Printmaking
In an age of computer graphics and digital images, printmaking can seem so, well, quaint. Let’s see now, how does this work again? You make some cuts or marks on a block or a metal plate, ink it, press paper to it, and pull off the image. Simple. And, yet, there’s something enduringly magical about it. From one drawing, many.
Printmaking has a long tradition in Europe and Japan, but the techniques were slow taking root in this country. American artists either learned the craft in Europe or were self-taught. It wasn’t until 1907 that the Art Students League – the legendary Manhattan art school – set up an etching class. But the classes grew, and by 1922 a full-fledged graphic arts department was offering woodblock, lithography, and other printmaking processes.
“A Century on Paper: Prints by Art Students League Artists 1901-2001” at the PaineWebber Gallery, presents works by an illustrious roster of League artists who were either teachers or students or both. They include John Sloan, George Bellows, Reginald Marsh, Thomas Hart Benton, Romare Bearden, Isabel Bishop, Jacob Lawrence, Robert Rauschenberg, Will Barnet, and Robert Kipniss.
The show is divided into decades, and it’s interesting to see how the movements of the century – precisionism, social realism, surrealism, and abstraction – found expression through print media.
Consider the mezzotint. In this technique, the entire surface of a metal plate is roughed up, creating burrs, which are then smoothed out to varying degrees with a tool called a burnisher. The rough areas retain the most ink and print black. Hence, the drawing process is one of pulling lighter tones out of a dark background, which tends to create a mood of mystery, as in the case of Kipniss’ “Illuminata” – luminous branching forms that look like apparitions.
Something similar happens in William Behnken’s “Of Land and Sea,” although in this case it’s an aquatint, another process that also allows subtle gradations of tone. The shadow-laden objects of this still life have a pregnant fullness and a brooding presence.
Etching is about line, rather than tone. The artist draws on a wax-covered plate, then immerses the plate in acid. The acid eats into the metal only where the scratch marks have been made, and these grooves hold the ink. The process allows for very delicate and fluid lines, as can be seen in a print by Marsh (a league instructor from 1942 to 1954), with his light, airy sketch of a pair of shapely young women who look bound for Coney Island. Unlike the mezzotint, which reclaims form from darkness, etchings enclose forms with spidery black lines. Here, the white of the paper is transformed into blazing sunlight reflecting off sunglasses, thighs, and the brim of a hat.
A similar effect is evident in “Winter ’78” by Michael Pellettieri, a current instructor at the league. His bird’s-eye view of a cluster of New York apartment buildings relies on countless painstaking strokes that practically define each brick and railing, while the snow-covered roofs of the buildings – the unetched areas – are brilliantly white.
Very similar to an etching is drypoint, with one subtle but important difference. The line is cut with a tool that leaves a burr along the groove. The resulting soft, fuzzy line is used to great advantage in Martin Lewis’ “Wet Night, Rte 6,” a 1933 print of two black sedans driving down a rural road. The drypoint line imparts just the right degree of blurring to the skeletal trees and power lines to evoke the rainy atmosphere.
Woodblock printing is the opposite of etching. Instead of carving a line, the artist cuts away everything but the image that is to be printed. The raised area holds the ink, as on a rubber stamp. The execution tends to be a bit rougher than in the other media, and the image more stark and forceful, as in Howard Cook’s “Manhattan Bridge.” The 1930 print is a view of the bridge’s underbelly and the massive concrete and steel pillars that support it – a celebration of machine-age power that was a hallmark of American precisionism.
The lithograph, brought over from advertising, attracted a broad spectrum of artists in the Thirties, probably because it’s a what-you-see-is-what-you-get process that doesn’t require as much technical skill as some of the other techniques. The artist draws on a limestone block with a lithographic crayon, and those marks are made ink-retentive while the rest of the block, damped with water, rejects the ink. Will Barnet’s “Fulton Fish Market” shows how lithographs can retain the character of a chalk or charcoal drawing. The loose physical expressiveness of that kind of drawing (as opposed to the fussier process of etching or the laborious cutting of a woodblock) is evident in this rendition of the bustling fish market where an apron-wearing fishmonger cleans a fish on a barrel head, under the watchful eye of a plump housewife.
The show weaves its way through the decades. Some modernist styles, such as Miro-like abstraction – in which quirky shapes and lines cavort about the surface – worked well in the print medium, as did cubist-inspired workThe show energetically turns the corner into the 21st century, with works that express the whole artistic range of the contemporary scene, from Masaaki Noda’s free-form geometric abstractions to Barnet’s lyrical representations to the rigorous realism of Pellettieri. It’s a great refresher, or introductory course on the art of the print, and testimony to the important contribution of the Art Students League to the artistic life of this country.
PaineWebber Art Gallery, NYC
2002
