The Contemporary Print from Pre-Pop to Postmodern - Review

Susan Tallman. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996. 304 pp., 161 color ills., 173 b/w. $50.

In May 1970, the British artist Richard Hamilton placed a camera before his television set and captured an image of a student protester mortally wounded by U.S. National Guard troops in Ohio. From that photograph, he produced a haunting color screenprint, Kent State, in a massive edition of five thousand. Joining the great tradition of Francisco de Goya, Honore Daumier, Kathe Kollwitz, and others who have used prints to denounce violence and social injustice, Hamilton also drew attention with this work to the rapid broadcast of images in a postmodern world - "from event to camera to satellite to television to camera to print" (Tallman, 67). With its qualities of mediation and multiplicity, the fine-art print suited his purposes perfectly; for these reasons, too, it has assumed a new status in recent years, as the modernist preoccupation with originality gave way to a withered aura and widespread acceptance of previously despised commercial processes such as screenprint and photo- and offset lithography. In the nineties, color photocopiers, computer scanning equipment, laser printers, and electronic billboards offer artists unprecedented potential for creating, combining, editing, multiplying, and distributing images. But there is more: revivalists of individual "expression" have continued to embrace the woodcut for its primitivist associations, as well as venerable intaglio techniques to satisfy an eager market. Approaching the end of the century, prints constitute "a special hybrid," in Richard Field's words, "that negotiates the slippery interface between Modernist and Post-Modernist practices."(1)

Accompanying the current interest in prints old and new is a spate of books and exhibitions exploring aspects of the history of printmaking in the United States and Europe.(2) Though the bulk of this literature focuses on the twentieth century, art historians who have felt ill-equipped to teach the history of printmaking now have a tremendous asset in Linda Hults's encyclopedic yet highly readable textbook, The Print in the Western World: An Introductory History. Hults gives significant emphasis, and rightly so, to Albrecht Durer, Rembrandt van Rijn, Goya, Pablo Picasso, and Jasper Johns. Yet hers is not a history of great artists. The social function of prints, the role of publishers, printers, collectors, and technical innovations, as well as the impact of religion and politics, all receive weighty consideration. Proponents of the new art history will appreciate the complexity of this approach, which is hardly new, however, to print historians, since the objects of their study have always seemed more intricately embedded in socio-economic webs than unique paintings or sculptures. One problem for readers attempting to navigate print literature lies in endlessly repeated explications of printmaking techniques, which can overwhelm neophytes and irritate initiates. Hults avoids this pitfall, and we thank her for it. She outlines the basic techniques briefly in two pages in the introduction, then goes on to more intriguing issues of originality and the relationship of prints to the larger history of art. Throughout the text, she returns to discussions of technique as needed, but most important is her engaging elucidation of subject matter and content (something sorely missing from too many books about prints).

Hults organizes her account, from the early fifteenth through the late twentieth century, into thirteen chapters. This structure nicely accommodates to a fifteen-week semester, or a three-part year-long sequence for students on the quarter system. Within this general chronology each chapter covers a technique, movement, or period. Chapter five, for example, treats reproductive printmaking - crucial as it was for the transmission of style until the invention of photography - from the later sixteenth through the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century gets two chapters, one on lithography and one on the etching revival. And German Expressionism, in which the graphic arts played such a preeminent role, enjoys a chapter of its own. The monumental research that informs this study is usefully organized in the endnotes and bibliographic references appended to each chapter. A bibliography, glossary of printmaking terms, and detailed index make the book itself an excellent reference tool. Black-and-white illustrations appear on almost every two-page spread, with a color plate section reflecting the greater importance of color in prints of the modern era.

As a corollary of the modernist insistence on self-referentiality, a prevailing prejudice against textuality in the visual arts until recently relegated much art, even entire movements, to the margins of historical interest. Because of their association with the printed word and "mere" illustration, prints were especially vulnerable to this bias, while Surrealism, for instance, with its decidedly fit literary bent, suffered a similar fate. Little wonder then, that Surrealist prints have been all but ignored as an area of significant research. Moreover, within the movement itself, the initial emphasis on automatism - a putatively spontaneous outpouring of the contents of the artist's psyche - rendered printmaking, with its step-by-step procedures and logical delays, problematic (Hults, 682). Most major Surrealists did, nevertheless, produce lithographs, etchings, linoleum cuts, or pochoirs. These are now beautifully documented in Surrealist Prints, a revised edition of the catalogue for the exhibition "Visionary States: Surrealist Prints from the Gilbert Kaplan Collection," organized by the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts in Los Angeles. With three scholarly essays and fine reproductions, the book fills what has been a gaping void in the literature on prints in this century.