Department of European Art

ACTIVITIES

Nightfall
(Studio School-wide curated exhibition)
Oct 30, 2015 – Jan 15, 2016
Reception: Fri, Oct 30, 5-7 pm

3 in 30: Nightfall: Prints of the Dark Hours
Tue, Nov 10, 11–11:30 am or Thu, Nov 12, 6:30–7:30 pm
Meet at Visitor Services Desk