Art: Goose Feathers & Spitzstickers

Licking their chops at the thought of Christmas presents still to be bought, the print-makers of the U. S. made jubilee last week. They did it by lodges. The Society of American Etchers held their with annual exhibition in New York’s National Arts Club.

The Philadelphia Society of Etchers had their annual exhibition in New York’s Grand Central Galleries. The Chicago Society of Etchers held up their end with an exhibition in the Chicago Fine Arts Building. The American Print Makers Society showed their sixth annual crop of etchings, lithographs, woodcuts. For the tenth year, the Brooklyn Museum showed “Fine Prints of the Year,” an international anthology of Continental. British and U. S. prints chosen each year by Critic Malcolm C. Salaman for the European section, for the last two years by Curator Susan A. Hutchinson for the U. S. In all these shows prices ranged from $10 to $50.

For every U. S. citizen who buys a painting or a piece of sculpture, probably 500 buy prints: etchings, engravings, mezzotints, woodcuts. Prints are comparatively inexpensive. Even in a city apartment a portfolio of 100 will fit in a bureau drawer. Because of their fluctuating value they appeal to the trading instinct latent in all collectors. But the appreciation of the graphic arts has this difference from the appreciation of painting: a man may have a sound knowledge of Renaissance painting without knowing the difference between tempera and gesso. But a print collector cannot appreciate what he has in his portfolio unless he knows a great deal about the technical processes involved. A finished print is the result of three artistic processes: composition, engraving, printing.

The late famed Joseph Pennell used to say that an etcher who did not print his own plates was not an artist but a manufacturer. The collector sees but half the beauty in a Whistler etching until he realizes how elegant Jimmy deepened his blacks by rebiting with stronger acid, lightened unnecessary lines by brushing them with varnish.

The London Studio has just published the first two handbooks in a series on the graphic arts.* Intended as manuals of instruction for art students the books contain little that any first-year student in an art school would not know, are of great value in showing the general public how prints are made, what to look for in the finished proof. Most interesting are the tipped-in photographs showing Etcher West and Woodcutter Leighton at work, pictures of all the etchers’ and woodcutters’ tools.

Everyone knows that an etching is made by scratching lines through the wax “ground” on a copper plate with a needle, then biting the exposed lines into the plate by dipping it in a bath of nitric acid. Few people know that the etcher’s needle should never scratch the plate itself (unless he is making a drypoint). Depth of line for increased blackness is all done by action of the acid. A goose feather is the best possible tool for brushing away microscopic gas bubbles while the plate is in the bath. Much of the effect of Whistler’s etchings is due to the fact that he was a superb wiper, had an unerring touch in wiping just the right amount of excess ink from his plates before each printing.

The normal effect in a woodcut is a white line on a black ground. To make black show against white, the boxwood must be cut away on either side of the line, a delicate operation. Wood-engravers’ tools are a series of little chisels and gouges known for the marks they make as scorper, square scorper, graver, tint tool, multiple tool (eschewed by severe wood cutters ‘as giving a pretty effect too easily) and spitzsticker. An amateur of wood engravings should be able to tell from the marks they leave just which tool was used on every part of his print.

For a printing press, Woodcutter Leighton uses the back of an old teaspoon, worn so thin that she can feel through it, to rub the damp paper on the inked block. There are other methods. Woodcutter Howard Heath (see cut), well known in New York art marts for his flower prints, prefers a little rubber roller.

* Making an Etching—Levon West ($2.50). Wood-Engraving and Woodcuts—Clare Leighton ($2.50).