‘Printing’ About More Than Technique

On its face the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “Printing With Color: Old Master Graphics From the Museum’s Collection” looks like a small specialist’s exhibition about reproduction technique. As such, the 45-work sampling is perfectly satisfactory, but there’s more to it.

The show traces the inventive ways artists set about incorporating color after the invention, in the 15th century, of printing with black ink on white paper. Initially the solution was simply to hand-tint printed images with watercolor, as demonstrated in “Saint Wilgefortis,” a medieval-style work by an anonymous German.

It looks fine, but the practice had serious drawbacks. Printing saved a lot of time. Manual tinting ate it back up again. There must be a better way. Why not make separate printing plates for each color?

Exhibition curator Victor Carlson shows how French printmaker Nicholas Le Suer accomplished this using five wood plates to reproduce a study of a young man with a book by Italian Mannerist Parmigianino. Mind you, the result doesn’t look like our idea of color reproduction. It looks like a drawing done on colored paper with various hues of chalk and inks. The resulting images were called chiaroscuro prints, a term combining the Italian words for “dark” and “light.”

This limitation didn’t prevent printmakers from doing spectacular work. At the end of the 16th century, for example, Andrea Andreani made a version of Andrea Mantegna’s painting “The Triumph of Julius Caesar.” Nearly 10 feet long and consisting of nine abutted sheets, the work is a pageant of heroes, elephants, chariots, cherubim, armor, arches and the spoils of war.

Most printmakers were skilled technicians who reproduced artist’s compositions. Dutch Mannerist Hendrik Goltzius both designed and executed his prints. A curious talent, he combined Italian grandiosity with German precision to create an unsettling, almost surreal aura. Two versions of his “Hercules and Cacus” suggest how color changes emotional tenor. The mythic hero is about to dispatch his opponent with a formidable club. A rendition in dark browns suggests a moment of deep passion. The cool black-and-gray version is more ominous, making Hercules’ act seem cold-blooded.

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For those already hip to the fundamentals of printing, this may all sound a bit rudimentary. Fortunately it’s almost impossible for works of art to talk about one thing at a time. As a subtext, the exhibition has already suggested the history of technology and its effect on economics. This kind of proto-mechanical printing would make pictorial imagery available to people who couldn’t afford original paintings and eventually fill everyday life with more pictures than anybody can count.

Pure science lent a helping hand in 1666 when Sir Isaac Newton formulated his theory of extrapolating the full prismatic spectrum from just three primary hues--red, yellow and blue. Printers, by overlapping plates bearing transparent versions of these colors, could, in principle, achieve full-color reproduction.

It took quite a while to work this out. French scientific printer Jacques-Fabien Gautier-Dagoty made an ambitious effort in his huge “General Anatomy of the Viscera, Life Size and in Natural Color.” Its use of Newton’s primaries plus a black plate marked a substantial but somewhat muddy advance in color printing.

The problem seems to be solved in Jean-Francois Janinet’s “Portrait of Marie-Antoinette.” It’s a Rococo honey of pink flesh, blue satin and imitation gold frame. It oozes a privileged good life shortly to be snuffed by the French Revolution.

Philibert-Louis Debucourt echoed the gloaming of those days lightheartedly in his satire “Two Kisses.” It depicts a rich old man admiring a painting of himself bussing a pretty young thing. Meantime in the background of reality, the girl is sneaking a smooch with the young artist. Debucourt, trained as a painter, made his own compositions but this one is clearly influenced by such British humorists as Thomas Rowlandson.

Debucourt is considerably more circumspect in his post-revolutionary “The Pleasures of Fatherhood.” Clearly a piece of artistic propaganda attesting to the stability of the new republican regime, the work is a study in paradox. By now color printmaking was in superb shape, but most of the people who could afford it had disappeared into the Bastille or the guillotine. It would take a while before the survivors could afford such decadent luxuries as color prints.

So there you are. A modest exhibition about technique blossoms into insights about economics, science, history and romance.

* “Printing With Color: Old Master Graphics From the Museum’s Collection,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.; through June 15, closed Wednesdays, (213) 857-6000.