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Print Lovers at 30
Printmaking: Contradictions and Community
(essay for the catalogue for the “Print Lovers at 30” exhibition Nelson Atkins Museum May 1 –August 1 2008)
Guest Curator, Professor Hugh J. Merrill
© 2008 by the Trustees of the Nelson Gallery Foundation
This catalogue, and the accompanying exhibition of selected works, celebrates the gifts of the Print Society, guided by curator and founder George McKenna, to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art over a thirty-year period. To more deeply understand the significance of these works one needs to go beyond the standard definitions of traditional printmaking techniques: lithography, etching, silkscreen and relief printing. Instead, one must examine printmaking as a discipline and recognize the two cultures of production that led to the creation of these remarkable artworks. The artworks collected by the Print Society represent two broad streams of the many tributaries defining contemporary printmaking. The first is the inclusive and community oriented world of the printmaker, while the second represents the exclusive and elite collaboration between esteemed artists and master printers.
Printmaking is an art form based on the mastery of wonderfully arcane processes. The alchemy of these magical mediums can inspire artists to explore and hone their personal vision and ideas through the craft of printmaking. However, the second group of creative individuals falls even more deeply under printmaking’s spell. The seductive powers of the techniques and processes of print lead them to become master printers. Master printers are often not artists creating images, but rather highly skilled crafts people. Brilliant in their ability to collaborate and work with artists from diverse disciplines, master printers helped create some of the most highly regarded art of the second half of the twentieth century.
Artist as Printmaker
In the first stream, one encounters the artist/printmakers frequently working in small communal or university print studios, following an eccentric personal dialogue between vision, ideas, instinct, and craft. The artist/printmakers are completely responsible for their creative production: from origination of the idea, making the drawing, processing the matrix, proofing and reworking the image and pulling the final prints. The printmaker’s individual effort is nurtured through the broader printmaking community, which is essentially a close-knit worldwide society subscribing to an ethos of inclusion, dialogue and validation. International conferences, exhibitions, print organizations, blogs, web sites, magazines, newsletters and community print studios thrive in this global grass roots community. Central to the printmaking community is the exponential growth of communication media that allows artists, print societies and studios instant access to each other’s work and ideas as well as to cultural, political images and other forms of visual information. The outcome of this culture is an energetic global dialogue on printmaking, ideas and contemporary art. This rich artistic dialogue and the works of printmakers are commonly overlooked by mainstream critical voices and galleries. Printmakers and their works generally remain embedded and sustained by the specialized and rich culture of the global printmaking community.
Ruth Weisberg, west coast artist/educator, accurately described the conundrum of the artist/printmaker in her ground-breaking essay, The Syntax of the Print: In Search of an Aesthetic Context (The Tamarind Papers, 9:52-60):
The history of printmaking encompasses great contradictions; prints are at once intimate and political, private and public. While in the past thirty years printmaking reflects every style and trend, it is often the refuge for the artist whose work was figurative, narrative, socially conscious or literary. It was a less rigid corner of the art world - one in which formalist aspects of modernism could be circumvented.
The Print Society, working under the direction of George McKenna, exemplifies the inclusive and democratic ethos of the printmaking community. Seldom in the curatorial process are non-professionals involved in making decisions for selecting works for a museum collection. Almost never are selections for the collection determined by the votes of the viewing public. Yet this was the procedure for choosing prints for the Museum by the Print Society. A small group of print enthusiasts working under the direction of the curator, George McKenna, would go to local galleries and artists’ studios to select prints and/or identify artists to be commissioned to produce works for the Museum. This process led to selecting both renowned artists/printmakers such as Tom Huck, Warrington Colescott, Eleanor Erskine, Craig Subler and Zigmunds Priede and well-established artists such as Red Grooms, Robert Cottingham, and Leslie Dill --whose prints were produced in collaboration with esteemed print publication studios.
Master Printer
The second stream of contemporary printmaking represents the exclusive and elite collaboration between renowned artists and master printers. This is a unique relationship. In describing the master printer, artist/printmaker Leonard Lehrer, quoted in Weisberg's essay referenced above, observed:
Printers are a special breed, a breed which combines immense skill with diplomacy and endurance, patience and knowledge; they set the tone for the project, maintain its rhythm, and are expected to have answers for everything . . . . It is a unique relationship and a unique component of the art world.
The master printer brings a vast knowledge of aesthetics, conceptual understanding and creativity to the collaboration. The interaction between artist and master printer is not only technical but is truly a creative collaboration and dialogue.
This is an elite and exclusive system of artistic production, emerging in contrast to the printmaking community’s general sense of inclusion and participation. The production of collaborative printed images takes place in world-renowned print publication studios with vast technical, financial and marketing resources. These include studios such as Universal Art Limited Editions (ULAE), Gemini G.E.L., Landfall Press and Tyler Graphics.
These artists are provided remarkable creative and production resources allowing them to push the edges of the craft and expand the definition of the possible. The collaboration between master printer and artist, financed by major galleries and with the resources of esteemed print publication studios has led to some of the most well know and remarkable art works of the present and past century. Susan Tallman, in the opening paragraph of The Contemporary Print: from Pre-Pop to Postmodern, captures the divide and success of printmaking as a discipline:
The contemporary print is simultaneously one of the most successful and one of the most disparaged art forms of our time. Between 1960 and the present the print has moved from the margins of art production to the center. No longer an isolated technical specialty, printmaking is now a standard part of most artistic careers. No longer confined to drawers, boxes, or albums, it has taken over spaces formerly occupied by painting. Not only do the best artists of our time make prints, some of the best artworks of our time are prints.
The Streams Converge
When the two streams converge they establish a complex symbiotic relationship. This unique relationship is demonstrated by Ron Adams’ print Blackburn, a remarkable work printed at the Lawrence Lithography Workshop in Kansas City. Both (artist) Ron Adams and (subject) Robert Blackburn are African-American artists, businessmen and master printers. Both men achieved success in the worlds of collaborative printing, as printmakers/artists and as community advocates. Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1934, Adams studied art and printmaking in Los Angeles and became a master printer for the esteemed studio Gemini G.E.L. where he worked with many leading contemporary artists including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella.
Adams left Gemini G.E.L. in 1973 for Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he opened Hand Graphics. There his collaborations focused on artists of color and women, such as Judy Chicago, Luis Jimenez and John Biggers, whose works often contained a strong social and political message. After thirteen years as owner and director of Hand Graphics, Adams turned exclusively to making his own art, often focusing on portraits of African Americans. Joseph Mella, Director, Fine Arts Gallery Vanderbilt University, notes on the website for the Gallery's exhibition, Ron Adams, Master Printmaker: A Survey of Work, 1984-1999:
Adams has distinguished himself three-fold: as a master printer of the highest order, as a successful business person in a kind of business that is more prone to failure than success, and as a strong graphic artist who has given us some of the most powerful images of African Americans of our time.
In 2002, Adams worked with master printer Mike Sims (founder of the Lawrence Lithography Workshop in Kansas City) to produce the color lithograph Blackburn, as an homage to Robert Blackburn, the first master printer for the prestigious Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) and founder of the Printmaking Workshop in New York. In addition to his status as a master printer, Blackburn was a highly esteemed abstract artist/printmaker.
Adams’ print shows Blackburn pulling a sheet of printed paper from the surface of a lithographic stone. Here, then, is the complexity of printmaking captured in the dynamic portrait of a great African American and insightful artist. Robert Blackburn was a force that changed the course of American art through his dedication to printmaking. He then expanded the role of the artist as a community advocate by establishing the Printmaking Workshop, founded in New York City in 1948.
Blackburn simultaneously worked on both sides of the printmaking divide as master printer and as artist/printmaker. As a master printer for Universal Limited Art Editions, he printed their first 75 editions, establishing a benchmark of quality for this world-renowned print studio. His innovative work as an artist and his experimentation with color lithography during the 1950s helped fuel the explosion of large-scale color prints to be produced in the coming decades.
Blackburn grew up on the cusp of the Harlem Renaissance and its artistic legacies. He demanded more of himself than being defined as artist and master printer. His strong sense of social justice led him in 1948 to establish the Printmaking Workshop the oldest and largest non-profit print workshop in the United States. The mission of this workshop is to maintain creative and artistic quality, support and encourage innovation, create opportunities for Third World and minority artists and foster public appreciation of the fine art print. His efforts helped in encouraging and training thousands of diverse artists to experiment in the graphic medium, and his legacy continues unabated. The Southern Graphics Council, North America’s largest and most prestigious print society awarded Robert Blackburn the Printmaking Emeritus award in 1993. In the same year, he was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellows Program “genius grant” for his work as an artist/printmaker and humanist.
Robert Blackburn never retreated from his dedication and love for these magical mediums and understood that the doors printmaking had opened to him both professionally and spiritually could be opened for others. In the end, Ron Adams portrays the essential Robert Blackburn, as a printmaker making a print.
The artists in this collection and exhibition owe a debt to the contributions of Ron Adams (Gemini G.E.L., Hand Graphics) and Robert Blackburn (Universal Limited Art Editions, the Printmaking Workshop) as well as other innovative printmakers such as Zigmunds Priede (Universal Arts Limited Editions), who is also included in this collection. It was their deep interest in printmaking as a medium of personal expression and their openness in sharing their insights as printmakers, master printers, and educators that led to the explosion of energy that characterizes the past five decades of contemporary printmaking. Their generosity and the efforts of many others like them have deeply affected both the growth of the printmaking global community and the development of collaboration between master printer and esteemed artists. The two streams outlined above, while in many ways emerging from opposite systems of production, are really interwoven threads of the same multifaceted creative community.
Collaborative print production does not begin and end at the doors of the elite publication studios but exists as a broad and complex set of permutations expanding the creative relationship between artist and printer. Across the globe printmakers have invented myriad new forms of collaborative interactions, and there are literally thousands of small print publication studios, university print publication programs and artists collectives producing exciting and excellent collaborative printed art works. Yet the significance of the works produced by master printers working in esteemed publication cannot be underestimated.
Today, printmaking continues to energetically respond to new ideas, cultural trends and advancing technologies. Printmaking is a forward-looking discipline and the universities, colleges and small print collectives across the globe are filled with dynamic young artists who will reinvent the practice to fit their own unique times and voices. Ms. Laura Berman, Interim Chair of the Printmaking Department at the Kansas City Art Institute, says in a note to the author:
Printmaking continues to align itself with print media and print culture seamlessly. In today's information age, the language and power of printmaking as an impression mechanism within our visual culture is stronger than ever. Artists trained in printmaking techniques are also knowledgeable of design, production, internet culture, environment and community; and often create artwork that exists within these multiple mediums simultaneously, through installations, performances and web-based works as well as traditional prints. The craft of printmaking is as important as ever in these works- it is a craft that relies on the hands-on involvement of the artist on many levels. The hands-on, process-oriented craft of printmaking imbues a unique value to prints themselves– a print represents the relationship of the artist to an image over a period of exclusive, labor-intensive time--whether it is a woodcut, web-based or installation work.
Printmaking is a vital and creative means of thought and expression for artists from diverse points of departure. All these artists fall under the spell of the amazing expressive flexibility of printmaking.
The future of printmaking will not be determined by new aesthetic theory, innovative technologies or past aesthetic traditions alone. The future will be defined by the vision of young artists using printmaking as a means of expression in a world of instantaneous communication of global events and images. Printmaking over the past four hundred years has always been in the process of becoming and as it continues to evolve, its future role in the 21st century cannot be predetermined but only marveled at as it arrives.