Art: Silk-Screen Prints

Periodically, U. S. artists and art dealers yearn for $5 customers—lots of them.

About all a $5 bill will buy is a contemporary lithograph or etching, signed with a good name, or a color reproduction of a painting. Most $5 customers buy reproductions. Many an artist would like to develop a cheap medium that would be as popular as reproductions. For the past five years, Artist Anthony Velonis has been at work in Manhattan on such a project. Its name: serigraphy, or, less flossily, silk-screen printing. Since last spring several U. S. museums have put silk-screen prints on view. Last week Manhattan’s Grand Central Art Galleries opened the best show yet.

Commercially, the silk-screen process has long been used in decorating textiles, wallpaper, bottle labels, 5-&10¢-store drinking glasses. Anthony Velonis, who was trained at New York University, began working with silk screen on a WPA art project. He uses a stencil cut out of a plastic, or built up with glue, on fine bolting silk, through which paint is squeegeed and imprinted on paper. For each color a separate stencil is used. An average print takes from four to ten stencils.

Silk-screen artists who have exhibited thus far (most of them WPAsters, few of them well known) learned the technique directly or indirectly from Artist Velonis, who left WPA last year to open his own studio. Silk-screen prints show a great variety of texture, may look like transparent water colors, opaque or transparent oils, powdery pastels, gouaches. Some high-priced artists, like Thomas Benton and Georges Schreiber, tried silk screen and gave it up because they felt the result looked too much like reproductions. But Adolf Dehn, able draftsman, works in silk screen, last week showed an amusing print —nuns solemnly painting pictures of the Great God Pan—at the Grand Central Galleries (see cut}.

The commercial advantage of silk-screen prints is that they can be sold as original work. Moreover, a buyer, paying $4 to $20 at current prices, can see and feel the honest-to-John paint on them.

Artist Velonis and his disciples can make up to 50,000 copies from most stencils, and undersell mechanical color printing on runs of 2,000 or less. One problem they have not yet solved: how to market their product.