ART MUSEUMS MARK THE 200TH ANNIVERSARY OF LITHOGRAPHY WITH EXHIBITION AND CATALOGUE

Contact: Kate McShea Ewen (617) 495-2397

Release: June 25, 1998

Cambridge, Massachusetts - The special exhibition Touchstone: 200 Years of Artists' Lithographs will be on display at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum from August 15 through November 1, 1998. The Art Museums is one of many museums nationally and internationally to mark the 200th anniversary of the revolutionary printing process now called lithography. Since its invention in 1798 when it was called chemical printing from stone, lithography has developed in every imaginable direction. Commercially, lithography has been adapted to the production of everything from microchip wafers to barn-sized posters. Lithographs can be produced from photographs, and now from digitally captured images and computerized instructions compiled as bitmaps. Yet lithography has also remained a premier fine-art print process. Approximately eighty-five works will be on display including lithographs by Goya, Delacroix, Géricault, Manet, Degas, Kollwitz, Picasso, Matisse, Klee, Kirchner, Nolde, Ernst, de Kooning, Frankenthaler, Rauschenberg, Johns and Kelly. Touchstone is organized by Marjorie B. Cohn, Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints, who is also the author of the catalogue. The Sackler Museum is located at 485 Broadway.

Of all the printmaking techniques, only lithography has allowed the artist to use his or her accustomed tools and materialsæbrush and paint, pen and ink, crayon, paperæto make prints. The exhibition will celebrate the freedom lithography affords the artist and its capacity to record the autographic touch, whether expressed in drawn line or brushed tone, or quite literally through the fingerprint, even, as seen in Joyce Wieland's O Canada of 1970, the mark of a kiss. Wieland, who is Canadian, sang the Canadian national anthem, pressing her lipsticked mouth to the lithographic stone as she formed each syllable. The print is a feminist's acid satire against dominant macho patriotism and at the same time an affectionate patriotic affirmation.

Yukinori Yanagi, from Japan, uses his fingerprints. His Untitled (the symbol of Korea and the symbol of Japan merging), plate 4 from Hinomaru, of 1991 presents a visual metaphor of the moral responsibility of individuals for the actions of their nations. The fingerprints printed in blue form one half of the t´aeguk, the emblem that symbolizes the complementary yin-yang opposites comprising the whole of Nature which appears at the center of the Korean national flag. The other half of the t´aeguk materializes from the merging of the blue prints with the Japanese hinomaru, the sun disc that appears at the heart of the Japanese national flag, which is formed in the print by innumerable red seal impressions, marks of individual identity in Japan.

The basic principle of lithography, including transfer lithography, is the mutual repulsion of water and grease. The design is drawn in a greasy substance directly onto a surface that also accepts water, or else it is transferred from paper onto such a surface, which will be the printing matrix. This matrix, traditionally a limestone slab and now often a zinc or other metal plate, is then processed to fix the design so that it will not smear or weaken, and to render the surface of the matrix not covered by the design more receptive to water. Once prepared for printing, the matrix is coated with water and then ink for each passage through the press. The moisture on the undrawn-upon areas of the matrix prevents the greasy printing ink from adhering to anything except the design, which through the pressure of the press is transferred to paper.

The artist does not need to learn complex chemical or mechanical procedures, and there is no need to master unfamiliar motions in carving or scraping. The creation of the design and the processing of the printing matrix can be independent operations, and while collaboration is today the norm, historically artists and printers have worked separately.

The ease with which lithography allowed printmakers to create their designs was quickly promoted. Early promoters of the process include Godefroy (Gottfried) Engelmann and Charles Joseph Hullmandel. These two enthusiasts produced instructional manuals for draftsmen attempting the new technique. Both Engelmann's (1822) and Hullmandel's (1824) manuals both will be in the exhibition. The pages to be displayed contain demonstration prints and passages. Hullmandel's passage gives careful attention to the pressure and speed of the artist's touch, to secure the most beautiful shading. In Engelmann 's passage he warns the novice against soiling the lithographic stone with fingerprints, saliva, and dandruff!

Many important painters favored lithography as a printmaking process. The French artists Antoine-Jean Gros, Théodore Géricault and Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet all communicated through lithography their loyal regard for the triumphs and sacrifices of the Napoleonic army, at a time when official nationalism devoted its honors to the restored monarchy. Gros's print Mamluk Chief on Horseback (Chef de Mamelucks à cheval) of c. 1817 is among the earliest French lithographs by an important painter and Academician. It is evidence of a taste for the exotic subject, and Mamluk Chief on Horseback is as well a particular reminiscence of Napoleon's Egyptian campaign and his assimilation of Mamluk soldiers as his personal guard. Géricault's Return from Russia (Retour de Russie) of 1818 announces the artistic ambition and seriousness of intent of the young Géricault with its scale an complexity of handling. With the restoration of the French monarchy, such a graphic reminder of the tragic nobility of the defeated Napoleonic army was equally radical in its political statement. Charlet's The Flag Defended (Le Drapeau défendu) of c. 1818 may represent the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon's ultimate defeat; the French soldiers are his Imperial Guard in combat against the Prussian Landwehr.

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, aged, infirm, and in self-exile from his native Spain, found renewed creative energy in the new medium of lithography. Earlier he had made a few relatively unsuccessful trials of transfer lithography in Madrid, but with the assistance of a skilled and sympathetic printer in southern France, he attacked the stones directly. An eyewitness reported that he "worked at his lithographs on an easel, the stone placed like a canvas. He handled his crayons like brushes..." Goya started by covering his stones with a medium tone, the visual equivalent of a painter's toned ground. He worked his designs up to light by scraping and he laid in dark accents with crayon in a sequence determined by the evolution of the compositions, without formula. Goya will be represented in the exhibition with an anonymous loan of four exceptional lithographs.

Lithography quickly found a role in caricature and decoration, and also in the demimonde of suggestive representations of fashionable young women. Pierre-Louis-Henri Grévedon's Night (Sleep) (La Nuit [Le Sommeil]), from the series Les Quatre Parties du Jour es (Times of Day) of 1833 was published on a pink paper wrapper. Charles Philipon's Louis Philippe Transforms into a Pear: Sketches Made at the Hearing of 14 November, supplement to La Caricature (no. 56, 24 November) of 1831 simulates a drawing that had actually been executed by Philipon in court in an attempt to convince his judges that the resemblance of King Louis Philippe to a pear was fortuitous, and that his political cartoons simply took notice of the obvious. Philipon was imprisoned and his paper, La Caricature, fined. When he then published this lithograph, the purported evidence of his innocence, the paper was closed down. The cartoon's power derived in no small part from the capacity of transfer lithography to replicate natural script as well as the look of a scribbled sketch.

Although stone marks were considered bad form by commercial printers, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner emphasizes truth to materials by allowing the stone mark to show in his lithograph Dancer Seeking Applause (Beifallheischende Artisin) of 1909 that he printed himself. The impoverished artist could not afford more than one stone, and so for a multicolored, multiple-stone lithograph such as Dancer, he was forced to print all of the impressions in one color and then efface the design on the stone to create the image for the next color, inevitably limiting his edition. However, the stone marks did assist in registration of the multiple passages through the press.

That artists have enjoyed using their medium of choice with lithography is apparent in Picasso's Head of a Woman (Tête de Femme) of 1945. Picasso was the inventor of collage as a fine art form, and so it is not surprising that when he returned to lithography in 1945, many years after an early try at the technique, instead of drawing directly on stone he crayoned over a sheet of transfer paper, cut it up, collaged the scraps into the head of a woman, and transferred the composition to stone.

In his transfer lithographs, such as Locust (Acacia) of 1965-66, Ellsworth Kelly considers his use of the technique more a question of vision than touch. Given his, and our, ingrained habit of reading images from left to right and bottom to top (near to far), the subtle inflections of his lines that cause silhouettes suddenly to resolve into objects in space simply would not work if reversed. The double reversal inherent in transfer lithography obviates the issue for the printmaker. While the expediency, the disposability, of paper over stone or plate is not irrelevant to Kelly, it is more the exact correspondence of transfer lithography to the eye/hand intimacy of drawing that he values.

Albert H. Gordon, an alumnus of Harvard College this year celebrating his 75th reunion, generously supported the publication of the catalogue.

RELATED EVENTS
Gallery talks: Gallery talks are free with the price of admission to the Art Museums. Hearing assists are available for gallery talks; arrangements should be made beforehand by phoning (617) 495-8286. To request a sign language interpreter, the public should call (617) 495-2397 using Massachusetts Telephone Relay Service 1-800-439-2370 three weeks in advance of the gallery talk.

Saturday, August 29, 11:30 a.m., Arthur M. Sackler Museum
with Marjorie B. Cohn, Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints.

Saturday, September 12, 11:30 a.m., Arthur M. Sackler Museum
with Marjorie B. Cohn, Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints.

Sunday, October 25, 2:00 p.m., Arthur M. Sackler Museum
with Marjorie B. Cohn, Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints.
More information on the following events will be available later this summer.

M. Victor Leventritt Lecture
Tuesday, October 6 at 6:00 p.m., Arthur M. Sackler Museum lecture hall
Drawn to Print, with Pat Gilmour, visiting professor, University of East London.
Free admission. Complimentary parking will be available in the Broadway Garage at the corner of Felton Street and Broadway.

The M. Victor Leventritt Lecture Fund was established through the generosity of the wife, children, and friends of the late M. Victor Leventritt, Harvard class of 1935. The purpose of the fund is to present outstanding scholars of the history and theory of art to the Harvard and greater Boston communities.

Lecture
Tuesday, October 13 at 6:00 p.m., Arthur M. Sackler Museum lecture hall
With Jerry Cohn, Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints.
Free admission. Complimentary parking will be available in the Broadway Garage at the corner of Felton Street and Broadway.

Studio Visit
Tuesday, October 20, departs from Fogg Art Museum at 9:00 a.m.
Fox Graphics/Merrimac Editions, Merrimac, Massachusetts.
Herb Fox, Director, will conduct the visit from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. during which visitors will see demonstrations of different lithographic processes. Lunch will follow at a nearby restaurant in which Fox's lithographs are on display. Open to the public. A fee will be charged for this trip. Call the Friends, Fellows and Special Programs Office at (617) 495-4544 for more information and to register.

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The Harvard University Art Museums' facilities are wheelchair accessible. For general information, please call (617) 495-9400. For press information or photographs, please contact Kate McShea Ewen at (617) 495-2397. For more information on events, please contact the Friends, Fellows, and Special Programs Office at (617) 495-4544. World Wide Web: www.artmuseums.harvard.edu. **

The Harvard University Art Museums comprise three museums (Busch-Reisinger Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Arthur M. Sackler Museum), all located on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, MA, at the intersection of Quincy Street and Broadway, adjacent to Harvard Yard. The Art Museums are open Monday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., and Sunday 1:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m. Closed holidays. Admission is $5.00; $4.00 for senior citizens; $3.00 for students; free under 18, on Saturday mornings and, as of July 1, 1998, on Wednesdays. For special tour reservations, please call (617) 496-8576. General tours are offered Monday through Friday from September through June; Wednesdays only in July and August. The Fogg tour is at 11:00 a.m.; the Busch-Reisinger tour is at 1:00 p.m.; and the Sackler is at 2:00 p.m. The Harvard University Art Museums is supported in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.