The Printmaker’s Art

Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn) (1606 – 1669)

Christ Crucified between the Two Thieves: 'The Three Crosses' c.1660

Drypoint and burin on paper: 38.50 x 45.00 cm

A new show at the National Gallery of Scotland opened last weekend. The exhibition is an understated affair, as is so often the way with prints. It is to be found downstairs at the back of the gallery in a small room which even the invigilator I asked had troubles locating. Actually he looked at me blankly, this clearly is not a show expected to pull in the punters. And yet the exhibition’s understatement belies the magnificence of some of the thirty or so prints on display here. The selection comes from the gallery’s extensive print collection and the curatorial idea behind the exhibition is simple and deliberate. The images are presented as ‘icons’, examples of some of the top hitting prints in the history of art, both beautiful and technically masterful. If these were paintings we’d be calling the exhibition a blockbuster. But they’re not, and it is not, and I must admit I am grateful for it as I had the room to myself for almost the entirety of my time there. The exhibition races through history without slavishly observing a chronological ordering, ranging from examples by Beccafumi (one of my personal favourites) to D Y Cameron, from Dürer through to Rembrandt, from Hogarth to Toulouse-Lautrec. It’s a whistle stop tour but the quality of each print can stand it. Despite their diminutive size you can’t take them in in one quick glance (mentally ticking them off from your list of great art to see), not really, there is too much there. Good prints such as these, with their detail and dexterity clearly yet unassumingly present, require a slower pace. Their intimacy makes the viewing experience far more personal and lasting, the lights are dimmed, the room quiet. It would be rude not to give them time, reflecting the slow paced build up such images took to construct in the first place (seven years in Rembrandt’s case).

The range of printmaking techniques and atmospheres achieved is impressive. And, I know you’ve heard it all before but they really have to be seen up close like this to be believed. Claude Mellan’s famous ‘The Sudarium of Saint Veronica’ is breathtaking, simple in conception yet highly complex in execution. The whole image is realised though a single line that grows from the middle of the print and then spirals outwards. The line expands and contracts to denote darker or lighter areas of detail of Christ’s image superimposed on the undulating veil. This could be merely a novelty piece for present day viewers but it is genuinely mesmerizing, its optical dizzying akin to a classic 19960s Bridget Riley painting. Wenceslaus Hollar’s ‘The Realms of Juno, Pallas and Venus’ are executed with characteristic precision through the play of shadows and highlights and in the threads of fabric. They compare wonderfully with Whistler’s more rough approach in his melancholic etching of Venice called ‘Nocturne: Palaces’. Here indistinct forms suggest crumbling out of focus buildings, watery reflections and shadowy corners through fine sketchy and scratchy cross-hatched lines. It is all very tactile stuff.

In fact it was intriguing to note just how sculptural these images appeared. This is partly, no doubt due to the nature of the process of printmaking which involves removing (either through carving, roughing up, delicate incisions or dissolution by acid) areas of the plate upon which the image is initially described, before being transferred to paper. Imagine this plate as a reusable form-giving cast pressed tight against the paper to give shape to an impression. But even in the finished prints evidence of the built up process of layering and construction is still there. In the case of ‘The Lost Receipt’ by Sir David Wilkie this is overtly presented through the display of two impressions at different stages of the image making process. In Rembrandt’s etching of ‘Christ Crucified between the Two Thieves: The Three Crosses’ the overlay of lines upon lines, stage upon stage, is clear. The image is made of various rhythms and depths of mark. They range from the lighter areas in the centre around Christ where figures are sketchily conceived, to the left third which appears murky where the outlines of horses and figures are thick and blurry, to the dark strip down the right side of the image that acts almost like a veil obscuring the layers of marks below.

This exhibition succeeds partly because of its compelling array of prints but also because of its simplicity. It does not obscure the objects by impenetrable technical terminology or didactic historical detail. Such approaches all too often see prints stifled by a structure for viewing which can seem incomprehensible to the unaccustomed. Here however grants its prints the space to be viewed as aesthetic images in their own right allowing us to make our own connections. These connections for me are curiously apposite to concerns one can readily identify in art now and in the second half of the last century. Such concerns favour ambiguity and incompleteness of form. Beccafumi’s near abstractions depicting the alchemist Vulcano at work, for example, or Whistler’s ghostly architectural forms clearly appeal to such a contemporary aesthetic. But even the most highly defined and precisely delineated print style like Hollar’s depend equally on ‘very imperfect resemblance’ in Descarte’s words.1 After all working within the relative restrictions of available printing techniques (which for a long time were based largely on a palette of dots, lines and perhaps washes) the power of suggestion rather than completion is paramount. Printed images are after all impressions defined by their partiality, as much by what is not there as by what is. That is to say their form comes about largely through the methodical obliteration of surface. These distant semblances of what they represent act as a catalyst for the viewer to imagine the rest. Much of the responsibility for building and completing the work is offered out to the viewer. What could be more post-modern than that? Equally the interest in revealing visual ancestries of a single piece of work, how a work is made, is rampant in todays art world. Think of ‘Blotter’ painted in 1993 by Peter Doig, which relies on a crucially perceptible slow build up of drawings, photocopies, prints and layers like of paint, like visual residue. Or what about Jorge Otero-Pailos’ 2009 latex cast of a crumbling Venetian wall which reveals the drawn out pitted deterioration of a surface by natural elements.

The narrative arc presented in the exhibition is straightforward and yet entirely satisfying in its subtlety. I have to commend the curatorial tactic here which somehow manages to reflect the suggestiveness and receptiveness of the prints themselves. Hannah Brocklehurst, its curator, has taken a step back. Boldly and refreshingly she has let the work speak for itself and trusted the viewer to think and look for herself too. It pays off. It offers a great introduction to some fabulous prints - a medium largely under-exhibited, under studied and over looked - and for the those for whom prints are old hat, perhaps it is a little frustrating in its sweeping overview, but you can never tire of looking at a great print.

The Printmaker’s Art is on display at The National Gallery of Scotland until 23rd May. Admission is free.

1 René Descartes, ‘Discours quatriesme: Des sens en general’, La Dioptrique in Discours de la methode pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la verité das les sciences, 1637, ed. Jean-Robert Armogathe et al., Paris, 1987, pp. 101-2 also quoted in Wiliam B. MacGregor, ‘The Authority of Prints: An Early Modern Perspective’, Art History, Vol. 22, No 3, September, 1999, pp. 391-3.