As a young boy helps prepare etchings for sale at his grandfather's studio, he imagines himself as part of some of the pictures. Includes a description of how etchings are made.

How is it that some established artists but not others come to be considered worth remembering? For answers, Etched in Memory looks at how history interacts with personal biography. The authors dig deeply into the archives for material on the careers and posthumous fates of nearly 300 British and American printmakers, half of them women, active during the Etching Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The authors examine the effects of changing taste on artistic productivity, on building a reputation, and on the selective survival of artists within the collective memory. They document the influence on careers of family milieu, of acces to art education, of sponsorship and networks, of having (or lacking) money, and of being in the right place at the right time. Being remembered requires, at minimum, that the artist's work be preserved and deposited in the cultural archives. It is here that demographics and other circumstances put women at a cumulative disadvantage.

Today the name Gene Kloss, NA, is synonymous with copperplate etchings and when this book was first published by Sunstone Press in the early 1980s, it quickly became a collector's item. No wonder because her limited edition prints are now becoming priceless on the art market. This 20th anniversary edition, the sole complete source of information on this outstanding artist, contains 81 black and white reproductions on 192 pages and includes a text by noted author Phillips Kloss. When Gene and her poet-husband Phillips Kloss first arrived in Taos, New Mexico, her first etching press, a sixty-pound machine, was installed at their camp in Taos Canyon by cementing it to a large rock. That press was eventually replaced by a 1,084 pound Sturges etching press purchased from a defunct greeting card company. With the years and the continual dedication came honors, national and international. The Smithsonian, the National Gallery, The Corcoran Gallery of Fine Art, the Library of Congress, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as many others, house the work of Gene Kloss in their permanent collections. From her spare life on the eastern edge of Taos with neither water nor electricity, but plenty of firewood, kerosene and inspiration, Gene Kloss informed the art world of the special beauty inherent in southwestern US images: the churches, the Indian faces, the mountains and valleys, the dances and intricate rhythms of life in a part of the United States that remains essentially unchanged to this day. ART NEWS called Gene Kloss ..".one of our most sensitive and sympathetic interpreters of the Southwest."

The Renaissance of Etching is a groundbreaking study of the origins of the etched print. Initially used as a method for decorating armor, etching was reimagined as a printmaking technique at the end of the fifteenth century in Germany and spread rapidly across Europe. Unlike engraving and woodcut, which required great skill and years of training, the comparative ease of etching allowed a wide variety of artists to exploit the expanding market for prints. The early pioneers of the medium include some of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, such as Albrecht Dürer, Parmigianino, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who paved the way for future printmakers like Rembrandt, Goya, and many others in their wake. Remarkably, contemporary artists still use etching in much the same way as their predecessors did five hundred years ago. Richly illustrated and including a wealth of new information, The Renaissance of Etching explores how artists in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and France developed the new medium of etching, and how it became one of the most versatile and enduring forms of printmaking. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana}

Features essays by Michael Cole, Larry Silver, Susan Dackerman, Graham Larkin, and exhibit co-curator Madeleine Viljoen. This book accompanies an exhibition that opened in April 2006 at the University of Pennsylvania.