Pan: A Graphic Arts Time Capsule of Europe 1895-1900

This exhibition presents graphic works by renowned artists of the fin de siècle that were published in Pan, the journal of an eponymous Berlin-based cooperative of artists, poets, and critics. Published from 1895 to 1900, Pan served as an important document of the transformation of taste and ideas during this period. It recorded the transition from modern forms of representation in the nineteenth century to the emergence of abstraction and expressionism in the twentieth.

The exhibition includes works by Aubrey Beardsley, Käthe Kollwitz, Auguste Rodin, Georges Seurat, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec as well as key figures in the Frye Founding Collection such as Wilhelm Leibl, Max Liebermann, Hans Thoma, and Franz von Stuck, who designed the distinctive logo and first prospectus for the journal.

The creation of a truly polystylistic, polyglot, pan-European publication such as Pan was in the spirit of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or great united artwork (which is also expressed in the architectural designs presented in the concurrent exhibition 1900). At the direction of Pan’s editors, illustrations were printed with the same care and integrity as the original works of art, in the belief that graphic arts provided access, for all, to the finest artists of the day.