The State of Printmaking
from the New York Times...
Printmaking has suffered a crisis in recent years, with art schools closing their printmaking departments and giving the space and resources to digital equipment and instruction. In this country fine-art printmaking has always occupied a hazy zone, somewhere between painting and drawing and photography. The European model — with artists like Dürer and Goya producing woodcuts, etchings or aquatints that rivaled or outstripped their best paintings, and apprenticeships developing new printmakers — has never been successfully duplicated in the United States.
Barnett Newman/Artists Rights Society
“Canto VII” (1963), by Barnett Newman.
Jasper Johns/VAGA, New York
"Two Maps II" (1966), by Jasper Johns.
This is where people like Tatyana Grosman come in. In 1957 Ms. Grosman opened Universal Limited Art Editions in West Islip on Long Island and began coaxing painters and sculptors to the workshop adjacent to her white-shingled suburban home. Jasper Johns got his start as a printmaker through Ms. Grosman (she actually delivered the first lithography stone to his New York studio in 1960); ditto Robert Rauschenberg, Lee Bontecou and Barnett Newman. After Ms. Grosman died in 1982, the master printer Bill Goldston took over and turned artists like Kiki Smith on to printmaking.
In the show are lithographs by Mr. Johns, mostly from the 1960s, with his signature maps and flags. “Decoy,” a large print from 1971, functions like a mini-survey of Mr. Johns’s cast-bronze sculpture, with a light bulb and flashlight at the bottom of the image and a Ballantine Ale can at its center.
Mr. Rauschenberg is represented primarily by lithographs from the 1960s that combine found images of figures like John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson with the freehand scrawling associated with Abstract Expressionism. “Breakthrough II,” from 1965, demonstrates Mr. Rauschenberg’s interest in accident and chance, a kind of anti-art art strategy he picked up from John Cage and Marcel Duchamp. When the lithography stone broke, Mr. Rauschenberg decided to incorporate the mishap into his work. It appears as a jagged white line running diagonally across the black and white image.
Ms. Bontecou’s crisp, elegant prints mirror her sculptures, particularly the “Prison” series from the early 1960s. Her “Fourth Stone” from 1963 looks like a constellation of U.F.O.’s headed directly toward the viewer. A complete set of Newman’s “18 Cantos” from 1963-64 provides the biggest blast of color in the exhibition. The diminutive lithographs contrast with his large-scale paintings. The fields of red, blue and green are still divided, however, by Newman’s trademark “zip” stripes.
Works by Ms. Smith, another artist from Mr. Winter’s generation, range from a messy, abstract lithograph created from photocopies of her own hair, neck and face and a “Cher” wig, to more recent, figurative prints that combine etching, aquatint, drypoint and watercolors and were inspired by Lewis Carroll’s manuscript drawings for “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground,” published in 1886.
Carroll Dunham’s series of “13 Female Portraits” perhaps best illustrates the complicated, sometimes contentious relationship between printmaking and digital media. The garish, cartoony figures — curators describe them as “caricatures of portraits”; Mr. Dunham calls them “deformed caricatures” — began as felt-tip marker sketches, which were then scanned into a computer and colored digitally. The printmakers at Universal spent months finding ink to match the electric pink, yellow and blue of the digital images.
In other circumstances a digital printer would probably be used instead. The artist’s “touch” is highly evident in Mr. Winter’s prints — this is one of the hallmarks of lithography — but in Mr. Dunham’s case, it would be difficult to distinguish between a print made digitally and through traditional means...and that was the death of printmaking as an art form though it remains alive now in fiber but soon that too will fall.
