Lithography For Artists. Anon

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СКАЧАТЬ Mr. Malcolm C. Salaman states that those among contemporary artists who accept crayonstone as the superior to transfer include “all our distinguished lithographers,” of whom he names Brangwyn, F. Ernest Jackson, Kerr Lawson, Sullivan, Becker, Hartrick, Spencer Pryse, John Copley, Ethel Gabain, and Belleroche. Mr. Belleroche writes to Mr. Salaman that transferring is “handy for rough sketches” but that “a good drawing will certainly lose all its savour after it has been subjected to the transfer operation.” Here in America, Albert Sterner, John Sloan, Chauncey Rider, and George Bellows would agree with their transatlantic brethren.

      And I agree with them; but not because I do not know how to value transfer. I am an expert transferrer, and in this book the operation is taught; but as an artist I work almost exclusively on stone. Mr. Pennell, on the other hand (as also, for the most part, Whistler), draws not on stone but on paper, and the prints are transfers. Fantin-Latour’s work is a mixture of crayon-stone, transfer, and white-line engraving.

      For going somewhat into these matters there are several reasons. A leading print dealer said to me that lithography was handicapped in that “the artists are too lazy to draw on stone.” A very important exhibition refused to let me catalogue my prints as drawn on stone. Certain interests are advantaged by keeping this distinction away from the public, the collectors, the critics, and such artists as know nothing about it. Where mention of it cannot be quite suppressed, the next best thing is to pretend that it is of no importance. That transfers can have merit no one doubts, but they necessarily lack the larger set of merits which is only possible to crayonstone. Hence, when Mr. Pennell writes in International Studio, Vol. 7 (1899), p. 43, col. 2, par. 2, that “you can do anything on paper that you can do on stone,” he writes mistakenly.

On the general subject of lithography there are some books, a very few. At least there are very few that are in English. Electing to begin with the last of these, we find it to be the book by Mr. and Mrs. Pennell, largely historical, but including a technical part by Mr. Pennell. No one could print with such a roller as he suggests; his statements about the washout contradict universal practice, and to apply an etch according to his figures would destroy the stone instantly.²

In the earlier literature of the subject the defect is that the art side and the craft side are not treated with equal authority. In none of them is there any assumption that the artist is going to do creative work and print it himself. They show the artist how to do the drawing but take it for granted that a professional printer will do the printing. In the latter years of the nineteenth century E. Duchatel, of Paris, sent out, in French, his work, Traité de Lithographie Artistique.³

About 1896 Alfred Lemerder⁴ got out, also in French, his very thorough technical monograph as a manual for lithographic artists and printers. Hamerton’s The Graphic Arts (1882)⁵ contains a few sound remarks on lithography, but nothing of more than general interest to the practical worker. In 1891 there was published in French an elaborate manual on all forms of lithographic work, written by a “chemical engineer,” M. M. A. Villon. In England in 1919 there was issued the last and revised edition of an excellent trade handbook, David Cumming’s Handbook of Lithography.⁶ In 1914, in London, there came out another excellent work of the sort, The Art of Lithography, a Complete Practical Manual of Planographic Printing, by Henry J. Rhodes.⁷ Richmond’s Grammar of Lithography,⁸ an English work of some fifty years ago, is a very good manual for commercial workers. In 1824 Charles Hullmandel,⁹ the English lithographer, published a technical treatise showing how to make on stone a drawing of the kind then in vogue, and in such a way that an edition of the sort then usual could be printed from it. In my earlier stages I got benefit from this book. In 1832 the same author put out his last edition of his translation of Raucourt’s excellent French work on lithographic printing; this also is a work of technical value to beginners. The last to be mentioned, though first in time and importance, is Senefelder’s own book,¹⁰ translated into English more than a century ago.

¹ Modern Woodcuts and Lithographs by British and French Artists. With Commentary by Malcolm C. Salaman. Edited by Geoffrey Holme. London, Paris, New York. The Studio, Ltd., 1919.

² Lithography and Lithographers, p. 261, line 3. New York: Macmillan Co., 1915. “Twenty parts of acid to one of water.”

³ En Vente à Paris chez l’Auteur, 8 rue Guy-de-la-Brosse, à la Société des Imprimeries Lemercier, 57 rue de Seine, et du Journal L’Artiste, 44 quai des Orfèvres (n. d.).

⁴ La Lithographie Française de 1796 à 1896 at les Arts qui s’y rattachent. Manuel Pratique s’adressant aux artistes et aux imprimeurs. Paris: Ch. Larilleux & Cie.

⁵ Published by The Macmillan Co.

⁶ Original edition issued 1904, London.

⁷ London: Scott Greenwood & Son; New York: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1914.

⁸ London: E. Menken.

⁹ The Art of Drawing on Stone. London, 1824.

¹⁰ Alois Senefelder, The Invention of Lithography (translated by J. W. Muller). New York: The Fuchs and Lang Mfg. Co., 1911.

      II. THE STONE

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      AS ALREADY stated, the principle of printing by the repulsion of oil and water, which was Senefelder’s invention and which has been called “lithography,” has been found applicable to so many other substances than stone—zinc, aluminum, glass, rubber, iron, etc.—that a wider name is needed for the work done by this method. “Planography,” of which lithography is one division, has been introduced. Planography prints neither from a raised surface nor from an incised surface, but from a flat surface whose diversities are purely chemical. A part of this surface, by being treated in a certain way, is made to accept water and refuse grease; the remaining part, treated in a different way, reverses this action, refusing water while accepting grease. These chemical preparations enable the printer, after wetting his surface, to make the ink stick to certain parts without sticking to other parts. This done, a print is got by pressing paper against it. This was Senefelder’s invention.

      Among all the substances available in planographic printing, stone has from the beginning always held the chief place. It holds it still wherever the first question is the quality of the work. Zinc is sometimes substituted as more convenient; but the work on it is not so good СКАЧАТЬ