The Rivival of Prints

By ROBERT HUGHES

Fifteen years ago, printmaking seemed to be passing unmourned into oblivion --at least in America, where lithography, etching and silkscreen attracted few major artists. The "precious object" tradition of the artist's print, with its small size, deckle-edged refinement and rigidly traditional techniques, suited neither the epic scale nor the conceptual thrust of new American art. Today the change is absolute. There is hardly a significant American artist who does not make prints as an integral part of his work.

Enthusiasm for the medium runs high, sometimes verging on the erotic. "It's got all the hardness of rock, but all the frailty and sensitivity of albino skin," says Robert Rauschenberg, discoursing on the creamy Bavarian limestone from which lithographs are printed. Master printers have acquired a new importance in modern art. The most flamboyant and innovative of them is Kenneth Tyler, 39, founder and head of Gemini, a Los Angeles printery whose special skills have attracted such artists as Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Josef Albers, Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein.

Tyler would be the first to acknowledge that he did not pioneer the revival of the "traditional" print in the U.S. Tatyana Grosman, 66, started a lithography press in a garage on Long Island, New York, in 1957; she produced prints for, among others, Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman and Jasper Johns, who may well be the world's greatest living lithographer. In Los Angeles, June Wayne's Tamarind Lithography Workshop, bankrolled by the Ford Foundation, has been training printers since 1960. Tyler himself studied at Tamarind from 1963 to 1965. But he found Tamarind's approach to printing conservative --Rauschenberg describes it as "church morality"--and quit to start Gemini in 1965. Since then, Tyler has driven the craft of printmaking beyond all its assumed limits. His contribution to the medium will be celebrated this spring by New York City's Museum of Modern Art, with a full retrospective of the 325 editions Gemini has produced.

Tyler's status as printmaker hangs on resourceful technical response to his artists' aesthetic demands. To make a sufficiently precise edition of Josef Albers' embossed linear prints, Tyler had the exact profiles of the lines programmed on tape and fed to an automatic milling machine, which cut the female mold. Roy Lichtenstein's Modern Head #4, an aluminum relief, called for seven processes of engraving, anodizing, lithography and lacquering. For his Figurine Cup suite, Los Angeles Artist Ken Price made an immense plaster cup and had a nude model pose with it. Tyler had the whole thing photographed and the photo image incorporated into the print. Even size is pushed to the limit. Measuring more than seven feet high, Rauschenberg's Sky Garden, with its looming rocket and superimposed images of Cape Kennedy and the Florida swamps, is the largest print ever made by hand. To make it, Tyler had three printing stones laminated onto a bed of aluminum honeycomb.

Vibrant Impresario. Tyler's policy is to invite four artists a year to produce a suite of prints. Like a mustachioed impresario fussing over his stars, Tyler supplies his charges at Gemini with everything from Arches cover paper to limousines and sushi fish. His first catch was Josef Albers, and the list of his successors reads like a lexicon of the avantgarde. Tyler, as patron, also has his own rules and his own pride of craft. He explains: "Each man will stay about three weeks, doing the drawings and consulting while we're making proofs. But I don't like the artist in the shop when we're doing the mechanical work. The artist has all the aesthetic control; we have all the technical control. The distinction gets very gray at times. There's nothing I'll say no to. But you have to learn that if the artist doesn't like something, he can say so."

Today Tyler has more overtures from artists than he can handle, and his reluctance to produce anything but ambitious prints and multiples (Lichtenstein's 4-ft. bronze relief, Peace Through Chemistry, was published at $5,000) by "name" artists has given rise to predictable criticism. Tyler's argument is that, without subsidy, only assured sales will underwrite the immense cost of the equipment needed to develop the print medium--and he has a point. (June Wayne of Tamarind has the same argument: "The more the artist knows about lithography, the more it costs to make a print of his work because he tends to push the medium.") Still, for Ken Tyler, experiment is the salt of printmaking. "If you have the confidence that the worst that'll happen to you is that you'll fail, you do it. Because I think that, in the end, the artist is the one who'll stand back with you and hold your hand. After all, you did it for him."

Robert Hughes

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