Lithography For Artists. Anon
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stone—not just casual experimentation, but could have really got used to it—what things we should now be treasuring! If today someone who can make beautiful drawings of the nude were to create a series on stone, it would be a very fine thing—and no one has done it. And for portraiture—the opportunity is obvious.
It is true that there are already a few artists—very few—who have in their studios lithographic presses and who print occasional impressions from their own stones. But for the most part even these men, with the machinery all around them, if they want an edition made, call in the professional printer. They discover that there is a difference between pulling an occasional experimental impression and printing an edition. The function of all printing is to multiply, and etching and lithography are both methods of making prints. If a man is not able, by printing, to multiply his work into reasonable editions, he is not in practical command of the craft. He may, just as anybody may, pull a proof—or, more correctly, an impression, for only a skilled printer can prove what a stone can do. But, as I have said, unless he can get the best the thing is capable of, and can keep on doing so through an edition (and I know of no artist in this country except myself who claims to be able to do this), he is not getting out of the process that for which it exists.
Among the etchers, printing one’s own plates is a very usual thing. But there are differences between an intaglio plate and a flat stone. The most important one is that the stone is much the easier to injure. Again, pulling a print or two is a different thing from pulling an edition. The act of printing, if it is in the least mismanaged, easily injures, even ruins, the design. Pulling an edition requires a mastery of the physical and chemical operations—of the acids and gums, of varnishes, inks, temperatures, dampnesses, pressures, backing-boards, printing paper, abrasives, solvents, etc.—sufficient to enable the printer to go on using the complex machine which these constitute, until the edition is complete. This, though rather more than is demanded of the etcher, concerning whom I speak advisedly, for I am an etcher myself, is by no means an impossible demand.
It would have afforded me much satisfaction to illustrate this work by examples chosen from the work of great men. I should love to get out a book just devoted to them, as works of art. As a contribution to the history of artistic achievement it would be a worth-while thing to do. But my present subject is not these achievements that artists have accomplished by means of the process but—quite a different thing—the process itself.
And if I were to bring in here illustrations from Prout or Gavarni, I should be but confusing myself and the reader by just this common confusing of the product with the process. In the dictionary sense, in fact, neither Prout nor Gavarni was a lithographer, for they did not print from the stone, or print at all. This was done by specialists—printers, correctly called “lithographers.” The artists were lithographic draftsmen. So, if I were to illustrate a treatise on the art of drawing and printing from the stone by designs from Harding or Daumier, there would always be this misleading element present. The men named could at best but illustrate the method of drawing, while nobody knows anything about the men who actually made the prints the public sees. Their very names are lost, masked under that of the firm that employed them. But since I became a craftsman myself and learned, by doing the same things, the difficulty and the importance of the part these nameless ones played in the proceedings, I have come to have a high respect for them.
If I had one of these printers beside me and if I could take up a particular lithograph which he had etched and printed and could learn from his own lips the exact steps he had taken to produce it, I should assuredly publish them, the design itself; and the names of both artist and printer. Having no such opportunity, I am quite unable to give of, say a print by Bonington, any such exact account of the mechanisms of its production as would enable the reader to utilize them in lithographs of his own. To do anything like this I am, whether I like it or not, forced to fall back on my own work, where I do know, quite exactly, just how every step of it was done, and can give an account of these steps. I hope that this explanation will make clear why this book is not illustrated by designs by men whose names are known all over the world.
I would like to be allowed, here where I am not tied down to technical matters, to discuss for a moment one or two things about lithography in general which seem to me to need discussing. In the first place, there is a universal looseness in the word “lithography” itself—a thing that has very likely come about because so much that is new has come into the art since its name was first applied to it. Etymologically it means drawing on stone, although we all know that not the stone but the opposition of grease and water is the essential matter. The same method may be used on other surfaces, and Senefelder merely adopted stone because it combined the greatest number of advantages. The commercial lithography of our day has found reasons, none of them artistic ones, for replacing the stone with zinc, glass, aluminum, rubber, and so on, turning out an enormous mass of widely diverse prints all of which, according to the loose terminology above referred to, are “lithographs.” A term that includes so much necessarily defines very little, wherefore the technical journals are now substituting, for all applications of the Senefelder process, regardless of the surface used, the word “planography.” Of planography, lithography thus becomes a subdivision.
Originally the field of planography was limited to that of lithography, at least in artistic printing, for before photography came in and the process block, practically all artistic planographic printing was done from stone, and from drawings made directly thereon, with crayon. Throughout all the great historic period of lithography this was the procedure.
I mention crayon thus specifically because it, above all others, is the art that has made history. Other ways there are, as I just said, to make designs: there is the brush and the pen, carrying ink; and Senefelder describes quite a list of “methods”—stumpings, scrapings, engravings, and so on—all of them obviously available and all having been available these hundred years; yet the history of these years, as deduced from the usages of the ablest lithographic artists, is that these things one and all are of little importance compared with the great basic “method” of taking up a piece of crayon and making marks with it.
“Drawing” has been defined as making significant marks, the significance being in proportion to the draftsman’s control of his hand and to the dearness of the record thereof. Various substances falling comprehensively under the name of crayon have been acceptably used by great men—charcoal, graphite, chalk, pastel, Conte crayon, and lithographic crayon. Of these, the last is peculiar in that it alone was deliberately and artificially invented with a view to its use on a pre-existing and definite surface. Of course it will make marks on other things than stone, but on none of them will it make marks that are so excellent.
An art so important as this deserves a name that shall not be ambiguous, that shall include what it is and exclude what it is not. Since it is simply crayon on stone, we have but to condense this a little and we have our word—crayonstone. Then, just as lithography is a division of planography, crayonstone is a division of lithography. With this long-needed addition to our vocabulary we can without circumlocution indicate the important class distinction between a drawing done on stone and one done first on paper and then transferred to another surface and planographically printed. The former, by this nomenclature, would be a crayonstone lithograph; the latter, if transferred to stone, would be a transfer lithograph, or, since these works are often transferred to zinc or other substance, a transfer planograph. For ordinary usage, however, the two simple words “crayonstones” and “transfers” embody all that is necessary.
Isabey, Bonington, Duzats, Ciceri, Gericault, Haghe, Mouilleron, Gavarni, Boys, Prout, Harding, Daumier, and their associates produced crayonstones and not transfers. Writing in England, in 1919, for a special number of the Studio entitled Modern Woodcuts and Lithographs,1 Mr. Malcolm C. Salaman states that those among contemporary artists who accept crayonstone as the superior to transfer include “all our distinguished lithographers,” of whom he names Brangwyn, F. Ernest Jackson, Kerr Lawson, Sullivan, Becker, Hartrick, Spencer Pryse, John Copley, Ethel Gabain, and Belleroche. Mr. Belleroche writes to Mr. Salaman that transferring is “handy for rough sketches” but that “a good drawing will certainly lose all its savour after it has been subjected to the transfer operation.”