Lithography For Artists. Anon
PREAMBLE
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IT IS suggested that one who puts out a technical book should begin by telling his public reasons why it should believe what he says. Reluctantly conforming to this, I will say that I was trained as a painter, also as an etcher, and have paid in time and labor the price necessary to the mastery of the operations involved in both the art and craft of crayonstone lithography. Here is brought into co-operation an artist’s lifelong familiarity with artistic problems and a technical grasp of the craft side of the matter—from graining the stone to flattening the finished proofs. The British Museum has a practically complete set of my prints, presumably as works of art; while in the offices of the heads of several of the best lithographic firms in New York they also may be seen hanging, bought and placed there as examples of craftsmanship. For a year I worked with my stones and presses in London. Then I brought them over to my present home at Woodstock, New York. Here I have gradually rounded out a sufficiently complete equipment. Here it is that I have done my private work, and here people sometimes come to study with me. Here in 1919 I put out what I think was the first published offer in this country to teach artistic lithography. When I go down from this rustic retreat to New York, it is generally to work for the rest of the world—write, lecture, print, exhibit—whatever comes up to be done.
As I have worked—making my own lithographs I mean—I have kept up a continuous and extensive experimenting with a view to subordinate to my purposes various new substances and methods. The bulk of the information thus obtained has had only a negative value; but in a few instances, important inventions of interest to artists generally have resulted. I have not, however, in cases where these are incorporated in succeeding chapters, thought it worth while to cumber my pages with a continual patter of remarks as to how this or that formerly was, or now is, done by others. Anyone who wants to may do this; and it would be of interest, for sometimes the new usages vary so widely from the old as to constitute almost a new art. Indeed, when working thus, solely for my own artistic aims, I have found this almost-new lithography more rewarding, more tempting to new fields, more certain of getting results, more lovely in results when got, than I ever dreamed was possible when I began.
Probably that particular new contribution which can be most readily appreciated is the one which puts into our hands a power, somewhat like that of the plate printer, to get tints and tones and richnesses by manipulations of oil and draggings of ink on the copper plate. The lithographic achievement of analogous results is entirely new. The results it is, not the process, which are analogous, for you cannot smear your ink and oil on stone as you can on copper. The means are unique, but the results are a richness suggestive of charcoal, mezzotint—effects of great beauty, and, as I said, not hitherto obtained, or possible, in lithography.
That I have written in a highly condensed and, from a literary point of view, unrewarding style is explained by the fact than any other style would have led on to a book of quite impracticable dimensions. Lithography has been to me for so many years a matter of purely personal adventure, full of the ups and downs that give fascination to any adventure, with high times of success and low times of black failure, that were my purpose other than to bottle up the maximum of facts in the minimum of space, I might have thrown it into the form of a personal story. Early and late I have plugged along, drawn always by something that was just eluding me—something, in the midst of dirty clothes and calloused hands, shining and beautiful. Sometimes it has been one thing and sometimes another; but always it was just beyond; to be captured and embodied tomorrow or next week or next summer. And when I have gone abroad and met and visited with professional printers, it has pleased me to find that, bound though they were to the chariot wheels of commerce, they, as well as I, experienced something of this glamor, something not quite to be explained—a sense of undiscovered possibilities, it may be. One said—and he had grown gray with the roller in his hands—“Oh, you will always keep finding out new things.” And for that I loved him, and our craft.
I. INTRODUCTION
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BOOKS telling how to make an etching have been published in considerable numbers; but of works intended to enable an artist to make a lithograph, with his own hands, there exists not one.
Not only is there this absence of books, but there is a scarcely less complete absence of artistic printers. The genuine professionals are tied up inside huge commercial establishments where they cannot as individuals—nor can their employing firms, with profit to themselves—undertake printing for artists. In these establishments everything is subordinated to speed, cheapness, and quantity production. Consequently, for the man who is simply the artist, who has drawn something lovely on a stone and wants thirty fine proofs of it, there is not in their world any place at all. Besides, it is only the very unusual commercial printer who, bred on and fed by commercialism, possesses that combination of artistic sense and technical and manual skill which works of art demand.
In the early days of lithography it was the business man, the publisher, who exploited it; and such a conception as that a private artist should set up and with his own hands serve his own press never entered anyone’s head. Had the suggestion been made, it would have been met by the objection that printing, unless it had been learned by a long apprenticeship in the regular way, would be too difficult for the artist. Beyond this it would have been said that the artist ought not to spare the time necessary to print what in those days would have been thought of as normal editions—editions of hundreds and of thousands.
We of today have brought in a different principle. We work with the idea that there is always room at the top and that tops are small. Instead of the rapid production of large numbers of middling prints sold cheap, we who specialize on fine prints substitute the slow and careful production of a few superb proofs sold high. This is an entirely different conception. And by it the artist can be his own printer and the printer be his own artist, which happens to be the only arrangement compatible with the finest achievement in both lines. It is because the production of lithographs in this way did not exist in the past and has but just begun in the present that I am sure the future is destined entirely to eclipse all that has gone before.
Our ancestors fought bloody battles with bows and arrows: we accomplish destruction otherwise, and these old tools of death are to us merely things of pleasure and discipline. The camera used to be only for the professional, but now it is everywhere—a means of personal expression. So in any number of instances it is the same. Among the fine arts, under the special culture of the amateur enthusiast, there blossoms here and there a higher sort of thing, carrying a previously unrecognized and unrealized cultural significance.
I offer this book to my fellow-artists knowing that none can get out of lithography all there is in it unless he does his own printing—and does it fully understanding the resources of the craft. And this reminds me to say that the idea in some artists' minds that lithography is primarily a thing for tasty sketches is wrong. Of course you can sketch and skirmish on stone—quite perfectly—nowhere more so—but to set this as the first thing is to run the chance of forgetting the more important fact that it is even more suited to work that is thorough and complete. There are circles in which it is the fashion, just now, to seem to see in mere scrawls virtues hitherto hidden from mankind. But the nature of the human mind has not changed because the excessive multiplicity of mechanical reproductions of hasty things has affected some persons' taste. There exist everywhere in the mob individuals who are not “mobized,” who are able to enjoy other than the snapshot mood. There are among the artists those whose nature it is to create thoughtful and complete works.
Let me try to suggest what I am thinking, by saying that sometimes the creative imagination works by flashes and records by jots—but not always. There are times when it acts ruminatingly, even dreamily. Our thoughts are necessarily clothed with the complete values and the defined and solid forms of nature, and sometimes the artist feels like going very far in realizing his values and forms. And when he does want to draw a relatively complete picture—complete in this sense—drawing on stone is marvelously suited to his need. It will accept any degree of elaboration and will give it unharmed in the print. I wish that Corot had drawn for us on the stone some of his landscapes, with all their beauty of tone. The prints would not have disappointed