Gallery Offers a Chance to Study the Fine Prints

From the time of the 15th Century, when printmaking began to flourish in Germany in the masterful hands of Martin Schongauer and Albrecht Durer, to the 1990s, artists have used varied printmaking techniques to make images and communicate ideas.

First there were woodcuts and engravings. Later came etchings, lithographs and screen prints. Late 20th-Century technology has added the high-quality digital print to the list of possibilities.

As a participant in the current festival, “L. A. Print ‘93: Southern California Perspectives in Printmaking,” Tobey Moss has made it her mission to inform all of us about the different printmaking techniques. Her show at the Tobey Moss Gallery, “Let’s Look at Prints, Let’s Really Look at Prints, Let’s Really Look at Prints,” presents more than 100 prints dating from the 15th Century through the 1970s. She has grouped them according to their printing method. If you’ve ever wanted to understand the differences between a lithograph and an etching, or other mysteries of printmaking, this is the place to go.

“Each technique has its own look, its own language. The line or the texture or the nuances possible with an individual technique becomes the artist’s vocabulary and intent. The more you know about the technique, the more you will be able to understand the artist’s intent. I believe the works that I’ve selected speak for the artist,” Moss said.

The oldest print in the show is the circa 1485 engraving, “The Passion: The Entombment” by Schongauer. An engraving is one form of an intaglio print--intaglio meaning “incised” in Italian--in which the lines that form the design are cut into a metal plate. The plate is often copper, but sometimes zinc or aluminum. It is inked and then wiped so the paper receives the artist’s composition from the incised lines.

In the etching process, the lines of the design are then bitten (etched or eaten away) by acid, creating a more fluid line than that of an engraving. In an aquatint etching, tone is added via resinous dust to the exposed areas of the plate.

A drypoint print is similar to an engraving, but the point used to make the design on the plate is diamond-shaped rather than rounded. It makes a different type of line, one with a tiny curl that is turned upward, which produces a print characterized by softer lines.

Two photogravure prints by Alfred Stieglitz, “Horses” and “Miss S. R.,” both from original negatives of 1904, also represent another form of intaglio printmaking.

“Le Matin” (1886), by J. J. J. Tissot, is a mezzotint, produced from a reverse engraving procedure. The entire plate is incised with a dense network of tiny lines. The resulting surface prints black; however, white areas are made by burnishing and scraping portions of the plate to create polished areas that will not accept ink.

“It gives you a mood, a texture, a velvet quality that is delicious and seductive,” Moss said.

Lithographs--prints made from a fine-grained flat surface, originally stone--range from James A. M. Whistler’s 1895 “The Fair” to Robert Rauschenberg’s 1975 “Arcades.” Several of them were printed in the 1940s, including Burr Singer’s 1943 depiction of two sailors reading “Letters from Home.” In 1943, this image was on view simultaneously in 26 cities in the patriotic graphics exhibition, “America in the War,” sponsored by Artists for Victory, a national federation of art associations.

Dorr Bothwell used the screen print technique to produce a thoroughly modern image of the well-dressed woman in “Comment on Fashion” (1947). In this process, a mesh cloth, originally silk, is stretched over a frame. The design, painted on the screen or affixed by stencil, is printed when color is forced through the pores of the exposed areas.

Among relief prints--in which the spaces that the artist carves out in a wood or linoleum block reveal the white paper, and what remains in relief prints black--are Paul Landacre’s 1937 wood engraving, “George Cukor” and Werner Drewes’ 1944 woodcut, “Mexican.” This abstract composition is part of a series on dance and rhythms.

The unsung individuals of this exhibit are the printers who collaborated with many of the artists represented to further the art of printmaking. Moss has information on several of them as well.

The public is invited to attend her lecture on the techniques of printmaking today, in the gallery, from 3 to 5 p.m.

“Let’s Look at Prints . . .” is open 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays through Feb. 28 at the Tobey Moss Gallery, 7321 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles. Call (213) 933-5523.

A LOOK AT LITHOGRAPHS: Down the street from the Tobey Moss Gallery, the Art Store Gallery is exhibiting “Great Beginnings: Tamarind Lithography Workshop, The Los Angeles Years 1960-1970,” also curated by Tobey Moss.

Among the 20 lithographs on view are prints by June Wayne, Clinton Adams, Rufino Tamayo, Jose Luis Cuevas and Jules Engel.

The art of lithography--invented in the 1790s in Bavaria by Alois Senefelder--was disparaged as a commercial technique during the early 20th Century. By the middle of the century, only a few printers in the United States were making lithographs.

Moss said that at that time, June Wayne was told that what she wanted to do on the stone couldn’t be done. So Wayne went to France, where there were master printers engaged in the challenges of lithographic art. Her 1957 “John Donne Series” was printed there.

After that, Wayne and Clinton Adams began a collaboration that gave birth to the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in 1960. It was formed to train printers and to encourage well-known artists to explore the medium.

“It gave new life to an old art form,” Moss said.

The lithographs in this show depict a wide range of content, and demonstrate the medium’s ability to convey different textures and communicate a variety of moods and feelings.

“Great Beginnings: Tamarind Lithography Workshop, The Los Angeles Years 1960-1970” is open 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturdays and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays through Feb. 28 at Art Store Gallery, 7301 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles. Call (213) 933-9284.

SEEM’S REAL: Olga Seem says she “paints things that are around me, in my own environment.”

As she teaches oil painting at Los Angeles City College, it was only natural for her to create images of remains in buildings across the street from the college that were burned out during the riots last spring. However, hers are not the typical pictures we have been bombarded with since the events.

Unlike a great deal of post-riot artistic reflections, Seem’s collaged oil paintings and mixed-media work on view at Space gallery, based on her own photographs, are not representational renderings specific to persons, sites or events. Rather, she hones in on small elements among the rubble.

Even though there are no direct references to the riots or an image identifiable as a gutted building in her “Deconstructed City” paintings or her mixed-media “Deconstructed City: Fallout” series, one can’t help but comprehend the source of her inspiration. Here, her forms and dark tones call up feelings of turmoil and memories of the riots.

She is more involved “in the configurations of forms caused by the fire” than the social aspects of them, she said. “They become very compelling, these shapes that we don’t often see. I have a tendency to pick minute objects and then glorify them.”

“I think of the melted metal parts as sculptural objects,” said Ed Lau, the gallery’s director. “They become beautiful sculptures.”

And somehow they speak to the social issues as well. Seem said a trash can-like image in a painting and a mixed-media piece is actually a melted section of an electrical conduit. There might be a nail, a razor or what appears to be a fire in other works. There seems to be a hand truck in “Deconstructed City 2.” The image in “Fallout 8” looks like a vortex spiraling downward.

However ominous in tone, this body of Seem’s work does not convey a sense of hopelessness.

“Olga Seem: New Paintings” is open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays through Feb. 27 at Space, 6015 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Call (213) 461-8166.