The 1960s have been described as an “explosive” period for the development of the contemporary print as a primary art form in America. The can-do spirit of the American printmaking renaissance gave rise to innovation that continues to inspire and inform printmaking today. Discover the radical nature of some of the artistic pioneers of this period and their “firsts” that changed the history of printmaking.

It is no coincidence that printmaking flourished in the 1960s. Printmaking seemed to embody the spirit of innovation and egalitarian idealism at the heart of the counterculture. From one metal plate, lithographic stone, or screen it is possible to create multiple impressions of one artwork. This means the print is one of the most affordable and accessible forms of fine art. Mary Margaret “Moo” and Harry “Hunk” Anderson purchased their first print in 1969. Since then, together with their daughter, Mary Patricia “Putter” Anderson Pence, they have cultivated an exceptional survey of American printmaking. The prints included in First Impressions are just some of the hundreds of prints given to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco by the Anderson family, and they represent the Andersons’ generous effort to make art accessible to all.

Intaglio
For intaglio printing, an image is carved into a hard material. The material is covered with ink and then wiped clean, leaving ink only in the incised areas. An impression is made when, under the enormous pressure of the printing press, the malleable surface of the paper makes contact with the ink, transferring image to paper.

Lithography
In lithography, artists create designs on a prepared lithographic stone or plate using an oily liquid. The surface is flushed with water and then applied with ink, which adheres only to the oily design. The inked design is transferred in a press to a sheet of paper.

Screenprinting
In screenprinting, ink is forced through a woven screen and momentarily pressed against a surface below. An impression is made at the point of contact. Stencils are used to make portions of the screen impermeable to ink in order to control the application of color.

The assemblage-like process adds to the illusion of depth in the final print. The jagged corners and shadowy passages are reminiscent of a city skyline at night, or one of Nevelson’s boxed wall sculptures.

Printing in the Third Dimension
To make Profile Airflow, Oldenburg created a lithograph and placed a layer of molded swimming-pool-blue polyurethane over the top. He spent more than a year refining the wooden relief used to create the polyurethane mold. Oldenburg wanted to create something that had an organic feel and was concerned that the artwork would look too cold and impersonal given all of the mechanical elements involved in its making. The malleable nature of the polyurethane was instrumental in giving Profile Airflow the fleshy quality that Oldenburg was looking for. After the first editions of Profile Airflow were sold, the material was found to discolor rapidly. Similar to some products of the automobile industry, early editions were recalled and replaced with new versions in a perfected medium. Undeterred, Oldenburg went on to create many sculptural multiples out of equally intriguing materials. His work sent printmaking rolling into the future.

Consumer Goods and the Human Experience
Like many artists in the 1960s, Oldenburg was fascinated by Americans’ relationships with mass-marketed and mass-produced consumer goods. His own representations of objects from popular culture often have organic textures and appear to concede to the pull of gravity. His depictions of machine-made objects are reminiscent of the human body. The combination of natural and machine-made attributes seems to question how the world of gleaming, manufactured consumer goods fits into the human experience.

ULAE
The beginnings of Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) are remarkably fortuitous. Tatyana Grosman, its founder, was born in Russia to Jewish parents and spent the first half of her life fleeing war. Evading the Nazis, she crossed the Pyrenees on foot, ultimately making her way to New York. She happened to uncover two Bavarian lithographic stones in the front yard of her New York home. Grosman followed her curiosity about them to learn the trade, eventually opening one of the most successful fine art printing workshops on the East Coast.

Tamarind Lithography Workshop
June Wayne opened Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles in 1960. Wayne had studied lithography in Europe and, upon her return, was dismayed at the dearth of American ateliers and master printers. Fearful that lithographic printmaking would cease to exist in the United States for lack of trained practitioners, she opened a workshop with support from the Ford Foundation. By 1966, largely due to dissemination of Wayne’s protégés to other presses, Southern California was an important domestic center of printmaking.

Crown Point Press
To Kathan Brown, founder of Crown Point Press, printmaking seems to have been a calling rather than a trade. Her story begins in a back garden of Edinburgh, Scotland, where she discovered an abandoned press. Forgoing a quick plane ride home, Brown opted to return with the press in a cargo ship. She traveled for two and a half months through the Panama Canal to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she established Crown Point Press, specializing in intaglio printmaking.

Lunch with Kathan Brown
Thiebaud created Lunch while having lunch with Kathan Brown during his first working session at Crown Point Press. On his first day in the studio, he began drawing from a photograph of one of his earlier paintings: a slice of pie. Brown went upstairs to fix lunch. When she returned she said “Printmaking should be original. What’s the point of copying yourself, of redoing something that’s already been done?” Thiebaud picked up a new etching plate and began drawing the lunch that Brown had just delivered. Once he had finished and they had begun to eat the sandwiches, Thiebaud explain his process and the importance of repeating the same subject in different media. It was the first of many Thiebaud-Brown projects.

Robert Motherwell
Motherwell created a famous group of paintings known as the Open Series that are typically characterized by a single-color surface and a few charcoal lines. The artist is said to have been inspired by the color fields he saw forming when one painted canvas was propped against another. In the printed series shown here, Motherwell used the same lithographic stone to create color fields in three distinct prints with similar compositions.

Richard Diebenkorn
Diebenkorn’s series 41 Etchings Drypoints contains portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and domestic interiors. Diebenkorn’s emotion-filled lines describe intimate reflections on his daily life.

Roy Lichtenstein
Lichtenstein’s Cathedral series is an homage to Claude Monet’s series of paintings showing the Rouen Cathedral under different conditions. Like Monet, Lichtenstein has created variation throughout the series by manipulating color and tone. But instead of painterly brushstrokes and dabs of paint, Lichtenstein used the modern, mass-market printing vocabulary of Benday dots, a commercial technique for creating color and form out of closely spaced, widely spaced, or overlapping uniform dots.

Innovation expands possibilities and, by definition, describes “firsts.” Artists and publishers inspired one another to push technical boundaries and take risks in the print renaissance of the 1960s. Robert Rauschenberg is one of the most recognized risk-takers in art during this period. His technically audacious experiments advanced printmaking processes.

When Rauschenberg created the print Booster, it was the largest handmade print to date. Six feet high, Booster redefined what was possible in printmaking in terms of scale, and the complexity of materials used. The process involved two lithography stones, screenprinting, x-ray films, photographs, offset rubbings, and direct drawings.

A booster is an engine that provides the added thrust needed for a rocket to escape the gravitational pull of the earth. In this print, you can see two jet engines hovering to the right of the skeleton’s hip, as well as a star chart specific to the year the print was made, 1967. Rauschenberg found inspiration in the innovations that launched humanity into space, and Booster is one of many artworks related to this topic.

Capturing a Zeitgeist
The televised launch of Apollo 11 on its mission to the moon had nearly all Americans glued to their television sets in 1969. NASA invited Rauschenberg to observe the launch as part of an art program celebrating the achievements of the American space project. After witnessing the event, Rauschenberg returned to Gemini G.E.L. and created lithographs inspired by the mission and the culture that it represented—one of innovation and radical social change.