Intaglio Printing
Introduction
Intaglio, meaning “to carve” in Italian [1], has been around since at least the fifteenth century, although one could argue that the basic mechanisms of intaglio printing have been around the advent of cave paintings and art. While the basic mechanism of intaglio has stayed the same over time, the art has evolved with advancements in the technologies needed to create intaglio prints. Due to the many possible techniques used to make an “intaglio print,” the term intaglio has become known as more of a genre or type of printmaking, rather than a singular type of printmaking. In its most basic form, intaglio consists of carving, etching or chemically removing pre-determined sections (or shavings) of metal from a metal plate. This basic result can be achieved in many different ways, and in doing so, has different effects on the style and aesthetic of the intaglio print.
In this paper I will be exploring one of the most modern forms of intaglio—color. After giving a brief history of intaglio as a print form, I will explore how intaglio color prints differ from their black and white predecessors, and what this means for the genre as a whole, as well as how it changes the experience of the viewer. After situating the reader within the broader context of color intaglio prints, I will analyze two famous prints that utilize the intaglio color print method. The first is Stanley William Henley’s “Witches’ Sabbath” printed in 1956-57. The second, Krishna Reddy’s “The Great Clown” series, was printed in 1986 and was printed using “simultaneous process from a carved intaglio plate” (Reddy 96). In looking at these two objects, I will attempt to answer the following questions: Why print color intaglio? How does printing in intaglio change the medium? Why has color intaglio become a popular art-form? Lastly, I will comment on the shift from engraving, etching and other forms of intaglio used in the 20th century and before, to color printing, and what it may mean for intaglio as an art-form today.
A Brief History of Intaglio
As I described above, intaglio consists of removing lines from a metal plate, generally a copper plate, either by engraving, etching or using various types of acids to eat away at the plate’s surface. This process creates crevices on the plate where ink will eventually be spread to fill the crevices. After the plate has been fully prepared, the artist prepares the paper by dipping it in water to dampen it. After, they align the plate onto the intaglio printing press, and place the damp paper over top of it. Unlike common presses, the intaglio press does not “stamp” the ink onto the paper. Rather, the intaglio press rolls both the plate and the paper through two large cylinders, where a tremendous amount of pressure is exerted. This is because, unlike printing press, the paper being printed on needs to be pushed deep enough into the intaglio plate to pick up ink. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, notes that it requires up to 20,000 pounds of pressure per square inch to adequately print using the intaglio method (Bureau of Engraving and Printing).
Traditional forms of intaglio use only one type of ink, usually black, to create a prints. However, the use of color in intaglio printing has only been seen starting in the eighteenth century (Gross 101). The main difference with color intaglio printing is the application of multiple different colors, and the resulting blending and mixing of colors if placed on top of the other. The earliest instances of print intaglio was in single color prints used in illustrations in books (Gross 102). Color printing was also used by artists, who employed various methods to print using multiple colors at a time. Jacques Villon would create color prints by creating three identical plates. Villon would then ink only the sections of each plate that he would want in each specific color. For example, on the first plate he would only ink the parts that he wanted blue, in blue, etcetera. The overlap would create different hues, and the use of the varying use of depth of the incisions made in each of the identical plates could make one color dominate another (in the overlapped areas) (Gross 103). Other methods, such as putting all the colors on a single plate, create different effects in the resultant print, and allow for a lot of variation as an artistic form.
Printing Intaglio in Color
Color printing has historically been used as a way to reproduce images and in turn convey information (Reddy 26). In the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, engravings were used to decorate “metal plates, armor, candlesticks, jewelry and articles of precious metal” (Reddy 26). Once the printing press was widely used, intaglio printmaking was used to enable mass-reproduced images in books. These illustrations were mainly in traditional black-and-white intaglio, since color printing was much more labor and time intensive as well as costly. However, artists began using the same mechanisms for intaglio to experiment with color printing. Artists began creating color prints starting in the sixteenth century (Reddy 29).