Andy Warhol Prints from the Cy Twombly Foundation

For Art Basel 2023, we are honored to present an important group of Warhol prints from the holdings of the the Cy Twombly Foundation. These prints were stored in their original boxes and had never been framed. They are notable for their overall excellent condition, pristine surfaces, extraordinary, unfaded original colors, and exceptional provenance.

No artist is more associated with the discovery of screenprinting as an instrument of contemporary art than Andy Warhol. While his epochal 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans (1961-62) were made with paint brushes, traced projections, and rubber stamps, by August 1962 he was using photo-mechanical printing screens ordered from commercial printers:

“The rubber-stamp method I’d been using to repeat the images suddenly seemed too homemade; I wanted something stronger that gave more of an assembly-line effect…You get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple—quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it.”

Upending the old painting-versus-print, unique-versus-multiple distinction, he used screenprint to repeat the same image within a painting, as in Marilyn x 100 (1962), and to repeat an image across hundreds of paintings, as with Flowers. But while he contributed screenprint editions to a few group portfolios, it was not until 1966— the year he announced his retirement from painting—that Warhol established his own in-house print publishing operation, Factory Additions.

Its first four publications—Marilyn Monroe (1967), Campbell’s Soup Cans I (1968), Campbell’s Soup Cans II (1969), and Flowers (1970)— have served to define Warhol as profoundly as any of his paintings. Printed by professional screenprint firms in the city, each portfolio consists of ten large screenprints that enshrine and formalize a subject mooted earlier and more capriciously on canvas.

Marilyn Monroe was the first. Taking the same cropped promo shot (for the movie Niagara) used in his paintings, the prints expand the face to heroic scale. All ten images use the same five screens: one for the photo and four for the color shapes that lie below. The only variables are the position of the top screen and the color schemes selected by David Whitney, whom Warhol put in charge of the project. The registration is never quite right—the photoscreen is sometimes too high or too low, or too far to the left. But this is “chancy” by design—every impression of a given print is “wrong” in exactly the same way.

In the early sixties, Warhol’s paintings of Monroe, the widowed Jackie Kennedy, and fatal car wrecks were provocative in their production but conformed to the expectation that important art reflects tragedy. The Flowers, by contrast, were almost belligerently decorative. Warhol cribbed four hibiscus blooms from a fold-out spread in Modern Photography magazine, ran them through a primitive photocopier to coarsen the gradients, and flatten the petals into bleached cutouts ready for lurid color. Like the Marilyns, the Flowers portfolio used five screens with dramatic changes in ink color. In two cases, color screens were rotated so their shapes no longer correspond with the open areas in the photograph, further disrupting recognizability.

Soup Cans I exalted the subjects of Warhol’s 1962 series, thought now not as paintings that double as supermarket fodder, but as prints claiming the space of painting. No color changes separate one from the next, only the text on the labels. Soup Cans II updates the original, classic flavors with new, trendier options like “Hot Dog Bean,” oddly adorned with British Guardsmen holding a banner announcing “STOUT HEARTED SOUP.”

By design, Warhol’s portfolios have filmic quality—variables play out against a constant ground like the movement of actors in a static film set. But they are rarely experienced that way. The prints’ large size made them difficult to display as a group and difficult to store. As a result, most sets have been broken up, with certain members (Pink Marilyn, Tomato Soup) coming to be seen as iconic, while others remained sleepers. Only when seen all together, however, is the essential tension between replication and individuality—so critical to Warhol’s career and instincts—revealed.

Andy Warhol

Marilyn Monroe (Marilyn), 1967

Screenprints

Sheet size: 36 x 36 inches

Printer: Aetna Silkscreen Products, Inc, New York

Publisher: Factory Additions, New York

Edition: 250, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Feldman and Schellmann II.22-27,30-31

Signed and letter numbered “G” in pencil, verso

Provenance:

Collection of Cy Twombly, Rome

Cy Twombly Foundation

Andy Warhol

Flowers, 1970

Screenprints

Sheet size: 36 x 36 inches, each

Printer: Aetna Silkscreen Products, Inc, New York

Publisher: Factory Additions, New York

Edition: 250, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Feldman and Schellmann II.64-69, 72-73

Each sheet is signed in ball-point pen and stamp numbered, verso

Provenance:

Collection of Cy Twombly, Rome

Cy Twombly Foundation

Andy Warhol

Campbell’s Soup I, 1968

Screenprints

Sheet size: 35 x 23 inches, each

Printer: Salvatore Silkscreen Co., Inc., New York

Publisher: Factory Additions, New York

Edition: 250, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Feldman and Schellmann II.44-48, 51-53

Each sheet is signed in ball-point pen and stamp numbered, verso

Provenance:

Collection of Cy Twombly, Rome

Cy Twombly Foundation

Andy Warhol

Campbell’s Soup II, 1969

Screenprints

Sheet size: 35 x 23 inches, each

Printer: Salvatore Silkscreen Co., Inc., New York

Publisher: Factory Additions, New York

Edition: 250, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Feldman and Schellmann II.54-63

Each sheet is signed in ball-point pen and stamp numbered, verso

The extremely rare complete set of ten screenprints that retains its original portfolio box and plastic storage bag

Provenance:

Collection of Cy Twombly, Rome

Cy Twombly Foundation

Cy Twombly was not a prolific printmaker, which should not be surprising—he worked intuitively, and printmaking is by nature discontinuous and indirect. In other ways, however, he was a natural: the instincts of his hand were those of a graphic artist, and his intellectual affections were at home with printed matter. When he did turn to etchings and lithographs, it was to distill his central concerns: Western culture’s inheritance from the ancient Mediterranean, and the primordial physical and conceptual urge to make a mark. Or to put it another way, admiration for what has come before, and the desire to make something that remains after.

Twombly’s first portfolios were a product of serendipity. On a trip to the States in 1967 (he had moved to Rome ten years earlier), he accompanied Robert Rauschenberg on a visit to Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), the Long Island workshop where Rauschenberg had been making lithographs. ULAE had just added an etching studio, and Twombly decided to try his hand.

His six pocket-sized Sketches are filled with thin lines in scudding motion—flurries of rectangles like papers caught by wind; letters and numbers scribbled right-way-round on the plate and reversed in the prints. Viewers with ambidextrous brains (or mirrors), might make out “A RAIN OF KISSES ON YOUR GREEN [illegible]” hovering above a raft of Xs and Os—a free-form citation from Pablo Neruda’s 1939 poem “Furies and Sufferings” (Las furias y las penas).

The four plates of Notes are larger and more formal—rows of continuous script running edge to edge with the urgent loop-de-loop of preliterate children who yearn for the magical authority of the written word. Printed on handmade paper the color of cheddar cheese, with a rugged deckle around all four edges, they seem simultaneously modern and ancient.

Four years later, visiting Rauschenberg on Captiva Island in Florida, Twombly availed himself of the facility Rauschenberg had set up there with master printer Robert Petersen, Untitled Press, Inc.. Drawn on the stone in crayon, Twombly’s six Untitled lithographs have a crumbly density quite different from the spidery line of his etchings. Printed in different inks on different papers, they have the tenor, not of writing, but of furious weather.

Like Twombly’s concurrent “blackboard” paintings, his early prints are at once abstract and inconclusively referential—fevered jottings that might reflect the mind of a poet or a cosmologist. The portfolios he made with Swiss lithographer Emil Matthieu in the 1970s are lighter, chromatically delicate, and more overt in their paeans to Classical civilization. Natural History Part II, Some Trees of Italy (1975/1976) is a nod to Pliny the Elder, whose Naturalis Historia set the model for the western encyclopedia (and whose death in the eruption of Vesuvius marks another intersection of nature and history). Combining hand-drawn lithography, collotype and grano-lithography (a photolithographic technique with no visible dot screen), the eight prints have the look of sheets from a naturalist’s notebook: the title page with its faux pressed leaves offers an index to the loosely sketched, lobed and pinnate forms that follow, less a field guide than a collection of mnemonics.

In Five Greek Poets and a Philosopher (1978), as in as in Six Latin Writers and Poets (1975) citation and drawing become one. Each embossed lithograph carries one name, scrawled at too large a scale to fit, like a miscalculated graffito.

For Twombly, as for Warhol, the portfolio was important. His prints echo the forms and ideas he was pursuing in painting, but where a painting series constitutes an impressive public display, the print portfolio is personal—a symposium on paper, where things talk to each while we listen and learn.

Cy Twombly Sketches, 1967

Etchings

Sheet size: 8 x 12 inches, each

Printer and Publisher: ULAE, West Islip, New York

Edition: 18, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Bastian 12-17

Each sheet is signed and numbered

The exceedingly rare complete portfolio of six etchings with the colophon page, inner paper folder and paper portfolio

Provenance:

Heiner Friedrich, New York, acquired directly from the artist in 1983 Ayn Foundation, Marfa, Texas

Cy Twombly

Note I, 1967

Medium: Etching

Sheet size: 25 1/2 x 20 inches

Printer and Publisher: ULAE, West Islip, New York

Edition: 14, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Bastian 6

Signed, dated, numbered, and titled

Cy Twombly

Untitled, 1971

Lithograph

Sheet size: 21 5/8 x 29 1/2 inches

Printer: Untitled Press Inc., Captiva Island, Florida

Edition: 26, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Bastian 30

Signed, dated, and numbered

Cy Twombly

Untitled, 1971

Lithograph

Sheet size: 22 1/4 x 30 inches

Printer and Publisher: Untitled Press Inc., Captiva Island, Florida

Edition: 26, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Bastian 32

Signed, dated, and numbered

Cy Twombly

Untitled, 1971

Lithograph

Sheet size: 21 5/8 x 29 1/2 inches

Printer and Publisher: Untitled Press, Inc., Captiva Island, Florida

Edition: 26, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Bastian 33

Signed, dated, and numbered

Cy Twombly

Natural History Part II, Some Trees of Italy, 1975/1976

Lithographs, grano-lithographs, collotypes

Sheet size: 29 7/8 x 22 1/8 inches, each

Printer: Matthieu Studio, Zurich-Dielsdorf

Publisher: Propyläen Verlag, Berlin

Edition: 98, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Bastian 52-59

Each sheet is initialed and numbered

The very rare complete portfolio of eight mixed media prints and colophon that retains its original paper-bound portfolio

Cy Twombly

Five Greek Poets and a Philosopher, 1978

Lithographs

Sheet size: 25 1/2 x 19 7/8 inches

Printer: Matthieu Studio, Zurich-Dielsdorf

Publisher: Propyläen Verlag, Berlin

Edition: 40, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Bastian 67-73

Each sheet is initialed and numbered, verso

The complete set of seven lithographs that retains its original paper-bound portfolio

Cy Twombly

Lepanto III, 1996

Monoprint, printed from a cardboard plate

Sheet size: 38 3/4 x 24 1/4 inches

Printer: The Artist

Publisher: Julie Sylvester Cabot for the Whitney Museum of American Art Editions, New York

Edition:12, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Bastian 86

Signed and numbered

Ed Ruscha’s Standard Station is one of the enduring emblems of American Pop art. Its subject was a lucky find: a dowdy gas station that he photographed on the drive between Los Angeles and Oklahoma City and included in his groundbreaking artist’s book, Twenty-six Gasoline Stations (1963). His ten-foot-long painting Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas (1963) glamourized the original with an elongated perspective “modeled after the way Bambi’s father stood in the forest,” he said. Many variations followed, none more famous than the Standard Station screenprint with its rainbow-roll sky—dyspeptic or paradisical depending on the viewer and the impression (the results of the “split-fountain” technique used were not entirely predictable). The idea for a screenprint had been proposed to him by a collector, Audrey Sabol, who offered to pay for the production and split the edition. Ruscha contacted a local screenprinter, Art Krebs, and the rest is history.

Three years later, Ruscha pressed those screens into service again to create the coffee-hued Mocha Standard; the wan Cheese Mold Standard with Olive; and, with his friend Mason Williams, Double Standard. The last is an overt pictorial pun, but all invite us to ponder the double meaning of “standard” itself—the unexciting center of the bell curve, or a heroic banner unfurled in battle. (Decades later, Ruscha would return to the composition in the all-white Ghost Station (2011).

The same year he made his screenprinted Standard deviations, Ruscha had a two month fellowship at Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. Founded to establish an American footprint for artistic lithography, Tamarind had a reverential approach to printmaking that was a world apart from the commercial printing that Ruscha quoted in his paintings and employed in his artists books, but he quickly learned to play to the medium’s strengths, with crumbly pencil lines, liquid washes, and delicate color.

Most of the Tamarind prints picture a single word that seems to be dribbled on a surface (Rodeo) or constructed from curled and folded strips of white paper (Zoo). Sin takes form in tall sheets of paper balanced on end, alongside a pimento-stuffed olive looking for its martini, perhaps. Olives, marbles, and houseflies were among the trompe l’oeil props that Ruscha used to disrupt the cognitive habits that differentiate reading from examining illusion. (Medieval manuscript illuminators had made similar use of insects and small fruits). In Marble, Olive, the titular objects don’t rest on a surface but appear to float above an imaginary, receding plane.

Made in California seems like a classic Ruscha phrase, at once quotidian and potentially poetic, especially when rendered as spilled orange juice. It was also the name of the group exhibition at UCLA in 1971 for which this print was made.

Ed Ruscha

Standard Station, 1966

Screenprint

Sheet size: 25 5/8 x 40 inches

Printer: Art Krebs, Los Angeles

Publisher: Audrey Sabol, Philadelphia

Edition: 50, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Engberg 5

Signed, dated, and numbered

Ed Ruscha

Mocha Standard, 1969

Screenprint

Sheet size: 25 3/4 x 40 1/16 inches

Printer: Jean Milant and Daniel Socha at the artist’s studio, Hollywood, California

Publisher: The Artist

Edition: 100, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Engberg 30

Signed, dated, and numbered

Ed Ruscha

Anchovy, 1969

Lithograph

Sheet size: 19 x 28 inches

Printer and Publisher: Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles

Edition: 20, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Engberg 29

Signed, dated, and numbered

Ed Ruscha

Rodeo, 1969

Lithograph

Sheet size: 17 1/4 x 24 1/8 inches

Printer and Publisher: Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles

Edition: 20, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Engberg 14

Signed, dated, and numbered

Provenance: Irving Blum Gallery, Los Angeles

Ed Ruscha

Sin, 1969

Lithograph

Sheet size: 14 x 15 1/4 inches

Printer and Publisher: Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles

Edition: 20, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Engberg 22

Signed, dated, and numbered

Provenance: Irving Blum Gallery, Los Angeles

Ed Ruscha

Zoo, 1969

Lithograph

Sheet size: 9 3/4 x 12 3/16 inches

Printer and Publisher: Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles

Edition: 20, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Engberg 23

Signed, dated, and numbered

Provenance: Irving Blum Gallery, Los Angeles

Ed Ruscha

Marble, Olive, 1969

Lithograph

Sheet size: 9 3/4 x 12 1/8 inches

Printer and Publisher: Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles

Edition: 20, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Engberg 26

Signed, dated, and numbered

Provenance: Irving Blum Gallery, Los Angeles

Ed Ruscha

Made in California, 1971

Lithograph

Sheet size: 20 x 27 7/8 inches

Printer: Cirrus Editions, Los Angeles

Publisher: Grunewald Graphic Arts Foundation, University of California, Los Angeles

Edition: 100, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Engberg 52

Inititaled, dated, and numbered

Dan Flavin’s fields of fluorescent tubes, deployed as sculptures and installations, are hallmarks of American minimalism—eschewing gesture, expressive touch, or implications of narrative, they concentrate attention on the phenomenological experience of light. It was not an approach that necessarily leant itself to printmaking. Visiting the Gemini G.E.L. workshop in Los Angeles in 1986, however, Flavin became intrigued—as many printshop visitors do—by the stacked tins of ink in their myriad colors, and the diversity of papers of various shades and textures. Rather than manipulate these things to make a picture, Flavin chose to treat them as a picture.

Though the seven resulting prints were made with lithographic plates and printed on a lithographic press, they are not lithographs in any conventional sense. He made no marks—the plate was simply inked edge-to-edge with an even application of straight-out-of-the-can color that overruns the papers’ deckled edges on three sides. Only at the top do we see a thin stripe of the substrate—a horizon of sorts, where one specific element meets another.

The title references Flavin’s friend Donald Judd, whose sculptures of repeated structures, often mounted on the wall in vertical stacks, were exemplars of early minimalism. Flavin did not dictate that his print series should be kept together (indeed full sets are now quite rare), nor did he indicate how they should be hung when a group, but given the right space, they could be arranged à la Judd, in a column.

Dan Flavin

(to Don Judd Colorist) 1-7, 1987

Lithographs

Sheet size: 29 x 40 inches, each

Printer and Publisher: Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles

Edition: 30, plus proofs

Each sheet is signed, dated, and numbered

The very rare complete set of seven lithographs

Printmaking exists for me as another way of expanding and clarifying an idea. This visual idea may eventually be worked on as a painting, or it may remain complete as a drawing or print. Some ideas seem best served on a sheet of paper, where the paper and image become one, as opposed to the more physical presence of a painting on a wall.”

Robert Mangold

Seven Aquatints, 1973, published 1974

Aquatints

Sheet size: 26 7/8 x 22 1/8 inches, each

Printer: Crown Point Press, San Francisco

Publisher: Parasol Press Ltd., New York

Edition size: 50, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Parasol RM7

Each sheet is signed, dated, and numbered

The very rare complete set of seven aquatints

Robert Mangold

Five Aquatints, 1975

Aquatints with etching

Sheet size: 9 x 9 inches, each

Printer: Crown Point Press, San Francisco

Publisher: Parasol Press Ltd., New York

Edition: 50, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Parasol RM9

Each sheet is signed, numbered, and inscribed, verso

The complete portfolio of five aquatints with etching that retains its original linen-covered portfolio box

Sol LeWitt

Bands of Color in Four Directions and All Combinations, 1971

Etchings

Sheet size: 21 1/8 x 21 1/8 inches, each

Printer: Crown Point Press, San Francisco

Publisher: Parasol Press Ltd., New York and Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut

Edition: 25, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Krakow Witkin 1971.04

Each sheet is signed and numbered

The rare complete set of sixteen etchings

Robert Ryman

Etching in Four Parts, 1972

Medium: Etchings

Sheet size: 11 x 11, each

Printer: Crown Point Press, San Francisco

Publisher: The Artist

Edition: 30, plus proofs

Each sheet is signed, dated, and numbered

The complete set of four etchings

Frank Stella

Star of Persia II, 1967

Lithograph

Sheet size: 26 x 32 inches

Printer and Publisher: Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles

Edition: 92, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Axsom 2

Signed, dated, and numbered

Helen Frankenthaler’s foray into woodblock in 1973 was, print scholar Richard Field wrote, “a departure so profound that virtually all subsequent woodcuts incorporated the thinking it embodied.” Bypassing the energetic gouging, spikey line, and opacity that had made woodcut a favored instrument of expressionism earlier in the century, Frankenthaler turned to the techniques employed in the Japanese Ukiyo-e prints she loved—prints whose transparent inks, shaped blocks, and exploitation of natural woodgrain echoed the fusion of color and substance achieved in her paintings.

Working at ULAE, where she had made lithographs for many years, Frankenthaler used a jigsaw to shape sheets of luan mahogany, experimenting with form and color in an improvisatory, responsive process. Though assisted by master printers, she did not like to delegate: “Only I could cut the shapes, create the drawing with the jigsaw, do the piecing together, the eliminating, the adding, and mix and correct the colors,” she explained. An astonishing forty-four days were spent proofing possibilities on the press before settling on the eight blocks and seven colors of Savage Breeze.

Reviewing these trial proofs later, Frankenthaler reconnected with one that employed just four blocks. She recut one of these and inked the reassembled compositions in red, black, and a narrow strip of spring green to produce Vineyard Storm. Both editions are printed on a Nepalese paper of almost unmanageable delicacy, which contributes to the prints’ organic character—less an image imposed on a substrate than the trace of evanescent event.

In 1977 Frankenthaler extended her investigation of woodcut, this time working with master printer Ken Tyler at Tyler Graphics in Bedford, NY. Essence Mulberry is a lyrical meditation on materials. Each of the four blocks used came from a different tree species—oak, birch, walnut and luan—providing shapes with visibly different grain. Instead of fitting jigsaw-cut shapes together like a puzzle, she layered the cut blocks, allowing for both sharply defined edges and gentle gradients. And the paper itself became a compositional force, occupying the lower third of the image—a kind of plinth for the chromatic movements above. The only difference between the editions Essence Mulberry and Essence Mulberry State I was the hue of this handmade Japanese paper: buff-toned in the first, clay-colored in the second.

Allusions in the print run both East and West: its verticality recalls hung scrolls (though Japanese scrolls are usually mounted with a large margin at the top rather than the bottom), and the rolling color fade is an effect often used in Ukiyo-e prints, though usually horizontally rather than vertically. The title refers to a tree on the Bedford property, as well as to a hue and to the fibers of many Japanese papers. The palette, meanwhile, was inspired by the faded hues of hand-painted fifteenth-century prints she had seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Helen Frankenthaler

Vineyard Storm, 1974

Woodcut

Sheet size: 31 1/2 x 27 inches

Printer and Publisher: ULAE, West Islip, New York

Edition: 4, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Abrams 49

Signed, dated, and annotated

An exceptional impression of this very rare print

Helen Frankenthaler

Savage Breeze, 1974

Woodcut

Sheet size: 31 1/2 x 27 inches

Printer and Publisher: ULAE, West Islip, New York

Edition: 31, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Abrams 47

Signed, dated, and numbered

Helen Frankenthaler

Essence Mulberry, State I, 1977

Woodcut

Sheet size: 29 1/2 x 18 1/2 inches

Printer and Publisher: Tyler Graphics Ltd., Bedford, New York

Edition: 10, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Abrams 58

Signed, dated, and numbered

Provenance:

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Two states of this rare print were made in 1977. The first was printed in an edition of 46, with additional working and trial proofs. There was a subsequent edition of 10, with 2 trial proofs. The configuration of the blocks and the printing of the two versions was identical. The only difference between the editions Essence Mulberry and Essence Mulberry, State I was the hue of the handmade Japanese paper: buff-toned in the first, clay-colored in the second.

Helen Frankenthaler

Cedar Hill, 1983

Woocut

Sheet size: 20 1/4 x 24 3/4 inches

Printer: Tadashi Toda, Shi-un-do Print Shop, Kyoto, Japan

Publisher: Crown Point Press, San Francisco

Edition, 75, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Abrams 121

Signed, dated, and inscribed

Richard Diebenkorn began working with Kathan Brown at Crown Point Press in 1963 and continued to do so for the rest of his life. He relished the physical qualities of particular processes—the fluid pull of the needle through waxy ground in etching, or the resistance of forcing one into metal with drypoint. When Brown urged him to think about color, however, he balked, fearing both the indirectness of complicated techniques and the potential crudeness of printed color. (A subtle colorist, Diebenkorn once asked printers to mimic the green of the San Francisco Chronicle’s sports section.) He overcame these hurdles spectacularly in 1980 with a group of etchings, including Large Bright Blue, that recast elements of his Ocean Park paintings with jewel-like luminosity. Using spitbite (dilute acid painted directly on the plate), he created shifting densities like passing fog, an effect particularly pronounced in Large Light Blue, a “ghost” edition in which the main plate was reprinted without re-inking.

When Crown Point launched its partnership with Tadashi Toda, a third-generation woodblock printer in Osaka, Diebenkorn was again dubious. He was a hands-on artist and the Japanese tradition did not encompass experimental play in the studio. Instead, the artist submitted a completed drawing that carvers would approximate through block-cutting. The artist could make adjustments, but usually in the form of instructions rather than direct actions. On the other hand, he loved the appearance of many Japanese prints, and so made the drawing for Ochre “with Japan in mind,” according to Brown. The rectangle at upper right suggests the cartouches in Ukiyo-e prints, while the recumbent white bracket shape might reference a distant Mount Fuji or a wave. Translating Diebenkorn’s additive marks to the subtractive nature of cutting, the block cutters replicated every bit of happenstance, the erratic bleeds of color, the thickening and thinning of a brushed line, even as edges became harder and textures flatter. On seeing the first proof, Diebenkorn announced it was “just what I hoped.” His most famous woodblock print, Blue, was more difficult: new blocks were added, old ones altered, and colors tweaked. When he returned to Japan in 1987, he created the deceptively collage-like Blue with Red (1987), and tried his own hand at block-cutting.

Given that dozens of blocks that may need to be cut for a single image, Japanese prints have traditionally been run in large editions. “Toda thought the idea of editions of twenty-five to fifty was hilarious,” Brown recalls. In the Western contemporary art world, the relatively large editions and the long-distance process of the Crown Point Japanese project initially raised eyebrows, but the quality of prints such as Diebenkorn’s put a quick end to carping.

Richard Diebenkorn

Large Bright Blue, 1980

Spitbite aquatint and softground etching

Sheet size: 39 5/8 x 26 1/8 inches

Printer and Publisher: Crown Point Press, San Francisco

Edition: 35, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: HFA 32

Initialed, dated, and numbered

Richard Diebenkorn

Blue, 1984

Woodcut

Sheet size: 42 1/8 x 26 1/2 inches

Printer: Tadashi Toda, Shi-un-do Print Shop, Kyoto, Japan

Publisher: Crown Point Press, San Francisco

Edition: 200, plus proofs

Initialed, dated, and numbered

Richard Diebenkorn

Ochre, 1983

Medium: Woodcut

Sheet size: 27 1/4 x 38 1/8 inches

Printer: Tadashi Toda, Shi-un-do Print Shop, Kyoto, Japan

Publisher: Crown Point Press, San Francisco

Edition: 200, plus proofs

Initialed, dated, and numbered

Ellsworth Kelly’s eloquent shapes are distillations, not of Euclidean principles, but of things seen in the world—a crumpled paper cup perhaps, or shadows falling on stairs. Freed from their native housing, they take on new sizes, colors, and material form. Green Curve and Blue Curve (State III) are part of Kelly’s 1988 “Fans” series, an exhilarating return to color after a sequence of black-and-white prints. Both are panoramic in scale and display the same eccentrically shallow portion of a circle—arc above, broadly obtuse angle below, balanced on its point. Each print in the series, however, is built from a different marriage of color, optical density and incident. Blue III was printed from a single plate inked in an unsullied solid blue. Green Curve, however, uses a semi-transparent green over another green plate of loosely drawn textures akin to the weathered surfaces of his steel and wood sculptures.

Blue Black Red Green (2001) is, Richard Axsom wrote in the Kelly print catalogue raisonné, the “most amiable of his prints.” The composition arose from Kelly’s viewing of proofs tacked up a row on the wall, and wanting to see them all on a single sheet. The four elements—quirky quadrilaterals, square-ish but not square, poised off-balance—was the subject of two important works the previous year: a four-panel painting, now in the collection of the Fondation Beyeler, and a six-story high installation visible through the glass façade of a German government building, the Paul Löbe Haus, adjacent to the Reichstag (Berlin Panels, 2000). In the print, the color shapes share the same substrate, tripping along the eight-foot-long page.

Ellsworth Kelly

Blue Black Red Green, 2001

Lithograph

Sheet size: 24 7/8 x 88 3/4 inches

Printer and Publisher: Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles

Edition: 45, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Axsom 293

Signed and numbered

Ellsworth Kelly

Blue Curve (State III), 1988

Lithograph

Sheet size: 37 1/2 x 84 inches

Printer and Publisher: Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles

Edition: 15, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Axsom 220

Signed and numbered

Ellsworth Kelly

Green Curve, 1988

Lithograph

Sheet size: 37 1/2 x 84 inches

Printer and Publsiher: Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles

Edition: 25, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Axsom 221

Signed and numbered

The table of the alphabet is a subject Jasper Johns has treated many times in many different materials, though his large Gray Alphabets (1968) lithograph may be its definitive exemplar. Its origin, Johns has said, lies in a book illustration showing the Roman alphabet (still lacking the letter “J”) in a grid. He adapted the structure for a 1956 painting, inserting his initials into their rightful place in the modern order, producing a 27 x 27 inch grid. Beginning with an empty box at top left, letters march in succession (a, b, c, … z ) horizontally and vertically. The letters of the next row and column shift over by one: instead of starting with a blank and ending on “z,” they begin and end with “a.” The next begin and end with “b,” and so on down the ranks. Traced from lower-case stencils in a Bodoni-like serif face, the letters were cut from paper and collaged to the canvas before being painted over with encaustic.

A drawing the following year used prefab file-folder letters arranged in the same formulation. In 1960, when Johns began making lithographs at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), he executed a large graphite wash drawing of the alphabet grid with more stereotypical stencil letters, and attempted to translate it to a stone. The results fell short of the necessary delicacy, however, and the stone was never editioned, though a surviving proof served as the ground for his painting Alphabets (1960-62).

Returning to the theme at the Gemini G.E.L. workshop in 1968, Johns expanded the scale (this would be the largest print he had made to that date), and returned to serifed type, using specially made backwards rubber stamps to apply the letters to the printing plates. (This is a double reverse: the relief surface of the stamp reads frontwards, so it will appear backwards on the plate, and then frontwards again in the final print.) To maintain clarity while evoking the flickering grays of the original encaustic painting, he broke the image out into four aluminum plates and mixed his own inks, some consisting of metallic pigments in a transparent base. The result, in the words of curator Mark Pascale, is “a masterwork of nacreous brilliance.”

Jasper Johns

Gray Alphabets, 1968

Lithograph

Sheet size: 60 1/2 x 42 inches

Printer and Publisher: Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles

Edition: 59, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: ULAE 57

Signed, dated, and numbered

Provenance:

Collection of Carter Burden, New York

Jasper Johns

Corpse and Mirror, 1976

Screenprint

Sheet size: 42 7/8 x 52 7/8 inches

Printer and Publisher: Jasper Johns and Simca Print Artists, Inc., New York

Edition: 65, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: ULAE 169

Signed, dated, and numbered

Jasper Johns

Savarin, 1981

Lithograph

Sheet size: 50 1/4 x 38 3/8 inches

Printer and Publisher: ULAE, West Islip, New York

Edition: 60, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: ULAE 220

Signed, dated, and numbered

Jasper Johns

The Seasons, 1987

Etchings with aquatint

Sheet size: 26 1/8 x 19 1/18 inches, each

Printer and Publisher: ULAE, West Islip, New York

Edition: 73, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: ULAE 238-241

Each sheet is signed, dated, and numbered

The complete set of four etchings with aquatint

Vija Celmins experimented with lithography in the 1970s. She had also done etching in art school, and when she was invited to Gemini G.E.L., she wanted to return to intaglio. She also wanted to make a large image of a night sky. Together with printer Doris Simmelink (with whom Celmins has continued to work), she decided to try mezzotint.

Mezzotint is the least practiced of intaglio processes, largely because it is the most physically arduous: a metal plate is roughened all over and the artist works negatively by burnishing areas to smooth them out. (The rougher the surface, the more ink it will hold in printing). Neither Celmins or Simmelink had ever made one, but mezzotint is also the perfect medium for a night sky, capable of the deepest, non-reflective fields of black and the subtlest gradients to brilliant white.

Mezzotint plates are small, so to make a print on the scale Celmins envisaged Strata (1982) used twenty-five joined together and worked as a unit, star by star. (The joints are seamless; the visible grid in the final image was created by the artist). Like her depictions of oceans and desert floors, Celmin’s night skies are not approximations or allusions to a general idea of night-sky-ness. They are “redescriptions” of a photographic image: each mezzotint star shines with its own specific diameter, intensity, and halation, and each is placed in the same relationship to others that has in the source photo.

Photographs, of course, don’t show the way things are, they show the way things look. And Strata is not a substitute for either the photo or the sky. There is no danger of mistaking one for the other, in part because the materiality of mezzotint is so particular, and in part because we can see her decision-making at work. “When you come up you see how it’s made, and it’s made very tenderly… you see the hand, but then it also disappears.”

Vija Celmins

Strata, 1983

Mezzotint

Sheet size: 29 1/2 x 35 1/4 inches

Printer and Publisher: Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles

Edition: 37, plus proofs

Catalogue Reference: MMA 14

Signed and numbered

Vija Celmins

Untitled Portfolio, 1975

Lithographs

Sheet size: 16 3/8 x 20 1/8 inches, each

Printer and Publisher: Cirrus Editions, Los Angeles

Edition: 75, plus proofs

Catalogue Reference: MMA 6-9

Each sheet is signed, dated, and numbered

The complete portfolio of four lithographs

Printmaking has been central to Kiki Smith’s art from the beginning, initially in the form of the imperfect screenprinting she used to create crowds of bodies and body parts; then in lithographs that enabled her to stretch her own visage in eerie ways. Since the turn of the millennium, she has focused on hand-drawn etchings that consider nature, storytelling, and the intrepid heroism of the vulnerable.

Pool of Tears 2 (after Lewis Carroll) is an adaptation of Carroll’s original 1864 manuscript drawing of the two-inch-tall Alice dogpaddling in the lake of tears she cried when she was big as a house. She is followed by a flotilla—duck, mouse and dodo, along with, Carroll writes, “other curious creatures.” Looking at the Carroll drawing and natural history illustrations as references, Smith drew her image freehand on the plate. (Her Alice swims East, Carroll’s swims West.)

But while Carroll’s drawing is just 7 ½ inches long, Smith’s plate is roughly four by six feet, a change of scale that matches the shiftiness of Alice’s situation—alternately far smaller or far larger than expected. To work on such mammoth surface, Smith sometimes had to walk or sit on the plate, and the resulting scratches and scrapes remain visible in the sky.

Carroll was an awkward draftsman, but to Smith’s eye his drawings are “gorgeous… perfect.” Her own hand is far more graceful, but also twitchy and unsettled. Together with the translucent hand-coloring, her line evokes a quaintly Victorian demeanor at odds with the work’s domineering size. But then, Alice—like Dorothy Gale and Little Red Riding Hood—is a child both in peril and in control. “I wanted to make images that would be useful and positive in daily life,” Smith has said. “I thought of female images that I liked, female superheroes.”

Kiki Smith

Pool of Tears 2 (after Lewis Carroll), 2000

Etching, aquatint, drypoint, and sanding with watercolor additions

Sheet size: 51 x 74 3/4 inches

Printer and Publisher: ULAE, West Islip, New York

Edition: 29, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Weitman 123

Signed, dated, and numbered

Richard Serra

Sonny Rollins, 1999

Etching

Sheet size: 39 3/4 x 50 1/2 inches

Printer and Publisher: Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles

Edition: 39, plus proofs

Catalogue Raisonné: Berswordt-Wallrabe 120

Signed, dated, and numbered