Summer Day | Winter Night (1994)

Summer Day | Winter Night (1994)
Ruth Fine
Papered slipcase with title printed on spine, enclosing a double-sided leporello. Slipcase, H190 x W110 x D20 mm; Leporello (extended), H185 x W1888 mm. [16] panels per side. Edition of 150, of which this is #56. Acquired from Weinrich Books, 12 June 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

A curator for the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC) for forty years, Ruth Fine is an artist in her own right. Holding a significant number of her works, the Pennsylvania Academy of Art (PAFA) organized an exhibition of them from 8 February to 7 July 2024. By including works by artists she has curated, PAFA highlighted those two important elements of her career. Another important element to add, though, is her association with Claire Van Vliet’s Janus Press. Not only is Fine the author of its catalogues raisonnés covering 1975 to 2005, she has provided prints for several of its works and published her own artist’s book under its imprint.

Summer Day | Winter Night (1994) could hardly be more representative of Fine’s and Van Vliet’s work for the Books On Books Collection. It consists of two accordion-folded sheets of Japanese paper, each with linocut prints. One depicts a summer’s day in landscape from five blocks; the other, a winter’s night from four blocks. Designed by Van Vliet, a folded band printed with gold leaf binds the two sheets back to back along three edges with the top edges left untrimmed and free. At one short edge, the band also attaches the leporello to the wraparound cover with the title printed on the front and a colophon inside. The slipcase’s paper covering closely matches the foil-printed band.

Wraparound cover’s attachment by foil-printed band at the bottom and top of front cover.

Fore-edge view (bottom and top) of the foil-printed band joining the two prints.

Interior view of the two sheets at the join with the foil-printed band.

The views on each print are essentially the same landscape with variations generated by the colors applied and careful changes from the five summer blocks to the four winter blocks. Notice how the verdant tree of a summer’s day becomes the barren tree of winter below, and areas of white shift from patches of light to patches of snow.

Some images disappear with the change of color or line — and do so with the change of season. Notice in the center and right panels below how the small white shapes suggestive of summer birds perching in the trees disappear or thin in number in the winter landscape.

Not every image is as easily identified as those of the trees. What is that triangular shape just left of center below? In Fine’s artwork here and her landscape diptychs in the PAFA exhibition, even identifiable figurative images have that edge of abstract expressionism. By blending the figurative and abstract and manipulating them with shifts of palette and change of line, Fine captures the objective and subjective realities that, between opposite seasons, a landscape’s features, textures, light and wind will change, and so will our moods in response to the same but different landscape.

By transforming what would otherwise be the flat side-by-side perspective of a diptych into a double-sided leporello, Fine and Janus Press have handed the reader/viewer a more complicated experience. Unlike a wall hanging or the juxtaposed photos above, the double sides impose a break in time, a lag between experiencing summer and winter, day and night. Unlike a pair of fully framed landscapes, these landscapes open freely along their top edges, implying a subjective sense of skyward unboundedness but, at the same time, denying it with a foil-printed frame on the other three edges. The experience of the single texture of the Japanese paper aligns with the artist’s choice of a single landscape. The physical turning the book over aligns with the artist’s physical changes in palette and image to evoke the seasonal changes in that landscape. Hand, eye and mind (memory) are nudged together in this more complicated experience, the more haptic experience of an artist’s book engaging the reader/viewer with the artists and their art.

Further Reading

“Judy Fairclough Sgantas“. 25 May 2024. Books On Books Collection.

“Claire Van Vliet“. 3 July 2022. Books On Books Collection.

Fine, Ruth. 2006. The Janus Press, Fifty Years : Catalogue Raisonné for 1991-2005, Indexes for 1955-2005. Burlington, Vermont: University of Vermont Libraries.

Fine, Ruth. 1992. The Janus Press 1981-1990 : Catalogue Raisonné. Burlington, Vt: University of Vermont Libraries.

Fine, Ruth. 1982. The Janus Press, 1975-80 : Catalogue Raisonné. Burlington: [Robert Hull Fleming Museum].

Harrington, Leah Triplett, and Dr. Anna Marley. “Cultivator: The Curatorial and Artistic Practice of Ruth Fine in Context“, Artists as Cultivators, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), Philadelphia, PA, 8 February – 7 July 2024.