GOLDEN STONE

For the art lover with a high taste and a low budget, the current renaissance of color lithography has proved a golden mean between expensive originals and photographed reproductions. The reason is simple. A colored lithograph, drawn by the artist on a flat stone or plate, can be cranked off by hand press, then signed and numbered to produce as many "originals" as the artist wants. The price drops accordingly, but each impression equally represents the artist's direct touch and workmanship.

Best index of the great popularity of the medium, until a decade ago all but abandoned by artists, is the Cincinnati Art Museum's biennial color lithography show. First held in 1950 with 235 works from 14 countries, the show this year boasted 426 lithographs by 275 artists in 32 countries. Sixty-seven of the lithographs from the Cincinnati show are now on view at Grand Rapids (Mich.) Art Gallery, will tour other U.S. museums until September 1958.

Abroad, the parade back to lithography was started by Picasso himself, who in 1945 became fascinated with the out-of-mode art form, was soon joined by a host of modern masters--Georges Braque, Fernand Leger, Joan Miro et al. In the U.S. lithography, which was revived as an art form under the WPA, also began its boom soon after World War II. Today in Manhattan The Contemporaries Graphic Art Center has in constant use most of the 90-odd lithographic stones it rounded up from old commercial houses Which since the turn of the century have shifted to zinc and offset printing.

The lithography boom is proving profitable to artists and art lovers alike. A one-edition gouache or oil by France's most popular younger painter, 28-year-old Bernard Buffet (TIME, Feb. 18, 1952 et seq.), costs up to $3,500. One print from his 75-edition Still Life with White Fruit Dish costs only $80, but sale of the whole edition would mount up to $6,000. Top Italian Painter Afro, 44, winner of Italy's first prize for painting in this year's Venice Biennale, gets $700 for a work the size of his abstract lithograph The Watchman; for one of the signed edition of 200, the price drops to $20.

As Cincinnati's museum discovered, such bargain art sells right off the walls. During its seven-week exhibit, more than 300 lithographs were sold. Most popular: Cranes in the Moonlight by Japan's leading lithographer, Yoshinobu Masuda, 51, and Zebras, by Swiss Painter Hans Erni. What gladdens lithograph fans most, however, is that the current boom is matching quality with quantity. Not since the days when such lithographers as Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Vuillard and Signac were at work has the outlook been so bright. Says Cincinnati's Print Curator Gustave von Groschwitz: "The current boom will equal and already looks as if it will surpass the golden age of the 1890s."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.