Ran from Feb 28, 2006 to Mar 25, 2006
Layton Gallery

Lecture: Friday, March 3, 5 p.m., by Frank Lewis, Director of Exhibitions at the Wriston Art Gallery
Reception following: 6 - 8 p.m.

This exhibition will display 12 prints by a group of artists whose names read like a who's who of early 20th century modernism: Alexander Archipenko, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Meidner, Franz Marc, Max Pechstein, and Egon Schiele.

The prints on display were produced in diverse printmaking media such as woodcuts, etchings, lithographs, and serigraphs, the majority of them during the creatively rich but socially tumultuous inter-war years, when many of these artists were viewed as degenerates by the Nazi regime. Alienated by the social mores of their time and the seemingly irrelevant traditions of the period's academic art, they moved their work into new directions for visual art, defining what was later to be regarded as one of the most important expressions of the early modern period.

La Vera Pohl, a young Milwaukee woman, acquired this diverse collection starting in the 1930s in Germany, by negotiating with heirs and visiting galleries and auctions. This will be the first exhibition of the Pohl collection in Milwaukee since it was moved to Lawrence University in Appleton after the school merged with the Downer Teacher's College in 1964. The exhibition is co-curated by James Slauson, a MIAD professor of art history, with Mark Lawson, MIAD's director of galleries.