|
Beginning in 1957, Universal Limited Art Editions
built its reputation by working with the biggest names in American
art. With the goal of bringing renewed prominence to the fine-art
print, the studio’s status was confirmed in 1960 when New
York’s Museum of Modern Art began acquiring the first print
from every edition. Presenting a selection of the Long Island printmaker’s
high-quality prints to a West Coast audience, this retrospective
offered 35 works by 25 masters, including Jasper Johns, Barnett
Newman, and Robert Rauschenberg. The exhibition revealed how some
of the country’s foremost artists translated their signature
styles into prints and simultaneously pushed printmaking into new
territory.
Cy Twombly’s Note IV (1967), engraved
with the artist’s energetic scrawls, slyly calls attention
to the printing process. The sides of the intaglio plate were left
inked, so that the image is framed with a rough rectangle that echoes
Twombly’s expressive lines rather than the customary clean,
embossed edge. The moody chiaroscuro of Lee Bontecou’s 1968
lithograph 8th Stone provides a more muted take on the
trademark eye form of her early sculptures. Suzanne McClelland’s
intaglio prints from 2005 each feature a provocative word written
in a liquid script amid textured, monochromatic washes of color.
The words Hunk, Stud, and Sugar Daddy
are spelled out in syrupy drips, their unexpected fluidity belying
both the words’ machismo and the precision of the printmaking
process. Elizabeth Murray’s Bill Alley (2006) takes
printmaking literally into a new dimension, reproducing the bright
colors and cartoon shapes of her paintings in a lithographic print
mounted on supports that pop out from the wall, like miniature versions
of her shaped canvases.
This review originally appeared
in the September, 2006 issue of ARTnews.
Reprinted with permission.
< back to art
|
