Prints and Printmaking

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18th-Century European Prints

At the turn of the 18th century, Paris was the artistic center of Europe. Such artists as François Boucher and Jean Honoré Fragonard documented court life in drawings and sketches; influential publishers then had these made into engravings, which proved extremely popular.

Until the 18th century England had not developed great strength in the graphic arts. Academic paintings of the nobility and aristocracy were popular, and these images were reproduced beautifully through the mezzotint medium. While the portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds continued to dignify academic tradition, a triumvirate of English satirists headed by William Hogarth worked against this tradition. James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, and Hogarth used engraving to satirize almost every aspect of 18th-century England. In tone, they ranged from gentle moralizing to savage commentary and occasional bawdiness.

During the 18th century the graphic arts once again flourished in Italy, as exemplified in the work of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo; Giovanni Antonio Canal, known as Canaletto; and Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Tiepolo is noted for his delicacy of line and the spacious quality achieved through economy of line and detail. Canaletto's solid draftsmanship, coupled with a lightness of line, enabled him to capture the courtyards, canals, and beautiful architecture of 18th-century Venice. With an architect's background and his expertise with the graver, Piranesi found a channel for interpreting his passion for Roman antiquities. He created several thousand prints, but of particular note is the series Carceri d'Invenzione (1745; 2nd edition 1760). These are large-scale views of imaginary prisons in spectacular architectural detail, combining the eeriness of a dungeon with huge vaulted ceilings, endless staircases, and massive interior bridges.

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19th-Century European Prints

In the 19th century, leading artists produced an extraordinary range of prints. Spain's Francisco de Goya, for example, combined aquatint with etching to produce bluntly truthful visions of the follies of humankind and the heinous acts of war. Goya's highly individualistic style comes across most characteristically in the print series Los Caprichos (The Caprices, 1797-1799), in which he is almost ferocious in his attacks on the clergy and on the government for its wealth, corruption, and hypocrisy. During the French occupation of Spain in the Peninsular War (1808-1814), Goya created his second most famous series of prints, Desastres de la guerra (Disasters of War, 1810), horrifying images of the hideous fate of people caught in war.

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In Paris, lithography provided the inexpensive means to reproduce images on a large scale in the form of prints, periodicals, and book illustrations. Honoré Daumier was the true voice of the middle class; his particular gift was for political satire and social commentary, and the corrupt reign of Charles X was perfect fuel for his powerful wit. Periodicals such as Le Charivari carried his acute, biting observations on government, the legal profession, and the upper classes and their many foibles.

William Blake was apprenticed to an engraver in 1772 and made antiquarian engravings for seven years. Throughout the 1780s, Blake worked as an engraver and also devised ways to print his own poems and illustrations together. He produced several books of mystical verse with his own unique and strange illustrations. His illustrations for the Book of Job (1826) are among his most intriguing works.

Prominent among mid-19th century French artists was the melancholic figure of Charles Méryon. More important than Méryon's technical acumen in etching was the manner in which he saw his adored city of Paris, in particular the oldest sections slated for demolition. He portrayed the charm and elegance of these old buildings in a highly dramatic manner.

From the 1860s to the end of the century, the Japanese print exerted an enormous influence on the art and artists of the time. According to tradition, the Parisian artist Félix Braquemond received a set of porcelain from Japan and found that the plates had been wrapped with the prints of Hokusai. Braquemond enthusiastically showed the prints to his impressionist artist friends, who were intrigued by their flat, bold, asymmetrical composition. The lithographic scenes by Edgar Degas of women bathing and dressing are reminiscent of the Japanese style. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was perhaps the most striking and original exponent of japonisme. Employing the subtle to brilliant coloration and the cropping of images characteristic of Japanese prints, he designed posters that capture the essence of charm and elegance.

Through the influence of the poster artist Jules Chéret, color lithography grew in popularity. The beautiful color lithographs of Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard portray Parisian scenes as well as the intimacies of family life. Along with Chéret's work, that of Théophile Steinlen and Toulouse-Lautrec made posters powerful mediums for advertising. The Czech artist Alphonse Mucha, in his stylish posters, emphasized the sensuous line and the decorative quality that was characteristic of the turn-of-the-century art nouveau movement.

The passionate and masterly Norwegian artist Edvard Munch created woodcuts and lithographs marked by powerful, highly personal imagery. His women are often lush and sensuous, while other images, including his men, are fraught with anxieties and inner tension.

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20th-Century European Prints

The many art movements that have coursed through this century are unusual in their diversity and number, and also in their rapid development. They include fauvism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, op art, pop art, and superrealism; printmakers have played a part in all these movements.

At the turn of this century Paris still reigned as the center of Western art and printmaking. A group of postimpressionists exhibited their paintings at the 1905 Salon d'Automne, among them Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault, and André Derain. Critics called them fauves (see Fauvism), literally “wild beasts.” These youthful artists sought to use color in a totally unrestrained fashion, which, with the exception of Matisse's graphic works, carried over into their prints. Matisse's most important prints, however, are black-and-white lithographs. In his many odalisques (models posed as harem beauties), Matisse chose a highly decorative background filled with a patterned design, while his model was dressed in an exotic Persian-style costume. This rich, opulent atmosphere suggests, in black and white, the intensity of vivid color.

Cubism, which translated the realistic image into abstract form by dissolving it into cubic elements and by crisscrossing shapes and planes, was the joint achievement of the French artist Georges Braque and the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, who worked together beginning in 1909. Founded on the qualities of superb draftsmanship, Picasso's earliest prints (1904) speak of directness and compassion, and evoke a somber and sentimental nature. In 1930 he was commissioned by the publisher Ambroise Vollard to issue a series of 100 prints, the famous Vollard Suite (published 1937), one of the artist's greatest graphic achievements. The subject matter of these etchings and aquatints ranges from the artist's studio and model to sensuous and emotional depictions of minotaurs, and to portraits of Vollard himself. Other artists who produced important cubist prints were Braque, Jacques Villon, Juan Gris, and Louis Marcoussis. Each worked to achieve a warm and harmonious relationship between the etched line and overall tonal quality.

Surrealism, which sought imagery that welled up from the unconscious and from dreams, produced a number of famous printmakers, exemplified in the work of the Spanish artist Joan Miró, whose color lithographs have a delightfully whimsical quality. A similar whimsicality, with bizarre overtones, is found in works by André Masson and Yves Tanguy. In 1910Marc Chagall came to Paris from Russia. Throughout a long career Chagall distinguished himself as a painter and printmaker, combining a folkloric, naive charm with rich, dreamlike imagery. Chagall's major graphic achievements are the series of prints Mein Leben (My Life, 1922), the 100 etchings (1948) for the novel Dead Souls by Russian writer Nikolay Gogol, and the 105 etchings illustrating the Bible (1956).

At the turn of the century, German artists developed expressionism—a style emphasizing subjective emotions and responses to the external world—in reaction against French impressionism and postimpressionism. As in the Gothic tradition, the immediacy and boldness of the woodcut made it a perfect medium. One group of Dresden-based artists, called Die Brücke (“The Bridge”), and included Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, and Otto Müller. Their styles varied from striking contrasts of sections of roughly gouged wood, in Schmidt-Rottluff's cartoonlike prints and Heckel's harsh portraits, to Mueller's lyrical composition of female figures. See Brücke, Die.

In Munich another group, Der Blaue Reiter (German for “The Blue Rider”), emerged, led by the Russian-born Wassily Kandinsky. Together with the Swiss artist Paul Klee, Der Blaue Reiter artists developed a refined abstraction, in which rhythm of line and a dramatic sense of color dominated, with an absence of representational objects. Klee, a unique genius, soon chose to work alone in Switzerland; he used images with seemingly childlike, naive qualities to create highly sophisticated personal statements with universal implications in the guise of fantasy.

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Early American Prints

In colonial America the decorative arts rather than the graphic arts flourished. There was, however, an interest in portraiture; the first mezzotint in America, dated 1728, is a portrait of the noted clergyman Cotton Mather by Peter Pelham.

After the American Revolution (1775-1783), more diversified subject matter developed. Engravings were made to commemorate famous battles, to depict historical events, and to honor generals and noted statesmen. Perhaps the best-known American historical print of this period is Boston Massacre (1770) by silversmith and patriot Paul Revere. Most early American prints were made by professional engravers who almost always relied on paintings for their subject matter. Prints also became important as a vehicle for the spread of political and social ideas.

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19th-Century American Prints

By the 1800s the first truly American printmaking movement had come into being. Topographical imagery was popular, as were genre scenes of American farm and city life. The most outstanding prints created during the 1820s and 1830s were the remarkable engravings by Robert Havell, Jr., for the folios of American birds (published 1827-1838) painted by American naturalist and artist John James Audubon.

Because they were less costly to produce, lithographs soon became more popular than engravings. The first private American concern to sell prints was founded by Nathaniel Currier. He and his partner, James Ives, became “printmakers to the American people” (see Currier & Ives).

Winslow Homer began his career as a magazine illustrator for Harper's Weekly. He eventually created two masterful engravings, Eight Bells (1887) and Perils of the Sea (1888), based on two of his best-known canvases. The most important American printmaker of the last half of the 19th century was James Abbott McNeill Whistler. He learned etching technique at the U.S. Coastal Survey in Washington, D.C. In 1855 Whistler went to Europe, where he began creating his famous series of prints, first of Paris (1858) and London (1860), and then Venice (1880, 1881). His experimentation with technique and refinement of compositional details earned Whistler a high position in printmaking.

Mary Cassatt, an artist from Philadelphia, went to study in Paris and settled there. An early impressionist, she developed expert technique in drypoint, etching, and aquatint. She further expanded her oeuvre by endeavoring to re-create the quality of the Japanese woodblock print in a series of color aquatints in which areas of soft color are combined with decorative patterning; these rank among her most famous prints.

Childe Hassam and Maurice Prendergast were America's important impressionists. Hassam concentrated on etching, using short staccato strokes within a firm design. Prendergast for a short time produced monotypes. His subtle and refined palette was well suited to this spontaneous and demanding method of printmaking.