The Artist and the Printer

As 'originality'—the direct involvement of the artist in a work of graphic art—is now a prerequisite of western printmaking, the fact that it is comparatively rare for the artist to undertake every facet of the task personally has tended to be concealed.

Many pre-photographic prints were made by a three-way division of labour. To create the wonderful Japanese Ukiyo-e prints of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the artist would draw an image on thin paper; this paper was pasted face-down onto the woodblock as a guide for professional cutters; and another group of craftsmen would then pull the actual impressions.

Despite its lack of 'originality' (as the term is now understood), the Ukiyo-e process gave rise to some of the loveliest colour prints the world has ever seen. In 1982, Kathan Brown's Crown Point Press, renowned in the United States for its original intaglio prints, revived the Japanese tradition for contemporary artists. Al Held and Francesco Clemente are among several painters who have provided watercolour maquettes for translation into woodcuts by Japanese craftsmen, a reversion to traditional methods that some curators and collectors have found shocking.

During the nineteenth century, some western artists not only made their own plates or blocks, but even began printing their impressions themselves. Instead of producing the identical editions required of professional printers (a task that demands a high degree of skill and consistency), these artists often created series of related but unique monoprints.

James McNeill Whistler, for example, learnt to print in 1858 by watching the great French etching printer, Auguste Delâtre. Delâtre's 'artistic' manipulative inking left specially wiped effects on the unetched surface of the metal plate, which a journeyman printer would have wiped completely clean. In Street at Saverne, Whistler's night scene in an Alsatian village, the intensity of the ink combines with the effect of the coloured papers to suggest nocturnal coolness and to vary the print's expressiveness at the printing stage. Later Whistler himself exploited these tonal possibilities while printing his Venetian nocturnes. His disciple, the Australian artist Mortimer Menpes, wrote in a memoir of 1904 that Whistler would turn every proof into a different state. As he printed, he would continually add drypoint marks or scrape the metal, 'caressing the plate into form'. Whistler felt that an etcher had to print his own impressions and that 'collaboration was an abomination'. Nevertheless, the commitment necessary for printing an edition of images is taxing, and he eventually discovered that Menpes was as capable of printing the nocturnes as he was. From then on, the artist, wearing canary-coloured kid gloves 'and not looking at all like a printer', would go off to garden parties leaving Menpes to do the work.

It was H.P. Bray, the most skilful printer at the English firm of Thomas Way and Son, who probably pulled most of Whistler's lithographs. The artist's use of an unfamiliar French transfer paper, and his drawing experiments using a sauce applied with a paper stump, required ingenuity in the processing. Whistler's lithotints, tonal images worked directly on the stone, were also difficult to print because of the tendency of the greasy medium used for drawing to spread. Early morning, for example, quickly became another nocturne, and Whistler had to do a considerable amount of scraping to regain the print's intended silvery delicacy.

The woodcuts of Paul Gauguin reveal how radically the printing of an image may alter its appearance and therefore its meaning. On returning from his first trip to Tahiti in 1893, Gauguin conceived ten large prints as illustrations for Noa Noa, a book about his travels designed to make his paintings more intelligible and saleable. The artist had left France—which he regarded as decadent—to recapture the life of a 'natural savage' in the South Seas; his prints were intended to convey the essence of the Pacific Islands to a French audience. Just as the text of Noa Noa was a stylistic blend of Gauguin's own untutored prose and the refinements of Symbolist poetry by Charles Morice (1861-1919), so the woodcuts combined deliberately crude gouging with a very delicate grazing of the block's surface. Unfortunately, however, printing these blocks created a number of problems for the artist. Although he occasionally produced exquisite monotypes from the blocks, like the Australian National Gallery's superb Te Faruru, in which loving natives have been drawn using a variant of Delâtre's inking technique, this manipulative inking shrouded his finer cutting and did not lend itself to the mass production of the popularizing publication he had in mind.

Louis Roy, a fellow artist, helped Gauguin print a small edition of his Tahitian prints, but being a messy workman he left ink all over the place and often created a printed surface like shiny linoleum. While the earth colours he used are appropriate to the subject, most of the artist's sensitive cutting was lost. It took Gauguin's son, Pola, who published a posthumous edition in 1921, to devise a printing method capable of rendering both the savage and the sophisticated marks in his father's blocks and of creating a consistent edition as well.

The possibility that printing might affect the aesthetic impact of a work was not lost on S.W. Hayter, founder of Atelier 17, the famous artists' co-operative which opened in Paris in 1927 and was transferred to New York during the second world war. Many significant modern artists have worked with Hayter, who believed profoundly that content and means of expression could not be separated. Not only did his experimental approach leave its indelible mark on the graphic art of this century, but he reinstated as a creative tool the engraving burin (previously used chiefly for reproductions) and ingeniously extended printing techniques in ways which might never have been devised had he not insisted that the artist's thinking should take place in the medium itself.

Despite the involvement of some artists in all stages of their graphic work, most have required the contribution of a protessional printer. In Paris, a focal centre tor artists since the mid-nineteenth century, many specialized workshops developed. The great commercial printing house of Lemercier, tor example, employed a trial proofer called Duchâtel, whose particular job was to collaborate with artists. As the revolution in colour lithography gathered pace towards the end of the century, a few sensitive and outstanding craftsmen opened their own shops, the most famous of which was established in 1888 by Auguste Clot.

The monochrome lithographs of Henri Fantin-Latour and Odilon Redon had led the way to the revival of French lithography, and Redon, who wrote about the process at length in his memoirs, was surprised that artists had not 'expanded further this rich and supple art', At the same time, having himself been at the mercy of a number of printers, he wrote with feeling: 'My God! How I’ve suffered in print workshops. What inner fury I’ve experienced at the unmistakable evidence of the dim incomprehension which the printer always showed toward my efforts'. Redon's frustration most probably arose from the gulf—that can so often develop—between the artist's desire for experimentation and the conservatism of printers who want to impose limitations so as to manage and stabilize images for edition printing.

Yet other painters were happy enough to rely on a printer's prodigious skill. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, for example, was especially fond of Henry Stern, a drinking partner to whom he dedicated many of his working proofs. The most important printer of the 1890s was probably Clot; he worked for the best known contemporary publisher, Ambroise Vollard, not only producing several albums involving a number of different artists, but also contributing to four great series, each comprising a dozen colour lithographs, by Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Ker-Xavier Roussel and Edouard Vuillard. One of the Gallery's prints by Denis, The reflection in the fountain, is dedicated to Clot as a 'souvenir of a laborious operation'. Although it has not been firmly established, Clot, who worked for the publisher Gustave Pellet as well as for Vollard, may have printed Lautrec's celebrated Elles suite; he certainly worked on the exquisite Béatrice, for Redon, as well as on a number of beautiful colour lithographs for Renoir. Indeed, although regarded as commercial by conservative die-hards of the time, the colour prints published by Vollard have since become justly celebrated. Nevertheless, Clot's input was often criticized. The contemporary writer André Mellerio, adhering to a strict conception of 'originality', felt that the printer intruded upon aesthetic matters that should have been entirely the province of the artist. He wrote:

This close and much needed collaboration between the artist and the printer would be reached by suggestion and agreement. They would thus overcome the difficulties of the craft at the same time that the liberated inspiration would assert itself more directly and intensely.

Lithography appears to have suffered a setback in the early part of the twentieth century—possibly through over-production, possibly because of cost, possibty because illustration could now be accomplished by photomechanical means. Whatever the reason, the main thrust of Vollard's publishing between the wars seems to have involved other processes.

Just as Clot had helped artists to conceive their colour lithographs, so the leading intaglio workshop of Roger Lacourière assisted great painters like Georges Rouault with their colour etchings. Rouault in fact worked with many printers and seems to have fallen out with one of the—Maurice Potin—because of the 'over-mellow prettiness' of the work this craftsman produced for him. Lacourière, on the other hand, gave the artist great satisfaction. The printer would take the black key drawings Rouault had made in sugarlift aquatint—a speciality of the house that allowed the artist to draw in positive rather than negative forms—and, using Rouault's maquette as his guide, would fabricate the necessary colour plates with magical skill.

The years immediately following the second world war saw a renaissance in lithography, chiefly at the hands of Fernand Mourlot who worked with most of the famous School of Paris painters. Marc Chagall created an enormous number of colour lithographs with the help of Mourlot's printers, while Georges Braque's lithographic masterpiece, Leaves colour light, was also made at his atelier. Braque, who until then had made predominantly linear etchings, was helped by Lacourière’s pupil, Aldo Crommelynck, to conceive colour prints as complex as his paintings. But it was Picasso who dominated the Mourlot and Crommelynck workshops with an inspirational output that affected all the artists who came after him.

Pat Gilmour

One of the greatest graphic artists of all time, Picasso took delight in breaking the rules. In this he was ably assisted by a number of printers who, after initially resisting his experimental approach, later became his willing collaborators.

Although he had made prints with Delâtre and had his own small press for proofing from 1907, it was only in the late 1920s that Picasso developed a sustained relationship with Louis Fort, a conventional intaglio printer. Fort simply carried out the artist's instructions, making no suggestions concerning the drawing or printing, but producing a group of classical and understated fine line etchings for the 1931 edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses.

In 1933, while walking in Montmartre, Picasso discovered the print workshop of Roger Lacourière—this accidental encounter was to lead to an important collaboration. Lacourière was an extremely inventive printer and, unlike Louis Fort, was also a skilled draughtsman and engraver. Having been introduced, like to Lacourière's sugarlift aquatint, Picasso went on to make some stunning aquatints in the Vollard Suite, a group of one hundred intaglio prints made between 1930 and 1937 and named after the French publisher.

It was in the late 1940s that Aldo Crommelynck, then an aspiring young artist, came to Lacourière's studio to learn engraving. Lacourière considered competent draughtsmanship to be essential for a printer, and, because Crommelynck had a gift for printmaking, suggested that the young man help the artists who came to his workshop. It was during this informal apprenticeship that Crommelynck first met Picasso. In their later years, Crommelynck printed about a thousand intaglio prints, or about half of the artist's published graphic output. According to his printer, Picasso 'had an extraordinary knowledge of his craft' and was able 'despite all traditional rules to put into practice simultaneously many techniques'. For his part, Crommelynck helped the artist with the difficult technique of laying the aquatint.

In a little over six months in 1968, the aged Picasso drew 347 intaglio prints, including 66 tiny illustrations for the bawdy fifteenth-century novel La Célestine. Always unconventional, he used a sugarlift aquatint technique on copper plates that were deliberately made greasy to repel the drawing medium.

After 1945, Picasso made his lithographs at the Mourlot workshop in what became another important collaboration with a printer. He initially faced an 'iron wall' of resistance when attempting to subvert orthodox lithographic methods, but through sheer persistence he slowly won the printers over. One of them, Jean Céléstin, recalled:

We used to leave at 8.00 p.m. at night and he [Picasso] would be there at 8.30 a.m. in the morning. Sometimes I would suggest we should call it a day. He would look at the stone, light up a Gauloise, and give me one, and then we were off again.

Having disarmed the printers, Picasso proceeded to ignore all the conventions of their craft. 'He did everything the wrong way', said Mourlot. 'He used gasoline, a thing never done. He used glue, gouache with ink ... everything that was anti-lithography'.

In one instance in 1961, the publisher André Sauret asked Mourlot to suggest to Picasso that he use colour in the monochrome illustrations for his forthcoming book Toreros. Picasso responded by returning one plate decorated with every colour from a box of twenty-four wax pencils. 'l take a look at the pencil box', said Mourlot. 'Twenty-four colours: all have been utilized'. The printer later wrote of his relief that Picasso had not used a box of thirty-six coloured crayons!

It was then up to Mourlot to carry out the task. Each colour was first traced and converted into the lithographic medium. The exact shades of ink were then mixed and all twenty-four separately printed. An astonished Picasso was handed the result. The artist had surely met his match!

Jane Kinsman

The skills developed by Parisian printers to serve the many artists working in the French capital did not exist elsewhere, partly because there was not the same demand, and partly because intense trade secrecy prevented the sharing of information about some of the more difficult operations. In such circumstances, artists were obliged to use the services of commercial pnnters, or, alternatively, to battle with art school facilities. In England between the wars, for example, the Curwen Press encouraged artists to draw their own printing plates, but when post-war union restrictions erected barriers, the time had come for a workshop along Parisian lines.

It was in the early 1950s that Stanley Jones, a student at London's Slade School of Art, decided to become a printer. Jones was inspired to this ambition by watching his teacher, the artist Ceri Richards, unsuccessfully trying to print his own lithographs—his determination to express himself lithographically was not matched by an equivalent technical expertise. Learning of Jones's interest in printmaking, S.W. Hayter gave him an introduction to the Atelier Patris in Paris, whose young proprietor was sufficiently enlightened to share his knowledge. An English publisher later asked Jones to return to Britain to set up a specialized artists' workshop, and in this way the Curwen Studio, which still produces lithographs for artists, came into being.

A rare insight into the way printers may take instruction from the publisher rather than from the artist is afforded by comparing one of Ceri Richards's early prints of the 1950s with the highly sophisticated impressions of the Dylan Thomas series that Jones was to produce for him a decade later. Rex Nan Kivell, who as director of London's Redfern Gallery published Richards's prints throughout the 1950s, used the services of David Strachan, an Australian artist who for a brief period ran the Stramur Presse in Paris. A note on an early proof in Nan Kivell's hand tells the printer to alter the artist's chosen honey and turquoise shades for Sunlight in Trafalgar Square and to use lemon yellow and cobalt blue instead. 'l like this lemon yellow, Dave', says a note on the proof, 'why not do it and let me argue with Richards afterwards...’

In the vast territory of the United States, the names of only three printers recur in the print literature of the pre-war period. The idiosyncratic Bolton Brown printed for fellow artists and so devoutly believed that the essence of lithography was crayon drawing on stone that he coined the word 'crayonstone' to describe it. Brown could achieve a remarkable range with his limited resources, conjuring up effects resembling pencil, charcoal, aquatint, and even soft-focus photography. Since he was extremely sensitive to the importance of the printer's input, he customarily signed the prints he editioned.

Another great craftsman, the New York printer George Miller, although clearly capable of dealing with such 'tricky stunts' as the beautiful mezzotint lithographs of the artist Robert Riggs, is said to have had 'some resentment of the vagaries of lithotint'. He certainly encouraged beginners to confine themselves to highly predictable crayon drawings, recommending that they use firm strokes in one direction with Korns crayon no.4. One artist who seems to have followed the printer's instructions was Grant Wood, who made his lithographs by post.

The third major figure in American printing before the war, Los Angeles-based printer Lynton Kistler, believed that part of his job was education, since artists who understood the medium did better than those 'who simply drew on a plate and let the printer do the rest'. Although he produced some colour prints, including Jean Charlot's exquisite offset Picture book, most of the prints published by Kistler during this era were monochrome.

Kistler gave up printing from stone in 1958 because of a painful skin allergy caused by lithographic chemicals, but not before he had worked with June Wayne and Clinton Adams, two artists who were to have a profound effect on lithography in the United States. Wayne, described by Kistler as demanding and meticulous, so loved the technique that when Kistler was no longer able to print for her she travelled to Europe to continue her work. At about this time, she was asked to nominate suitable artists to receive Ford Foundation Grants. As an aside, she commented that the Foundation should not make grants to individuals but should do something to benefit all artists, such as reviving the dying art of lithography. The result was that she herself was asked to take on the task, and in 1960, at about the time the Curwen Studio was opening in England, she started the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles and ran it there for a decade. With the assistance of Adams as associate director, Wayne was not only instrumental in introducing a highly sophisticated form of colour lithography to countless artists, but in creating opportunities for a generation of printers to reinvent the art of experimental collaboration in an American setting. Ken Tyler, the printer whose work was featured in an exhibition at the Gallery in 1985, was trained at Tamarind, which Adams continued after 1970 as an Institute within the University of New Mexico. The Workshop has effectively transformed the possibilities for graphic art in America, and has helped make the climate hospitable not only to lithography, but to all forms of printmaking.

When American Artist magazine published a directory of printers in 1976, about 40 workshops were named, over half of which were run by Tamarind-trained printers. The group as a whole was estimated to be making 100 000 impressions a year, with a retail value of some US$20 million. By 1983, The Print Collector's Newsletter was able to list over 160 print workshops, representing a greater variety of opportunities for artists than there had ever existed before.

Some artists prefer to work closely with one printer and to develop a relationship in which their aesthetic needs are so deeply understood that speech is almost unnecessary. June Wayne, for example, who enticed Jean Dubuffet's personal printer, Serge Lozingot, from France to Los Angeles, now enjoys the services of her own printer, Ed Hamilton. Far from resenting the repetitiveness of editioning, Hamilton uses the Chinese movement discipline of Tai Chi to perfect his printing.

Other artists may actually select a printer with a 'look' appropriate to the image they want to make. Jasper Johns, who for a decade has mined an iconography limited to a series of hatchings—repeated, reversed, rotated and mirrored—is fascinated with the way in which both the technique and the style of a printer may modify a given image; similar images by Johns have been processed by printers from Crommelynck in Paris, to Lozingot, now at the Gemini G.E.L. Workshop in Los Angeles. Richard Hamilton and Jim Dine, who have both made prints in a number of countries, have reacted differently to Crommelynck's sublime aquatinting. Hamilton has delighted in the printer's precision and has undertaken complex works based on James Joyce's Ulysses that he would never have attempted elsewhere, while Dine has simultaneously admired yet subverted the sophisticated French tradition.

Kathan Brown at Crown Point Press is the doyenne of intaglio printers in the United States. In 1972 she extended her premises, bought a new press and devised an elaborate technique to permit the artist Chuck Close to make his large mezzotint Keith. With the help of her first husband, Jeryl Parker, Brown also developed the rigorous evenness of aquatint necessary for the Minimalist style. Crown Point Press consciously tries to avoid acquiring an identifiable 'look'. Nevertheless, when Robert Kushner works there, his ebullient personality tends towards the classical restraint he admires in Matisse, and he uses a minimum of the rather brash collage materials he applies liberally when working elsewhere. By contrast, Judith Solodkin of Solo Press—Tamarind's first 'mistress printress'—brings out Kushner's playful side, encouraging him in the use of unusual solvents like Fresca soda, or resists such as spaghetti, not to mention collaged feathers, plastic flowers and sprinkled glitter.

The work of Jennifer Bartlett perhaps best exemplifies the wealth of printing talent that a graphic artist can exploit in the United States today. Running counter to what is expected of a given printing technique, she has submitted the same subject, inspired by drawings of a French garden, to woodcut and screenprint, making each look like the other. Her five-part print Graceland Mansion attests to the diversity available to the artist in New York and was made with the help of printers at four different workshops—the relief specialist Chip Elwell, the intaglio printer Prawat Laucharoen, the lithographer Maurice Sanchez and the screenprinter Hiroshi Kawanishi.

Pat Gilmour