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RESONANCES
 Prints rich in Associations
“…there
is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot
live always in the present it must not be considered
at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians,
of the great painters who lived at other times, is
not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive
today than it ever was."
(Picasso)
No
work of art is created in isolation but is related
to the context of its time, to what has gone
before and, with historical hindsight, to what will come
after. Just as the artist’s personality and interests,
determined by what he has seen or what he is remembering,
perhaps unconsciously, will play their part, the viewer
additionally contributes his or her own distinct personal
associations.
The
colour of the wall paper of a childhood bedroom, the
well-known view from the living room window, a
facial similarity to a loved one, the location
of a happy holiday, objects iconic or obscure admired
on museum visits, the prevailing cultural ambience
of a particular period in one’s life, can all
influence and affect how we see and how we relate to
an image.
David Hockney has commented in an interview “The
fact is, we see with memory, which is why none of us
sees the same thing.”
The
affordable price range of prints, makes it possible to
indulge the occasional idiosyncratic personal rapport,
as suggested above, in collecting prints.
Images
that call to mind other images or circumstances, images
made in direct response, as well as those which unintentionally
strike chords of familiarity in the viewer, form an
interesting selection and question the whole concept
of the nature of originality.
Originality
is a contentious term in specific regard to printmaking;
replication of images being seminal to its invention.
From its origins printmaking has been both a means of
reproduction and a vehicle for original creative expression.
This dichotomy and the paradoxical interplay between
these raisons d’être result
in a fascinatingly rich variety in printed art.
A
frequently quoted adage of Picasso (possibly apocryphal)
is “All artists copy, great artists steal”.
Successive generations of artists have regularly borrowed
from one another.
Raimondi,
as well as imitating landscape backgrounds for his
own engravings from Dürer and
Lucas van Leyden, directly copied Dürer’s
woodcuts of The Life of the Virgin as copper
line engravings, causing Dürer to complain to the
Venetian senate. Goltzius, took out a protective copyright
(privilege) with regard to his engraving of The
Standard Bearer, which was being pirated (see
item 151), but in each of his six plates of
the "Life of the Virgin", tours
de force of virtuosity, he himself imitated the
manner of six different artists, including Dürer
and Lucas van Leyden. It is even reported that he removed
his monogram from some impressions and successfully passed
them off as original compositions by Dürer or Lucas.
Emulation
became a creative force.
It
became part of artistic practice to select models from
the masters and combine them into a new original composition.
Rembrandt is known to have owned an impression of the
Mantegna engraving of the Virgin and Child from
which he borrowed the pose for his own Madonna in The
Virgin and Child with the Cat and the Snake.
Rembrandt: The
Virgin & Child with the Cat & the
Snake
Original etching, 1654. Ref: Bartsch 63ii/ii (Sold)
In
another etching, Christ driving the Money-changers
from the Temple, Rembrandt took the stance of
Christ, with arm raised holding a scourge, long wavy
locks of hair falling over his back, from a woodcut
of the same subject in Dürer’s Small
Passion series. Copied
onto the plate in the same direction as the Dürer
print, the figure is reversed in impressions of Rembrandt’s
etching. Rembrandt even re-used
a copper plate etched by
Hercules Segers, which he had acquired. Segers’ Tobias
and the Angel was
itself a free imitation in reverse of Hendrik Goudt’s ‘large’ Tobias,
engraved after the painting by Elsheimer. Rembrandt
burnished out the large figures of Tobias and the
Angel at the right and replaced them with a large
clump of trees in front of which the small figure
of Joseph leads the donkey ridden by Mary with
the baby in The Flight into Egypt. Two thirds of
the plate, representing a panoramic landscape,
remain untouched and print exactly as Segers left
the plate.
Raphael’s compositions have been amongst the most
influential in the history of art. A number of them were
based on ancient Roman sculptures. Scholars have identified
the different antique relief carvings on various sarcophagi,
newly unearthed in his day, which were the source of
some of his groupings of figures. Not himself a printmaker
Raphael collaborated with Marcantonio Raimondi, supplying
drawings which Raimondi and his workshop worked up into
finished engravings. Most of the drawings are lost but
through the engravings Raphael’s ideas have been
transmitted to subsequent generations. As late as the
second half of the 19th century Manet would borrow from
a Raimondi-Raphael engraving for the arrangement of his
figures in Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe.
Jacques Villon: colour aquatint of Manet’s Déjeuner
sur l’Herbe.
Manet posed his three principal
figures, his brother Eugène, his future
brother-in-law Ferdinand Leenhoff and the model
Victorine Meurent,
in direct imitation of a Raphael
drawing (now lost) as known to him through
the Raimondi engraving.
He was also inspired in the general concept by
Giorgione’s painting Concert Champêtre.
Among
printmakers the most powerful and recurring influences,
especially as regards British artists, are Rembrandt,
Whistler, Japanese prints, Blake, Palmer and Picasso.
In continental Europe Velasquez and Goya were also
important in this context.
The
prints in the catalogue are largely grouped in order to
correspond with this list.
Of
this listing, Whistler and Picasso, in particular,
were themselves susceptible to a huge variety of influences
in their own work, as well as themselves affecting
the work of others.
Japanese
colour woodcuts were a stylistic revelation to 19th
century European artists but the opening up of Japan
to the West also conversely introduced Japanese artists
to the convention of western linear perspective.
 |
James McBey: Artist and
Model.
Etching, 1924.
A self-portrait looking
like Rembrandt. |
The reasons artists imitate and the nature of their
copying are many and various but can be summed up as appreciation, apprenticeship,
dissemination and pastiche. The catalogue contains examples
of all of these.
Emulation
is perhaps a natural adjunct of admiration. The qualities
admired in another artist’s work
can provide a creative ‘jump start’ or suggest
new directions and possibilities. Directly copying another’s
artwork can teach much about the work in question. The
physical act involving both close observation and intellectual
reconstruction gives valuable insight.
The
teenage Wierix brothers who proudly added their ages
as well as their monograms to their engraved copies of
Dürer wished to demonstrate their skill.
Before
the invention of photography, hand-engraved prints
were the only method of disseminating images to a wide
audience; and also the only way to satisfy, or commercially
exploit, a demand for iconic images.
After
the discovery of photography, the lively surface of
a hand-engraved colour aquatint was preferable to the
flat, mechanical surface of a photolithograph to reproduce
contemporary masterpieces that were housed in national
museums and unavailable to hang on private walls except
in reproduction (see above - the Villon aquatint after
Manet’s painting).
Although
too great a dependence on imitation, together with
a lack of assimilation into, or the independent development
of, the emulator’s own style, can lead to pastiches,
most artists make of their borrowing something new
and original in its own right. Compositional details
and subjects may initially be imitated but are transposed
by the unique, individually identifying touch of the
artist into something that is immediately and recognisably
his own.
A motif derived from another source can be deep
in the subconscious and unwittingly presented as an original.
As a quotation I can no longer clearly recall or attribute
perfectly expresses it, people hear the echoes but think
they are listening to the original sound.
 Colour
of itself has an intrinsic resonance. Even in monochrome
prints, which are in principle simply black and white,
the black can vary from charcoal to grey-black, to
blue-black, green-black, brown-black, the ‘white’ paper
from off-white to cream, to buff, to grey-white and all
the various shades in between. The resulting effect varies
in each different combination. The more so if the monochrome
ink is a ‘real’ colour, brown, red or green
perhaps. In a full colour print there is the harmony
of the overall colour scheme, the relation of the different
colours adjacent to each other, and the magical creation
of a third colour when two colours are overprinted. Claude
Flight of the Grosvenor School wrote in his book on linocut “red
over blue over yellow gives a different result to blue
over red over yellow or yellow over blue over red, and
so forth”.
In
contemporary printmaking the complexity of colour printing
in the more recently invented processes of lithography
and screenprint can result in the role of the printer
being that of an important collaborator, going back full
circle to the Raphael-Raimondi relationship in the early
16th century.
However,
above all, this catalogue contains some beautiful prints,
with some interesting comparisons and juxtapositions,
and I hope you share my enthusiasm and pleasure in their
variety and find they chime sympathetic chords.
Published
summer 2009
80 pages, 183 items described, with 161 illustrations in black and white
and thirty-two in colour.
(UK
Price: £10, International orders: £15)
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Artists
included in the catalogue:
- Acroyd
N
- Anderson
S
- Ardizzone
E
- Bartsch
A
- Bauer
M A J
- Bella
S della
- (Bewick)
- Blake
P
- Blake
W
- Bléry
E
- Bol
F
- Bone
M
- (Bosch)
- Brangwyn
F
- Bresslern-Roth
N von
- Brett
S
- (Bruegel)
- Brockhurst G L
- (Bronzino)
- Callot
J
- Calvert
E
- Cameron
D Y
- Castiglione
G B
- (Cézanne)
- Clarke
J
- Cornet
J P
- Craig
E G
- Crome
J
- Daumier
H
- Denne
C.
- Dietricy
C
- Drury
P
- Dufy
R
- (Dürer)
- Durig
R
- Ensor
J
- Erbslöh
A
- Fevre
F le
- Fitton
H
- Fookes
U
- Frost
T
- (Gainsborough)
- (Giorgione)
- (Goltzius)
- Gorlato
B
- Goya
F
- Griggs
F L
- Gross
A
- Haden
F S
- Hardie
M
- Hayes
G
- Hiroshige
A
- Hodgkin H
- (Hokusai)
- Holmes
K
- Hoyton
E B
- (Ingres)
- (John
A)
- (Klee)
- Komjáti
J
- Laboureur
J E
- Le
fevre F
- Leibl
W
- Leyden,
Lucas van
- Livett
U
- Kollwitz
K
- Manet
E
- Matisse
H
- McAgher(?)T
J
- McBey
J
- Meryon
C
- Michl
F
- Millet
J F
- Moncornet
B
- Monk
W
- Muyden
E van
- Nicholson
W
- Nolde
E
- Orovida
(Pissarro)
- Osborne
M
- Ostade
A van
- Palmer
S
- Patrick
J McIntosh
- Pennell
- Picasso
P
- Piper
E
- Pissarro
C
- Pissarro
O
- Platt
J
- Possoz
M
- Pott
C
- Prunaire
A A
- Raimondi
M
- Ranft
R
- (Raphael)
- Rayner
H
- Rembrandt
- Rethel
A
- (Reynolds
J)
- Ric
(?)
- Richards
F
- Robins
W P
- Rousseau
H (le Douanier)
- Salamanca
A
- Shaw
N
- Short
F
- Smart
D I
- Sparks
N
- Spencer
N
- Stephens
I
- Strang
W
- Sutherland
G
- Symons
M
- Tanner
R
- (Turner)
- Tushingham
S
- Unwin
F
- (Van Gogh)
- Velasquez
- (Vermeer)
- Villon
J
- Waterloo
A
- Watts
M
- Webb
J
- Whistler
J M
- Wilson
R A
- Wyllie
W L
- Yoshida
H
- Yoshida
T
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