Printmaking Information

PRINTMAKING/PRINTING: TECHNOLOGY, INDUSTRY, INFORMATION AND ART.

[Relief Printmaking] [Intaglio Printmaking] [Lithographic Printmaking] [Silkscreen and Stencil Printmaking]

RELIEF is the oldest printing process. Chinese woodblock prints exist from the Seventh Century. When the technology came to Europe eight hundred years later, it rapidly made books available to a wider market, effectively breaking the royal and church monopolies on the transfer of information. The masses were given simple pictures of the Saints, the powerful, and the fashionable.
Artists worked on a par with today's movie makers, in that they made the visual statements that caught the popular imagination. The German master Albrecht Durer, spread his images all over civilized Europe and made himself a very wealthy man by his woodcuts, engravings and etchings. With the invention of the latter two Intaglio processes artists moved away from the RELIEF medium and only with Gauguin, in the late Nineteenth Century, does the technique enter the Fine Art world again.
In England and the United States wood engravers working on the end grain of fruit woods, produced fine tonal images. Foremost among these is Thomas Bewick whose volumes illustrating British Birds are the most notable.
In the Twentieth Century Munch, leads artists like the German Expressionists, Kirchner and Nolde to experiment with the brute power of black and white peculiar to woodcut. Picasso added to the color side of the relief process with his linoleum prints.
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INTAGLIO first appears about twenty years after the first woodblock prints in Europe (around 1430). Jewelers and armorers had for centuries been engraving designs onto their work, so at first all lines were cut with an engraving tool. Then etching techniques were brought over from the jeweler's craft, and suddenly it became possible to draw with the freedom of a pen, on the smooth metal surface, and let acids do all the cutting. This made the process open to artists fluid drawing styles, as opposed to the more stilted products of the majority of engravers. For the next four hundred years, reproductive intaglio printers gave copies of all the great paintings, sculptures, and sights of the Western World to the public. Many great artists created an even greater fame for themselves by working with good engravers. Rembrandt had a studio full of assistants who 'shaded in' his plates after he had done the initial drawings. This was not considered any more fraudulent than we would a movie-maker having others point the cameras as he makes his film. Major artists in the field of intaglio printmaking include Rembrandt, Goya, Whistler, Piranesi and modern masters like Hopper, Close and inevitably Picasso.

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LITHOGRAPHY was only discovered at the end of the Eighteenth Century, by Alois Senefelder. It allowed the artist to draw directly on the stone with pen and oily ink, or with the greasy lithographic crayon. Artists initially found it too limiting after the freedom of etching, and ignored it for about fifty or sixty years, but commercial printers saw its possibilities very quickly, and used it to print maps, publish music, make elaborate labels, and to generally do what was too expensive and cumbersome using engraving or woodblock. In France Artists like the satirist, Daumier in the mid Nineteenth Century, and Toulouse-Lautrec, Mucha and even Cezanne turned to it producing a rich body of work. At the same time in the United States the lithograph was being used by the publishers, Currier and Ives to spread images of the New Country all over the world. In the Twentieth Century American Printmakers revolutionized the technique at the Tamarind Studio in Los Angeles, and at ULEA in West Islip. In the former craftsmanship was the trademark, and in the latter adventurous combinations of imagery seemed to predominate. Major artists from this phase include Rauschenberg, Stella and Johns.

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SILKSCREEN developed from the simple technique of the stencil which has been around as long as we have had things to draw around or spray paint over. It entered the Twentieth century as a cheap way to label commercial products, but by the fifties and sixties artists like Andy Warhol and Victor Vasarely had co-opted it as a perfect way to produce all the hard edges and multiple images that were the staples of Pop and Op.