SeattlePrintmakersCenter

Dürer’s mistake  

A sea change in printmaking revisited  

It is this professor’s opinion that Albrecht Dürer, regarded by many as the father of printmaking as a fine art (not craft nor technology) made a mistake in adopting the art of drawing and painting as the basis for his development of the “fine art print.”

From A. Hyatt Mayor’s book, Prints and People

The following paragraph from A. Hyatt Mayor’s 1972 book, “Prints and People,” stopped me in my tracks. I am re-reading Mayor’s book because I am working on developing the Seattle Printmakers Center, and in this paragraph I felt I had found the brick wall that stultified my work at the University of Washington many years ago and which, now, necessitates getting back to that work we had started in the 1970s. Here is Mayor’s thought:

“Dürer mastered the techniques of woodcut, engraving, etching, and drypoint, invented modern watercolor, and drew in every medium except red chalk. By being the only artist so versatile, he completed the transformation, begun by Mangtegna and the Housebook Master, of entirely freeing printmaking from its craft origins. After Dürer, printmakers were trained by drawing, not by working in wood or metal, and all the different kinds of prints fused together under the leadership of painters.”

Of course, you need to read more of the printmaking history leading up to Dürer. Mayor mentions elsewhere that Dürer’s style might have been different if he had met with other artists living and working at the same time, such as Leonardo da Vinci. It would be fun to speculate on a fictional meeting among Dürer, da Vinci, and Luca Pacioli—the latter who was a renowned mathematician and, as for da Vinci, a kind of universal man. I’ll leave that fiction for someone else, but it was painters like Bellini and Mantegna—masters of the painterly form—to whom Mayor gives credit for bringing the painter’s knowledge of depicting form to Dürer.

What if . . .

Dürer’s engraving, “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” is dated about 1498—eight years after one of my favorite drawings by da Vinci, “Vitruvian Man” (and I pirated this for my humor print, “The Vitruvian Press”). Also, we know Dürer visited Venice, but it was probably before da Vinci and Luca Pacioli were there.

My point is that if Dürer was correct in swaying the practice of printmaking toward the canon of painting and drawing, and loosening the ties of printmaking to the trades of engraving and woodcutting, then we lost, in effect, the root of printmaking, which was not in the manner by which printing plates are made, but the reason we make printing plates in the first place, which is to achieve a method by which we can make identical images that can be carried afar, or, if we choose, to make variations using the printing plate as a kind of tool or instrument.

Printmaking, in effect, was cut off from its roots when it was turned to mimicry of the drawing and painting arts. The roots of printmaking go back to prehistoric handprints on the walls of caves, deliberately made by human innovation, that of spraying pigment around the human hand pressed on the wall, or printed with a palm-full of paint. The handprint is the first human print made intentionally—not by mere incident of, say, stepping on mud and leaving a footprint impression.

The main stem and root of printmaking re-joined

In the 1970s I re-joined printmaking to its prehistoric human innovation for making exactly repeatable images and it changed my career; ended my career, actually, as a college professor in the institutionalized world of academic art practices. In 1968, I re-joined printmaking to its technical innovation roots first with photography—a technology which had not yet been accepted as a valid art form by the faculty of the University of Washington.

My print of that year, “Collection III: Part of the Children’s Game,” was not alone in my use of photo-etching. There were a number of artists using photo silkscreen and lithography processes in launching the Pop Art and Post American Expressionist movements. In printmaking exhibits there was a growing number photo etchings shown.

A few years later, after I had gone to Europe for my first post graduate study abroad, I started working with what became known as video art, and I approached the electronic media the same way I had approached my printmaking—a blend of innovative technologies and improvisations. A key to this experience was that I worked with a group—my students—and people from the music and dance departments of the UW.

Printmakers are sharing kinds of people. That is why, when A. Hyatt Mayor’s book came out about that time, it had the effect of raising my appreciation of printmaking as a social art. The performance nature, a time-based experience, drew the main stem of printmaking back to its roots as an act of innovation in time, using a technical principle, i.e., if you ink and stamp your hand again and again, you will get almost identical results. Small variations reflect the human element and this is something machines cannot do unless the machine (a machine under computer numerical control) is programmed by a human.

Seattle Printmakers Center Rising

Re-reading A. Hyatt Mayor’s book helped me clarify what happened around the turn of the 16^th Century in Europe with Dürer’s influence arising from taking the lead of painters and, according to the author, eschewing the crafts of woodcutting, etching, and engraving. Dürer’s innovations—watercolor, drypoint, etc.—were like the forces of human invention and creativity, but put into commercial service.

It was this atmosphere that I found dominating the UW School Of Art in 1966, and continued throughout my short, happy career at the institution. Painters insisted that printmaking should be an extension of painting—as it was in Dürer’s time—and they used their collective political force to keep it that way. It was obvious to me that severance of printmaking from its roots in human innovation and technology would kill printmaking and students would, as a consequence, miss out on learning how to take advantage of new technologies.

Before I left the UW, I was able to bring about some of the basics of a well-rounded printmaking curriculum by bringing in video and computers within view of the students. Some of the students were influenced by this, and some of them made good use of the principles of printmaking after they graduated.

By principles I mean that printmaking is human innovation, it is a social art and has ties with performance of time-based arts. This includes not only live performance (as when you print a plate over and over, sometimes with an audience on hand) but also mediated performances, such as film, video and multimedia recordings. These are central factors in my claim that the Seattle Printmakers Center will grow out of a unique blend of art, technology and performance that I think characterized that time, in the 1970s, when I re-joined printmaking to its roots and I elected to ignore Dürer’s mistake.