Colour Lithography and Its Moral Nature a Paper Written As Part of the Requirements for the Masters in Library and Information Science Degree at Mcgill University
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Colour Lithography and its moral nature a paper written as part of the requirements for the Masters in Library and Information Science degree at McGill University Allana Mayer 2014 Introduction Lithography, the process of applying paints and inks to a stone for transfer to paper, was invented in Germany in 1798 by Alois Senefelder (Twyman, 2013). The technique is less talked-of than the invention of movable type, or the diffusion of digital tools, in their effects on the respective industries and sociocultural climates of their times, but historical documents do portray a similar tension between a new technology and existing processes. Lithography is in particular an interesting halfway point between the former and the latter: while the process of mechanical reproduction is an obvious antecedent to the invention of printing in general, its chemical-based process is a herald of things to come, namely home laser printing that uses toner and ink to apply images to paper -- or even the chemical negative/ positive processes that make up photosensitive reactions. The chemical process that operates in lithography relies on oil and water repelling one another but adhering to stone. An image is drawn onto a lithographic stone (often limestone or zinc) with a grease stick or wax crayon, then the stone is coated with gum arabic, citric acid, and water, which is repelled from the oily design and adheres to the negative space, without etching the stone. Then the stone is prepared for printing with a mixture of oil-based paint and water: the water adheres to the gum arabic in the negative space, while the oil-based paint creates a positive image and is transferred to subsequent sheets of paper. We are here interested in colour lithography, also known variously as chromolithography, tinted lithography, and linotinting (this specifically when using a watercolour-like wash). Senefelder experimented with various methods for colour lithographic printing, and, in discussing lithographic futures, suggested in an 1818 book that multi-colour printing would be not far off. In England and France other printers were experimenting with similar techniques, but a patent for chromolithography was not handed out until 1837, in England, to Godefroy Engelmann, of German and French origin (Twyman, 2013). The method entered commercial use in the 1850s; this was a satisfying way to provide affordable colour illustrated texts to the public (Marzio, 1979). The process of colour lithography requires several stones per image, one for each ink pigment: in many early cases colour lithography was a single colour added to highlight a black-line image, whereas some of the most complex and accomplished colour lithography could use hundreds of stones for a single image. This process was found to be best for specific uses: in other places, black-line lithography was combined with select hand-colouring, or a few chromolithographic layers were laid down and then detailed by hand. We are concerned here with purely lithographic processes that rely on one or more colour stones for illustration. In this essay, cartography and fine-art reproduction are compared to investigate concepts of originality, usefulness, and aesthetics as employed by several demographics: artists, cartographers, printers, critics, curators, sellers, and the buying public. Colour lithography’s methods of diffusion into public knowledge, let alone approval, provide interesting contrasts between the “artistic” concerns of reproduction makers and the more utilitarian ends of cartography. History And Context The histories of both printmaking and aesthetics coincide when telling the story of chromolithography. Much of the intricacies of these other techniques are beyond the scope of this essay, but some context is required. Mass-printing methods for illustrations include woodcut engravings, intaglio, and copperplate etching, paving the way for the idea of ink transfer from solid image to paper. Meanwhile, an early example of the use of Newton’s theory of colour division (compiling the primary colours of red, yellow, and blue to make any colour in the spectrum) was created by Jacob Christoper Le Blon in the 1710-20s using the mezzotint process; Engelmann applied this principles in the 1830s, as did the development of photography and every colour-printing technology since (Twyman, 2013, p. 20). Examples of use of colour in conjunction with black-inked text exist as far back as 1457, in the Mainz psalter printed by Gutenberg progenies Fust and Schoeffer (Twyman, 2013, p. 17). This method involved laying several colours of ink in patches -- blue, red, and black -- on a single page of movable type, obviously a time-consuming process. The invention of lithography in 1798 was relatively understated, as it did not fall into common use until the 1820s, due to technical problems that made mass production difficult (Marzio, 1979). Engelmann solved the majority of these technical issues. Originally, Senefelder’s design for a lithographic press was reliant on a scraper moving against a stationary stone; subsequent designs by Mitterer and other inventors involved moving the bed (paper and stone) against a stationary scraper (Szrajber, 1997, p. 295); various designs use levers and wheels for control, cylinders and runners for moving the bed or press, single-handle or double-handle models; etc. Patents for lithographic presses were mainly dependent on cylindrical limestones before 1840, and flat stones after; this may not reflect cultural usage of the time (Szrajber, 1997, p. 300). Eventually (in 1875) a patent would be handed out for a rotary lithographic printing press, which operated on images etched into cylinders, but we will mainly discuss planographic printing before this invention (Marzio, 1979). Lithography found its main commercial use in cheap and replicable illustrations for other published matter, mainly texts. Many beautiful examples of book illustrations, often from medicine, botany, and zoology, exist today. Colour Lithography Just as one-colour lithography was coming into its own, Senefelder was suggesting various methods and innovations for perfecting the chromolithographic process. In 1818, Senefelder’s treatise Vollstandiges Lehrbuch der Steindruckery (published as A Complete Course of Lithography in 1819) detailed several possible ways for dealing with multi-layer printing alignment, ink types, and other problems (Twyman, 2013, p. 26). From these early theories, little is done to develop proven methods for over a decade. Evidence is hard-pressed to produce more than half a dozen examples of Senefelder’s and other’s experiments. In the 1830s Europe discovered the suitability of chromolithography for the reproduction of paintings through complicated tonal layering. Previous to this, chromolithography was mainly used to add highlights to an otherwise black-line lithographic image, or colours were printed “side-by-side” for a simple and flat effect, sometimes painting multiple colours of ink onto a single stone (Clapper, 2002, p. 18). Paper tended to react badly to multiple layers of ink, resulting in “paper stretch” (Twyman, 2013, p. 25). Colour layering became easy with the use of transparent ink layers between colours, to prevent bleeding; after this, chromolithographers could achieve astonishing levels of complexity and detail. Colour lithography is considered “the most significant event in colour printing in the nineteenth century” due to its unique position in an “artistic movement” (Ward, 1962, p. 35). Original creativity in the medium was less popular than its use for reproduction, at least before the 1850s; after this point, chromolithographic processes had led to work in early photographic reproduction, leaving the manual process to be explored by artists. It had its heyday in the 1890s, coinciding with Impressionism’s use of colour without lines. Artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and James McNeill Whistler experimented with colour lithography, while Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Paul Cezanne designed black lithographs to which colours were subsequently added by printers -- a fairly common relationship, as lithographic printing became its own specialized skill, hard to master simultaneously with other media. This may be a good time to make some terminological distinctions: colour lithography should refer to a process wherein multiple stones are used to create an image with varying ink pigments. It should not, then, refer to a lithographic image in black ink that has subsequently been hand-coloured or tinted through some other process. However, there does seem to be confusion about this in the literature. A good example is Edouard Manet’s only foray into “colour lithography,” as it is termed: Polichinelle (1874), currently held by the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, is a black lithographic print (of which Manet experimented with about twenty) that is hand-coloured in gouache and watercolour. This painting was the model for colour lithographic prints (in brown, gray, green, yellow, blue, red, and a neutral tint) made in 1876, meant to be distributed widely, but the prints varied slightly in pose from the original, indicating a certain amount of artistic intervention by Manet and his printer Lemercier (Ward, 1962, p. 38-39). The print itself was highly admired but also censored for either its apparent political parody or depiction of drunkenness: either way, changes were made from