Because Water Hates Grease

/TV is the medieval alchemist's sign for stone. Today it is the trademark, or "chop," as printmakers call it, of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, a modern, scientific, and rather messianic attempt to revive the making of graphic art from stone. As the Los Angeles-based, nonprofit workshop prepared to print its chop last week on the 1,000th litho created there since its beginning four years ago, it seemed to mark the rebirth of an art form lately thought inferior to painting because of its duplication by mechanical means.

Goya never worried about that; he did 23 series in the new art when he was nearly 80. Daumier put lithography to use in mass communication, publishing 4,000 editions of his social satire. Toulouse-Lautrec, adding color, posted florid cancan girls on every street corner. But lithography seemed to many 20th century U.S. artists too much part of the mass world.

Pressure Cooker. True enough, a lithography studio like Tamarind does resemble an industrial plant--it is full of polished stones, pots of ink, presses, reams of handmade paper. The artist's task, in the simplest form of lithography, is to draw his work on flat stone with a greasy crayon. A printer-artisan wets the stone with water, which the grease rejects, and then rolls on ink, which the grease accepts. When the artisan presses paper to the stone, the ink prints the work of art, and the process can be repeated as many times as the artist requires.

The rub, in the U.S., has been to find an artisan-printer fully qualified to work with an artist. In 1958, a spunky Chicago woman named June Wayne had to travel to Paris to find an artisan with whom to illustrate a book of John Donne's poetry. She griped to the Ford Foundation, which has since mollified her with $565,000 worth of grants to found Tamarind for a limited period of time, and made her its director.

Named for the Hollywood street it faces, Tamarind is a complex of white-stucco-walled buildings where the lights generally burn late seven nights a week. "This place is a kind of a pressure cooker," says Director Wayne, 46. "If you don't have a lot of time to fool around, dammit, you don't fool around." The time ends in 1965, when the Ford subsidies stop and Tamarind will have to try to carry on by itself.

Direct as Oils. Seventy-two artists have come to Tamarind to see and conquer lithography. Lipchitz' only litho bears Tamarind's chop. Richard Diebenkorn, Antonio Frasconi, John Hult-berg, Henry Pearson, John Paul Jones, Misch Kohn, James McGarrell, Louise Nevelson, Rico Lebrun and Jose Luis Cuevas have done prints there. Yet

Tamarind does more than make lithos: it makes lithographers. Seventeen artisans, usually on leave from college graphic-arts departments, have received $1,200 grants for three-month working sojourns. Tamarind conducts a research lab where artisans experiment with new lithographic methods.

By its nature, lithography is more direct and spontaneous than other graphic arts. No chiseling, carving or etching is required: the artist just draws on the stone. Wide ranges of effects are possible: both June Wayne's Dorothy the Last Day, an impression of her mother just before she died, and Sam Francis' untitled abstraction use four colors apiece. Lithography bears up under both subtle gradations and flamboyant freedoms of color, fluidity of materials and spontaneity. When desired, reproductions from the stone can artfully simulate many of the effects of painting.

One Score Editions. Each edition, or "strike," of Tamarind lithos is limited to 20 for the artist to sell and nine un numbered prints for the workshop. Six of the nine are sold to collectors for the benefit of Tamarind; three are kept for historical, teaching and loan purposes. The artist, with his artisan, supervises each reproduction. Each of the artist's prints bears, in his own handwriting, the notation 1/20, 2/20, etc. After the scheduled number is completed, the stone is "regrained" (erased), and a cancellation proof is made to certify the end of the edition.

Tamarind believes in the traditions of medieval guilds. Craftsmanship and cooperation between artist and artisan are the rule. Those who have left their studios to travel to the unartsy atmosphere of Tamarind have applauded the experience, and art buyers applaud the chance to get new art of all kinds at prices lower than single oils. After all, a score of lithos hardly floods the market.

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