Art: Stone Stuff

Even if it were not one of the cheapest and easiest methods of reproduction of a draughtsman’s work, lithography would be popular with artists because of the purely tactile pleasure of drawing in crayon on smooth stone. Since its discovery 139 years ago, this youngest of the great printmaking processes has been a valued sideline of many an important European and U. S. painter, the mainstay of at least one indubitable master, Honore Daumier. In spite of having cluttered up the earth with a God’s plenty of “chromos,”† it has remained a fine as well as a commercial art. At the Boston Museum of Fine Arts last week 527 of the handsomest prints that have been pulled from stone since 1799 gave visitors an eyeful of old and new scenes and artistry in the largest exhibition of lithographs yet hung in the U. S.

Rewards to print lovers for a long dawdle through seven of the Museum’s big, bright exhibition rooms began with a curiosity: a faded title page to a Suite d’Airs Connus, par Mozart, printed in Offenbach, Germany, in 1799 and decorated with one of the earliest known lithographs. Among great prints and notable prints thereafter encountered:

¶An anonymous, memorable caricature of the first Baron Rothschild strutting like a Semitic pigeon, done in France in 1806.

¶A Self Portrait of the Artist Slightly Squiffed by Baron Vivant Dominique Denon, Napoleon’s chief looter and director of the Louvre.

¶A set of hitherto undiscovered humorous postcards of Civil War camp life by U. S. Master Winslow Homer.

¶Seven superb Daumiers.

¶Five small, beautiful prints of Parisian concerts and cafes by Edgar Degas.

¶Two of Goya’s famed bullfight scenes, Mariano Ceballos and La Division de Place.

¶The late George Bellows’ unsurpassed Stag at Sharkey’s and Dance in a Madhouse.

¶Tic-Toe, a lithograph by Abstractionist Paul Klee.

¶Who is Your Father, an illustration by Jean Chariot for Paul Claudel’s book on Mexico. By a characteristically Bostonian accident, this print was entitled in the exhibition Motherly Care.

In the history of lithography, as in that of engraving and woodcut, a curious legendary role belongs to laundry. Plate engraving is supposed to have been discovered when someone threw a heap of wet linen over a steel cuirass, later found it patterned from the intaglio work on the steel. Albrecht Dürer was reputedly driven to the solace of wood blocks by his wife’s demeanor after her hard day’s washing. More recent and not at all apocryphal is the account handed down by Johann Nepomuk Franz Aloys Senefelder, a ragtag Bavarian actor & playwright, of the fretful day in 1796 when he was so poor he had neither paper nor ink with which to write his laundry list. Senefelder. whose plays no one would print, had been trying to make himself his own engraver bypracticing writing backward on slabs of limestone which he picked up around Munich. In wax, backward, he wrote the laundry list on a piece of stone, reflected afterward that if the stone were bitten away with acid around the wax he could ink it and get an impression. He did.

Purists enjoy contradicting the pretty story that this was the first lithograph. It took Senefelder two years more to find out that stone printing worked better if the stone were not etched but merely wetted so that printer’s ink, which is greasy, would be taken up only by the greasy spots left by writing or drawing. Impressions from the inked stone could then be made on a simple hand press. When Senefelder had established this in 1798 he had invented lithography. By 1819 he had nearly exhausted all the methods of working on stone with crayon, pencil, pen and brush, using gum arabic and other chemicals to fix the stone for as many as 2,000 prints.

With these discoveries a Stone Age began in European art. Napoleon’s art-loving. Louvre-stuffing generals visited Senefelder’s press on their way home from Austerlitz, soon made lithography the rage in France. Progress was slower in England, as Charles Dickens later related. “The solemn, awful, inexorable literary Rhadamanthus, the dread Quarterly Review itself, sitting imposingly on its curule chair in ambrosial bigwig and high-heeled shoes, promulgated edicts against the new-fangled invention. …” Nevertheless, albums of lithographs became fashionable in both countries, though French artists were soon unbeatable in the medium. Some of the finest early lithographs were by French dilettanti whose names have not transpired. Expert lithographers were Isabey, Charlet, Gericault, Bonington, Delacroix, Daguerre (before he invented the daguerreotype), Gavarni and Daumier, whose political satires for Le Charivari, first published in 1832, rank as the best lithographs so far. Daumier produced about 5,000 pictures, of which the Boston museum owns more than 4,000.

As the first blizzard of lithographs subsided after 1860 into a softer fluttering of grandiosities, choice lithography became the concern of curators of prints. In the Athens of America this, like othermanifestations of European culture, got a sympathetic hand. By 1887 the tiny Boston Museum owned so many more prints than anything else that a print department was organized even before the department of Greek and Roman art. For 25 years it was the only serious pioneer in print collecting among U. S. museums. During that time lithography was revitalized by young French impressionists—Degas, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec. Bonnard, Pissarro. Signac, Vuillard. Corot—who skipped the conventional wild-crag-&-tree subjects, drew atmospheres and forms. By buying their work and that of their most modernsuccessors, the Boston Museum’s print department has formed the most comprehensive collection in the U. S., rivaled only by the S. P. Avery collection at the New York Public Library.

Curator of the department since 1924 has been portly, silver-haired Henry Preston Rossiter, born 52 years ago in Canada, indebted for much of his knowledge of prints to two years’ service in France, first as a subaltern and finally as a major, with the Canadian Infantry. Rossiter’s way of relieving the monotony of war was to study catalogs from every dealer in Paris and London, buy cheap prints which could be taken up into the line. Apart from this, the best thing he remembers about the War was driving a British tank, whose downslithers gave him “a lovely sensation.” Abstracted, ruddy and untidy, he now sits at a big desk beside a lofty window which frames two sprawling, dirty vines and a begonia plant, directs the immaculate preservation of more than 100,000 prints. Last winter Curator Rossiter exhibited 500 as the first gesture in celebration of his department’s soth anniversary. The lithographs now on view are the second gesture.

†Chromolithographs, i.e., in color, a method used by the Victorians for the brummagem reproduction of paintings.