Print Exhibit Reveals a Pictorial History : Display: Show at the San Diego Museum of Art demonstrates how the medium revolutionized the arts.

“Since the invention of writing, there has been no more important invention than that of the exactly repeatable pictorial statement.” The print, according to art and social historian William Ivins, revolutionized every strand of life it touched since its emergence in the 15th Century. Science, technology, communications and the arts have been radically changed by the advent of printmaking, and, in turn, those changes have been reflected in prints themselves.

The San Diego Museum of Art’s new exhibition, “The Art of the Print,” prompts just such grand claims for the medium, because so many of society’s seismic shifts materialize in this survey of 500 years of American and European printmaking.

The show covers a vast amount of territory with remarkable conciseness and eloquence. Most of the show’s 150 prints come from the museum’s own collection, but these are supplemented by other works from local private and public collections.

In terms of encyclopedic accuracy, the museum’s collection--and therefore this show--has many chronological, geographical and historical gaps. But, curator of prints and drawings Malcolm Warner (with the assistance of John Digesare and Judy Oberhauser) has crafted a show with such cumulative richness that such lapses matter little.

This is not a show of individual masterworks as much it is an exhilarating journey through centuries of social, attitudinal and artistic change.

As the show progresses from prints by the old masters to those by today’s young lions, we witness a steady loosening of the reins in both form and content.

The 15th- and 16th-Century engravings on view parallel the sacred paintings of the Renaissance, with their fine detail devoted to the crisp folds of the Virgin’s cloak or the radiant light emanating from the Christ child’s halo. Sin and sacrifice dominate these works, and it’s not until the 17th Century, in the work of Rembrandt van Rijn and other Dutch artists, that we begin to sense real flesh, puffy eyes, and tired limbs weighted by the physical stress of life and not just its spiritual pressures.

Rembrandt’s prints are casual snapshots compared to the stagy theatrics seen in the art of his predecessors. Printmakers began to embrace a wider, more critical world after the 17th Century. Albrecht Durer’s circa 1496 image of the repentant, prodigal son newly sworn to the glory of God and the sanctity of life gave way to Francisco de Goya’s donkey-toting peasants satirizing the Spanish elite (1797-8), and, eventually, George Grosz’s sneering look at the vices of the German bourgeoisie (1922).

The evolution continued steadily and radically, giving rise to landscape and genre images unleashed from mythical and religious constraints. Devotional icons and images of adoration continued to be made (witness Edouard Manet’s 1866-70 vision of the dead Christ with angels), but were offset by themes far less holy. By the 1880s, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was using the power of the print to explore the wilder circles of show business and even prostitution.

Sin continues to be a magnetic attraction for artists, but it is no longer feared and reproached as before. In 1902, Norwegian artist Edvard Munch pictures “The Sin” as a nude woman with long waves of red hair and brutally direct green eyes, a terrifying beauty possessed by her own seductive powers.

Myth, too, has remained an appealing mine of source material into the 20th Century, but times and perspectives have changed since Jan Harmensz Muller’s charming engraving of a satyr removing a thorn from a faun’s foot (circa 1590-95). Muller’s mythical creatures cavort in an Arcadian wonderland, but those of Pablo Picasso occupy a tense realm somewhere between fantasy and nightmare. In his 1933 dry point, “Minotaur Caressing a Sleeping Woman,” a curly-haired, horned creature hovers a breath away from a delicately featured woman. The Minotaur leans over her like a man, but with the terrifying bulk of a beast.

The broadening of the parameters granted to and eventually seized by the artist also can be traced here through portraits. In 1586, Hieronymus Wierix made an engraving of his boss, Philip II of Spain, that served as the king’s public-relations image, his 8x10 glossy. Appropriately, King Philip is seen as authoritative, stern and most of all, rich. In 1923, German artist Kathe Kollwitz used the woodcut medium as a mirror, her only boss being her own strong sense of self. In her gripping self-portrait, as in the rest of her oeuvre, Kollwitz questioned the distribution of power as forcefully as Wierix had celebrated King Philip’s own manipulation of it in his portrait.

One of the strengths of the museum’s print collection is in American works from the first half of this century, and the show takes a deliberately slower course here, pausing to note lesser-known names among the more acclaimed.

Printmaking’s history as a democratic, accessible medium has made it conducive to the depiction of humble subjects--laborers, farmers, the working poor. The American section of the show dwells in this terrain the longest, with Jackson Lee Nesbitt’s image of steelworkers pouring hot metal, Harry Sternberg’s scene from the coal miner’s daily grind and Thomas Hart Benton’s poignant scene of migrant farmers on the move.

As this survey of printmaking turns the corner into the contemporary era, the prints get louder, larger, yet more banal. Now Mao Tse-tung is on a par with Marilyn Monroe in candy-colored screen-prints by Andy Warhol. Jasper Johns memorializes beer cans, Claes Oldenburg plans an iconic monument to a three-way plug, and Jim Dine makes portraits of paintbrushes.

Only a few of the contemporary printmakers here make art about the world beyond their studio, among them Polish artist Krzysztof Skorczewski. In his trilogy of prints from the early 1980s--”Tower of Babel,” “Ark” and “Deluge”--massive manual efforts stand like stark monuments to human vanity and futility.

“The Art of the Print” is, ultimately, a journey of discovery. Revealed along the way is not only the significance of the various printmaking media--often condescended to by connoisseurs and collectors--but also the wealth of the Museum of Art’s own long-sequestered print collection.

Next year, the collection will be granted its own permanent gallery as a result of a gift from the late Carol Dempster Larsen that also will give a healthy boost to the print and drawing department’s acquisition and conservation budget. The generosity of this gift and the wisdom of this show are both accomplishments the museum should be proud of.

“The Art of the Print” continues at the San Diego Museum of Art through Jan. 5. The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday, 10-4:30.