We Begin with Surface —a discussion of prints from The Cochran Collection
This talk was presented in conjunction with the exhibition 20th Century Masters, 20th Century Graphics! from The Cochran Collection, Spiva Center for the Arts, Joplin Missouri, August 28, 2005
Printmaking is a subject I love. I remember the first time I made a print in Mrs. Oatman’s 7th grade art class at South Kickapoo Junior high school in Springfield, Missouri. She showed the class how to cut a design deeply into the surface of a linoleum block, how to roll ink onto it, and then when the surface of linoleum met surface of paper—voila, there was a print! Doing this I always felt excited and composed and continued the study of printmaking in college. But I didn’t think that the process that excited me so much in the studio had anything to do with the ordinary moments of life.
Studying Aesthetic Realism, I learned three important things: 1) I learned what makes a print beautiful. 2) I learned that art isn’t in a separate and better world as I thought, but that every technical aspect of art, including printmaking, has to do with things I was in midst of everyday with family, friends, at work and school. 3) And, I learned that art is the greatest opposition to the way we can lessen the meaning of things, including other people, which is contempt, “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.”
Printmaking begins with surface—a woodblock, an etching plate, a lithography stone, a frame stretched with silk; and ends up on a surface—paper. In a successful print, surface is always at one with depth. The Cochran Collection of 20th Century Graphics vibrantly illustrates this statement by Eli Siegel, poet and founder of the philosophy Aesthetic Realism:
“All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”
This is the basis of my teaching now and of my talk today. The central opposites in printmaking are surface and depth. Every print can tell us how depth and surface are in the world around us, in the people we know, and in ourselves! First, I am going to discuss some technical aspects and then we’ll look more closely at prints in this exhibition.
Printmaking Technique
In The Book of Fine Prints, the former Curator Emeritus of prints at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Carl Zigrosser explained that a: “Print stands for anything that is printed. That the word has so many and varied connotations, merely emphasizes the extent that prints have permeated and become part of our daily life. Indeed, it would be amusing to speculate on how barren life would become were all prints removed.”
The some of you may know, the art of printmaking has a long history. It began in 8th century China as ancient artisans applied ink onto a design cut into the surface of wood and printed that image on paper. In the 14th century a big thing occurred when Johannes Gutenberg for the first time used moveable type, enabling the printed word to be mass produced. The history of the print includes the work of great artists such as Durer, Rembrandt, Goya. Today the printed image is everywhere—on money, the newspaper, greeting cards, wallpaper, labels on medicine bottles, cereal boxes. The list could go on.
There are four basic types of printmaking represented by the works in The Cochran Collection—relief, intaglio, lithography, silkscreen. And each has a different approach to the opposites of surface and depth.
Relief
Matisse, Henri, Linocut Kollwitz, Käthe, Self-Portrait, 1922-23, woodcut
Relief printing is the oldest of all the print methods, and the easiest—think of a potato print and what millions of children learn in school, as I did. A central thing in relief printing is how while staying on the surface we can be deep at the same time. Are we hoping to do that? Do we want what we show to represent what we feel inside? In an Aesthetic Realism consultation, I was once asked “Do you feel you show yourself to people? Do people have to guess at least 5 or 6 times before they find out what you really feel?” Yes, they did.
In relief printing an artist draws directly onto linoleum or wood. Everything around the drawing is cut out making the image stand out in relief. The image is printed by rolling ink across the surface with a tool called a brayer, laying paper on top, and applying pressure either with a press or by hand. As we can see in the linoleum print by Henri Matisse (above left) and woodblock print by Käthe Kollwitz (above right), the printed image on the paper corresponds to the surface of the block, while the white areas which are surface of the paper, correspond to the deep cuts made into the block around the image.
Intaglio
Rembrandt van Rijn, The Three Trees, 1643, etching, engraving and drypoint, plate 8 3/8 x 10 15/16
Intaglio printing, which includes etching and aquatint, is just the opposite of relief. Intaglio comes from the Italian, meaning “to cut or dig in.” It begins on a hard metal surface, a copper or zinc plate, and the image lies below its surface. In intaglio etching, for example, the surface of the plate is coated with an acid proof ground. The artist draws on this with a sharp needle, scratching through the ground and exposing the metal below. When the plate is immersed in a tray of acid, the image is bitten or incised into the metal in the areas exposed. This is a critical and exacting process. And an artist has to know how little or how long the acid should bite the plate.
There are many phrases we use about ourselves and others that have their ethical connotations, like “She has a biting wit,” or “stop needling me,” or saying that someone has an “acid tongue.” In printmaking the purpose is to be both sharp and kind, show the value of something, not sharp in a sarcastic, contemptuous way. When an etching is printed an exciting thing happens. The incised lines are filled with ink, the ink remaining on the surface is cleaned away. Paper is placed on top and as it is run through a press, the paper is pushed into the lines. A moment of much anticipation and surprise for every printmaker is when the paper is pulled up and the image that was in the depth of the plate is now on the surface of paper.
Lithography
De Kooning, Willem, The Man & the Big Blonde, 1982, lithograph, framed: 28 ¼ x 33 ¾ x 1”, The Cochran Collection
In lithography all the action stays on the surface, but the process is anything but superficial. A lithograph is the result of the age-old battle of water and oil repelling each other. In Willem DeKooning’s 1982 lithograph titled The Man & the Big Blonde he has used this technical situation of things opposing one another to show another more familiar kind of opposition—between a man and woman. In lithography however, opposing things work together for one purpose. The artist drew onto the surface with a greasy crayon or an oil-based liquid. Then he dampened the stone with water, but the greasy crayon repels the water. When colored inks are applied to the surface the “greasy” image accepts the ink, while the dampened areas, reject it. The original drawing is what prints when paper is placed on top and it is run through a press.
Silkscreen
Warhol, Andy, Untitled from Marilyn Monroe, 1967, 36 x 36 inches, Museum of Modern Art, NY
Lastly there is silkscreen. Born in the 20th century, it began as a commercial art and became popular as an art form in the 1960’s with the work of Andy Warhol, for example. This is his ever so famous 1967 print Marilyn. Silkscreen begins with a piece of silk or nylon having a very fine mesh, stretched tightly over a wooden frame. Instead of the image being above the surface like relief printing, below like intaglio, or on like lithography, the ink creating the image has to pass through the surface. The artist blocks out the areas of the screen not intended to print. A tool called a squeegee is used to pull the ink across the screen. In the areas where the screen remains open, the ink is forced through the surface and prints on paper placed below. To print each individual color, the artist had to block out everything else not that color. And as you can see the process requires great precision as multiple colors are used.
I now look more closely at specific works in the Cochran Collection in relation to this question about the opposites of depth and surface asked by Eli Siegel in his historic Fifteen Questions titled “Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?” first published in 1955 in “The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.” The question is directed to painting, yet it is also central to the print
“Is painting, like art itself, a presentation of the “on top” obvious, immediate?—and is it also a presentation of what is implied, deep, “below”?—and is art, consequently, an interplay of surface and sensation as “this” and depth and thought as “all that”?”
Festival by Yaacov Agam
Agam, Yaacov, Festival, 1977, silkscreen, framed: 35 x 37 ¾ x 1”, The Cochran Collection
In my life, I often went from feeling giddy at one moment to being down in the dumps at another. This print is about how a person can be cheerful and deep at once. Optical artists, like Yaacov Agam, as well as Anuszkiewicz and Vasarely who also have work in this exhibition, were interested in how our eyes see the vibrations of color on a surface. In this print there is a constant interplay of “surface sensation” and depth that is implied. The surface vibrates with a teasing drama of flatness and depth, as bands of color—appearing almost like strips of film—spin, spiral and loop around in a dark blue space. Some of the bands seem to be on top of others, some seem to pass through another and at times they join together in a little do-si-do. Every time we look, a shape that appeared flat before, seems as if it were three dimensional in space; or a color that seemed muted before, now appears assertive. As things seem to shift and change on us, are we annoyed? No, we are delighted, because as it teases us we also see composition.
What Can Art Teach Us About How to See Objects?
In the 1950’s a new way of seeing objects emerged with the advent of Pop Art, which had us see that there was meaning deeper than we knew in commonly used commercial packaging, advertising, newspapers. In an interview Roy Lichtenstein stated said “There are certain things that are usable, forceful, and vital about commercial art. We are using things.” Lichtenstein used comic book images to have us question pretense and insincerity, to see mystery in a situation where one might glide along on the surface. Andy Warhol made us think newly about the kitchen pantry in his Campbell’s Soup Cans; and Claes Oldenburg made small objects so monumental that they can’t be ignored.
For Artists by James Rosenquist
Rosenquist, James, For Artists, 1976, collage and silkscreen, framed: 37 ½ x 29 ¼ x 2 ¼”, The Cochran Collection
Pop Art challenged our confined notions of objects that we use without really “seeing” them, and that is what James Rosenquist does. Rosenquist began as a billboard painter in his native North Dakota and then in New York City. His paintings are montage arrangements of fragmented images from magazines, newspapers, common objects and popular products. Monumental in scale—one of his paintings is 85 feet wide—these realistically rendered objects in strange juxtapositions make you wonder: What is this about? Rosenquist once said “I wanted my pictures to be impersonal and knock you in the face.” And that is just what they do!
In the print titled For Artists, we recognize a box of Tide. Down the center of the white space is a bright vertical swath of pink, orange and green going from top to bottom. And placed in the green shape is a dark reddish-brown line that looks like a piece of twine. Tied in a knot and frayed at the end, it jauntily sticks upward. Framing the center of the print are a series of concentric circles, the outer ones thin while the inner circle is wide. These are printed in a deep recessive blue and just what do they represent? At the top, the twine seems to be holding them in space like a tire swinging from a rope. Or do they represent a target with its center the near red dot over the “I” in Tide? Are they outlines of a window in a washing machine door? Are they pure abstraction? On the one hand they are so obvious and on the other they are mysterious.
In an interview published in the February, 2004 issue of Art In America, Rosenquist said this about his work:
“I wondered, how can I make a mysterious painting by painting enlarged fragments—very realistically—and putting them in a picture so that the thing closest to you would be recognized last.“
Even though we are aware of its presence, the last thing that we fully see is a belt that is collaged to the surface over the word Tide. What is it doing there? A belt around our center holds something in place, and that is what it’s doing here, holding together those day-glo pink, orange and green shapes. And the belt is as wide as the “T in tide: and makes another letter T on the surface. A belt, a bobby pin, a knot, all are objects that join things, that tie things together. And they are all tied together by the blue orbiting circles. And that wide circle echoes the circular forms in the Tide box, in that red bull’s eye.
Perhaps Rosenquist is making a deep and visual pun on the meaning of the word tide, the ebb and flow of oceans which sounds like the word TIED, what we do with our shoelaces. I think this print is titled for “For Artists” because the job for an artist is to see how different things are related, tied together and that is the deepest job of every person.
Dark Cake by Wayne Thiebaud
Thiebaud, Wayne, Dark Cake, 1980, woodcut, framed: 22 ½ x 24 ¼ x 1”, The Cochran Collection
Wayne Thiebaud belongs to a long history of artists who have painted objects, such as the great 17th century still life painter Chardin. What is surprising about Wayne Thiebaud in the 20th century is that what we often walk by at the dinner or bakery window and want to eat, he looks at, studies and paints! He is best known for his paintings of luscious cakes and pies on display, which he said were painted from actual experience. His forms tremble between flat abstraction and a tangible reality—we see pie and we also see the universal forms of abstract geometry—circles, rectangles, triangles, a little red sphere of a cherry. Thiebaud explained:
“I would really think of the bakery counter, of the way the counter was lit, where the pies were placed, but I wanted just a piece of the experience. From when I worked in restaurants, I can remember seeing rows of pies, or a tin of pie with one piece out of it and one pie sitting beside it. Those little… fragmented circumstances were always poetic to me.”
In Dark Cake, a 1980 lithograph, the artist presents this cake with majestic grandeur that makes us want to see and honor it, not just gobble it up. This single cake is placed prominently in the center of the page in front of a dark space and on a blue illuminated surface. Printed in rich browns and bright coppery ochers, this cylindrical cake is a drama of dark and bright, “surface and sensation as this” and “depth and thought as all that.” Look at the shadow on the side of the cake that is closest to us. That shadow, deep and recessive, seems almost like the dark opening of a cave. Is the artist telling us “There is mystery, unknown caverns of meaning to be explored and reflected upon in the things most near you.” I think he is.
Objects that we also meet every day are people. They are the objects that walk, talk and often confuse us, and the whole history of art has been rich in showing how the surfaces of people reveal their depths. I look now at three works in the exhibition—two figurative and one abstract—that vividly comment on the opposites of surface and depth in ourselves, and how to see our relation to the world beyond ourselves.
Red Haired Girl with Green Robe by George Segal
Segal, George, Red Haired Girl with Green Robe, 1982, silkscreen, framed: 47 x 37 1/8 x 1 ½”, The Cochran Collection
The 20th century American sculptor, George Segal is most known for his life size plaster casts of people placed in real settings. The people are completely white, but their expressions, the way their bodies move, the real objects they’re placed in relation to, convey feeling, and make them seem more alive. In his 1982 silkscreen titled Red Haired Girl with Green Robe we see a girl with fiery red hair, a green robe draped about her luminous body sits in an electric blue space. Her skin is aglow, yet she seems contained as she holds on to herself. And though color swirls about her, she looks inward. George Segal is dealing with the fight in every person between being self-contained and free.
In his poem “The Print of Man” Eli Siegel has these lines:
The print is a matter of RECESSION and GOING FORWARD.
Life is. Life is a making one of FROM and TO.
So is the print.
This print puts together the going forth and holding back. Look, for example, at how the downward direction of her head, arm, hip and leg makes her body seems to sag with weight, while her luminescent skin comes forward with energy. The light pinks, blues and greens used to define her body are the same colors that brightly swirl around her. The green robe and red hair, which are opposite colors, represent a drama that is going on in this girl between coolly receding and warmly coming forth. The green of the robe is vibrant and blends, fusing into the blue space, while that red hair streams outward like a flame. I think the artist uses that red hair to shake her out of her complacent self; and the green robe to show that what is outside of her is closely related to herself.
Flies in the Spider Web by Alexander Calder
Calder, Alexander, Flies in the Spider Web, 1974, lithograph, framed: 24 ¼ x 30 ¼ x 1”, The Cochran Collection
Alexander Calder is one of the important sculptors of the 20th century for the way he used surface. Out of flat sheets of metal he created monumental works called stabiles, because they stayed put; and mobiles because they move, gracefully floating and turning in space. It’s important that Calder painted the surfaces of his sculptures. He made what we associate with weight, light.
In Flies in the Spider Web, a lithograph of 1974, we see bright flat shapes of red, blue, yellow, and black in a white space all engaged a lively dance with a black spidery form. The shapes rise and sink, are large and small, thick and thin, some are on top of others and some are below. Look at the black shape in the upper right corner. Like the belt in the Rosenquist print it also is pressed up to the surface of the picture plane as it lies across a blue circle and hangs down over a red one. It is heavy in its black, cumbersome in shape, but it’s lifted and buoyant, even as it droops. In the opposite corner a bright red shape sinks and rises, is on top of two black circles yet, random specks of black are on its surface. It is weighty like a sack of potatoes, but its bright red is assertive, and with some struggle it rises upward to a delicate, somewhat uncertain point. Calder doesn’t do what we often do in life, feel our lighthearted self is so different from our seriousness and that we can only be one or the other. On this surface, he is both.
Alex by Alex Katz
Katz, Alex, Alex, 1970, lithograph, framed: 38 ¾ x 29 ¾ x 1 ¼”, The Cochran Collection
The American painter Alex Katz is most known for his large-scale figures that are flatly painted, dramatically cropped and almost leap out of the picture plane. In a 2002 interview with “Border Crossings, A Magazine of the Arts” the artist said:
“What I do is figurative painting without values and a content; it’s the opposite of Rembrandt. That content is buried way in the back, which is where I want it to be. I think there’s nothing more interesting than appearance.”
Katz loves surface and begins with it, but does he stay there? In this 1970 lithograph titled Alex, the artist boldly shows himself right up front on the surface and yet his eyes are hidden behind the dark lens of his sunglasses. He is looking straight at us, as we see and don’t see him. A familiar situation we all have is that we want to show ourselves and we also want to hide. This is the situation Alex Katz is looking at head on in this self-portrait titled “Alex.”
So just where, to use the artists words, has he “buried the content,” which is a way of saying the depths. Everything is painted in flat areas of color—his hair and skin, sunglasses, t-shirt. Is there depth conveyed in the lightly drawn lines across on his brow that depict deep furrows. Do these lines convey something of thought, time, experience? And look at his sunglasses. They hide his eyes, yes, but within their flat rounded shapes we see reflective strokes of green, giving us a hint of what he is seeing. And what does he see? The blue shapes of water at each side of the print inform us that he is outside in the world of sun, water, land and buildings, it is the world he sees.
In a 1949 lecture titled “Poetry and Depth,” Eli Siegel said:
“Everybody would like to be deep, and everybody also spends time avoiding being deep.” [TRO 940] “…depth in art is always the superficial made deep, and the deep made outward or even “superficial”—that is, seen on the surface.” [TRO 942]
As artist, Alex Katz is masterful in making the superficial deep and the deep superficial. Look at how in the water the little ripples of short white lines imply spatial depth. And those flat shapes of refreshingly bluish-green nestle into his shoulder, neck and cheek. Alex and the world around him are on the same plane. And also look at how the color of the artists lips, warm pinkish flesh tone, is the same color on the rocks that we get a glimpse of on the shoreline. Our eyes move from mouth to shore, from near to far, from surface to depth and back again. Through color he relates his own soft lips to geology. Katz shows that we can see ourselves and our relation to the world at the same time. And he shows that the outside world—the world that we can see as cold, unfriendly, inimical, have contempt for, and want to hide from, is the same world that refreshingly nestles around us.
Surface and Depth in Printmaking & Love—
Woman & Man on Couch by Ralph Soyer
Soyer, Raphael, Woman & Man on Couch, 1982, etching, framed: 13 x 14 ½ x 1”, The Cochran Collection
I conclude by discussing two works on a subject close to the heart of every person—love. Raphael Soyer is considered a Social Realist. A cozy moment is what seems to be portrayed on the surface of his 1982 etching Woman & Man on Couch. A man and woman sit on a soft sofa, she on his lap. Every woman, and this is true of me, has hoped to be the shining star in a man’s life; and this woman, the object of the man’s adoring gaze, is the brightest thing in the whole composition. But look at how uncomfortable she is as her weighty body slides downward. In his book, Self and World, Eli Siegel explains that in every love relation between two people:
“There is a third partner. That partner is the world as a whole…. The purpose of love is to feel closely one with things as a whole.”
The objects in this room represent that third partner, which the man and woman seem oblivious to. Yet with strong sharp strokes the artist insists on the reality, the depth, of these objects. In the midst of soft sofa and body, the angles of the slanted picture frames and open cabinet door sharply impinge on the couple. They appear like critical points that say “don’t forget about us.”
Look at how the little cabinet in the far corner of the room, with its dark interior invites us into its depths with its bright open door. This is so different from the woman’s expression conveying a feeling woman have had after getting what they thought they wanted with a man, a kind of flat emptiness. I once felt that a man’s sole purpose in life was to adore me and that my problems in love came because he hadn’t realized yet what a magnificent being I was. Needless to say, I got and gave a lot of pain. As I concentrated on thinking about a man thinking about me, I was doing what the artist criticizes in this print, making a man flat and non-nonexistent. We can see this in how his back and shoulder is a flat shape and his legs seem not to exist at all
When I was seeing a man who I hoped to impress, even while I acted bright and breezy and appeared to be interested in the topics of his conversation—the aerodynamics of jet liners for instance—I felt nervous and didn’t understand why. I asked about this in an Aesthetic Realism consultation and my consultants asked me: “Does a man have three-dimensional reality to you? Are you in a fight between staying on the surface and going deep?” I was and they explained: “If you stay on the surface you have to be uncomfortable because there is all that depth you are not honoring.”
What a revolution it was to learn that the very opposites in the art of printmaking, are a guide for how I hoped to be with a man. Learning this, I felt I didn’t have to pretend anymore, or arrange myself for a desired effect. And I learned this fact: a man is a subject of knowledge just like the Italian Renaissance. I respect the expression of Raphael Soyer in this etching. He is using definite form and line to and his keen observation to show a mistake people can make in love about surface and depth, so that we can learn to avoid it.
Love by Robert Indiana
Indiana, Robert, Love, 1982, silkscreen, framed: 32 x 31 ¾ x 1 ¼”, The Cochran Collection
Robert Indiana’s paintings, prints and sculptures of the word “Love” were so popular in the 1970’s that the image was issued as a stamp by the United State Postal Service. He printed many versions of this work in different color combinations. The 1970 orange, red and blue silkscreen is part of the Cochran Collection. The four letters of the word love are arranged in an unexpected way—the L and O sit atop the V and E. The L is placed solidly as the O slants on an energetic diagonal. The letters are on the surface but how vital is the space behind them?
In an article that appeared in The Journal of the Print World titled “What Are You Looking for in Love? Or Robert Indiana’s Love”, Ken Kimmelman, an Emmy award winning filmmaker and consultant on the faculty of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, describes how crucial that space is to the beauty of this print. He writes:
In this work, Indiana shows the world is present in the very midst of love. When we look at words, we usually don’t think about the spaces within the letters, just as when we look at a person we don’t see that the qualities of the world are in that person. But see how the shapes within these letters and the spaces between them are beautiful, distinct forms? And because of that square composition, we see that these shapes that are not the letters, actually define them! And because the colors are flat, placed on the same plane, you can’t say what is background and what is foreground.
Love, the real thing is always a putting together of surface and depth. Through another person we want to feel that we are in a surprising and accurate relation with everything else, like the space and letters in Indiana’s print. Aesthetic Realism teaches that the purpose of love and the purpose of art are the same—to see the world, which include a man or woman we may care for, with meaning, form and composition
Printmaking answers YES to Eli Siegel’s question from “Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?”
“Is painting, like art itself, a presentation of the “on top” obvious, immediate?—and is it also a presentation of what is implied, deep, “below”?—and is art, consequently, an interplay of surface and sensation as “this” and depth and thought as “all that”?