The autographs of World War II’s Big Three leaders – etched on a program to a string orchestra concert during a break from their conference in Potsdam – are on display at the U.S. National Archives in a new exhibition that aims to look at history through penmanship.

The exhibition, which opens Friday and runs until Jan. 2015, taps into the National Archives’ collections to show more than 100 signatures of figures as diverse as pop legend Michael Jackson and the first U.S. president George Washington.

In perhaps the most chilling section, the National Archives has put out the marriage license of Adolf Hitler signed on April 29, 1945 as the German dictator and Eva Braun eloped one day before they committed suicide.

The license, seized by U.S. troops, testifies that Hitler and his longtime girlfriend were “of pure Aryan descent” and asks Braun, “Are you willing to take Our Fuehrer Adolf Hitler as your husband?”

Hitler signs with a scrunched scribble and Braun begins to write “Eva B-” before crossing out the “B” of her maiden name and writing Eva Hitler. The dictator’s confidants Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann signed as witnesses.

“Signatures tell us a lot about their owners and the circumstances under which they were made,” said David Ferriero, archivist of the United States.

The exhibition’s signatures show Civil War president Abraham Lincoln to be “decisive,” anti-slavery activist Harriet Tubman as “determined” and Hollywood legend Katharine Hepburn as “fearless,” he said.

The exhibition highlights the unexpected turns and what-ifs of history. A 1989 card signed by Saddam Hussein thanks new U.S. president George H.W. Bush for his “kind greetings”; two years later, the United States would attack Iraq after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait.

Another display shows the young Richard Nixon’s application to be an FBI agent. The fresh law school graduate never heard back – apparently, he was told years later, due to budget cuts in Washington – and he returned to California, soon embarking on a political career that would lead him to the White House.

Jennifer Johnson, the exhibition’s curator, said that the one historical figure she felt obliged to include was the U.S. revolutionary John Hancock, whose signature is on display in a document as governor of Massachusetts.

Hancock’s conspicuously large signature on the 1776 Declaration of Independence from Britain – on permanent display elsewhere at the National Archives in Washington – was so famous that his name has become synonymous with an autograph in American English.

Shifting to the contemporary era, the exhibition demonstrates an autopen. Barack Obama has become the first president to use an autopen, authorizing his signature remotely on urgent legislation when he is away from Washington, triggering protests by lawmakers from the rival Republican Party.

Beyond politics, signatures are increasingly uncommon in the Internet era.

U.S. teachers generally emphasize penmanship less than educators in Asian and European nations.

Johnson said she expected children at the exhibition to have trouble reading cursive writing.

“We’re certainly ticking that way in how we sign things. When I think about it, I don’t put pen to paper that often when making a transaction,” she said.

“As a historian, I’m terribly sad about it … but I think it’s inevitable.”

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LONDON – A new display exploring the high demand for copies and versions of portraits by Tudor court painter Hans Holbein the Younger has opened at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

“Hans Holbein Re-made” brings together a selection of important copies of the celebrated German artist’s portraits, revealing at the same time new research that has emerged from the gallery’s ongoing “Making Art in Tudor Britain” project.

During Henry VIII’s reign, Hans Holbein the Younger undertook many portraits of prominent individuals at court, such as Thomas Cromwell, Thomas More and William Warham. In the years following his death in 1543, Holbein’s portraits came to be prized, and demand for his work increased, due to both the importance of his sitters and his own fame and reputation as a highly skilled artist. As a result, there was a lively market for copies of his portraits, with artists producing paintings that faithfully mimicked both the composition and coloration of the original works.

“Hans Holbein Re-made” will show a selection of copies of Holbein’s portraits from the National Portrait Gallery Collection, including William Warham, John Fisher, Sir Thomas More and Sir Richard Southwell, all of which have undergone technical analysis as part of the Gallery’s “Making Art in Tudor Britain” research project. This research has revealed new information about how and when the paintings were made, and about the techniques that were used to ensure that the finished works skillfully evoked the originals.

The copied portraits were produced by making patterns from the original drawings and paintings, and by deliberately trying to imitate Holbein’s techniques. It is thought that the artists would have had access to the original Holbein painting (or direct patterns from the original) as the features and proportions of the figures are often matched with considerable exactitude. The differences between the portraits show that, far from being the specialist production of a single workshop, the copies were produced by artists working in numerous different studios. The number of surviving works of this type suggests that there was a lively market for such paintings during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I.

A portrait of Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, which is thought to be one of the first miniatures Holbein painted, will be displayed alongside a digital interactive screen that will allow the technique used in the portrait to be compared with that seen in another miniature thought to be by an artist working in Holbein’s studio.

A German painter, printmaker and designer, Holbein (1497 or 1498-1543) became best known in England for the compelling realism of his portraits. The son of artist Hans Holbein the Elder, he learned painting from his father and worked in Basle, Switzerland, before moving to London. Holbein worked in England from 1526-28 and returned in 1531/2, remaining here until his death. In addition to becoming court painter to Henry VIII he painted several courtiers, gentry and merchants. Over 80 of his portrait drawings survive, along with miniatures and paintings, providing a remarkable document of the period.

“This exciting new research has shown how the memory of the key personalities of Henry VIII’s court was kept alive through the creation and display of newly made portraits at least 50 years later,” said Tarnya Cooper, chief curator of the National Portrait Gallery.

For further information, visit www.npg.org.uk.

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NEW YORK – “The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux,” a major retrospective that explores the life and work of the exceptionally gifted, deeply tormented sculptor who defined the heady atmosphere of the Second Empire in France (1852–1871), is on view at the Metropolitan Museum through May 26.

The first full-scale exhibition in 39 years devoted to Carpeaux (1827–1875), it features about 150 works including sculptures, paintings and drawings, which are organized around the major projects that the artist undertook during his brief and stormy career.

Major international loans that have never before traveled to the United States, or have not been here for decades, come from the Musée d’Orsay; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes (Carpeaux’s birthplace); the Louvre, Petit Palais, and other French institutions; and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen. Important loans also come from the Getty in Los Angeles and from private collections.

The exhibition was organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Musée d’Orsay.

Carpeaux is best known today for a single masterpiece, Ugolino and His Sons (Metropolitan Museum), yet he was a multifaceted and prolific artist. A sculptor of emotion, both grand and intimate, he was drawn to extremes from Michelangelo to Watteau while retaining respectful admiration for his peers in French sculpture. A precursor to Rodin and a host of other early modern sculptors, he imbued his work with strong movement and visceral drive. He strove for anatomical realism in all media, but especially in his marble sculptures and busts, which seem to capture flesh and blood in stone.

“The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux” evokes the ambitious public monuments he created through groupings of drawings and vibrant preliminary clay models and traces the evolution of such masterpieces in marble as Ugolino and his Sons and the Musée d’Orsay’s Prince Impérial with his Dog Nero. Carpeaux sketched his surroundings constantly and had a genius for portraiture. Ravishing portraits of celebrities and friends, and wrenching ones of himself and his wife Amélie, are on view along with poignant drawings of an astonishing variety of subjects and techniques. His dramatic, highly independent paintings, barely known during his lifetime, are also on display.

The exhibition probes overlooked works to reveal not only the darkness and despair of his troubled existence, but also his cruelty toward his wife. Carpeaux, who was plagued by serious physical maladies and violent mood swings throughout his life, was only 48 when he died. Despite this, he was extraordinarily productive, accomplishing a vast body of work sustained at the highest level of quality.

Carpeaux was born 1827 in Valenciennes (also the birthplace of Jean-Antoine Watteau), the son of a mason and a lacemaker. He was accepted into the renowned École des Beaux-Arts in 1844 where he worked fervently to win the prestigious Prix de Rome. Carpeaux finally won the prize for sculpture in 1854, then moved in 1856 to Rome, where he found inspiration in classical antiquities and the Italian masters, especially the works of Michelangelo. Ugolino and His Sons, rendering a scene from Dante’s Divine Comedy, was completed in plaster in 1861, the last year of his residence at the French Academy in Rome. It created a sensation and brought Carpeaux many commissions. Upon his return to France, Ugolino was cast in bronze at the order of the French Ministry of Fine Arts and exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1863. The Metropolitan’s marble version was completed in time for the Universal Exposition at Paris in 1867. Various preparatory sketches of Ugolino in different media are on display in the exhibition along with the monumental marble.

Upon his return to Paris, Carpeaux established himself in artistic and society circles and was appointed the art tutor of the only child of Emperor Napolean III and his wife Eugénie, Louis-Eugène-Napoléon-Jean-Joseph Bonaparte, the Prince Impérial. Carpeaux proposed to the Emperor and his wife a portrait of the young Prince Impérial and created a standing portrait in marble that shows the boy, about 8 years old, with the emperor’s dog Nero, a gift from the Russian ambassador. The portrait of the crown prince was rapturously received and reproduced in different sizes and media such as bronze, plaster, terra cotta, and biscuit. Even after the fall of the empire and the early tragic death of the crown prince – who was killed by the Zulus in South Africa in 1879 – the Sèvres porcelain factory continued to sell his portrait under the title Boy with a Dog. The Musée d’Orsay’s marble and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek’s silvered bronze of The Impérial Prince and His Dog Nero are on view side-by-side with other versions of the work.

In 1863, Charles Garnier, the architect of the new Paris Opéra, commissioned four sculpted groups by four artists to decorate the façade of the building. Carpeaux’s group celebrates the theme of dance. Over a three-year period, he produced hundreds of sketches and models before deciding upon a composition of naked women encircling the spirit of dance. When The Dance was unveiled, it caused a scandal. The public was so shocked by the realism of The Dance that it was proclaimed pornographic. A bottle of ink was thrown against the sculpture and its removal from the Paris Opéra was demanded. However, the war of 1870 and the fall of the Second Republic, followed by the death of Carpeaux in 1875, eventually put an end to the controversy. Today The Dance is considered one of the 19th century’s epic works.

Carpeaux still retains a strong hold over the imagination, particularly in his native country, where he has held pride of place in the museum of his birthplace in Valenciennes and in the galleries of the Musée d’Orsay ever since it opened in 1986.

“The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux” exhibition is made possible by the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation.

Additional support is provided by the Gail and Parker Gilbert Fund and the Diane W. and James E. Burke Fund.

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Adams offered to personally print, sign and sell sets of 25 photographs from them – but with several conditions attached: He would select the first 10 and let buyers choose the other 15.

But not just anybody with $30,000 to spend in 1980 could purchase the collection he called “The Museum Set Edition of Fine Prints.” They would be sold only to people Adams judged serious collectors and only after they promised never to resell them. If they left the buyer’s family, they would have to go to a museum.

Among the few dozen who made the cut were the late Leonard and Marjorie Vernon, prominent California collectors whose set was given to the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2011 and is now the centerpiece of “In Focus: Ansel Adams,” which opens Tuesday.

Augmented by several other Adams’ photos from the museum’s collection, the exhibition marks the 30th anniversary of the photographer’s death next month. More than that, it provides a fresh look at both Adams’ genius with a camera and in the darkroom.

“What sets them off, really,” said Karen Hellman, who curated the exhibit, “is that they were created all within a span of years by Ansel Adams himself, at a time when he was printing with a particular intensity in mind.”

Although the collection contains several instantly recognizable images, such as Moon and Half Dome, photographed in California’s Yosemite National Park in 1960, and The Tetons and the Snake River captured in Wyoming in 1942, it’s safe to say even serious students of his work haven’t seen photos quite like these.

The difference is likely best displayed in two large prints of arguably Adams’ most famous work, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico. The museum set photo printed by Adams in 1980 hangs side-by-side with one he printed in 1948.

In a brief video clip accompanying the exhibition, Adams describes how he captured the image on a late November afternoon in 1941. He was returning to Santa Fe from a day of searching for subjects to photograph, when he caught a glimpse out of his car window of an “extraordinary” scene of the moon rising over a cemetery.

“I practically ditched the car, and I had some companions with me,” he recalled. “I started yelling, you know, ‘Get me the eight-by-ten, get me the tripod.’”

He managed to get off one shot before he lost the light from the setting sun that had been illuminating the crosses marking the cemetery’s graves – and providing the element that made the photo.

Although the brilliance of Adams’ work is clearly seen in the 1948 print, it’s displayed in much more intense contrast in the 1980 version: The crosses are brighter, the night sky is darker, the buildings in the background and the landscape in the foreground are sharper.

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They’re going on shelves and in cases at the Museum of East Tennessee History in Knoxville in an exhibit called “Woven of Wood.” The display runs through June 1.

The baskets date from the 1880s to just before World War II. Guest curator Carole Wahler says they were made for use in rural homes, in gardens or on farms. Most are made of white oak and were crafted in East Tennessee, though the exhibit includes a few made in Middle Tennessee.

The exhibit will include special events including a basket-weaving demonstration and a talk on the history of basketry in the region.

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Information from: The Knoxville News-Sentinel, http://www.knoxnews.com

Copyright 2014 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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