Читать книгу Lithography For Artists - Анон - Страница 3

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BOOKS telling how to make an etching have been published in considerable numbers; but of works intended to enable an artist to make a lithograph, with his own hands, there exists not one.

Not only is there this absence of books, but there is a scarcely less complete absence of artistic printers. The genuine professionals are tied up inside huge commercial establishments where they cannot as individuals—nor can their employing firms, with profit to themselves—undertake printing for artists. In these establishments everything is subordinated to speed, cheapness, and quantity production. Consequently, for the man who is simply the artist, who has drawn something lovely on a stone and wants thirty fine proofs of it, there is not in their world any place at all. Besides, it is only the very unusual commercial printer who, bred on and fed by commercialism, possesses that combination of artistic sense and technical and manual skill which works of art demand.

In the early days of lithography it was the business man, the publisher, who exploited it; and such a conception as that a private artist should set up and with his own hands serve his own press never entered anyone’s head. Had the suggestion been made, it would have been met by the objection that printing, unless it had been learned by a long apprenticeship in the regular way, would be too difficult for the artist. Beyond this it would have been said that the artist ought not to spare the time necessary to print what in those days would have been thought of as normal editions—editions of hundreds and of thousands.

We of today have brought in a different principle. We work with the idea that there is always room at the top and that tops are small. Instead of the rapid production of large numbers of middling prints sold cheap, we who specialize on fine prints substitute the slow and careful production of a few superb proofs sold high. This is an entirely different conception. And by it the artist can be his own printer and the printer be his own artist, which happens to be the only arrangement compatible with the finest achievement in both lines. It is because the production of lithographs in this way did not exist in the past and has but just begun in the present that I am sure the future is destined entirely to eclipse all that has gone before.

Our ancestors fought bloody battles with bows and arrows: we accomplish destruction otherwise, and these old tools of death are to us merely things of pleasure and discipline. The camera used to be only for the professional, but now it is everywhere—a means of personal expression. So in any number of instances it is the same. Among the fine arts, under the special culture of the amateur enthusiast, there blossoms here and there a higher sort of thing, carrying a previously unrecognized and unrealized cultural significance.

I offer this book to my fellow-artists knowing that none can get out of lithography all there is in it unless he does his own printing—and does it fully understanding the resources of the craft. And this reminds me to say that the idea in some artists' minds that lithography is primarily a thing for tasty sketches is wrong. Of course you can sketch and skirmish on stone—quite perfectly—nowhere more so—but to set this as the first thing is to run the chance of forgetting the more important fact that it is even more suited to work that is thorough and complete. There are circles in which it is the fashion, just now, to seem to see in mere scrawls virtues hitherto hidden from mankind. But the nature of the human mind has not changed because the excessive multiplicity of mechanical reproductions of hasty things has affected some persons' taste. There exist everywhere in the mob individuals who are not “mobized,” who are able to enjoy other than the snapshot mood. There are among the artists those whose nature it is to create thoughtful and complete works.

Let me try to suggest what I am thinking, by saying that sometimes the creative imagination works by flashes and records by jots—but not always. There are times when it acts ruminatingly, even dreamily. Our thoughts are necessarily clothed with the complete values and the defined and solid forms of nature, and sometimes the artist feels like going very far in realizing his values and forms. And when he does want to draw a relatively complete picture—complete in this sense—drawing on stone is marvelously suited to his need. It will accept any degree of elaboration and will give it unharmed in the print. I wish that Corot had drawn for us on the stone some of his landscapes, with all their beauty of tone. The prints would not have disappointed him, and the world would have been the richer. If Inness could have worked on stone—not just casual experimentation, but could have really got used to it—what things we should now be treasuring! If today someone who can make beautiful drawings of the nude were to create a series on stone, it would be a very fine thing—and no one has done it. And for portraiture—the opportunity is obvious.

It is true that there are already a few artists—very few—who have in their studios lithographic presses and who print occasional impressions from their own stones. But for the most part even these men, with the machinery all around them, if they want an edition made, call in the professional printer. They discover that there is a difference between pulling an occasional experimental impression and printing an edition. The function of all printing is to multiply, and etching and lithography are both methods of making prints. If a man is not able, by printing, to multiply his work into reasonable editions, he is not in practical command of the craft. He may, just as anybody may, pull a proof—or, more correctly, an impression, for only a skilled printer can prove what a stone can do. But, as I have said, unless he can get the best the thing is capable of, and can keep on doing so through an edition (and I know of no artist in this country except myself who claims to be able to do this), he is not getting out of the process that for which it exists.

Among the etchers, printing one’s own plates is a very usual thing. But there are differences between an intaglio plate and a flat stone. The most important one is that the stone is much the easier to injure. Again, pulling a print or two is a different thing from pulling an edition. The act of printing, if it is in the least mismanaged, easily injures, even ruins, the design. Pulling an edition requires a mastery of the physical and chemical operations—of the acids and gums, of varnishes, inks, temperatures, dampnesses, pressures, backing-boards, printing paper, abrasives, solvents, etc.—sufficient to enable the printer to go on using the complex machine which these constitute, until the edition is complete. This, though rather more than is demanded of the etcher, concerning whom I speak advisedly, for I am an etcher myself, is by no means an impossible demand.

It would have afforded me much satisfaction to illustrate this work by examples chosen from the work of great men. I should love to get out a book just devoted to them, as works of art. As a contribution to the history of artistic achievement it would be a worth-while thing to do. But my present subject is not these achievements that artists have accomplished by means of the process but—quite a different thing—the process itself.

And if I were to bring in here illustrations from Prout or Gavarni, I should be but confusing myself and the reader by just this common confusing of the product with the process. In the dictionary sense, in fact, neither Prout nor Gavarni was a lithographer, for they did not print from the stone, or print at all. This was done by specialists—printers, correctly called “lithographers.” The artists were lithographic draftsmen. So, if I were to illustrate a treatise on the art of drawing and printing from the stone by designs from Harding or Daumier, there would always be this misleading element present. The men named could at best but illustrate the method of drawing, while nobody knows anything about the men who actually made the prints the public sees. Their very names are lost, masked under that of the firm that employed them. But since I became a craftsman myself and learned, by doing the same things, the difficulty and the importance of the part these nameless ones played in the proceedings, I have come to have a high respect for them.

If I had one of these printers beside me and if I could take up a particular lithograph which he had etched and printed and could learn from his own lips the exact steps he had taken to produce it, I should assuredly publish them, the design itself; and the names of both artist and printer. Having no such opportunity, I am quite unable to give of, say a print by Bonington, any such exact account of the mechanisms of its production as would enable the reader to utilize them in lithographs of his own. To do anything like this I am, whether I like it or not, forced to fall back on my own work, where I do know, quite exactly, just how every step of it was done, and can give an account of these steps. I hope that this explanation will make clear why this book is not illustrated by designs by men whose names are known all over the world.

I would like to be allowed, here where I am not tied down to technical matters, to discuss for a moment one or two things about lithography in general which seem to me to need discussing. In the first place, there is a universal looseness in the word “lithography” itself—a thing that has very likely come about because so much that is new has come into the art since its name was first applied to it. Etymologically it means drawing on stone, although we all know that not the stone but the opposition of grease and water is the essential matter. The same method may be used on other surfaces, and Senefelder merely adopted stone because it combined the greatest number of advantages. The commercial lithography of our day has found reasons, none of them artistic ones, for replacing the stone with zinc, glass, aluminum, rubber, and so on, turning out an enormous mass of widely diverse prints all of which, according to the loose terminology above referred to, are “lithographs.” A term that includes so much necessarily defines very little, wherefore the technical journals are now substituting, for all applications of the Senefelder process, regardless of the surface used, the word “planography.” Of planography, lithography thus becomes a subdivision.

Originally the field of planography was limited to that of lithography, at least in artistic printing, for before photography came in and the process block, practically all artistic planographic printing was done from stone, and from drawings made directly thereon, with crayon. Throughout all the great historic period of lithography this was the procedure.

I mention crayon thus specifically because it, above all others, is the art that has made history. Other ways there are, as I just said, to make designs: there is the brush and the pen, carrying ink; and Senefelder describes quite a list of “methods”—stumpings, scrapings, engravings, and so on—all of them obviously available and all having been available these hundred years; yet the history of these years, as deduced from the usages of the ablest lithographic artists, is that these things one and all are of little importance compared with the great basic “method” of taking up a piece of crayon and making marks with it.

“Drawing” has been defined as making significant marks, the significance being in proportion to the draftsman’s control of his hand and to the dearness of the record thereof. Various substances falling comprehensively under the name of crayon have been acceptably used by great men—charcoal, graphite, chalk, pastel, Conte crayon, and lithographic crayon. Of these, the last is peculiar in that it alone was deliberately and artificially invented with a view to its use on a pre-existing and definite surface. Of course it will make marks on other things than stone, but on none of them will it make marks that are so excellent.

An art so important as this deserves a name that shall not be ambiguous, that shall include what it is and exclude what it is not. Since it is simply crayon on stone, we have but to condense this a little and we have our word—crayonstone. Then, just as lithography is a division of planography, crayonstone is a division of lithography. With this long-needed addition to our vocabulary we can without circumlocution indicate the important class distinction between a drawing done on stone and one done first on paper and then transferred to another surface and planographically printed. The former, by this nomenclature, would be a crayonstone lithograph; the latter, if transferred to stone, would be a transfer lithograph, or, since these works are often transferred to zinc or other substance, a transfer planograph. For ordinary usage, however, the two simple words “crayonstones” and “transfers” embody all that is necessary.

Isabey, Bonington, Duzats, Ciceri, Gericault, Haghe, Mouilleron, Gavarni, Boys, Prout, Harding, Daumier, and their associates produced crayonstones and not transfers. Writing in England, in 1919, for a special number of the Studio entitled Modern Woodcuts and Lithographs,¹ Mr. Malcolm C. Salaman states that those among contemporary artists who accept crayonstone as the superior to transfer include “all our distinguished lithographers,” of whom he names Brangwyn, F. Ernest Jackson, Kerr Lawson, Sullivan, Becker, Hartrick, Spencer Pryse, John Copley, Ethel Gabain, and Belleroche. Mr. Belleroche writes to Mr. Salaman that transferring is “handy for rough sketches” but that “a good drawing will certainly lose all its savour after it has been subjected to the transfer operation.” Here in America, Albert Sterner, John Sloan, Chauncey Rider, and George Bellows would agree with their transatlantic brethren.

And I agree with them; but not because I do not know how to value transfer. I am an expert transferrer, and in this book the operation is taught; but as an artist I work almost exclusively on stone. Mr. Pennell, on the other hand (as also, for the most part, Whistler), draws not on stone but on paper, and the prints are transfers. Fantin-Latour’s work is a mixture of crayon-stone, transfer, and white-line engraving.

For going somewhat into these matters there are several reasons. A leading print dealer said to me that lithography was handicapped in that “the artists are too lazy to draw on stone.” A very important exhibition refused to let me catalogue my prints as drawn on stone. Certain interests are advantaged by keeping this distinction away from the public, the collectors, the critics, and such artists as know nothing about it. Where mention of it cannot be quite suppressed, the next best thing is to pretend that it is of no importance. That transfers can have merit no one doubts, but they necessarily lack the larger set of merits which is only possible to crayonstone. Hence, when Mr. Pennell writes in International Studio, Vol. 7 (1899), p. 43, col. 2, par. 2, that “you can do anything on paper that you can do on stone,” he writes mistakenly.

On the general subject of lithography there are some books, a very few. At least there are very few that are in English. Electing to begin with the last of these, we find it to be the book by Mr. and Mrs. Pennell, largely historical, but including a technical part by Mr. Pennell. No one could print with such a roller as he suggests; his statements about the washout contradict universal practice, and to apply an etch according to his figures would destroy the stone instantly.²

In the earlier literature of the subject the defect is that the art side and the craft side are not treated with equal authority. In none of them is there any assumption that the artist is going to do creative work and print it himself. They show the artist how to do the drawing but take it for granted that a professional printer will do the printing. In the latter years of the nineteenth century E. Duchatel, of Paris, sent out, in French, his work, Traité de Lithographie Artistique.³

About 1896 Alfred Lemerder⁴ got out, also in French, his very thorough technical monograph as a manual for lithographic artists and printers. Hamerton’s The Graphic Arts (1882)⁵ contains a few sound remarks on lithography, but nothing of more than general interest to the practical worker. In 1891 there was published in French an elaborate manual on all forms of lithographic work, written by a “chemical engineer,” M. M. A. Villon. In England in 1919 there was issued the last and revised edition of an excellent trade handbook, David Cumming’s Handbook of Lithography.⁶ In 1914, in London, there came out another excellent work of the sort, The Art of Lithography, a Complete Practical Manual of Planographic Printing, by Henry J. Rhodes.⁷ Richmond’s Grammar of Lithography,⁸ an English work of some fifty years ago, is a very good manual for commercial workers. In 1824 Charles Hullmandel,⁹ the English lithographer, published a technical treatise showing how to make on stone a drawing of the kind then in vogue, and in such a way that an edition of the sort then usual could be printed from it. In my earlier stages I got benefit from this book. In 1832 the same author put out his last edition of his translation of Raucourt’s excellent French work on lithographic printing; this also is a work of technical value to beginners. The last to be mentioned, though first in time and importance, is Senefelder’s own book,¹⁰ translated into English more than a century ago.

¹ Modern Woodcuts and Lithographs by British and French Artists. With Commentary by Malcolm C. Salaman. Edited by Geoffrey Holme. London, Paris, New York. The Studio, Ltd., 1919.

² Lithography and Lithographers, p. 261, line 3. New York: Macmillan Co., 1915. “Twenty parts of acid to one of water.”

³ En Vente à Paris chez l’Auteur, 8 rue Guy-de-la-Brosse, à la Société des Imprimeries Lemercier, 57 rue de Seine, et du Journal L’Artiste, 44 quai des Orfèvres (n. d.).

⁴ La Lithographie Française de 1796 à 1896 at les Arts qui s’y rattachent. Manuel Pratique s’adressant aux artistes et aux imprimeurs. Paris: Ch. Larilleux & Cie.

⁵ Published by The Macmillan Co.

⁶ Original edition issued 1904, London.

⁷ London: Scott Greenwood & Son; New York: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1914.

⁸ London: E. Menken.

⁹ The Art of Drawing on Stone. London, 1824.

¹⁰ Alois Senefelder, The Invention of Lithography (translated by J. W. Muller). New York: The Fuchs and Lang Mfg. Co., 1911.