Baren Digest                Monday, 24 June 2002        Volume 19 : Number 1874


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From: "Elizabeth B. Atwood" <elizuno@midcoast.com>
Date: Sun, 23 Jun 2002 16:47:36 -0400
Subject: [Baren 18446] censorship 

To all:
Will I be banned from the list for asking,
"Why has  been banned? And who is the censor that made that decision?"
I read the digest form of Baren.........so perhaps I have missed something!
In wonderment...........ElizA


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From: Myron Turner <mturner@Ms.UManitoba.CA>
Date: Mon, 24 Jun 2002 07:49:23 -0500
Subject: [Baren 18447] Re: Helen Frankenthaler 

Before leaving Connecticut, I went back to see the Frankenthaler prints at 
Yale one more time, and this time got a better sense of what was involved 
in their creation.  First, the most recent of the prints, "Madame 
Butterfly", uses 102 colors and 46 blocks.  It's very large, approxmiately 
42 x 80 inches, made up of three sheets of paper.  The other large print is 
"Tales of Genji".  Both of these works are printed in Japanese water-based 
inks and the blocks were cut and printed for her from her designs, with her 
ongoing input at each stage of the process.  Each of these prints took 
several years to complete.

Her prints raise interesting issues.  I think it's fair to say that she's 
the author of these prints but not (I would argue) their maker.  This 
needn't be an important consideration unless you can't separate what you 
admire in her work form the technical mastery, the virtuosity, they 
display, since those are the printer's and not hers.

I realize that there's a whole culture of 20th century printmaking in which 
artists work with master printers, and there's been a wide range of 
relationships between artist and printer--from artists who directly create 
and/or work the plate, to artists who hand the printer an image, common in 
silkscreen.  Personally, I've always found the latter practice 
questionable.  For instance, the "fine art" view of prints looks down on 
artists who have paintings reproduced by offset.  I'm not clear in my mind 
that there's a difference between that practice and the practice of 
creating a painting for silkscreen reproduction.  Usually the difference is 
the status and "seriousness" of the artist.

To get back to Frankenthaler:   the demands of her prints may have pushed 
the printer to new heights of virtuosity, but the virtuosity is still the 
printer's.   If on the other hand, you feel that the source of their value 
is in the design, the image, the concept, then the printer's role is 
subordinate to hers.  A lot of contemporary art falls into this category, 
where work is fabricated for the artist either in whole or in part.

The Yale exhibit shows the original monoprint  Frankenthaler created for 
one of the "Genji" panels but the wooduct created from this image is 
clearly superior to the monoprint--suffused with a light and translucency 
that just isn't in her own original.  So where does the credit go for this 
print?  It has to go--at the very least--to the collaboration between 
artist and printer.

The "Madame Butterfly" triptych in particular raises another question about 
these recent prints.  Its surface appearance isn't that of a 
woodcut.  This, even more than the "Genji" prints, looks like a 
painting--unlike her earlier woodcuts.  So one wonders why go through all 
of this trouble--102 colors, 46 blocks, three years of work--to transform a 
painting into a "painting"?

Some bareners have jokingly raised the question of the sales value of these 
prints--but there is an economic subtext to their creation:  the cost of 
making these prints had to be substantial, so that only an artist with her 
economic base could afford to have them made.  Which reminds me of a 
documentary I once saw on Motherwell, in which he would call out a color 
and his assistant, sitting right next to him, would hand him the colored 
pencil he asked for.


At 02:52 PM 23/06/2002 -0400, you wrote:

>.. for me, Helen Frankenthaler's woodblock prints are
>among the supreme objects of late 20th-c American art. I first saw Cedar Hill
>on the cover of A Graphic Muse, a book about women printmakers that was
>published in 1987 and includes two powerful woodblock prints by Lousia Chase.
>A large print by HF  was at the Boston Museum of Fine Art last winter, in a
>show of contemporary prints that included a wild piece by Terry Winters that
>was never touched by human hands, as far as I can tell - the plate was cut by
>laser, and the print was printed through a hydraulic press. The wall text
>explained that Frankenthaler had worked with ten plates, each of a different
>kind of wood, which fascinated me with the possibilities of building up a
>surface from all those grains.
>
>I've been lucky to study woodblock printing with Yasu Shibata, HF's printer
>at Tyler Graphics, as well as with April Vollmer.
>
>Janet Hollander



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