Complete Printmaker

John Ross, Claire Romano, Tim Ross

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781439135099
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Techniques

This revised and expanded edition takes the reader step by step through the history and techniques of over forty-five print-making methods. From the traditional etching, engraving, lithography, and relief print processes to today's computer prints, Mylar lithography, copier prints, water-based screen printing, helio-reliefs, and monotypes, The Complete Printmaker covers various aspects of fine printmaking. The book also includes a survey of issues and contemporary concerns in the printmakers world.

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Relief Prints

PABLO PICASSO Woman with a Flowered Hat, 1962 Reduction linocut, 13¾″ × 10¾″ Courtesy Reiss-Cohen, Inc. Photo by Nathan Rabin

Among the most appealing aspects of relief printmaking are the directness and swiftness of making an image and the simplicity of the materials used in creating it. In a relief print it is the surface of the block that yields the image; the areas that do not print are cut away, as in a woodcut or linocut, or a positive image is created by cutting white lines into the block, as in a wood engraving. In a collage print the relief surface is achieved by adhering materials to a support plate. In all methods ink is rolled on the surface, paper is then placed upon it, and this is either rubbed by hand or run through a press to produce an image. Of all the forms of expression in printmaking, the relief print is the most ancient. Although it is not possible to relate the rich history of the relief print in a limited space, a few highlights can help illuminate the historical precedence for many technical procedures we use today.

Origins and Development of Relief Printing

The history of the relief print is the history of peoples desire to communicate information, first through symbols and later through images and the printed word. The relief print can be traced to prehistoric origins, when early cave dwellers developed a unique iconography in both the Western and Eastern hemispheres. The engraved and scratched lines filled with earth colors that decorated the walls of caves were certainly a precursor to printmaking. Incised, engraved, and carved images were an important form of human expression. The earliest evidence of the production of impressions from carved reliefs comes from the Sumerians, who date from 4000 B.C. Among their carved reliefs are stamping devices that they pressed into moist clay. They also carved cylinders of lapis lazuli, alabaster, and other materials, which could be rolled into soft clay to leave the imprint of some authoritative signature. By stretching the imagination a bit, these imprints can be regarded as multiple prints on clay.

The Olmec Indians of Mexico, who date from 1000 to 800 B.C., baked clay tubes with relief designs that were used to print repeat patterns, perhaps on bark or on their own bodies. However, even the Olmecs’ use of some form of color to roll out their multiple designs did not lead to printing for communication.

The transition from clay and stone to wood for stamping seems to have occurred in Egypt, where early examples of woodblocks used for printing textiles date to the sixth or seventh centuries A.D. It was also at about this time that examples of printing on textiles and paper appeared in China. The invention of paper in China as early as 107 B.C. had opened up the possibility of multiple printing and the dissemination of images and information.

EARLY WOODCUTS IN THE EAST

The advent of paper answered the popular need to produce rubbings from stone inscriptions of the writings of Buddha. Dampened paper could be pressed into the inscriptions to yield an impression of the forms, or a pad of ink could be rubbed on the surface of the paper so that raised white writing appeared on a blackened ground. We can only guess that the logical next step was to carve the inscriptions into woodblocks, apply a water-based ink to the surface, and pull a hand-rubbed print much as we do today.

The earliest woodblock print bearing an image appears in the 17-foot-long Diamond Sutra scroll, printed by Wang Chieh in A.D. 868. This complex figurative image with text was discovered by a Taoist priest when he opened a sealed cave in eastern Turkestan in 1900. Because the text and image were cut from one block, this combination is referred to in the West as a block book. The complex and sophisticated imagery in the Diamond Sutra suggests that the Chinese had a much earlier history of printing from woodblocks onto paper and textiles. Color printing from more than one block dates from the same period.

Through succeeding centuries, the Chinese produced thousands of extraordinary block books on medicine, botany, agriculture, poetry, and literature. They printed complex block books with color plates in the seventeenth century, including two “how-to” manuals—the Ten Bamboo Hall Painting Book, a collection of exercises in drawing birds, fruits, and flowers, and the Mustard Seed Garden—for artists in need of instruction and inspiration. These books were later brought to Japan, where they influenced the development of the Ukiyo-e prints. Although the Chinese developed woodcuts of great skill and beauty, they seem to have lost interest in the medium after a period of years, and there was little further development of color in the Chinese woodcut.

ANONYMOUSAllegory on the Meeting of Pope Paul II and Emperor Frederick III, 1469-73 Woodcut National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

EARLY WOODCUTS IN THE WEST

The woodcut in Western art appears to have evolved in much the same way as it did in the East. It fulfilled a utilitarian need in the printing of textiles and helped to propagate the faith through the printing of images of a devotional nature. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries literacy was a rarity enjoyed only by the church hierarchy and the ruling classes. What better method was there to inform the ignorant populace of the late Middle Ages than to produce prints that could narrate the story of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the lives of the saints?

Paper from the East was known in Spain in the twelfth century, but only when it was produced in large quantities in France, Italy, and Germany in the fourteenth century did the art of the woodcut begin to flourish.

The oldest surviving European woodblock is a fragment of a Crucifixion scene dating from the late fourteenth century. Called the Bois Protat, it was found in a monastery in eastern France in 1899. The block is cut on both sides, but only one side is intact enough to print. Because the complete scene measured a good 2 feet square and paper at the time was never that large, it is thought that it once was printed on cloth for a banner or altarpiece.

In southern Germany, woodcuts began as primitive religious images. Their directness, simplicity of line, and economy of means made them very powerful. They were handbills for veneration, sold for pennies to pilgrims visiting holy places and to the populace on religious feast days. Woodcuts of Christ or the Virgin Mary were often pasted inside traveling chests or onto small altarpieces and frequently sewn into clothing to give protection from evil forces. Many were hand-colored to add reality and make them more appealing.

Although card playing existed in the thirteenth century among the upper classes, it was not until paper came into common use in Europe in the fourteenth century that woodcut playing cards reached the masses. Early images depicted soldiers in Germany and an alphabet series in Italy, and in France cards showed decorative court personages similar to those on today’s playing cards.

RELIEF PRINTS IN PRINTED BOOKS

Before printing from movable type took over in the middle fifteenth century, block books similar to those in the Orient appeared in western Europe. Pictures and words were cut on the same block. Outstanding block books were produced in the Netherlands: the Apocalypse of St. John, the Art of Dying, and the Paupers Bible were copied many times in Germany and the rest of Europe. The block-book Bible provided important models for Master E.S. and Martin Schongauer.

Although movable type had already been invented in Korea and used by the Chinese for many centuries, it was not until the 1450s that Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany, developed his method of printing from cast-metal type. The block book became obsolete, as did the scribe, and a new era opened in western Europe as printing shops sprang up to fill the demand for books and woodcut illustrations. Although the new press-printed books could not compare with the illuminated manuscripts of the nobility, the middle class at last had access to legible texts.

The second half of the fifteenth century was also the period when dotted metal, or criblé, prints were printed from pewter or copper. Gravers, drills, and punches of narrow sizes and shapes were scooped or hammered into metal to create fine lines that printed white or black when inked and printed as a relief print. This painstaking method was popular in northern Europe but rarely pursued in Italy. The results were decorative but of limited creative influence.

RENAISSANCE MASTERS OF THE WOODCUT

It was at this time that painters began to show an interest in making woodcuts. It is thought that in Ulm, Martin Schongauer’s brother Ludwig drew adaptations of Martins engravings onto wood. In 1486 Erhardt Reuwich of Utrecht, the first artist to be named in print, made a spectacular panoramic woodcut of Venice that was 5 feet long, the first folding plate in any Western book. Later Reuwich’s blocks were adapted in the Nuremberg Chronicle, a pioneer encyclopedia of world history.

By the late fifteenth century, the great artists of northern Europe—Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein the Elder, Hans Baldung Grien, and Lucas Cranach in Germany, and Lucas van Leyden in the Netherlands—were making woodcuts of great eloquence. Dürer (1471-1528) in particular widely influenced other artists. In addition to numerous single prints, he produced four superb woodcut series: the Great Passion, the Small Passion, the Apocalypse, and the Life of the Virgin.

ALBRECHT DÜRER The Riders on the Four Horses (From the Apocalypse, c. 1496) Woodcut Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Gift of Junius S. Morgan, 1919

HENDRIK GOLTZIUS Hercules Killing Cacus, 158 Chiaroscuro woodcut in two shades of sepia and black National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Rosenwald Collection

Dürer himself was greatly influenced by Italian Renaissance art, which he had encountered on his travels to Italy when he was in his early twenties. Many of the Italian figurative woodcuts reflected the graceful draftsmanship of Sandro Botticelli, with a thinner, more fluid line than that in northern European woodcuts.

Multiple-block color printing was done as early as 1508 by the German Jost de Negker, with Lucas Cranach and Hans Burgkmair taking up the method soon after. Called chiaroscuro woodcuts, these works resembled tonal drawings in that several values of one color were printed from separate blocks, starting with the lightest tone. The Germans depended on an outline block ...