Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was born in France in 1864 and went on to become one of the most influential illustrators and printers of his time.  His most well-known and successful work centers on the decadent life of urban Paris.  Lautrec was especially drawn to the theater district of Monmartre where the most famous cabaret performers played, and artists, writers, and philosophers came to live.  During the time when his work was most prolific, in the late 1890s, Lautrec was living in a post-impressionist Europe, swamped by an overwhelming atmosphere of indulgence in alcohol and sordid entertainment.  Richard Thomson calls it a “means to represent a complex, fluctuating scene, chic and seedy, corrupt and commercial, subtle and gross”(508). His ability to capture this feeling is his most successful quality as an artist.

Ambassadeurs: Aristide Bruant dans son cabaret 1892

Lautrec manages to display the eccentricity of personality with sparing, energetic lines that show the influence of master drawers like Degas, and utilizes traits of Japanese prints like large, flat color areas, and oblique points of view in his advertising posters for celebrities like Jane Avril and Aristide Bruant. His talent for abstraction offers a seductive, yet innocent glimpse into Parisian nightlife that played on popular fad and intrigue of the urban lifestyle.  Other successful strategies in Lautrec’s work are his process of sketching performers in their own surroundings, building a bond of familiarity for their unique characters, employing free-form lettering for clear direction of information, and using a tone of decorative unity that suits his medium of two dimensional color lithography.  I think Lautrec’s least successful work is his paintings, because although they retain his linear style of working, his line quality is at its most expressive and powerful in his prints due to its economy and harmony with the flat use of color and compositional abstraction. 

Jane Avril 1893

Robert Indiana

Not a typical print in The Print in the Western World, Robert Indiana's LOVE etching and aquatint (1991) grabbed my eye (above).  Interestingly, the LOVE series began as an image for a MoMA holiday card in 1958, but its' popularity led to the production of post-stamps (below), silkscreens, aquatint etchings, and the well-known sculptures.

Robert Indiana, born Robert Clark, adopted the last name Indiana to strengthen  his identity to the midwest.  His text work is inspired by road and establishment signs that break up the characteristically flat midwestern landscape, and he uses his text to do the same in societies' flat habits.  Best illustrated by the post-stamps and city sculptures, the bright colors and bold letters of the word LOVE interrupt a passerby.  Robert Indiana also made work where EAT and DIE were paired together, but interestingly, the optimistic words such as LOVE, HUG, and HOPE have been more successful.  Other works such as painting the letter "M" on the Milwaukee Bucks basketball court and the Taipei 1011-0 (below) brightly colored numbers also insert text into routine like signs, but I find them to be less successful because they seem disconnected.

The optimism, simplicity, and ubiquity of LOVE create a positive, globally connected feeling.  It seems that Indiana has caught onto this, as demonstrated by his HOPE fundraising for the Obama campaign and his Peace Paintings after 9/11.  From a printmaking perspective, I find two things very intriguing: 1) LOVE began as a holiday card and transitioned from digital to traditional as well as cheesy to fine art.  But I wonder- were the silkscreens and aquatint etchings necessary?  I don't think so- what's the point?  Is not it successful as a card or post-stamp?  2) LOVE is a printerly sculpture by its' ability and encouragement to be reproduced.  How do relate printmaking to the sculptural object?

Katharina Fritsch: A Sense of the Uncanny

Katharina Fritsch is a contemporary German artist famous for her large-scale polyester sculptures. At first glance, her subject matter seems eclectic— even random— but a closer look at Fritsch's artistic process and conceptual ideas reveals that her work is actually highly focused. For one thing, the idea of clichéd and popular imagery seems to underly all of her pieces. In several of her early works, she depicts a human skull as it is typically represented in anatomical studies, halloween decorations and punk regalia. As you can see below, Fritsch experimented with presenting the same basic skull form from slightly different angles, or with different accents (like the hat). The repetition of the skull in all three works begins to speak about the overuse or commercialization of specific imagery in modern society. Fritsch's addition of absurd touches like the hat or color pink seem intended to get viewers thinking about how symbols lose their meaning the more they are appropriated.

   

In Fritsch's recent work, the skull symbol continues to appear, but alongside other popular icons, like angels, snakes and the Virgin Mary. The image below (left) is a photograph of Fritsch's installation in the courtyard at MOMA. The right is a photo from an outdoor terrace at the Art Institute of Chicago.

When I look at these assemblages, I immediately try to place the icons in some historic or cultural context. Are they references to Christian iconography? Classical mythology? The trouble is, Fritsch's sculptures are hard to place, precisely because they are so familiar. I feel as if I have seen them all before, but not at this scale, and certainly not in shades of blue, yellow and green. Again, even though Fritsch's choice of color might seem arbitrary, the tones she's decided on are actually very specific. Every color is artificial, and completely covers the sculptures in an even, unnaturally opaque tone. The combination of slick surface, artificial color, and familiar imagery makes me think of kitsch and tourist paraphernalia. 

 

The scale of the works above is either jarring or humorous, depending on your perspective. Some critics have discussed Fritsch's work in relation to the idea of the "uncanny"— a phrase used to describe anything that is uncomfortably familiar, like a bad omen from a dream. I saw the piece at MOMA over the summer, and my initial impression was confusion, then wonder, then amusement. Together, these large colored figurines felt odd next to one another, as if they had materialized from a fourth dimension or mirage.

I thought it was fitting to include an image of Fritsch's 1993 piece, "Rat King," which gained her international fame at the 1999 Venice Bienale. The piece is part amusing, part nightmarish, and all because of the artist's conscious use of repetition and scale. I can guess how the sculpture might overwhelm the average gallery viewer: can you imagine entering a room full of life-size rats? They are all joined at the tail, a reference to the strange mutation that occurs when a horde of rats are born attached by their tails. This phenomenon— called a "rat king"— has long been a source of superstition in Germany, and it is likely Fritsch chose the subject matter because it already a basis in national folklore.

One more piece to consider: "Company at Table," 1988 (below). The extreme angle of this photograph  highlights the uncanniness of this sculpture, which again evokes a nightmare or visual representation of irrational fears. Anyone could relate to the horror of this piece: it literally depicts a cloning and loss of identity. I think this installation is one of Fritsch's most successful works because it is spare in color, save the vibrant tablecloth. The repetition of the emotionless, robotic human figure gives the piece depth and makes it eerily fascinating. 

One thing I forgot to address early on in this entry: Fritsch gained fame as an artist after her debut show, "From Here On," which opened in Dusseldorf in 1984. She has since exhibited in prestigious museums all over the world, including the Tate Modern, SFMOMA, MOMA, and Stuttgart. She studied art history in Germany and now works at the Arts Academy in Dusseldorf.  

Erich Heckel

Erich Heckel was born in 1883 and died in 1970 in Germany. He was a painter and printmaker. Heckel was one of the four artists who founded Die Brucke. Die Brucke was a group of artists formed in Dresden, Germany in 1905, the other founding members were Frizt Bleyl, Ernest Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. The group was interested in primitivism within art as well as combining the painterly technique of Gauguin and Munch with an intense involvement with printmaking. The name Die Brucke (The Bridge) is symbolic of their attempt to merge past, present, and future and to move towards expressing the human condition and against depicting the changing/industrial world around them.

Franzi Reclining 1910 

Heckel's Franzi Reclining is a good example of the work that he did within the field of printmaking. Most of his prints are woodblocks with a limited palette (oftentimes limited to black and white) with expressive marks. Many of his figures and portraits are composed of faceted plains. The Die Brucke movement is cited as being influenced by African masks and Oceanic sculptures, and in Franzi Reclining you can see that influence within the flat/mask like quality in the face. To print, the block was cut into four pieces and inked separately with black and red. His prints in comparison to his paintings are more expressive yet use fewer colors. I included an image of Weisses Haus in Dangast To show the difference between his print work and his painting.

Weisses Haus in Dangast 1908 OIL PAINTING 

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Junges Madchen / Young Woman 1913

The raw and expressive quality of Heckel's prints I find to be a strength of his work. Although the marks of many of the printmakers within the Die Brucke movement begin to melt together within my head, I still find those marks intriguing. His limited palette is something that I consider both a weakness and a strength. For some of the images the black on white paper adds to the drama of the piece but I do enjoy it more when he adds color, like in Portrait of a Man or Franzi Reclining. His color choices often add an insight into the person's well-being that he is depicting and I enjoy those narratives that could be told through limited color. I question why his paintings are so colorful yet his prints seems to remain with a limited color palette. I like that his paintings seem separate from the print work because it shows the importance of the printmaker's mark, how it is not just to replicate the painting. The expressive lines of the woodcut seem to show more emotion, it shows the mark of the hand which is something that the Die Brucke was interested in as a contrast to Industrial Society. 

Männerbildnis / Portrait of a Man 1919

Krankes Madchen / Sick Young Girl   1913

-Rachel Sperry

William Blake

William Blake was an English artist and poet best known for his literary works, which have perhaps drawn attention away from his achievements in the visual arts. Despite this, one art critic has described him as “far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced” (Jonathan Jones for The Guardian). Although not widely known during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the Romantic Period, championing the power of human creativity, and opposing the rationalism and mechanistic lifestyles which he saw as the downfall of man. The romantic period was a movement that responded to industrialization and attempted to improve man through reverence for the human spirit and the natural world.

Blake's works were almost all based on narrative, primarily being illustrations or illuminations of written works. Blake made use of monotypes and monoprints, and also hand colored a large amount of his work. Much of his work is tied to the mythology that he had created, in which human creativity is essentially God itself. Below is a hand colored engraving titled Albion Rose, featuring Albion, a character in his works that represents the perfect man.

Blake produced mainly etchings and engravings, focusing on relief etching, a process that he invented, in creating his illuminated books. In this method, the images were painted on using a ground, including the words of his poems and the accompanying illuminations, and then the negative space would be dissolved in the acid, leaving a relief surface. An example of one such etching (hand colored) can be seen below.

Blake was trained as an engraver, and although he is better known for his relief etching, most of his commercial work was done in engraving. Some of his personal work, such as the illustrations for “The book of Job”, a series of 22 prints illustrating the biblical Book of Job, was produced through engraving. One of these engravings is pictured below.

His invention of relief etching is the work that he is most known for, as it is the most innovative. While he made a good deal of work in engraving, his training in engraving was of a style that had become old fashioned, and so his engraving was less well received than a lot of his other works. Still, he is one good example of a historical printmaker who used printmaking as a tool rather than a process, using etching, engraving, and painting, together with his mastery of the English language in order to achieve his conceptual goals. Thus, he cemented his place in the canon of both English Literary and Western Visual history.