Young Lithographers Breathe New Life Into Their Old Craft

Lugging a 120-pound calcium lithography stone across his studio, Michael Woolworth says a lithographer’s relationship with an artist is similar to that of an orchestra musician and a composer.

“But the musician rarely works with the composer, while a lithographer works directly on the composition when it’s born,” Woolworth said.

Woolworth, one of a group of young lithographers breathing new life into the old craft, has been in Paris printing artists’ prints since he “took some time off from college” nine years ago.

In his courtyard studio, the 27-year-old Woolworth uses hand presses built around the turn of the century, perfecting techniques he learned apprenticing with the old master, Fernand Mourlot. When Woolworth arrived in Paris, he got a job with Mourlot’s grandson, Frank Bordas, who was part of a new wave of printmakers trying to revive lithography.

“The idea was to bring artists back to litho--to assure them that it was not too much of a market tool and that it was a serious medium,” Woolworth said.

“Just the fact that it’s done by hand, the litho has a more sensual appeal to it,” he added, looking up at one of the many colorful prints adorning the walls of his studio. “It’s a different approach to work--it’s more experimental and less systematic.”

Lithography, once used by virtually every newspaper to print drawings and photographs, was developed by Aloys Senefelder in the early 1800s in Bavaria. But it was in Paris that lithography really took off, with the artists Toulouse Lautrec and Alphonse Mucha refining the process.

In the 1920s and ‘30s, artists such as Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard began to work in litho. Then, after World War II, Mourlot began a series of lithos with Pablo Picasso, and soon thereafter everybody from Jean Dubuffet to Marc Chagall to Alexander Calder was making litho prints.

These lithographs were sold, signed and marked with the number of the print and the number of prints in the edition. Many of the early lithos by well-known artists are extremely valuable. After a print run is finished, the drawing on the stone is usually erased and the stone reused.

In the 1970s, however, several scandals were uncovered in which artists made more than one edition of the same print, and many painters stopped making lithos.

“A lot of junk was being printed in the ‘70s,” says Erika Greenberg, an American artist and printmaker living in Paris who has worked with Woolworth.

In making a litho, an artist draws a mirror image of the finished print on the stone with a grease pencil. The stone is then prepared with an acid solution, which makes ink adhere to the places where the artist has drawn but not to the blank stone.

“It’s the principle of the repulsion between grease and water,” Woolworth says. “The artist draws on the stone exactly the same he would draw on a piece of paper--it’s very close to his original work.”

After several years of apprenticeship, Woolworth became a full partner in the studio. In 1985, he branched off on his own, opening a shop called Michael Woolworth Publications on the Ile Saint Louis just behind the Notre Dame Cathedral.