Krishna Reddy: A Strong Impression

On August 22, 2018 one of the giants of twentieth century printmaking passed away at the age of 93. N. Krishna Reddy was instrumental in making printmaking something unique, not merely a secondary medium for creating a reproduction of an artwork in another form, as it had been perceived for much of the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries. He and his mentor, Stanley William Hayter, are far from common household names, yet their impact on Modernism proved fruitful in shaping the processes and works of some of the key figures of midcentury Modernism, such as Joan Miro, Louise Nevelson, Pablo Picasso, and Jackson Pollock.

Reddy was born in a small town in India in 1925. He went to university in his home country and began teaching art there in the 1940s. At this point he was working primarily in sculpture and painting. After WWII, as Europe was beginning to rebuild, Reddy made his way west and first settled in London in 1949. There he studied sculpture with Henry Moore. By the next year he had moved on to Paris where he also studied sculpture with Ossip Zadkine.

Stanley Hayter had first set up his workshop (Atelier 17, but now running as Atelier Contrepoint) in the late 1920s. It was a meeting place for artists from around the world, who had come to Paris to study the evolving styles of early abstraction. Hayter’s workspace and press allowed these artists to try their hand at engraving and etching, even if their primary media were something other than printmaking. With the onset of WWII Hayter moved Atelier 17 to New York City for a period, but by the time Krishna Reddy was in Paris, Hayter had returned and was running both the American and French versions of the workshop for a period.

Reddy took to printmaking, especially engraving, right away. He shared Hayter’s enthusiasm for the direct processes of working a metal plate. Eventually, during the 1950s, Reddy was named as a co-director of Atelier 17 in Paris. It was not odd that an individual who had originally trained as a sculptor would become a director of the most significant printmaking workshop in the world. Hayter, himself, had started out as a painter and continued to paint throughout his life. Helen Phillips, Hayter’s second wife, was also primarily a sculptor before she met her husband and began working in etching and engraving processes. This was also the case for the American Shirley Witebsky, Krishna Reddy’s first wife. With this group of very physical printmakers it was no wonder that some new, experimental, and significant changes would soon be discovered at Atelier 17.

The most famous technique to come out of Atelier 17 is often called Color Viscosity Etching. It was usually called Simultaneous Color Intaglio printing by both Hayter and Reddy. The process was discovered somewhat accidentally by Reddy and his fellow countryman, Kaiko Moti, before being fully developed by Hayter and Reddy. At its root is the tendency for two oil-based inks to reject each other when one is oilier than the other. If an oilier ink is rolled onto the surface of a plate, another, tackier ink can be rolled over the first inking without disrupting that initial ink surface. This became most important when the sculptural aspects of Reddy’s (and others’) works allowed rollers of different densities to apply the inks. A hard roller would deposit an oily ink on the top surface of the etching plate, whereas a softer roller with a tackier ink could deposit ink on a lower surface, while not changing the ink from the previous roller. This discovery finally achieved the effect that Hayter had long been searching for—a way to ink an etching plate in colors so that it could be sent through the press only once.

The technique of simultaneous color printing became synonymous with the artists of Atelier 17. Hayter had his own ways of utilizing the process which changed over time, as he worked in the collaborative atmosphere of Atelier 17. Reddy, however, made the process his own. While Hayter favored engraving and the use of etching acids to develop textures and depth in his plates, Reddy was prone to work the plate in a more sculptural way. Using traditional hand engraving tools alongside electric rotary (aka Dremel) tools, Reddy produced what were essentially low relief sculptures in a metal plate. As aggressive as this method might sound, under his masterful hand, using the color viscosity method, Reddy was able to achieve incredibly nuanced inkings of his intaglio prints.

Floraison (or Blossoming) from 1965, was the first work that Reddy created entirely utilizing hand tools, without any etching techniques. It is reminiscent of many of his and Witebsky’s etchings of this period. The true print collector can relay just how interesting these works are to examine. They may look lovely framed, but are best enjoyed outside of a frame where the embossed depth of the plate can be seen on the back side of the sheet of paper. Close examination reveals that Reddy was a master of color with this technique. What first appears to be a basic inking with black and blue is discovered to be more complex. Reddy actually used a pale orange color with one of the rollers. This layer of color is made to mix with one of the lower layers of blue—instead of rejecting it—creating a richer gray than what is possible with an inking of black alone.

Hayter wrote two editions of his seminal work New Ways of Gravure that explain the process of Color Viscosity printing. They are each illustrated with works by a variety of artists—including Reddy—who passed through Atelier 17. However, Reddy’s book, Intaglio Simultaneous Color Printmaking: Significance of Materials and Processes, goes much further into the details of the process, revealing just how complex the inkings of some of his prints were. It is an essential handbook for anyone interested in learning the process. 

One of the last major exhibitions to highlight Reddy’s work was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, about two years ago. I was fortunate to see Workshop and Legacy: Stanley William Hayter, Krishna Reddy, Zarina Hashmi at the Met in February 2017. This was not a huge exhibition, but the limited works actually made it a more intimate encounter with the works. There were several very important Hayter works on display (including two works that appear in my own collection) but there were many Reddy pieces that I had never seen in person. Also included was one of Reddy’s sculptures. This exhibition was the highlight of my trip to New York. It has been instrumental as I put together an exhibition of Atelier 17 artists from my own collection.

With the loss of Reddy, there is one remaining major figure from Atelier 17 still working. Hector Saunier continues on at the Atelier. He started at Atelier 17 after Reddy moved to the U.S. Luckily, with shows like the one at the Met, and others that have been touring (such as Syracuse University’s About Prints, named after Hayter’s other major publication), the important work of these artists is not being lost. A new generation can discover just how influential these men and women were on Modernism in its early days.

Georges Rouault: A Synthesis of Tradition and Innovation

One of my artistic heroes is the French Expressionist Georges Rouault. Though he is still discussed in twentieth century and Modern art history courses, his name does not resound with most people as one of the elite Modern artists of his generation, such as Henri Matisse or Pablo Picasso. In a cursory comparison one would not find much in common between Rouault’s work and my own. His very direct and aggressive style seems at odds with my more “refined” realism. Still, Rouault’s primary work in both painting and printmaking, as well as his consistent themes of uneasy religious engagement with contemporary culture, can be aligned with my own work.

Rouault’s monumental print undertaking—one of the greatest all time achievements in printmaking—is his Miserere et Guerre. These large intaglio works, originally envisioned as two sets of fifty plates each (fifty for the Miserere segment and fifty for the Guerre), ultimately were produced as a total of fifty-eight plates. Still, that result is an enormous achievement.

The suffering of Christ is mingled amongst the suffering of humanity in these works. What first seem to be awkward juxtapositions of images are quite intentional. The images are all dark, both in value and subject. Even images of the Virgin Mary seem stained with darkness. She butts up against images of wealthy, bourgeois women, as well as haggard prostitutes. She is the deliverer of salvation to both. The sadness and brokenness of the prostitute are balanced against the detachment of an elite, whose indifference and intractable hold on resources are partly responsible for the circumstances of the former. All are in need of mercy (miserere) and all are at war (guerre) with the world and their own condition.

The themes are further explored through kings, judges, clergy as well as skeletal specters of death. All of these expose the corruption of this world in some form. Christ suffers with and for each one. While the individual images may seem desperate and despairing, there is a strand of hope running throughout the entire series.

However, it is not just Rouault’s thematic elements that have held sway over me. His process for these works, and his unswerving dedication to seeing the work completed just as he originally envisioned, have been instrumental in my own current work. It took Rouault about fifteen years to physically complete the Miserere. But it was actually a project thirty-six years in the making, from the first drawing to the final publishing of the completed prints. Of course, he was working on many other paintings and print projects during that period, but I recently took comfort in this. My own intaglio project consisting of fifty plates, originally conceived almost twenty years ago, is probably more on schedule than I would have believed.

The original designs for the Miserere prints were actually ink drawings. Since Rouault’s work was always an odd mixture of tradition and innovation, the drawings were actually transferred to copper etching plates through a photographic process. Photogravure (sometimes called heliogravure) is an early photomechanical process that allowed photographic images to be printed on paper, from a photographic negative, without the fading that happened with earlier photographic prints. The photogravure work prints like an etching but looks more like a photograph.

Rouault was not at all content with his initial photogravure plates and refused to allow them to be printed as they first existed. Instead, he meticulously reworked each of the plates with traditional forms of etching and intaglio, including hand working of the plates with mezzotint roulettes, scrapers, and burnishers. The results are far more than early photomechanical “reproduction.” Rouault did so much working and reworking of the the copper that it is often impossible to know what exactly he did to get the soft, velvety effects and deep, rich values. Many of the etchings look more like charcoal drawings than etchings. Each plate could be considered a masterwork, but considering that there are fifty-eight, it is an unfathomable achievement.

This brings me to the comparison with my own Palimpsest Portraits series. While there are many images of Jesus within this series, there are also “out-of-place” figures, just as with some of the Miserere works. I want viewers to analyze the series as a whole, much like the Miserere, to consider the unusual juxtapositions. Individual images may have a similar dark content as Rouault’s, but there is just as much similarity when it comes to the process.

The Palimpsest Portraits, likewise, mix technological innovation with more traditional modes of working. Each of these plates starts with a drawing, too. However, my drawings are completed in Photoshop and are composed completely from passages of text. The next step is quite like the photogravure process employed by Rouault. I transfer the images onto copper plates via a toner-based transparency print (these are the transparencies used for overhead projectors which are printed through a copy machine or laser printer). The plate and transparency are slowly heated so that the toner offsets (or melts) onto the plate, eventually acting as a resist in an acid bath.

If I was only printing these images in black and white, most of the work would be done at this point. Still, also like Rouault, I do extensive additional work on each of the plates after the first photomechanical etching process has been completed. To enhance the realism, I use multiple applications of soft ground etching textures to soften and darken the tones. This is tempered through much scraping and burnishing. The textual elements still remain, but may be further enhanced with traditional hard ground etching. The plates are also developed to differing levels to allow for the color printing process. This allows multiple colored inks to both separate and mix in various ways to create the final effect.

This is a time intensive process. There is no other way to achieve the effects required by the concept. Rouault has taught me that there is no need to compromise on your vision. Working and reworking these plates becomes a joy as I am surprised with each new plate. The new color combinations and alternate pairings of images continue to open the series in directions that far exceed my first thoughts about this series. I am pleased that the reception of these images by viewers will further expand how the pieces “speak” to each other.

Ready, Set, Print

It has taken a few months to get everything aligned, but the time has finally come. The Kickstarter Campaign to make the Palimpsest Portrait Project a reality is now live. You can find out more about the particular printing process I use below, but all the specific details are available right on the Kickstarter Campaign page. The best overview is actually presented in the video shared here.

Your first question about the images you’re seeing is probably, “Why are you pairing those particular people together?” Well, the answer to that comes down to the text that actually makes up these images. That text is from the Desert Fathers, the ancient, mystic monks of the Egyptian desert. While reading of the accounts of their lives, I came across a monk who was said to have asked God to show him which of the saints he was like. God sent him to several individuals, both good and bad, with whom the monk could make this comparison. In the end the monk realized that, “no one in this world ought to be despised, let him be a thief, or an actor on the stage, or one that tilled the ground, and was bound to a wife, or was a merchant and served a trade: for in every condition of human life there are souls that please God and have their hidden deeds wherein He takes delight.” This got me thinking about how I view and treat people. Do I see that element or spirit of God in everyone? Is or was there ever a person I could not view in that way?

These figures, and more, came to my mind and I began to design this provocative project. It is meant to be seen as a whole series and not just as individual works. After years of working on the concept, on and off, it is time to finally see it made. That is why I created the Kickstarter Campaign. This project cannot happen without the help of many people coming together to make it happen. Unless artwork is specifically commissioned, it is typically up to the artist to self fund the project and hope that someone will, eventually, like it enough to buy it. Often, the sale of one artwork funds the creation of the next one. When the funds needed to obtain equipment and materials reach a certain level, turning to crowd sourcing is a wise option.

So, please take a look at the campaign. Join in if you can. Even if you can’t, please share the project on social media (you can do that right through the Kickstarter page). When many people come together around this project it can become reality. 

Note: The full funding goal for this project was not reached through Kickstarter, however, several generous individuals did fulfill their pledges directly To Tyrus so that he could begin a portion of the etching portraits. If you would like to give toward the completion of the funding goal, to see this project fully completed, you can do that through his website.

The Palimpsest Portraits: A Resurrection

In 2006 and 2007 I first began serious work on a project that was not yet named. Conceptually, it was to consist of twenty-five portrait pairs—fifty total portraits. Each pairing would situate an image of Jesus, from art history, with another individual. The other person might be historical, from popular culture, or even relatively unknown. He or she may be generally acknowledged as good or bad or somewhere in between. The idea was based in my understanding of a story I read from the Desert Fathers and has been mentioned here before. (for an explanation of “Palimpsest,” refer to the previous posting)

For various reasons the project was not completed a decade ago. Mainly, it was an expensive venture. I did acquire some of the materials needed to complete it, but the process was also quite time consuming and my job at the time left little available time to devote to the task. And, quite a daunting task this was. The color viscosity printing technique planned for the series is technical and complex, too. And I added the complication that the images were to be “drawn” from text—just to complicate matters more.

I had wanted to utilize this printing technique since I first came across the works of Stanley William Hayter and Dick Swift in the university art collection when I was in graduate school. The intensity of the colors used and the complexity of the color mixings enticed me. Hayter’s work tends to be on the more abstract side, though some of Swift’s includes a good amount of representational imagery. I wanted that element of representation, but desired to make it my own. The use of text, running through all forms of my artwork, was my distinctive take on the technique. 

The major pause in the project came when I moved in 2008 and no longer had access to the large rubber ink rollers of varying density that are required for the printing process. Over the past few years I have further experimented with the technique on a limited scale, with the small ink rollers I do possess. They are not large enough to complete the project as planned, but I have been determined to perfect the technique and seek funding for the equipment and materials needed to complete the project as originally envisioned. The images here reveal two of those experiments.

The digital “drawings” of the images are first composed from text in Photoshop. When the values have been sufficiently produced, the image is transferred to a copper plate. However, much traditional etching work still needs to be completed at that point. At least three distinct levels need to be developed into the copper plate (this is for color separation and mixing with the various inks and rollers). Surfaces need to be bitten in acid or smoothed with tools so that colors and values print clearly. Here, I show the multiple states of a self portrait and an image of Martin Luther King. The first tests of each can be somewhat unrecognizable, but over time, the development of the plates reveals both the images and the tiny textual elements that compose them.

These are still only trial images, to give prospective funders an idea of what I’m attempting to produce. The comparison between the first images from a decade ago and these newer versions shows how my process has changed—and improved—over that period. I feel that I am finally ready to complete these works as they first existed in my imagination. The larger images allow for much greater complexity with the text as it relates to the design. Hopefully, new larger works will find their way into future posts later this year.

Dick Swift: The Art of Physical Printmaking

Many people first discovered my artwork through publications or exhibitions that included my printmaking. In truth, I had never worked in any printmaking medium until I was enrolled in my graduate painting program. I appreciated the various techniques as another way to explore the concepts I was developing within my paintings. In my second year of graduate school I was asked to take on a gallery assistant position in the School of Art. One of my main objectives was to design a database and enter records for the 2000 – 3000 artworks in the collection. It was rummaging through the vast print collection there that most peaked my interest in printmaking.

If there was no prior record of a work, I could often figure out the printing technique by some plate mark or lack of one. When I came across a couple different pieces by the artist Dick Swift (who recently passed away in June 2010 at the age of 91) I was at a loss for how he created the works. I pulled in one of my printmaking professors to explain the processes to me. This began my fascination with Swift.

The two works in the Bowling Green State University collection were etchings. One was Station Six (Veronica’s Veil) from Swift’s Stations of the Cross series. The other was a large multi-plate color etching entitled The Prophecy II. My professor told me that much of the work was done with soft ground etching and that the irregular plates for the latter image had been shaped with either a band saw or a jeweler’s saw. The plates were then printed with the viscosity method. I was able to find out more about viscosity etchings through my research into the work of Stanley Hayter—also represented in the collection—but I located only scattered details about Dick Swift. This was in the days when it was still fairly difficult to do very extensive research with the internet. I did, however, make a vow to myself that if I could ever find a copy of The Prophecy II I was going to buy it.

In the year 2000 I asked the members of a printmaking email listserv if anyone had information about Dick Swift. A few members let me know that they had studied under Swift in the printmaking program at California State University—Long Beach. Next I received a message from Dan Lienau of Annex Galleries in Santa Rosa, California. The gallery actually represents the work of Dick Swift. Dan said that Dick had recently brought in some works and that is where I was able to obtain a copy of The Prophecy II. I was also put in touch with Dick; the telephone conversation we had about his work provides the foundation for the analysis below.

Dick Swift was one of several printmakers (including Ynez Johnston and Leonard Edmondson) who worked in somewhat experimental styles in the Los Angeles area in the 1950s and 60s. Swift studied at the Otis College of Art & Design under Ernest Freed, another artist caught up in the revival of printmaking that swept the art schools in the mid-twentieth century. The chief architect of this renaissance was Mauricio Lasansky, the Argentine-American printmaker whose University of Iowa intaglio-based printmaking program produced a generation of printmakers who went on to establish printmaking departments at universities throughout North America.

Printmaking in the United States, like all art in the mid-twentieth century, was largely influenced by artist immigrants from around the world—specifically Europe. Stanley Hayter had initially started his famous Atelier 17 in Paris. It temporarily moved to New York during the period of World War II. Swift studied at Atelier 17 in 1964-65, after it reopened in Paris. Hayter was intent on bringing printmaking into a new stage of development—a period in which it would not be used solely in service of other art forms, like painting, but would be seen as its own creative medium.

Swift favored intaglio, mostly etching, within the studio. While the Long Beach print studio had facilities for intaglio, relief, lithography, and silk screening, nearly eighty percent of the work was completed in intaglio. Dick was drawn to the interaction with the metal etching plate. The tactile, almost sculptural, process of etching shines through in his intaglio works. The use of soft ground etching, especially, became somewhat of a trademark in Swift’s process.

Even though Dick joked about how a printmaker friend referred to the soft ground process as the “venereal disease” of printmaking, he was able to transform the process into something new. The Stations of the Cross prints provide a glimpse into his process. While Hayter’s work, particularly from the late 1950s onward, was almost purely abstract, Swift preferred mixing representational imagery with abstraction. The impressions made in the soft ground on “Stations” plates reveal the use of fabric textures. These do not act purely as decorative elements but as integral design forms. The haloes on the figure of Jesus seem to be lifted from the textures impressed into the ground from a paper doily. The textures in the clothing of the figures seem more natural because it is often based on textures of actual cloth. One can already find elements of the artist’s personal visual vocabulary cropping up in this series.

The Veneration of the Ancestors is another work by Swift that utilizes soft ground etching extensively. While this is a color etching, it was produced more like Hayter’s early experiments with color, or like the methods Lasansky employed. Hayter sought to print multiple colors simultaneously on one plate. Some of his first experiments used color passages that were silk screened onto an inked intaglio plate. It appears that Swift rolled colors onto this plate with stencils. The color fields are broad and pure. The texture, however, is more overpowering. It creates rhythms that draw the eye throughout the composition. One is not able to fully appreciate this work in a digital image or even a photographic print. Swift’s love of the physical possibilities of the plate comes through only with examination of the actual prints.

However, it is works like The Prophecy II, its earlier counterpart The Prophecy, and Oedipus that show Swift’s mastery of the medium. Again, the prints cannot be fully appreciated in reproduction. In order for the simultaneous color viscosity printing to work there must be distinct levels in the plates. This creates incredible texture in the prints. Each of these works used a variation of the soft ground technique that Swift developed (as explained in Leonard Edmondson’s book, Etching). After an initial soft ground texture was bitten into the metal plate Swift “inked” the plate with more soft ground so that the pits and crevices were filled with the soft ground. The plates were then placed in acid once more until the open parts of the plate were at a lower level than the textures created initially.

These works are so intricate that Swift says they took more than a couple months to complete. It is no surprise that they would take so long to create when one investigates the intricacies of these prints. The mixture of representational forms, Hebrew text, and abstractions found in the Prophecy works is mind boggling. Swift felt more could be done to the first print so he worked on a second version. Not only did he leave out one of the original plates, a comparison between the individual printed portions shows that Swift altered the images, adding linear etched passages and textures as he further developed the plates.

One of the more intriguing aspects of Swift’s work is the religious content in so many pieces. The artist was baptized a Roman Catholic, but he told me that he no longer ascribed to any specific religion. Though Eastern philosophies and religious concepts were more prevalent in the art world at mid-century, Swift felt that his connection to traditional Western religious concepts actually helped the acceptance of his work at the time. For him, the myths and stories of our cultures and religions touched on some themes common to all humanity.

These large, multi-plate works convinced me that there were aspects of etching that could compliment my painting processes. The realism embedded in portions of these prints let me know that it was possible to utilize color etching—and viscosity printing in particular—in a way that was not as abstract as Hayter’s work. It took some time for me to figure out how this would manifest itself in my own work. I first employed the technique with the Cathedral Floorplan etching series. Taking cues from Swift’s use of Hebrew text, I eventually began a series that mixed the abstractions of text with representational imagery, all completed with the viscosity technique.

It is a shame that so few people know of Dick Swift’s work today. It has such a unique style that offers something for everyone. If you ever have a chance to view any of his works in person take that opportunity. You won’t be disappointed.

Louise Bourgeois: Farewell to the Spiderwoman

The world said goodbye to one of the most acclaimed “artist’s artists” on May 31, 2010. Louise Bourgeois was not a household name, but she did influence several generations of artists with her provocative and seemingly contradictory images. Since she lived to the ripe age of 98—working well into her 90s—it is no surprise that multiple generations have looked to her for inspiration. It is hard to imagine artists like Kiki Smith creating such mythical and symbolic works without Bourgeois as a forerunner.

Bourgeois was born in France to parents who worked as tapestry restorers. The mosaic of that household, with all its traumas and dysfunctionalities, was the endless well for her creativity. Her father was a charismatic philanderer who openly carried on an affair with the live-in governess. Though her mother tried to shield the children from the situation, she also acted as if the affair did not exist. The artist, therefore, somewhat loved and distained both parents.
 

By 1938 Louise had met and fallen in love with an American art historian. They married and she moved with him to the United States. During the next decade she became ensconced in the old boys club of the mid-century artworld. She studied with Stanley Hayter and several of the leading Surrealists at Hayter’s relocated Atelier 17 in New York City. Though Bourgeois denied any attachment to Surrealism, she was part of the influx of European Modernists who had converged on New York, transforming it to the art capital of the world. She had a rather successful career during this time—a period when many outstanding female artists, such as Lee Krasner, were still relegated to the backseat of the artworld bus.
 

During the next two decades Bourgeois seemed to disappear into obscurity. She continued working steadily as her art, quietly, changed the way women were perceived within art society. The questions she was asking and the ideas she explored were especially influential on the new generation of feminist artists.

It wasn’t until 1982 that Bourgeois was suddenly omnipresent within the artworld. The Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of her work—the first for a woman at that institution. At the age when most Americans would have been approaching retirement, Bourgeois was just about to begin the most important decades of her career. This is where the contradictions began to be evident. This tiny senior citizen was creating chiseled marble sculptures. This grandmotherly figure often produced overtly sexualized images—like the infamous sculpture tucked under her arm in her portrait photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe. But she also produced sensitive watercolors and doll-like figures sewn from her old clothing. The variety of materials appropriated always made her difficult to pinpoint.

 In recent years Bourgeois has most often been associated with her spider sculptures. These tend to be gigantic spiders that hover over the viewer, transforming him or her into prey. Typically exhibited in public settings, these spiders are made on a human scale. The spider image is derived from the artist’s mother and the family tapestry business. Bourgeois saw her mother as a protector and a weaver. Still, the ominous quality of the spiders cannot be fully explained through analogies to the artist’s mother alone.

The marble sculptures of Bourgeois exist singly, but also as elements within larger works. Often, they are in the form of disembodied appendages. The body is always the central image of Bourgeois’s work, even when it is absent. Hands, feet, and headless and armless bodies remind the viewer of the traumas of life and the severings that populate our relationships. Figures exhibit amputations that recall the effects of tattered relationships.
 
Other marble sculptures mix the sexual characteristics of males and females. The artist never saw herself as a feminist, per se, though the evidence of her childhood experiences and relationships to her parents bleed through in these works. The rounded and organic forms are at once abstract compositions, but they can simultaneously be read as hybridized breast and phallic forms. They are inter-sexed works that allude to the physically complimentary nature of men and women. The red watercolor seen here, with a clearly male figure seemingly carrying a fetus within its womb, creates a similar effect.
 

 
 

The spider is certainly feminine for Bourgeois, but it seems to represent a mixture of the mother and the governess. The female spider is protective, but it has an element of temptress to it. Bourgeois created small room-like installations that she called “cells’ or “lairs.” The latter term relates specifically to the spider. When the lairs are created with wire fencing they have a web-like appearance that doubles as a place of confinement. It is contradictions like these that make Bourgeois difficult to decipher. From one work to another, and sometimes within a single work, the symbolic imagery can read as multiple things all at the same time.

Along with the fearful emotions that are conjured with many of the artist’s works, there is an alternate side of healing that is also derived from Bourgeois’s youth. The doll-like sculptures, sewn from remnants of the artist’s old clothing, relate to the mending of worn tapestries. These dolls, or puppets, are reincarnations and reanimations. The new life found in these works is like the adage of “making lemons into lemonade.” Bourgeois has taken the tatters of the childhood she was handed and turned them into works that go past the hurts of her youth. These were not art therapy for her, but a way to deeply touch these similar wounds in others, that all may move past their common tragedies.

Bourgeois was an artist who adapted to the times. She lived through the days of Modernism, when the Cubist abstractions of Picasso were seen as revolutionary. Unlike Picasso, and many other Modernists, Bourgeois significantly adapted her work in startling ways over her many decades. The message remained the same though she was able to develop new processes to speak to new times, influencing countless younger artists along the way.

Engraving and the Art of Stanley William Hayter: Taking the Hard Line

I can’t see that there is a very accurate measure for fame. In fact, I’m not sure we would really want to attempt creating such a system. Fame is not an indicator of what kind of influence or importance a person actually holds within his or her immediate circle or within the larger culture. It is more of a popularity contest based on some least common denominator.

For this reason, most people do not know the name Stanley William Hayter. Most artists don’t even recognize his name. That does not diminish his importance. As a printmaker, Hayter initiated some of the most significant media-specific changes of the twentieth century. But it was his inventive spirit that ultimately impacted hundreds and thousands of artists who would not necessarily classify themselves, primarily, as printmakers.

I admit that I knew next to nothing about printmaking until I was about halfway through my graduate program in painting. I knew the minimum about techniques. I also knew a bit about Durer and Rembrandt, which came from general art history survey courses. And I had some interest in the work of Leonard Baskin, but that had much more to do with style than technique. When I came into the presence of a color intaglio work by Hayter (Saddle, above) my interest in printmaking skyrocketed.

I think my earlier lack of enthusiasm for printmaking and printmakers was largely due to my preconceptions about the medium, I figured that it was merely a medium by which paintings and other artworks could be inexpensively duplicated for the masses, only in black and white. This was exactly the kind of thinking that Hayter worked against for most of his life. He wanted to transform printmaking into a highly original and creative medium in its own right.

Hayter’s first prints were in black and white, but they were works unto themselves and not derivative or reproductions of other prototype works. (A side point is that printmaking has continued to suffer from the belief that prints are mere reproductions. There is a major and distinct difference between what many call "prints" and true original print media.) Hayter’s primary process was intaglio—which encompasses a wide variety of techniques that incise or abrade a metal plate. Nearly every intaglio work by Hayter incorporated engraving. He referred to himself as an engraver and that technique was at the heart of his method.

Although Hayter is often linked to the Surrealists, he transcended the movements of the twentieth century. Hayter worked with several Surrealist artists, but his imagery was not intrinsically linked to their styles or concepts. His engraving favored freely flowing virtuosic lines that mocked the unforgiving nature of the metal surfaces he utilized. Themes for the engravings often came from literature. A master work, Death by Water (above), takes its title from a movement in T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land. It was not unusual for the works to take on such existential themes, particularly during this early black and white period.

The passage from the poem reads as follows:
Phlebus the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

While Hayter generally took a much more abstract approach to his literary transpositions, this work retains a certain faithfulness to the text. One senses the whirling undercurrents of the seas as they assault the tragic figure of Phlebus. Yet delicate lines also seem to suggest the gentle picking clean of the Phoenician’s bones.

Rescuing printmaking from the realm of simple reproduction of previous imagery would have been a sufficient and noble goal. And Hayter’s engravings were able to accomplish this in the minds of many. His next endeavor was more far reaching. His belief in the medium as an avenue for unlimited creative expression empowered him to open a printmaking workshop—Atelier 17—where others could come to experiment with intaglio processes.

At first, Hayter did not visualize himself in the role of teacher. He championed an approach of freedom in the print studio, though, in the end, if one came to study at the workshop he had a somewhat regimented approach to the medium. This was, however, a structure within which a great deal of creativity could still be expressed. Atelier 17 opened in Paris before WWII and was a creative meeting ground for many renowned continental artists of the period. When the war threatened France Hayter uprooted the studio and transplanted it to New York for a time.

Many artists came to Hayter’s workshop with little experience in printmaking. Their clean slate status, mixed with the experimental nature of the workshop atmosphere, provided the impetus to challenge tradition. Hayter harnessed the questioning spirit of these artists, bringing their collective energies together so that the whole of the Atelier’s efforts became something much more than the disparate parts.

The next challenge that Hayter and his associates undertook was printing in color. Previous color intaglios were either printed in black and white and then hand colored, or printed with multiple plates. The multi-plate method was cumbersome and produced unreliable results. Hayter felt that if multiple colors could be printed from a single plate, on only one pass through the press, the results would be more consistent.

Cinq Personnages (above) is the watershed print that marked this transition. At times Hayter had created stencils through which he had rolled colored inks onto the plates before they were passed through the press. The colors were a bit diluted with this method (though he did create some incredible images with this process). For Cinq Personnages, the colors were applied to the plate with silk screens. This rendered vibrant colors. But, while the registration of colors was better, using all the silk screens was still somewhat laborious.

What one begins to sense in this transition is Hayter’s new way of conceiving imagery. The same lyrical line quality is apparent in the engraved portions, but color and shape are equally comprising the finished products. It is this presence of color and shape that connects the work more to painting than to drawing. Drawing and printmaking had traditionally been grouped into the category of graphic arts. Hayter, who was also a painter, wanted to transcend these media specific categories.

The last stage of the color printing transformation came when members of the Atelier (usually this discovery is attributed to Krishna Reddy) found that multiple colors could be applied to one plate by producing varying levels within the plate, then inking the plate with inks of different viscosities, using rollers of different hardnesses. Saddle, the first work I encountered, is a variation on this method: it only incorporates two inks with one rolled color. The intermixing of the various inks created a breadth of color combinations and sparked a revival of interest in printmaking.

The vibrancy of the colors used in these prints was like nothing seen in intaglio works during the previous centuries. By the 1960s and 70s Hayter’s style had taken a slightly different direction, in keeping with the new multi-color printing. Still stemming from his engraved line work, the jarring color shifts resulted in combinations of either analogous or complimentary colors. The results were somewhat similar to the Op Art works of the period, yet retained a distinctive quality of their own.

Mauricio Lasansky, an Argentinean-American, studied with Hayter while Atelier 17 was in New York. Lasansky’s color printing methods were much different from Hayter’s but, along with Hayter, his impact on printmaking in the U.S. was astounding. Lasanksy started one of the first MFA printmaking programs and his students went on to found the major university printmaking programs across the nation. Still, the renewal in printmaking—intaglio specifically—was initiated when Atelier 17 was briefly located within U.S. borders.

There was actually a confluence of multiple factors that caused this renaissance in printmaking. Much of it had to do with timing. Hayter was in the right place at the right time. The U.S. was perched on the edge of its first original, world-impacting art movement—Abstract Expressionism. The experimental qualities of Abstract Expressionism were similar to the innovations found in Hayter’s workshop format. Although Stanley Hayter is not the household name that Jackson Pollock is, his spirit infused the work of many mid- and late-century artists, even if they may not recognize it.

Whatever Happened to Art Criticism?

The contemporary art world, like any subculture, is a symbiotic community. While talent, hard work, and timing are factors through which artists and artworks find a place into the canon of art history, there is also a good deal of nepotism. This “I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine” state of affairs has resulted in a recent dearth of genuine art criticism—though this may have always been part of the system.

Writing on art still exists, but it often avoids stating strong opinions in black and white. An article in the February 2009 issue of Art in America touched on this in terms of market characteristics. The author lamented the loss of standards of quality which he claims has been one reason for such sharp increases in the valuation of art by living artists. A major point was that a pluralist view in the art world, along with a refusal to state that there could feasibly be some system of quality standards, has resulted in a lack of experts who can truly assess this.

I do not expect that the reviews written in major art periodicals and newspapers are going to be scathing censures of particular exhibitions or artworks. I have first hand experience with the inherent dilemmas of writing art criticism. When I was writing art reviews for a newspaper in Boise, Idaho I routinely wrote about exhibits and artists that interested me—ones I felt had merit. One gallery owner complained to my editor that his gallery’s shows were never covered. My assignment, with my editor’s full understanding that I would likely be less generous with my compliments, was to review their next show. The gallery owner didn’t complain again.

The art community in any region or municipality is small. Even New York and London have quite manageable art communities. You can accurately surmise that Boise’s is a rather small one. Even when my reviews were mostly positive I would sometimes point out problematic display issues or inconsistencies in the selected works. Once, after mentioning that the enormous frame on a particular landscape painting dwarfed the better features of the piece, the artist took me task. While attending opening receptions during the following Boise First Thursday festivities I was harassed and followed by the artist from one gallery to another. I eventually left earlier than I had planned and decided that large opening receptions were likely not the best setting to view works anyway.

I think this might be one reason for the lack of true critical writing. In the smallness of the art world it is far too easy to anger not only an artist, gallery director, or curator, but the associates of those same people. Unless the critic has a stable position with a particular publication she may be walking on very thin ice when negative criticisms are relayed.

However, all publications are complicit in this lack of true criticism. In an effort to publish what sells best, journalistic integrity is compromised. What we are offered, instead, are synoptic reviews that provide a written facsimile of the exhibition inventory and layout, while avoiding any meaty discussion of the works’ merit, or lack of it. Expert opinion may still just be opinion, but it has the backing of the author’s expertise which should carry the appropriate weight. It is always the similar opinions of many experts that create a consensus that work is of great value. The critical opinion of one bad review will not end a career.

This disappointment in a lack of real criticism was made manifest in an art review of an exhibition of work by Stanley William Hayter, printed in the March 2009 issue of Artnews (the exhibit was of Hayter’s work from 1940-50 at Francis M. Nauman Fine Art, written by Alfred MacAdam). I had been immensely disappointed that I was not able to view the exhibition. The artist’s work has made a significant impact on my own printmaking. I own the catalogue raisonne of his prints and have read most of the available literature on his life and work. I even own several of Hayter’s etchings.

I could have written a more accurate critical review without seeing the exhibit or even knowing which specific works were in it. This was merely a biographical snippet gleaned from either sources I had already read, or perhaps from the catalogue for this exhibit. I gained no new knowledge or insight on the artist, his work, or even this show. There wasn’t even a sense of what specific techniques comprised the works in the exhibit—how the works related both to one another and the decade in which they were created.

I don’t fault Mr. MacAdam for all this. He gave readers exactly what the magazine editors had requested. And the brief piece was helpful if only to provide an introduction of Hayter’s work to a much larger audience. At the same time, I wanted something more substantial from the review, and from many others that I read.

Instead of just accepting the way things are I take this as an opportunity to make what little difference I can. While this blog continues to be written with those who are somewhat estranged from the art world in mind, I now have more resolve to provide additional critical analysis than what may already be available. In fact, there will certainly be some attention paid to Stanley Hayter in the coming weeks. Assessing art and artists of our time is valuable for everyone and hopefully creates more interest in a field that remains insignificant to far too many.