Selected Prints and Drawings by Beth Van Hoesen: A Gift from the Adams Trust

The exhibit features 55 prints and drawings by California printmaker Beth Van Hoesen, whose career began in the 1940s and lasted into the twenty-first century.

As the historian Bob Hicks noted, Van Hoesen favored compositions that isolated the subjects in a neutral field, the better to emphasize the artist’s extended observation of her models and her meticulous rendering. In this sense, Van Hoesen’s work resonates with the fabled precision and spiritualized realism of Northern Europe’s great graphic artists (ex: Albrecht Durer, Rembrandt). Indeed, Van Hoesen’s importance rests in precisely this combination of historical moments – the great period of European printmaking and what is arguably the most significant era in American art history – made evident in her masterful works on paper.