Exhibitions
Printmaking in Paris: Picasso and his contemporaries (British Museum, till 14 September)
Prints, Paris,
Picasso plus . • •
Peter Black
Picasso's 'Portrait of Jacqueline wearing necklace resting on her elbow, 1959 The British Museum collects prints and drawings in an impressive way, sensibly buying things that are not the height of fashion. Its knowledge of foreign schools is usually ahead of the rest of us. Previous shows, for example The Print in Germany, • and Modern Scandinavian Prints, have allowed us to see recent acquisitions promptly, and the accompanying cata- logues have made important contributions to the art history of prints. The Museum shows its prints — because both paper and colours are sensitive to light — in the rar- efied atmosphere of an aquarium-like space where exotic creatures thrive behind thick glass. Billed as an exhibition of mod- em art, this show is genuinely popular quite an achievement for the art form often considered lowest in the pecking order, and (in the minds of some) tainted by com- merce because prints exist in many copies. People will come mainly to see the prints of Picasso and Matisse, but the show has the serious scholarly aim of describing avant-garde print-making in Paris from roughly 1900 to 1960.
The principal theme is the work (and life) of Picasso, itself sufficient justification for seeing this show. From the `Repas Fm- gal', a graphic restatement of the famous Blue Period painting, we trace his develop- ment through Cubism (with fascinating comparative prints by Dufresne, Villon and Capek) to classicism and beyond. In that beyond, after 1945, Picasso's arresting figu- rative prints compete with the main stream of expressive abstraction. On reflection, I wonder if Picasso does actually stand com- parison with those contemporaries. He is powerful and idiosyncratic, certainly the greatest artist of the century to have made prints, and his work always hovers on the edge of abstraction. But great individuals rarely have much in common with their contemporaries, and Picasso's peers (in originality, parading of self, sheer numbers of prints made) are not to be found among the movements represented here.
Abstract art is given a rather lop-sided treatment, although it seems to have been the starting point for the exhibition. One puzzle is the absence of the Surrealists (Hayter, Masson, Ernst, Dali) in whose prints occur the most interesting develop- ment of the 1930s, and necessary as back- ground material to much post-1945 imagery. Some of the 1950s prints are dis- tinctly commercial in feel, produced by spe- cialist printers who would manufacture lithographs for painters keen to manipulate the burgeoning print market. These are precisely the works which give prints a bad name, because often you see no more of the artist's hand in the final print than a pencil signature. A word of warning: when artists are described as 'working closely' with a printer, this invariably means that the printer did most of the work. This is especially true of colour prints done in the multi-plate way, which require unrewarding labour in separating colours, and are essen- tially reproductions.
This leads to a major reservation about the exhibition, the damaging treatment of S.W. Hayter, a British artist widely acknowledged as the greatest print-maker of the century. It was Hayter whose prints inspired the likes of Miro, Chagall, Gia- cometti, Pollock, Corneille, Alechinsky how to see the plate as an original (sculp- tural) creation, and not resort to reproduc- tive techniques for colour. Hayter's workshop, Atelier 17, was a print-making research centre in Paris and New York, spanning the years 1927-1988, where the dead process of monochrome metal-plate etching was converted into a medium for original expression in colour, without inter- mediary technical processes. This is the story that ought to have been the centre- piece of the section on colour prints of the 1950s. But Hayter is here reduced to being (as he was) a great teacher, a word which spells death to a reputation. His imagery is shown here only in the watered-down work (wrongly catalogued) of his students. Ironi- cally, the Museum houses the largest col- lection of Hayter's work in the world. Only one is shown.
Since Hayter lived and worked mostly in Paris, where his reputation is secure, he does need to be well represented in Britain, where he is scarcely known. He was not just a teacher, he was a technical innovator of genius, and used his innova- tions with equal genius. He should be a source of national pride. An opportunity has been lost.
The exhibition will certainly not disap- point those who wish to see a selection of 20th-century prints from the finest collec- tion in the country. However, the catalogue does not reach the Museum's usual stan- dards, either in content or design. There are errors of fact, and some historical cate- gories are stretched arbitrarily in order to accommodate particular prints. The phrase avant-garde is used throughout rather loosely to confer approval, even on the old- fashioned representational engravings of Laboureur which so obviously cater to pop- ular taste.
Peter Black is joint author of The Prints of S.W. Hayter, a Complete Catalogue, Phaidon 1992, and lectures on the history of print-making at Anglia Polytechnic University in Cambridge.
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