By John Russell, The New York Times, June 22, 1979
A lot of people love prints, and why not? Prints are fun to look for, fun to find, fun to take home and fun to hang on the wall. By “prints” I do not mean reproductions, facsimiles or any other form of counterfeit. I mean prints: original works of art that come to us in the medium for which they were originally conceived. A print is — and one can’t say it too often — something for which the artist takes total and immediate responsibility, as distinct from something to which he lends his name.
So prints are fun to possess. They are also fun to talk about. Print collecting is a social activity in a way that collecting paintings and drawings is not. To buy a print of recent date sets up a whole network of relationships: with the publisher, with the master printer who was in charge of the workshop and with all the other people and institutions who have bought that same print. We may not know more than one or two of these people, and some of them we may not even know by name. But there they are, out in the far blue yonder, and what they have in common with us is that none of us could resist buying the print. This is quite a different _matter from buying a work of art that exists once and once only and may never- be seen, let alone coveted, by anyone else. To buy even one print is to become enrolled in a secret society whose functioning is largely benign.
It was always so. Great artists have been making fine prints for 500 years and more. The passion for those prints cuts across all barriers. Considerations of age, sex, religion, color and social status lose all meaning when faced with the passion for prints. Every great artist has pored over prints. Prints were for many generations the poor man’s picture gallery. They were the consolation of the hermit, the secret hoard of the miser and the mainstay of the historian. Prints were the stuff of life, and quite often they cost pennies.
That was the fascination of the print. What you held in your hand was not a reproduction. It was something that the artist had carried out himself, with his own hand, on a woodblock, a metal plate or a lithographic stone. No one had come between him and you. You were holding an original document that linked you directly to the artist. He might have been a hack engraver, but he might also have been Duller, Rembrandt or Goya: one of the greatest men who ever lived. And in every big city in the Western world there were shops where prints were on offer by the thousand.
Until quite lately, prints in general were clipped. There were great names and rare states, just as there were artists who had committed following. But the pleasure of print collecting is that there is literally no end. to it in many of its manifestations. You can go into a print shop like Paul Proute’s in Paris. and come out a week later without even having got into the inner room. And even after World War II, $100 would get you quite a long way with most of the individual prints at Proute’s. This was true of most of the old master prints, and it was true of certain 20thcentury prints that would cost you $10,000 or $12,000 today, if you could find them. Print collectors in those days were the real thing, moreover: fanatical old savants like the ones whom Honore Daumier drew, penny‐pinching bachelors out of the novels of Balzac and English public servants in retirement.
But that was long, long ago, before the print boom, the print industry and the high-pressure promotion of the print. When Ellsworth Kelly first made prints for the Galerie Maeght in Paris, you could walk into the gallery and buy as many as you wanted for $20 each. Prints came into the world in silence and secrecy, the way a leaf falls from the tree in darkness. To push a print was unknown: even when the artist was Picasso or Matisse, there seemed to be plenty to go around from an edition of 50 or 75.
It is difficult to say exactly when that attitude changed. It was not because of any Connoisseur’s Guide To Print Collecting den improvement in the general quality of prints. It would be hard to find better prints than those made by Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard in their youth or by Picasso and Matisse throughout their long careers or by Edvard Munch before 1914. German Expressionism before 1914 was — epitomized as much in prints as paintings. Marc Chagall was a wonderful printmaker 50 years ago. Prints and printmakers have been in great shape for as long as anyone can remember.
What happened was that people began to make big money out of prints. There were several reasons for this. One was that prints got to be bigger, jazzier and altogether more of a spectacle. The master printer — the man in charge of the print workshop — began to serve the artist the way a recording engineer serves the recitalist. He showed the artist how to do things that the artist had never dreamed were possible. Given, in some cases, the merest outline of an idea, the master printer came up with an end-product that was astonishing in its vigor, its assurance and its breadth of resource. What the master printer had to offer was not printmaking, in the old sense: it was printmaking as metamorphosis, and it
This happened precisely at the time when the prices of paintings and drawings began to go way beyond the reach of most people. Collectors for whom prints had always seemed a second-best field of inquiry were forced to think again, and in quite a few cases they were very agreeably surprised. The change came too late for most of the American Abstract Expressionists, but it had a dramatic effect upon the activity of the next generation of American artists: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, Robert Morris, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine and others. There was no longer any reason not to make prints. Printmaking had proved itself able to adapt to every nuance that was asked of it, and whereas it had stood in the past for a rigid and torturous discipline, it suddenly shaped up as one of the freest and most flexible of all modes of
Universal Limited Art Editions
As if that were not enough, printmaking in certain hands stood for perfection of a kind that had elsewhere seemed to vanish from the world. When Tatyana Grosman founded the print workshop in West Islip, L. I. that she called Universal Limited Art Editions, the artists who went to work there found that no limits whatever were set to their period of experimentation. If they wanted to turn the key in the lock and come back in three years, that was all right. If they wanted to keep the whole staff on the job for 96 hours together, that was all right, too. There was nothing Mrs. Grosman wouldn’t do to get perfection.
Whatever comes out of Universal Limited Art Editions tends to have an introverted look, no matter who signs the print. With Gemini G. E. L. in Los Angeles, and more recently with Tyler Graphics in Bedford Village, N.Y., the work tends to have a more aggressive, up‐front air. “Come on — we’ll show you” is the basic attitude at both Gemini and Tyler Graphics, and it also prevails at, the workshop in New York City where, Hiroshe Kawanishi gives a new resonance to the notion ‘of silk screening. But at every. good print workshop (and there are others, not mentioned here), , the :master printers understand two things. One is that making art is a lonely business. The other is that to get out of the studio and into the collective and supportive atmosphere of a print workshop can be a colossal encouragement to an artist. The renaissance of the print — if it can be so called — is as much psychological
Regret for Lost Opportunities
Looking at the mere handful of prints that was made by many a distinguished artist in the 1920’s and 30’s, we may regret the opportunity lost. Looking at the overproduction of certain great names (European and American alike) in the 1960’s and 70’s, we may mourn the age of innocence when even a Matisse or a Miro would make a print, pull one or two copies, put them in a drawer and forget them. The first thing that a print collector has to do in the late 1970’s is to learn to distinguish between prints to which the artist has entrusted his deepest feelings and prints that result from a more or less honorable form of replication.
How to do that? “Keep looking” is the answer. Go to the nearest museum that has a print room and work your way through the boxes (make an appointment first). Subscribe to the Print‐Collectors’ Newsletter ($29 a year, and worth every cent). Read whatever you can on the artists who tempt you, and keep in mind that for every one of us there is a sleeping beauty among the artists of the past.. Never miss an auction sale; much can be learned from promiscuity. And then, when you are sure both of what you want and of what you can afford, give the galleries a thorough going over.
Which galleries? An invidious question, to which all answers are unfair. My own first allegiance would be to the A. A. A. Galleries, 663 Fifth Avenue, at 52d Street, where Sylvan Cole and his colleagues have many thousands of prints in stock. (They pride themselves, by the way, on not stocking one or two of the big sellers who give prints a bad name.) Their holdings go back almost 100 years, and they don’t go in for the big‐name, big‐price prints that have come up in the 1960’s and 70’s, but they know a very great deal, they are
My second general recommendation would be Brooke Alexander, at 20 West 57th Street. Mr. Alexander takes up where Mr. Cole leaves off, more or less, which is to say that he offers a wide choice of the prints of the last 10 or 15 years, together with others still barely dry from the press. The spirit of the age vibrates through his little gallery, and we have a sense that he genuinely loves what he is doing. While in that same neighborhood, you could look in at the Bernard Jacobson Gallery, 24 West 57th Street, and the Getler‐Pall Gallery, 50 West 57th Street. Mr. Jacobson specializes in British printmakers, many of whom are well worth looking up, and the Getler‐Pall Gallery always has one or two classics of the modern American movement stacked away in
Works of the Old Masters
It is a mistake to be too long away from prints of an earlier period. Old master prints have the effect of freshening our eye. From that point of view, a halt at the William H. Schab Gallery, 37 West 57th Street, is never without its rewards. It is also getting to be known that Andrew Fitch of the Fitch‐Febvrel Gallery, 5 East 57th Street, has the kind of fanatical absorption that makes for a really good print dealer.
As part of one of everyone’s favorite bookshops, Weyhe Inc., 794 Lexington Avenue, at 61st Street, there is a print gallery that makes every exiled European nostalgic for the long‐destroyed print shops of Berlin and Frankfurt and Munich. We should none of us be surprised if Emil Jannings were to come puffing up those narrow stairs in one of the earlier and sedater scenes from “The Blue Angel.” At 50 West 57th Street, Martin Sumers carries on that same tradition, though not in quite such evocative surroundings.
There are many, many other places in New York in which prints of one kind or another can be found. M one extreme, there are galleries in which you know from the start what you can get. If you go to Castelli Graphics, at 4 East 77th Street, or to Pace Editions, at 32 East 57th Street, you will find prints by the artists whom those two galleries represent: no bargains and no surprises, but the real thing at source. Many other galleries — Terry Dintenfass, for one, at 50 West 57th Street keep prints by their affiliated artists continually in stock. Among print publishers, the Petersburg Press of London has a gallery at 17 East 74th Street, in which you can see their prints, new and old, and it should be said that they have an exceptionally strong list.
Pleasures of Discovery
But the fun of print buying is starting out with one thing in mind and ending up with quite another. The A. A. A. is a good place for that. Another is the print department of the Kennedy Galleries, 40 West 57th Street. This has a strong holding of the gallery’s own artists, but what I have especially in mind is the enormous stock of older prints. You would have to know a great deal about prints to be able to spend an hour among those boxes and not turn up something that you didn’t know before.
And that is, after all, one of the two classic postures of the print collector. The other is to know exactly what you want, and where to get it in perfect condition and at the earliest possible moment. Neither ideal is now easy to realize, but New York City is a good place to give them a try.
The New York Poetry Forum Americana Awards Celebration will be held Sunday at 1:30 P.M. at the Poe Center of Herbert H. Lehman College, Grand Concourse at East Kingsbridge Road across from Poe Cottage.