American Monotypes from the Baker/Pisano Collection | Page 8
the monotype printmaker is the necessity of working quickly.
The ink used for monotype, whether black printer’s ink or oil
paint thinned to suit the task, will stay wet on the plate long
enough to be applied and worked, but not for hours at a time.
The time limits that the medium places on the artist encourage
spontaneity, though they may threaten thoughtful composition.
The monotype does provide great latitude for changes before
printing. It is very simple, after a stroke of the brush has been
made, for the artist to alter it by pushing the ink around on the
plate with the brush’s bristles or by drawing into the ink with
the brush handle’s tip. Some artists prefer to start by covering
the plate with an even coat of pigment. The artist can then
work back into that solid field, clearing some areas with a cloth,
and thinning or reapplying ink to other areas with a brush or
fingertip. Since all of these tools and approaches leave distinctive
marks in the final work, monotypes often show very clear traces
of their making. The marks of wiping cloth, brush, and fingertip
bear witness to the creation process even as they merge to create
an overall image. For instance, the very figural Georgia O’Keeffe
(American, 1887–1996) monotype in this exhibition (page 46)
has one of the artist’s fingerprints at the middle right of the
figure—quite literally, the artist’s touch.
For audiences as well as artists, the immediacy of the artist’s
hand is part of the attraction of the monotype process. At the
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INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN MONOTYPE
end of the nineteenth century, when the earliest prints in this
exhibition were made, Europe and America were in the midst
of a lively transformation in art that saw the rise of Impressionism. Many of the American artists who dove into the milieu
of European art were braced and challenged by the freedom of
new styles abroad on the continent: looser brushwork and the
conscious expansion of painting beyond traditional portrait,
history, and landscape subjects. These along with the exploration of
the art of other cultures and novel techniques were a heady mix,
and American expatriates brought back with them a mélange
of fresh approaches to the work of making art, including the
monotype technique.
Foremost among the American artists who popularized the
monotype were William Merritt Chase (American, 1849–1916)
and Frank Duveneck (American, 1848–1919). More than an
important portraitist of his day, Chase was a teacher and avid
explorer of art. Though his own professors at the Akademie der
Bildenden Künste München (The Munich Academy) espoused
a solid, didactic historical painting style, Chase explored the
less-academic Barbizon School painters’ style before eventually
embracing the colorful, modern subjects and novel compositions
of Impressionism. Like many of his European contemporaries,
Chase was intrigued by non-Western art, and his New York
studio was famous for its eclectic collection of interesting objects
from distant cultures. It is probably inevitable that an artist with