Princes of prints

ELIZABETH MURRAY, subject of a Museum of Modern Art retrospective that closed in early January, was in her Tribeca studio making more paintings. But she had too many ideas. She didn’t have the time to translate them all into paintings.

Better to translate those ideas into prints, she decided. So she made dozens of drawings, chose a handful of favorites and stuffed them into her suitcase. Then, as she’d done many times before, she headed west to Los Angeles and the sleek gray home of print publisher Gemini G.E.L.

A few months later, her colorful drawings now re-imagined on hand-carved chunks of white foam, Murray is back at Gemini to finish her three-dimensional artworks. At the center of her artist’s studio here is a spacious table covered with chunks of foam, paintbrushes, a bucket of watercolor pens, and jars of indigo and vermillion, turquoise and yellow-green paint. Finished pieces from her emerging “Sweetzer Suite” are already up on one wall as she hand paints the remainder.

“My paintings were very similar to these forms,” says Murray, “but you really can’t try out all your ideas with paintings. It takes so long to make each one. I thought this would be a project for me to do at Gemini.”

Gemini co-founders Sidney B. Felsen and Stanley Grinstein would certainly agree. Murray is one of a select group of major American artists for whom Gemini has become a second home. For 40 years now, art world superstars have come across the country or, often, across town to create limited editions of etchings, lithographs, woodcuts, sculptures or, as in Murray’s case, something different altogether.

Sixty-two artists have worked at Gemini now, spending several days or weeks at the sprawling place on Melrose near La Cienega. The building’s 1979 addition was designed by Frank Gehry, who has also created his own prints there, and Gemini’s artist roster reads like a who’s who in American art. Felsen counts up more than 250 print editions each by Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Rauschenberg, more than 160 from Richard Serra and more than 100 each by Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein.

To celebrate their 40th anniversary year, Felsen and Grinstein invited 15 artists to create special new work that will likely also be part of an art exhibition and book commemorating the occasion. Nearly everyone said yes, and Gemini’s studios have been humming with activity for months now.

Kelly, John Baldessari, Ann Hamilton and Ken Price have already completed their anniversary-pegged artworks. So has Murray, whose anniversary suite, “Metropolitan,” preceded the “Sweetzer” series. Gemini’s silk-screen studio is replete with large prints of Jonathan Borofsky’s multicolored figures in various stages of completion. Copper plates and other signs of Serra’s multiyear etchings project are all over the place -- in special acid vats out back, on tables, tacked to walls.

Now in its third year, the Serra project requires copper plates so big and heavy that a 350-gallon vertical acid tank and special pulley system had to be built at Gemini to accommodate them. The original images are drawn by Serra, after which comes the printing and considerable back-and-forthing with Serra for approvals.

Visiting Los Angeles, Serra is in and out of Gemini, reviewing plates and prints as they emerge from acid vats or presses. The sculptor, who says his ideas for the etchings aren’t totally resolved until he starts making them here, says he enjoys the collaboration with Gemini’s printers. “They are willing to entertain your mistakes,” says Serra, who has been working at Gemini since 1972. “They assist and support you no matter if the work is moving well or not. They are a great sounding board and kind of become part of your mental family.”

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From diverging fields

FELSEN, the Gemini partner in charge of working with artists and running the shop, nestles in a small office whose walls are covered with photographs he’s long taken of Gemini artists at work and at play. Felsen, 81, and Grinstein, 78, the Gemini partner supervising sales and curating, have been friends since they met as students at USC; Felsen introduced Grinstein to his architect wife, Elyse, and served as best man at their wedding.

Grinstein knew many artists from both his forklift business and art collecting, and Felsen, a CPA who had studied art over the years, had several art world clients. In 1966, the two friends brought their art interests center stage to launch Gemini with master printer Kenneth Tyler.

Although European print workshops long flourished, there wasn’t much printmaking in the United States until the late 1950s. “Our hero was Tatyana Grosman at ULAE [Universal Limited Art Editions] on Long Island, who brought the aesthetic of printmaking to the U.S. in 1957,” Grinstein says. “She encouraged young artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns to experiment with this media.”

By 1960, artist June Wayne was training printers in Hollywood at her Tamarind Lithography Workshop, attracting major artists such as Josef Albers and Ed Ruscha.

“It’s great that Gemini is here in California,” says master printer Jean Milant, who trained at Tamarind before founding print publisher Cirrus Editions here in 1970. “They’re continuing the tradition of the print revolution that began here in the ‘60s.”

With printer Tyler, Gemini also added experimentation and scale. Tyler, who left Gemini in 1973 to start his own print workshop, Tyler Graphics, in Bedford, N.Y., had trained at Tamarind and in 1966 was already running his own custom printing shop called Gemini Limited. Tyler had printed for Albers at Tamarind, and Gemini G.E.L. (which stands for Graphic Editions Ltd.) began with Albers’ series “White Line Squares.” Man Ray, who stayed with the Grinsteins when he was in Los Angeles later that year for a retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, was Gemini’s second artist.

Next came Rauschenberg, who was also instrumental in luring to Gemini such fellow East Coast artists as Frank Stella and Claes Oldenburg. Johns, Lichtenstein and Kelly soon followed and, around the same time, so did such prominent locally based artists as Sam Francis, Price and Ruscha. “In the first five years,” says soft-spoken, nattily dressed Felsen, “all these accomplished artists had been here already.”

The art world has paid attention. In 1971, the Museum of Modern Art in New York recognized Gemini’s first five years with its “Technics and Creativity: Gemini G.E.L.” In 1981, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., launched its Gemini G.E.L. Archive with an initial gift of 256 prints and sculpture editions by 22 American artists. Later gifts have resulted in examples from most of Gemini’s 2,041 published editions, and there have been major National Gallery exhibitions of Gemini prints in 1984, 1994 and 2001.

“Gemini is and has been since it existed one of the two or three premiere houses for printmaking in America,” says Earl A. Powell III, National Gallery director and a former director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “They’ve worked with the greatest living artists, and their portfolios are of extremely high quality. Gemini has always been rooted in and championed Los Angeles as an art center and place to be.”

Oldenburg once called Los Angeles “a sort of paradise of technology” and the city’s pioneering spirit infused Gemini as far back as Rauschenberg’s 1967 project “Booster and 7 Studies,” said to be the largest lithograph made until that time. “Bob said, ‘I want to do a self-portrait and X-ray my body,” Grinstein says. “We knew some doctors, and they did the X-rays. We always talk about the easy prints, and it never happens. That why we’re successful -- we knocked ourselves out to do what the artists wanted.”

Apparently so. In the ‘70s, for instance, Gemini researched and assembled parts of car doors and windows for Edward Kienholz’s sculpture series “Five Card Stud” and essentially re-created David Hockney’s Hollywood Hills studio at Gemini so he could draw there. Serra used a specially built wall at Grinstein’s former forklift company to draw on a huge sheet of handmade paper, and when the sculptor was working in Iceland, Gemini sent him small etching plates and other supplies. Rauschenberg worked with print paper at mills in India with Felsen and in China with Grinstein.

“America is a can-do country, and that was a mind-set I learned when I came to Gemini,” says workshop manager and printer James Reid, a Canadian who has been at Gemini for 26 years. “In the beginning, I might have thought, ‘That’s crazy.’ Now I get past that and try to figure out how to do it.”

Printers like such challenges, observes Santa Monica-based artist Baldessari. For his anniversary edition at Gemini, Baldessari brought in flat maquettes of multilayered images of guitars, indicating additional planes he wanted. Gemini printers made up three-dimensional maquettes to scale, which the artist then fine-tuned. “I’ve found that printers don’t like to do the same old thing,” Baldessari says. “So I just pose the question -- ‘Can you do this?’ -- and look at the expression on their faces. So far, so good.”

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Artists are in charge

EACH Gemini print is signed and numbered by the artist and then stamped with the Gemini chop, the symbol for the zodiac sign. As publisher, Gemini owns the artworks, offers them for sale and pays each artist a royalty. But nobody gets an advance payment, Felsen explains. “We pay all the artist’s costs for travel and materials. Production costs are very high, and artists understand that. Their ‘advance,’ in a sense, is the cost of producing the project.”

Theirs is an invitational workshop, Felsen adds, but once there, artists are in charge. “The artists decide what they want to do,” he says. “There are no demands on them and no restrictions, except that we really don’t want to get into pornography or something that’s blatantly political.”

Gemini sells prints at its Melrose Avenue headquarters, online and to dealers, museums and others around the world. Prices generally range from $1,000 to $10,000, Felsen says, depending on the artist, size and year, and Gemini sells its older prints as well as more recent ones. Scarcity fuels price increases, he observes, noting, for instance, that the popular Baldessari guitar prints have climbed from their original price of $3,800 in December 2004 to $9,000 now.

Baldessari, who has also made prints in New York and Zurich workshops, says he likes the idea that he doesn’t have to get on a plane to work at Gemini, but for other artists, the journey is often part of the attraction. Serra, for instance, takes a break in the midday sun out on Gemini’s patio, saying, “In New York, it’s very difficult for me to unplug. I don’t have my finger in the light socket out here.”

But wherever they’re from, the artists are clearly at Gemini to work. Murray, for instance, is there all day long, breaking only for the lunch that’s brought in for her each day. She may go with Felsen and his wife, art dealer Joni Weyl, to a Dodger game or museum opening, but that’s unusual. “The industry of these people is astounding,” Felsen says. “Elizabeth has assigned herself a week to be here, and she’s getting as much work done as she can.”

Nearly all of Gemini’s artists are American, although Felsen says he’s talking with artists outside the U.S. about working here. Nineteen of Gemini’s 62 artists are no longer living, he adds, expressing concern about the aging of their artist population. Naming such “younger” artists as Hamilton, Robert Gober and Cecily Brown who have already worked at Gemini, Felsen says he’s currently wooing half a dozen others.

But new collaborations tend to be infrequent, he concedes.

“We have eight printers, and that’s the most we ever want,” Felsen says.

“If you have a limited number of printing teams and you have projects that take a lot of time, every time you add a new artist, you stretch the rubber band of when you can invite the artist back who just finished a project. Over the years, these great, accomplished artists keep coming back, and we want them to.”

Felsen clearly relishes his work and friendships with those artists, and so does partner Grinstein.

“Artists don’t usually want you to be around them in their creative moments,” says Grinstein. “But printmaking is a collaborative process. We’ve had the chance to be around some of the most creative people in the world when they’re creating.”

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What is an original print?

Artist June Wayne, founder of Tamarind Lithography Workshop, has often been asked to define an original print. Her definition, honed over several decades, goes like this: “It is a work of art, usually on paper, which has siblings comparable to the Dionne quintuplets. They all look alike, they were all made at the same time from the same matrix, the same creative impulse, and they are all originals. The fact that there are many of them is irrelevant.”