$25 Pictures

The man who knows more about prints than anyone else in the U.S. is the Philadelphia Museum's bearded Carl Zigrosser. Last week Manhattan's Whitney Museum put on a show of contemporary U.S. prints, selected by Printman Zigrosser. It was the most comprehensive print show Manhattan had seen in years.

Printman Zigrosser looked over the works of about 1,000 artists. The 261 prints he selected, representing almost every well-known name in U.S. art, covered the period between 1914 and 1941. This cross-section of U.S. printmaking showed that: 1) in variety and quality of work, U.S. printmakers were leading the world; 2) since World War I, U.S. print-makers had turned gradually from Romantic Venetian canals and Gothic cathedrals to forthright, glamorless, often satirical comments on the U.S. scene.

The Whitney show started with the lacy, architectural etchings of such classicists as Connecticut's John Taylor Arms and Philadelphia's Joseph Pennell. the gloomy, satirical lithographs of such old warhorses as Manhattan's George Bellows, ended with samples by big-city artists like Adolf Dehn, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Paul Cadmus, Midwestern and Southern regionalists like Grant Wood, Thomas Benton and John McGrady, experimentalists like Stuart Davis and Federico Castellon.

Says Expert Zigrosser, who crusades for print-lending libraries, wants to see prints collected like books in the average home: "There is no distinctive American style of printmaking. But there is an American accent-a vigor, an emphasis on having something to say, rather than upon the technique of saying it."

U.S. prints today are made in a great variety of ways. Most popular with artists and collectors are:

Woodcuts, printed from wooden blocks in which designs have been cut with knives and gouges (a favorite method of 16th-century German Albrecht Duerer and the Japanese printmakers).

Etchings, printed from copper plates in which a design, drawn by the artist, has been dug out by the corrosive action of nitric acid. He starts by giving his copper plate a coat of beeswax, scratching his design in the soft wax with a needle. Copper, exposed where the wax has been scratched away, is then eaten away by acid. Parts still covered with beeswax remain uneaten. When the acid bath is over, remaining wax is rubbed off and plate is ready for printing. In Drypoints, which look like etchings to the uninitiated, the artist scratches his design right on the metal, uses no wax.

Lithographs, printed from a dampened stone on which a design, drawn with greasy crayon, retains a coating of printer's ink which fails to stick to the" wet stone. Lithographs have been made since the beginning of the 19th Century, but have become popular with U.S. artists only since the 1920s. Today they are probably the most popular form of print, and their recent development has been almost exclusively a U.S. phenomenon.

Serigraph, or Silk-Screen Print (TIME, Nov. 11, 1940), printed through a stencil which has been built up with glue or lacquer on a semitransparent silk screen. Pigment, oozing through the silk, creates a meshlike, colorful surface.

Because modern methods of steel facing (an electrical process) can make the surface of any plate as hard as steel itself, there is no practical limit to the number of prints a modern artist can turn out from a single plate. But contemporary artists usually limit their prints to sets of 25 to 200 copies, destroying their plates after they have printed the limited number. Unlike the great printmakers of the 17th, 18th and 19th Centuries, who sold their prints for a song (Hogarth: 25-c- to $1.75; Goya: 30-c-; Duerer: 80-c- to $2.40), modern printmakers sometimes get as much as $100, occasionally (Zorn, Cameron, Benson, McBey) two or three times that much. But the average good print price seldom exceeds $25.

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