In Love With Lithography : Show focuses on the artworks produced by the Hollywood-based Tamarind Workshop of the 1960s

Only 30 years ago lithographic prints by American artists were considered little more than decorative or novelty items.

“They were going for five bucks, maybe $50 at the most,” said Sylvan Cole, the dean of American print dealers, speaking from his home in New York. “Most artists, including the best known, were not doing much, if anything, in lithography.”

Since then, lithography has roared into respectability. Today, there is hardly an important painter who has not at least dabbled in this printing method. Collectors came to love the prints, especially when it meant that they could own a work by a famous artist without paying the astronomical sums commanded by a painting.

That does not mean that lithographs are cheap. When the art market was at its height in the late 1980s, a lithograph by a hot artist could fetch more than $100,000.

A lot contributed to lithography’s rise from poor cousin to rich uncle. One of the most important contributions to the medium was the creation in 1960 of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Hollywood.

This decade-long program trained artists and printers in the use of the printing method and was undeniably successful. Almost every major art lithograph printer to work in this country over the past three decades passed through its intensive training program.

Numerous famed art printing establishments, including Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles, were started by Tamarind alumni. Well-known artists such as Josef Albers, Louise Nevelson, Rufino Tamayo, John Altoon, Sam Francis and Jules Engel were at Tamarind.

More than 40 lithographs done at the workshop by Albers, Altoon, Engel and others will be featured in an exhibit beginning Tuesday and running through Sept. 7 at the Tobey C. Moss Gallery in Hollywood.

“Tamarind was where I got the experience in this country when I came from France,” said Serge Lozingot, later the master printer for 18 years at Gemini, where he worked with Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein and Richard Diebenkorn. “It was a chance to experiment. There are so many chemicals, many methods. It is very technical, it takes time.”

A stone slab is the basic tool of the art lithographer, who usually uses a hands-on method instead of the mechanized, offset lithography process. The best slabs come from Bavaria.

Generally, the artist draws an image onto the stone using a grease pencil or crayon and employing a variety of techniques to get different effects and tone values. The stone is then treated with acids, other chemicals and inks until it can be used in a press to reproduce the image on paper.

The first great artist to employ lithography was Goya, who in 1825 at the age of 79 did four large images of bullfighting. Later that century, French artists such as Delacroix and most especially Daumier took lithography to new heights. Manet, Degas, Renoir and Cezanne also did lithos.

Picasso, Matisse and Miro experimented with the form in the 20th Century, as did Klee and Kollwitz in Germany. But by mid-century, lithography’s popularity was fading, in part because offset printing was being widely used to make inexpensive reproductions of existing paintings. This soured lithography’s reputation as a fine-art form.

Few modern artists were interested in learning the technique. “Almost none of the new, upcoming artists learned lithography,” Cole said. “People like Jackson Pollock wanted to make spontaneous works, and they did not think that possible with lithography.”

A few art lithography workshops were established in the United States, however, including one created by Tatyana Grossman on Long Island that attracted several emerging artists.

But many artists, including a Chicago-born high school dropout named June Wayne, went to Paris to do serious work in lithography. She fell in love with the form and, upon returning to the United States, wrote a proposal for the Ford Foundation to sponsor the workshop that would later be called Tamarind.

“It was not going to be just a training place,” said Wayne, now 73. “It was to be . . . an attempt to revive a dying art and give it the means to thrive.”

The foundation eventually poured about $6 million into the workshop over the 10 years of its existence. “No one got as much foundation money for art as June did,” Cole said.

Wayne located used stones and presses and had them shipped to the large studios she had designed and built in Hollywood on Tamarind Avenue. Through a grants program, she began to bring in artists and printers whom she thought could further the form.

The artists--generally two at a time--would study and produce lithographs at Tamarind for two months. There was also a visiting artists program for those who did not want to stay that long.

In addition to being paid a stipend, the artists owned the lithographs they made there.

Lozingot was one of the experienced printers who Wayne brought in from Europe to work with the artists and train new printers. “I was in France and I got a letter from this June Wayne saying I was getting a prize for being one of the best printers,” Lozingot said. “I did not know why I was getting that, but then I realized she was trying to attract me to Los Angeles. I said, ‘OK, I come for three months.’ ”

Lozingot was at Tamarind for four years.

The printers got lithographs, too. In accordance with artistic tradition, they would receive the first acceptable print in a series to come off the press. Lozingot retired from printing two years ago and is now selling off his ample collection.

Although Wayne had hired administrators to handle the day-to-day operation of Tamarind, she was clearly in charge, making all the final decisions about which artists would come there.

“She ran the place like a work camp,” said Cole, noting that Wayne made several enemies in the art world during that time.

But even her detractors admit that her commitment to art lithography was responsible, in large part, for its acceptance in this country. Tamarind not only trained artists and printers, it produced volumes of written material on the form and set standards for nomenclature and documentation of art prints.

It championed the use of highly limited print runs, which made individual prints more valuable. “I wanted to bring the art form to the point where it could flourish in a free-market society,” Wayne said. “I do not believe in permanent subsidy.”

In 1970, she decided that the original Tamarind’s mission had been completed, although Ford was willing to keep supporting it, she said. About 120 artists had been through the program and about 60 printers had trained there.

The workshop was recast as the Tamarind Institute at the University of New Mexico, where it continues to train artists and printers.

Wayne said she made only a few lithographs during the existence of the workshop--three of which will be on view at the Moss exhibition. She still does occasional lithography work at the New Mexico institute, but she also creates huge abstract tapestries and paintings, often influenced by her fascination with quantum physics and other scientific fields.

She still does most of her art work in the Tamarind studios in Hollywood, where she and her husband also live.

Although Wayne is anxious to explore new fields in art, she realizes she will probably always be best known as the creator of Tamarind.

“I am very proud of what I did, but I would just love it if I could get off the subject of Tamarind,” she said with a laugh. “People treat me like an institution and I react rather crabbily to that.”