From Durer to Cassatt: Five Centuries of Master Prints from the Jones Collection

Herschel V. Jones, a newspaperman and museum trustee, wowed the art world in 1916 when he donated thousands of prints to the young Institute. This exhibition is curated to offer an overview of techniques and trends in a genre that, because of its affordability, has always cast an eye toward market concerns. Thus the popularity of peasant festival scenes in the sixteenth century, replete with vomiting and fondling and buffoonish antics that intrigued the bourgeoisie. Also on view are masterpieces by Dürer, who used his incomparable engraving skills to render light refracting through the windows of St. Jerome’s study, and seemingly every last hair on his companion lion. At the opposite extreme is Francis Jourdain’s White Cat, made almost five hundred years later, whose economy shows the influence of Japanese art, which captivated many French at the fin de siècle. 2400 3rd Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-870-3131; www.artsmia.org