Century-Old Lithographs Seem Forever Young

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s newest summer show avoids the routine quality of exhibitions selected from permanent collections. Dubbed “Drawings on Rocks,” it first sounds as if it might be a display of aboriginal markings on native stone. That misapprehension is disabused by the subtitle, “200 Years of Lithography.”

If that clears things up, it doesn’t turn the four-gallery installation into the grab bag one might expect. Rather, in some 120 examples it focuses attention on how young the lithographic medium is compared to such venerable forms as engraving and etching. The method was discovered in 1789 by the German playwright Aloys Senefelder, making it just 50 years older than photography.

The two media--different as they are--share the quality of mechanically simplifying the task of making and reproducing pictures. In lithography, artists draw directly on flat stones that also act as the printing plate. It’s a very supple and efficient method. Artists started working in it right away. (Benjamin West’s example dates from 1806.) But this exhibition clusters chronologically around the end of the 19th century. It feels modern throughout.

There’s a touch of familiar time in Henri Fantin-Latour’s “Prelude to Lohengrin.” Even though the subject is classical, the image hovers on the surface like a TV picture. Odilon Redon transformed the intense detail of an old master like Durer from an act of labor toone of imagination. His “For Edgar Poe” alludes to the American poet who inspired Baudelaire, who, in turn, invented the idea of artistic modernism.

But the end of the last century never feels more contemporary than in the section on color lithography. In this country, most fine artists snubbed the medium. That left the field to commercial lithographers like Currier and Ives who made picturesque scenes for nice respectable folks. Mechanical chromo-lithographers made color reproductions of paintings like William Harnett’s “The Old Violin.” They were varnished to look like the real thing available at a bargain price.

The French version was spectacular. During the fin de siecle, artists like Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard and Alphonse Mucha made advertisements for popular entertainments that were also artistic masterpieces. It was a bracing moment when fine art and popular art were fused. The carrier that made it possible was lithography.

As the exhibition moves into this century, it seems to go out of its way to emphasize the Populist character of a flexible medium and the utility of plates that didn’t wear out. Virtually endless reproductive capacity meant that individual pieces could be made inexpensively available to ordinary people. The idea clearly appealed to the various socially conscious art movements of the 1920s and ‘30s. The Mexican muralists were particularly keen. David Alfaro Siqueiros produced wonderful portrait heads with the gravity of stone carvings. Diego Rivera rendered subjects like “Zapata and His Men.” The Mexicans established a legendary Populist print workshop, the Taller Grafica Popular. Among those influenced by the Mexicans were African American artists such as Charles White. (There’s an interesting dovetail between this show and “In the Spirit of Resistance” at the California African-American Museum.)

The urge to make an accessible art also touched German Expressionists like George Grosz in his political cartoon-styled “The Capitalist.” George Bellows clearly had a grass-roots audience in mind for his famous “A Stag at Sharkey’s.” California artists felt the vibes. Fletcher Martin virtually lifted the pose of Bellows’ boxers for his brawling “Trouble in Frisco.” Millard Sheets never looked better than in his Ash-Can style “Family Flats.”

By the ‘60s, however, lithography had faded. It was revived locally by June Wayne’s Tamarind workshop. Once again there was talk of the medium making art more widely available. But the fact was that art was more interested in absorbing popular culture than ordinary people were in acquiring art.

The final section on our century echoes the oversize color boom of Paris’ banquet years, albeit dimly. There is little of the celebratory spirit in Robert Rauschenberg’s 1967 “Booster,” with its X-ray image of a human skeleton. There are big splashy abstractions by Joan Miro and Sam Francis, cool ones by Jasper Johns and Frank Stella. Lithography had split into two versions, the mass-market printing industry and the signed limited-edition, hand-pulled object deluxe for the carriage trade.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.; through Jan. 4. (213) 857-6000.