Color in Artists' Books • Charles Meryon • Stencils on Early Woodcuts • Color in the Age of Digital Reproduction Letter
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US $25 The Global Journal of Prints and Ideas September – October 2013 Volume 3, Number 3 Color in Artists’ Books • Charles Meryon • Stencils on Early Woodcuts • Color in the Age of Digital Reproduction Letter from Montreal • Prix de Print • Treasures from the Vault • Martin Puryear • Dieter Roth • Under 100 • News ARTIST BOOKS A selection of recent and current publications THE ARION PRESS KARA WALKER Porgy & Bess, the libretto by DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin, with sixteen lithographs by Kara Walker in the book and four additional lithographs as an extra suite in portfolio. Book edition 400; suite edition 40. JONATHAN HAMMER Animal Farm, the novel by George Orwell, with twenty-four relief prints by Jonathan Hammer in the book and an extra suite of all twenty-four prints in portfolio. Book edition 300; suite edition 30. LUCY GRAY The Day of the Locust, the novel by Nathanael West, with an introduction by David Thomson and twenty photographs by Lucy Gray. Book edition 400. WENDY ARTIN Stone from Delphi, poems with classical references by Seamus Heaney, selected and with an introduction by Helen Vendler, with sixteen watercolor drawings by Wendy Artin. Book edition 300. JULIE MEHRETU Poetry of Sappho, in Greek with facing English translations by John Daley with Page duBois, with twenty double-page relief prints by Julie Mehretu in the book and four additional prints as an extra suite in portfolio. Book edition 400; suite edition 40. RAYMOND PETTIBON South of Heaven, the novel by Jim Thompson, with an introduction by Arnold Hano and forty-four drawings by Raymond Pettibon. Book edition 400. WILLIAM T. WILEY Don Quixote, the novel by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Edith Grossman,with ninety-seven relief prints and a large print with colors by William T. Wiley. Book edition, in two volumes, 400; print edition 40. THE ARION PRESS 1802 Hays Street, The Presidio, San Francisco, CA 94129 415-668-2542 • [email protected] • www.arionpress.com September – October 2013 In This Issue Volume 3, Number 3 Editor-in-Chief Susan Tallman 2 Susan Tallman On Color Associate Publisher Sarah Bodman 4 Julie Bernatz Black Books: The Use of Color in Artists’ Books Managing Editor Annkathrin Murray Thomas Primeau 11 Coloring Within the Lines: Online Columnist The Use of Stencils on Early Woodcuts Sarah Kirk Hanley Jacobus van Breda 17 Manuscript Editor Charles Meryon: Paper and Ink Prudence Crowther Jason Urban 23 Design Director Pattern Recognition: Skip Langer A Letter from Montreal Associate Carinna Parraman 28 Isabella Kendrick Color in the Age of Digital Reproduction Prix de Print, No. 1 34 Justin Quinn: Fallen Chapter 71 or 4836 times E Treasures from the Vault 36 Richard H. Axsom Ellsworth Kelly’s Red Reviews Susan Tallman 39 Martin Puryear Charles Schultz 42 Ian Davenport: Circle Etchings Amelia Ishmael 43 Alain Biltereyst: Untitled Allison Rudnick 44 The Game-Changing Editions of Dieter Roth News of the Print World 47 On the Cover: Francis Elliott, cover of Dark <100 54 Globe (2009 –), altered school atlas, black marker pen. Published by the artist, London. Contributors 59 Guide to Back Issues 60 This Page: Detail of colored and uncolored impressions of Christ’s Entry to Jerusalem Online: from Christ as the Man of Sorrows (fragments) Sarah Kirk Hanley / The INK Blog (ca. 1500, France), color woodcut. Miriam and Gold Rush: The Print Market Now Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, New York Public Library. Photo: Denise Stockman. The series “Treasures from the Vault” Art in Print was made possible with the generous 3500 N. Lake Shore Drive support of the IFPDA Foundation. Suite 10A Chicago, IL 60657-1927 www.artinprint.org [email protected] No part of this periodical may be published without the written consent of the publisher. On Color By Susan Tallman olor is generally considered a where the material specifics of inks and just ones and zeros. For most practical Cdesirable thing. A sign of health. papers are treated as active contributors purposes today, color is the default and Of spring. Of light at the end of the to meaning. It can be seen in Ian Dav- black-and-white is an “effect” achieved by tunnel. It is how cultures around the enport’s intensely colored Circle Etchings clicking the desaturate button. world mark the end of mourning and (reviewed on page 42) and Alain Bil- The ease and access of color print- how generations of moviegoers knew tereyst’s cardboard reliefs (p. 43), and ing has changed the way artists think Dorothy was no longer in Oz. This auto- is manifest in the subtle tonalities about print both in and out of the digi- matic equation of color with all-good- of Martin Puryear’s ostensibly black tal realm. Jason Urban’s report from things may be a little grating for those and white etchings (p. 39). Justin Quinn, Montreal (p. 23) documents a city in who love the concision and high stakes selected by Jane Kent as the winner of which artists have seized upon print of black-and-white prints, drawings and the first Art in Print Prix de Print techniques—primarily screenprint—as a photographs, but the fluid integration way to color the world. As a technology, of color in man-made objects has been a screenprint is simply a tweak on the 16th- technological Holy Grail for millennia. century stencils described by Primeau, Kandinsky, Albers and many others have but it is being used to apply ink to every- attempted to codify the power of color in thing from chipboard to entire building art, but color in print is a different animal façades. from color in painting—or has been until The new profusion of color, of course, recently. This issue of Art in Print looks has its own drawbacks. Inkjet has made at color: color as technology, color as color printing easy, but not necessarily subject matter, color as experience and precise or appealing. On page 28 Carinna meaning. Parraman reports on efforts by the Painters may mix pigments willy-nilly Centre for Fine Print Research in Bristol on palette and canvas, but print demands to adapt commercial digital color to the a separation of parts. For centuries the more meticulous needs of artists. approach to printed color was additive: Meanwhile, in a sea of cheap printed you began with black or brown ink on color, black-and-white can now assert paper, then added a second shade and itself as a purposeful choice. Sarah Bod- tried to line them up as best you could. Multi-pass printing of circular dots from the man’s survey of artists books on page 4 Dark line came “naturally” before any project “Color Printing 7.0: Next Generation takes us on a tour of darkness where we chromatic addenda. On page 11 Thomas Multi-Channel Printing” in conjunction with Marie find black as the cosmos, black as the Primeau sets the stage by examining Curie Initial Training Networks, the Norwegian deep, black as weapon, black as armor, Color Research Laboratory at Gjøvik University the early attempts of European art- College and other partners. black as the inky embodiment of text, ists and printers to enliven their images black as the veil of ignorance and black as with stenciled color, resulting in a semi- the framing of light. mechanized paint-by-number. competition (p. 34) plays on our asso- Finally, in the second installment of Over the course of subsequent cen- ciations with the paper colors that lie so our “Treasures from the Vault” series, turies, printers continued to search for unremarked beneath black letters. In all curator and scholar Richard Axsom takes ways to mimic the chromatic plasticity of these works color and material are as inti- on the most gregarious of colors and the painting, but with little success. Etchers mately linked as they were for Meryon. most virtuosic of contemporary color- and engravers instead saw virtue in the Just a couple of decades ago the divi- ists in his essay on Ellsworth Kelly’s Red discipline and intensity of black. Yet, as sion of the world into black-and-white (2005) (p. 36). It is a reminder that some- Jacobus van Breda’s account of Charles versus color felt normal. Photographs, times color is not an add-on at all, but a Meryon’s etchings (p. 17) makes clear, movies, television and photocopying sea to dive into for all its giddy retinal even among the most meticulous (and were all originally—like prints on paper— sensations—sensations that, for what- color-blind) of etching revivalists, color black-and-white things to which color ever reasons of human neurology, have found its way in. Meryon’s fondness for was later added as an optional and expen- the ability to transport us beyond the printing on pastel-tinted papers added sive extra. This is the dichotomy captured realm of explanation. variety to his impressions, but it can also so effectively in the early work of Dieter be seen a forerunner of 20th-century Roth, recently on view at MoMA (p. 44). Susan Tallman is the Editor-in-Chief of approaches to paper—its texture and But digital printing and digital pho- Art in Print. color—as a substantive part of the image, tography have brought about a paradigm not merely a backdrop for other action. shift. To the cameras (phones) we carry, This attitude continues to under- the printers that sit on our desks and lie most contemporary printmaking, the LCD screens on our laptops, it’s all 2 Art in Print September – October 2013 Commentary: Where Were the Prints? The New-York Historical Society’s exhi- bition “Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and Art in Print is the Thirties New York” was a generally well- received show, a gathering of about 40 single most comprehensive Marsh paintings, along with a smattering of paintings by other artists of the time resource for serious writing on, including Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Kenneth Hayes Miller, Isaac and Raphael Soyer, and timely information about, and Walt Kuhn.