The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum Gary Lichtenstein exhibition brochure

Lichtenstein

Gary Lichtenstein: 35 Years of Screenprinting June 27, 2010 – January 2, 2011 The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Gary Lichtenstein: 35 Years of Screenprinting

In the world of printmaking, screenprinting has often been looked on as some sort of black sheep or wild child. Its typical autobiography goes something like this: born from commercial parents and raised in the world of circus posters and beer bottle labels, followed by an adolescence of Pop art indulgence and rock ’n’ roll T-shirts.

But the story is much more complicated (and interesting) than that. Screenprinting originated in China around one thousand years ago, and was brought to Europe sometime in the eighteenth century. Its development was slow, due to the preciousness of silk (“silk screen printing”) and it was first patented and popularized in England early in the twentieth century for wallpaper production. Considered one of the most versatile printing methods, it can be applied to virtually every material and surface, even those that are curved.

Given this history, it is not surprising that those who are attracted to fine art screenprinting are a unique breed. One of the most singular artists and master printers working exclusively with screenprinting is Connecticut native Gary Lichtenstein, whose long and complex career now spans thirty-five years. Lichtenstein’s role as an artist in his own right has brought an innovative perspective to his craft. This perspective has been skewed by an usual trajectory: at the beginning of his career in the 1970s, he worked exclusively as a printmaker; but following the rich experience with color that screenprinting provided he turned to painting, reversing the typical order of artistic practice. It is Lichtenstein’s innate ability as a colorist, together with his belief in spontaneity and accepting what others would consider accidents or mistakes, which has defined his studio. Indeed, observing Lichtenstein’s approach to making a print with an artist, one is reminded more of the procedures found in a great recording studio than a printmaking shop. Multiple trial proofs and color

Courtesy of the artist and Gary Lichtenstein Editions, Ridgefield, CT

Tom Christopher, Like Popeye After a Can of Spinach. Never Saw Anybody Move So Fast. Ever., 2004

variations are the norm, and Lichtenstein has no concern about how many screens it will take to successfully resolve an image. It is not unusual for a print from his studio to have fifteen or twenty colors, and there are examples of prints with forty or more colors. The majority of printers merely try to duplicate what the artist wants to see, but Lichtenstein loves to show the artist what they have never seen before, intimately participating with them in the creative process.

While a student at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1970s, Lichtenstein landed a job as a studio assistant with artist Robert Fried. Fried is primarily known now for his role as a pioneering designer and printer of broadsides for the Fillmore West and other music venues in the Bay Area, having made iconic posters for bands including Santana, the Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company.

However, at the time he was recognized as a significant Bay Area painter and sculptor, contemporaneous with William T. Wiley and Joseph Raffael (sadly, Fried died young in 1975). Two fine art prints by Fried that Lichtenstein worked on are included in this exhibition, revealing both the artist’s ironic political consciousness and his wry sense of humor. Fried was one of the first artists in San Francisco to significantly utilize screenprinting, although the Bay Area was several years behind the East Coast in the development of the medium for fine art purposes.

Lichtenstein started his own screenprinting studio in San Francisco in 1978, naming it SOMA Fine Art Press from the ancient Sanskrit word for an intoxicating drink used in religious rituals. During the twenty-five years he worked in the Bay Area he collaborated with over seventy artists, including geometric abstractionist Karl Benjamin and ceramic artist and printmaker Ken Price. Included in this exhibition is an ambitious artist book project by Price and poet Harvey Mudd, which included a series of thirty screenprints by Price printed at SOMA and published by Arabesque Books. It is perhaps hard to understand now, but in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s much of the art from the West Coast shared similar traits, including a funkier, more provisional quality, and a broader, more liberated color sensibility than what was happening in New York. Recently, when Lichtenstein was printing Robert Indiana’s new series of 2 Hope prints, there was this revealing interchange: Robert Indiana: “Where are you getting all these colors, Gary?”

Gary Lichtenstein: “Maybe it’s because I’ve lived in California a long time.”

Lichtenstein’s interest in the pure perception of color led to a series of prints he made in the late 1970s and early 1980s based on “rainbow rolls,” the graduated, spectrum-like effect that comes from blending colors with a squeegee directly on the screen. The two prints from Lichtenstein’s series Seems Like Manhattan seen in this exhibition utilize this technique, creating the impression of a vast, glowing, atmospheric skyscape. Rainbow roll effects are impossible to completely control, making every print in which they are utilized different to varying degrees. Robert Indiana’s Hope Cross, which was recently printed by Lichtenstein, achieves its lively, optical quality by the skillful use of rainbow rolls as the background on each of its five canvases.

Robert Fried, Farsighted, 1974 Courtesy of Gary Lichtenstein

Printmaking is usually thought of only in connection to paper, but Lichtenstein has eagerly embraced canvas as a screenprinting surface, allowing the creation of extremely large prints that don’t need to be presented under glass. Andy Warhol pioneered silkscreen printing on canvas in the early 1960s, combining its ability to reproduce photographic imagery with painting. Screenprinting inks are very durable, resembling paint more than the inks used in lithography, etching, and digital printing, and they are produced in matte, satin, and gloss finishes, allowing the printer to control the surface qualities in each application. The possibilities of canvas are explored in two prints in the exhibition: Alex Katz’s The Raft and Michael De Feo’s Flower.

The Raft was laboriously hand-made from a photographic transparency of one of Katz’s paintings. Lichtenstein interpreted the colors and layers of the painting into fourteen hand-drawn transparencies on Mylar, each one being used for one color in the print. This process is far from mechanical reproduction, with the intent being to recreate the original painting, not to reproduce it. This distinction is subtle, but important, as it gives the finished print a life of its own that pays homage to the original, avoiding the slavishly photographic.

Michael De Feo’s Flower is a multi-media work on canvas that pushes the definition of what constitutes printmaking the furthest of any work in this exhibition.

Lichtenstein screenprinted the artist’s signature green flower image onto blueprint paper and De Feo subsequently incorporated this print into a collage made from found maps. This hybrid print/collage was then fixed to a stretched canvas, with the artist adding hand-painted passages. Rather than being a print made in a numbered edition, Flower is a unique work that is part of a limited series of closely similar hybrids.

The decision for Lichtenstein to move his studio from San Francisco to the East Coast in 1998 was determined by a number of factors. Having originally come from Connecticut (he was born and grew up in Waterbury) he and his wife wished to raise their son in the east. But it was the impact of digital technology on the printmaking world in the late 1990s that had the most influence on the decision. Digital technology and inkjet printing were radically altering the world of editioned work, not just for printmaking, but also photography. Lichtenstein’s practice was always based in

the value of the hand-made, and the growth of digital was beginning to undermine the economy of traditional techniques. Downsizing the studio to focus on what he and other artists valued in the more artisanal side of printmaking made sense. Also, as stimulating as the art world in the Bay Area was, Lichtenstein found it limiting in terms of scale, and the potential for new collaborations found in the greater New York metropolitan area was significant. The new studio in Ridgefield, housed in a converted barn, was christened Gary Lichtenstein Editions to signal a fresh start, and has hosted projects by over twenty artists during its first decade in Connecticut.

Lichtenstein’s emphasis on the artisanal does not mean that he completely shuns digital technology, however. He looks at digital as just an additional tool at his disposal, to be used judiciously in the service of the handcrafted.

In a single print, Lichtenstein might utilize a digital scan printed on Mylar to create one screen, followed by a screen created with a traditional India ink drawing on Mylar. The nature of screenprinting inks also creates opportunities that are unavailable in digital printing, such as the ability to print in white, and metallic and florescent colors.

Lichtenstein’s open attitude towards his craft has fostered all sorts of unique collaborations since he settled in Fairfield County. Besides publishing work himself, he has produced editions with publishers such as American Image Atelier and Exhibit A Editions; but it is the range of works outside traditional publishing that truly reveals his adventuresome and generous spirit. He has been collaborating with The Aldrich’s editions program since 2008, and he has made prints for, among others, Ridgefield’s Scotts Ridge Middle School (a class project utilizing the signatures of all the seventh grade students), and the Yale Symphony Orchestra. In 2007 Lichtenstein and artist Mark McChesney produced a beautiful new Symphony print, reviving the tradition of the Symphony producing unique screenprints for each season that had started in the 1960s and ended in the 1980s.

Lichtenstein’s studio has now taken the history of screenprinting full circle. Brought from China to Europe, and then expanded in the later half of the twentieth century by a group of artists and craftspeople in the United States, screenprinting is being utilized by a group of emerging Chinese artists such as Feng Zhengjie, with whom Lichtenstein now finds himself working.

It is clearly a medium that in the right hands has the ability to endlessly—and imaginatively—reinvent itself.

I would like to thank Gary Lichtenstein’s longtime friend, filmmaker Elliot Caplan, for producing the short video that accompanies this exhibition.

Filmed during the recent production of one of Robert Indiana’s Hope prints, it wonderfully captures both the personality of the printer and his process.

Richard Klein, exhibition director 1 Many of the artists with whom Lichtenstein has worked, both in California and Connecticut, have produced numerous prints at his studio. In San Francisco alone he produced over 800 print editions.

2 From a conversation at Indiana’s studio in May 2010.

The framing of works in this exhibition was generously supported by Chris Durante Framing Studio, Danbury, CT.

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Larry Aldrich (1906 – 2001), Founder

Robert Indiana, Hope Cross, 2010

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Courtesy of the artist and American Image Atelier, New York

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