Printing A Modern World

Printing A Modern World

Written and Curated by Jacob Edwards

Over the course of the first four decades of the twentieth century, prints and printmakers would participate in changing social, cultural, and economic attitudes toward art and its role in society. The revival of interest in etching from the mid-19th century onward was a reflection of a changing society whose modes of art and representation were changing with it.

In a 1901 issue of Brush and Pencil, Morris T. Everett reveals his frustration with the recent slump in the decades-long etching revival. Active in France and Britain since the mid eighteenth century in the United States for the last several decades of the century, etchers and printmakers had active in not only making work but promoting a market for their art. But Everett did not see the explosion of interest in etching as a phenomenon without ramifications: “The two things primarily responsible for the decline of etching are commercialism and the development of reproductive processes…Invention has made a travesty of first, second, and third states, remarque proofs, and everything else that collectors of prints prize.” Lamenting the introduction of much more durable steel plates, which greatly increased the number of prints that could be pulled from a single plate, Everett asserts that “It was the mere commercial expedient of supplying to the public ‘something as good as the genuine’ for a mere song” that “virtually sounded the deathknell of etching”¹

But by 1936 the situation had changed: now, the issue with printmaking culture was its obsession with limited runs that ensured a print sold for more than it was supposedly worth in artistic ability alone. In the introduction to America Today, a volume of 100 prints selected by the American Artists’ Congress, Harry Sternberg insists that

This digital exhibition, Printing a Modern World, focuses on the depiction of life in an increasingly industrialized world. Printers captured subjects ranging from the chaotic “newness” of the dense urban center to the more pastoral, but certainly not uncritical, views of America beyond city limits. Representing different styles and subject matter, the selected prints, largely by twentieth century American artists, represent only a slice of the etching revival in all of its phases and a small portion what the Gladys Engel Lang and Kurt Lang Collection offers. This exhibition offers a focused investigation of one period of artistic output and attempts to understand how printmakers in the first half of the twentieth century adapted to and understood a newly-created, “modern” world.

How can the print, a centuries-old medium, be a modern phenomenon? Elizabeth Helsinger understands the rediscovered medium of etching as a “non-narrative, anti-realist art of line and tone evoking the look and feel of modern life.”³ And to support the rediscovery, publishers, dealers, critics, and artists themselves were establishing new markets, new languages, and new mythologies purpose-built for the medium. Etching is by no means a modern invention, but its revitalization as an art form meant that it needed to be understood in radically different contexts that those of Rembrandt, for example.

Most prints are mechanically reproducible, meaning a print is not a single object that needs to be safeguarded in a museum or kept hidden in the hands of a private collector like a painting or sculpture. With dozens, or even hundreds of original prints of a single plate in existence, a relatively popular print market was able to flourish. And with prices low enough to be afforded by the burgeoning middle classes (in the 1920s a Whistler etching might have sold for £120, the equivalent of around $5500—not affordable, but a relative bargain for what some might consider a masterpiece of etching⁴), a culture of consumption and collection developed.

Compared to the public spectacle of the art museum, the collection and perusal of a portfolio of prints was a private, intimate affair, at home in even a cramped urban apartment. Suitable not only for the parlor wall too small (or humble) for an oil painting, etchings also found a home in the bedroom: one collector is even said to have slept with his portfolio of Rembrandt etchings under his pillow in case he woke from dreaming of one and needed to lay conscious eyes on it,⁵ and by the 1920s the phrase “Come up and see my etchings!” even entered parlance as a clichéd attempt at seduction.⁶

Both the culture and subject matter surrounding prints bore hallmarks of an industrializing society at odds with its own citizens. As evidenced by the thesis of America Today, the print in the early 20th century became an outlet for often political artists who, under the banners of movements like Social Realism and American Regionalism, gave their work a more overtly critical gaze over contemporary society. And while photography and film would largely replace printmaking as the primary representative art after the Etching Revival’s decline, they were no replacement; etching was, as Helsinger puts it, “not quite poetry, but more than journalism, less innovative than avant-garde painting but more formally self-conscious than much realist art.”⁷ Even with etching’s relative artistic conservatism, thanks to its dependence on the line as the primary bearer of meaning, the prints were not a reflection of reality so much as individual artists’ equally individual interpretations and understandings of a rapidly changing world.