Rare gestures: various misconceptions about Abstract-Expressionist prints, a long-neglected field, are challenged in a traveling show titled "The Stamp of Impulse." - Prints - Naples Museum of Art

Received wisdom has it that Abstract Expressionism was not a significant movement for prints. With a few exceptions--Gottlieb, Motherwell, Frankenthaler, Francis--Abstract-Expressionist artists have generally been viewed as contributing little to printmaking in terms of quantity or innovation. By contrast, Pop art (so the wisdom goes), with its stake in mechanical processes and mass consumption, not to mention the coincidence of it arising alongside the great collaborative print workshops such as Tatyana Grosman's Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in West Islip, N.Y. (in 1957), and June Wayne's Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles (in 1960), is more often viewed as the first artistic movement in the second half of the 20th century to fully embrace prints. As the landmark traveling exhibition "The Stamp of Impulse: Abstract Expressionist Prints" makes clear, however, the received wisdom is only partly correct, for the relative inconsequentiality of prints in Abstract Expressionism has more to do with the history of the print market in America than with any profound antipathy to the medium on the part of midcentury abstract artists. Nobody was buying abstract prints during the early years of the movement, and since there was no demand, artists tended to produce prints as experiments, and only occasionally in editions, which were almost always small. Filed away in studios or tucked deeply in the archives of a few public collections, these prints lapsed from obscurity into oblivion.

This exhibition, more than a decade in the making, disproves the assumption that the oblique and sometimes arcane techniques of the print medium were inimical to the creative spontaneity and immediacy of touch so valued by Abstract-Expressionist artists. It is a refreshing corrective. David Acton, curator of prints, drawings and photographs at the Worcester Art Museum, has selected 100 abstract prints by 100 artists, some famous, others less so. Esthetically lively and diverse in their experimental range, the works emanate from a movement broadly defined to include artists like Nathan Oliveira and Larry Rivers, who might not come to mind, primarily, as Abstract Expressionists; more women and artists of African-American and Asian descent than readily attach themselves to a canonical checklist; and a hefty contingent from California (especially the Bay Area) and places other than New York that are often given scant treatment in narrower overviews.

In example after example, the prints in this exhibition demonstrate the ubiquity and persuasiveness of the abstract vocabulary pioneered in New York during the 1940s, from the surrealistic biomorphism of Gerome Kamrowski, working in drypoint, or of Peter Busa, in screenprint; to moody whorls and swaths of liquid tusche in landscapes by Hans Burkhardt, Edward Dugmore and Adja Yunkers; to radiant atmospherics in prints by Paul Jenkins, James Kelly, George Miyasaki, Anne Ryan and Sylvia Wald. A number of the artists on view here were influential in the movement's early days in New York (John Opper and Kamrowski, for example), but later, driven to take academic positions to support families, they fell by the wayside of critical attention. Like so many in the show (Jackson Pollock, Jacob Kainen, Norman Lewis, Emerson Woelffer, and others), they were supported at one point or another during the 1930s by the Federal Arts Project/Works Progress Administration, though they and their abstractionist colleagues had little interest in pursuing the type of social realism that had come to be associated with the FAP/WPA, especially with the influential graphic-arts division in New York.

Some of the works in this show, two-thirds predating 1960, are quite rare. The Dugmore, for example, is one of only a few lithographs the artist made early in his career, in 1949, at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), later the San Francisco Art Institute, which, under the directorship of Douglas MacAgy, had been transformed from a "sleepy debutantes' craft center into a serious, progressive academy," as Acton writes in the catalogue to the show. (Dugmore abandoned the medium--and graphics, for the most part--shortly afterward.) A dozen or so prints in "The Stamp of Impulse" were made by artists at CSFA: among others, Frank Lobdell, who taught there, and three other members of the so-called Sausalito Six (James Budd Dixon, Walter Kuhlman and George Stillman).

The CSFA printmaking studio was open at all hours and became a gathering place for a bohemian crowd. It was here that Californians began to gain a special skill in lithography, in particular, though a close examination of the shape of CSFA impressions (and it is always worth noticing these, since the artists intended that they be integral to the composition) reveals that there were only a very few stones in the shop and they were used over and over again. (1)

Artists who by nature were given to experimentation were drawn to workshops like that at CSFA and, on the opposite coast, to British-born William Stanley Hayter's Atelier 17. During the Second World War and for a time thereafter, Atelier 17 was transplanted from its home at 17 rue Campagne-Premiere in Paris to the New School for Social Research in New York. Hayter also did several teaching stints at CSFA; all the more surprising, then, that there are no works by Hayter himself in the show.