The Print in the Western World: An Introductory History - Review

By now many of the fine-art presses that sprang up in the United States since the late fifties - Moser estimates some three hundred - have amassed impressive archives of prints by thousands of artists. As Hansen observes in a lengthy endnote, museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, National Gallery of Art, and Walker Art Center, have become fortunate repositories for these archives (60, n. 2), publishing catalogues of their holdings with histories of their respective presses. The Milwaukee Art Museum's colorful Landfall Press: Twenty-Five Years of Printmaking and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's Thirty-Five Years at Crown Point Press are recent examples of this genre, joining Esther Sparks's hefty monograph on ULAE and Ruth Fine's on Gemini G.E.L.(3) These books honor inspired entrepreneurs - like Jack Lemon of Landfall and Kathan Brown of Crown Point - who are the sine qua non of contemporary fine-art print publishing. Special hybrids of artist, curator, teacher, and trouble-shooter, such master printers also give genuine meaning to the term collaboration in their working relationships with the artists whose prints they produce. The Landfall catalogue, with lively essays on the history of the press and its publications by print curators Mark Pascale and Joseph Ruzicka, contains a very personal and funny account by Vernon Fisher of an artist's experience working with the powerful, taciturn personality he dubs "Landfall Jack." While Lemon's first love is lithography, Brown's is etching and, more recently, Japanese woodcuts. The story of her visionary enterprise, from a small contract printing shop in 1962 to renowned print publisher today, told by Fine in Thirty-Five Years at Crown Point Press, is complemented by Karin Breuer's highlights of the Crown Point archive and Steven Nash's discussion, in "From Paper to Canvas," of how artists' prints often inform their paintings rather than the other way around.

In her essay "Collaboration in American Printmaking before 1960" for Printmaking in America, Moser suggests how Marxist, feminist, pluralist, and interdisciplinary approaches have begun to encroach on the hegemony of the "great person" modal of art history (10), such that communal aspects of artistic practice, including printmaking, are now of interest. A thoughtful scholar, author of a superb history of the monotype,(4) Moser analyzes the various kinds of relationships that have existed historically between printers and artists. Once printers were skilled craftsmen with limited, commercial ties to artists, but since the sixties they have assumed an inventive and more truly collaborative role in the creative process. Printmaking in America is invaluable for these kinds of insights. For instance, Walker in "Printmaking 1960 to 1990" calls attention to the dramatic difference between the original goals of Grosman and Wayne, though the two are usually hailed together as generators of a U.S. print renaissance. While Grosman wanted to publish the finest prints by the best artists, relying on the craft of service-oriented European printers, Wayne's ambition was educational: she hoped to (and did) train expert lithographers who would then establish their own workshops, forming creative partnerships with artists across the continent.