Graphics: Mixed-Up Medium

The more mixed up the better seems to be the motto in art these days. Sculptors are adding paint to metals and incorporating everything from old divans to truncated taxis as props for their pop works; painters are bulging their canvases out into space to challenge the sculptors. Now the mixed-media trend seems to have struck the world of prints. Scorned are such traditional tools as the lithographer’s stone and crayon, the engraver’s burin, the woodcutter’s gouge; in are Plexiglas and acetate, molded plastic and all kinds of electric lighting.

The new style in graphics went on display last week at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art with 48 prints by 15 artists. In the opinion of the museum’s print director, William Lieberman, the pioneer of the movement is Robert Rauschenberg, who in 1964 created a print called Shades, which was, in effect, an art-toy-graphic. He transferred bits of newspapers and magazines onto a lithography stone, then inked and printed the image on an acetate sheet, which he in turn laminated on Plexiglas. Finally, he illuminated the whole thing with a light bulb. The result: a movable electric 3-D graphic.

Other artists took it from there. New York’s Tom Wesselmann silk-screened the image of a nude onto plastic, then shaped it to capture its contours as well. Britain’s Eduardo Paolozzi used eleven colors for Wittgenstein in New York, incorporated such city elements as jets, skyscrapers, and the man from a Bufferin ad to tick off hectic modern life. Roy Lichtenstein printed his Moonscape on metallic plastic that shimmers like aluminum foil. Claes Oldenburg made a serigraph print and attached a rust-colored felt tea bag.

Purists protest that such tours de force rely more on hired technicians and expensive presses than on the artist’s guiding hand, but Director Lieberman doubts that the artist ever really loses control. Furthermore, he says, collaboration is not that new: “Holbein never cut his woodcuts, nor did Durer; someone else did it for them.”