History of Printmaking
In the beginning, before the
printing press, printmaking
was not considered an art form, rather a
medium of communication. It was
not till the 18th century that art prints began
to be considered originals
and not till the 19th that artists began to produce
limited editions and
to sign their prints along with the technical information necessary to authenticate
the
work.
Engraving goes back to cave art, executed on stones,
bones and cave walls. The duplication of engraved images
goes back some
3,000 years to the Sumerians who engraved designs on stone
cylinder seals.
Academics think that the Chinese produced a primitive form of
print, the
rubbing, as far back as the 2nd century AD. The Japanese made the
first
authenticated prints, wood-block rubbings of of Buddhist charms, in the
late-middle eighth century.
Printmaking in
Europe
European
printmaking began with textile printing as
early as the sixth century, while
printing on paper had to wait a bit
longer for the arrival of paper technology
from the Far East. The first
paper produced in Europe was in Játiva in Spain in
1151. The first
woodcuts printed on paper were playing cards produced in
Germany at the
beginning of the 15th century. It was only slightly before this
that the
first royal seals and stamps appeared in the England of Henry
VI.
Printing from a
metal engraving
was introduced a few decades after the woodcut, and greatly
refined the
results. Restricted at first to goldsmiths and armorers, it soon
became
the most popular form of serial reproduction. The earliest dated printed
engraving is a German print dated 1446, "The Flagellation," and it was in
Germany that early intaglio printing developed before passing to Italy
(Mantegna, Raimondi, Ghisi) and the Low Countries (Lucas van Leyden, Goltzius,
Claesz, Matsys). From makers of playing cards the metal engraving
technique
passed to artists where it probably reached its apex in the
hands of Albrecht
Dürer in the 16th century. Albrecht Dürer represented a watershed in the
history of printmaking, and, since he travelled to Italy, his influence
was
felt there in a direct way.
The Seventeenth
Century
The seventeenth century saw a flowering of
ornamental
and portrait work all over Europe, with Rubens and Van Dyck leading
the
way in Flanders. By this time most intaglio work was acid etched, as
contemporary artists considered this a less commercial, more creative, nobler
technique. Though Italy was a hotbed of etching, ironically the leading
etchers
there were foreigners: Jaques Callot and Claude Lorrain from
France and the
Spaniard, José de la Ribera. The leading figure in the
Netherlands at this time
was, of course, Rembrandt, who left to posterity
a monumental benchmark both in
terms of quantity and quality. His
approximately 300 plates represent virtually
every aspect of human
endeavor.
Europe's printmaking center of gravity moved to Italy in the 18th
century, beginning
with Tiepolo who, it is said, exercised a significant
influence on Francisco Goya. Then came Canaletto, the
chronicler
of Venice and Piranesi, allegedly the most important
architectural printmaker
of all time with some 3,000 large arquitectural
etchings. The tradition of
distinguished English printmaking dates only
from Hogarth in the 18th century,
but he was quickly followed by the
satirical Rowlandson and then William Blake,
the crown jewel among British
printmakers. Blake's
contemporary in Spain was Goya, who stretched the limits of printmaking to
new
heights and depths.
The Nineteenth Century
The
nineteenth-century saw printmaking follow the same turbulent trail as the rest
of the visual arts. In France the active printmakers at this time included
Ingres, Delacroix, the Barbizon School (Daubigny, Theodore Rousseau and
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot) and the political satirist Honoré Daumier,
who
made more than 4,000 lithographs, mainly for newspaper illustrations.
The most
important printmakers among the Impressionists were Manet and
Degas, the former
mainly in lithographs.
Though we have barely touched
upon Japanese printmaking here, special mention must be made of
the master
of woodcut, Katsushika Hokusai, who in the last half of the 17th
century
and the first half of the 18th produced some 35,000 drawings and
prints,
many of them recognized masterpieces, many of which were to exert an
important influences on European printmakers.
Nineteenth century English
printmaking highlights an Englishman, Francis Seymour Hayden,
and an
American, James McNeil Whistler. The other notable American printmaker
at
this time, though more in terms of natural science than art, was James
Audubon.
Enter Picasso
Printmaking, like everything else in the art world, exploded in the first half
of the 20th century. First and foremost was
Pablo Picasso, the Spanish lad
from Málaga who made more than 1,000 prints
including etchings,
engravings, drypoints, woodcuts, lithographs and lino cuts.
Picasso almost
single handedly returned printmaking's center of gravity to
France. Then
came Braque, Matisse, Rouault, Chagal, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Jan
Arp,
Salvador Dalí and others. In Germany it was the time of the
Expressionists, Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann (who taught in the U.S.A. after the
Second World War), George Grosz, Ernst Barlach, Erich Heckel, Oskar
Kokoschka
and others. Hot on the heels of Expressionism in Germany came the
Bauhaus,
where artists like Kandinsky and Paul Klee produced seminal
work.
In England Henry Moore, besides working in sculpture, also created
a powerful
series of lithographs, and Graham Sutherland did noteworthy
work as well, along
with Anthony Gross. In the United States in the 20th
century the tradition of
distinguished printmakers includes George Wesley
Bellows in lithography, John
Sloan and Reginald Marsh in etching and
Milton Avery in drypoint. But perhaps
the most noteworthy of American
painter/printmakers of this period are Edward
Hopper with his excellent
and highly personal work and Ben Shahn, who excelled
in a variety of print
media.
Information taken from this source: http://www.worldprintmakers.com/english/pmhist.htm
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