Michael Mazur
"Monotype: An Artist's View."

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York, 1980.

One close look at Degas's Cafe-Concert Singer was all I really needed to get started.1 This tiny explosive image, a spontaneous gift of the artist's spirit, seemed to have been breathed directly on the paper in one magical gesture. A closer look reveals Degas's labor. His fingers pushed in ink like modeling clay. His painter's cloth wiped out the black ink for luminous whites. His brush added telling contours. At just the right moment he printed his constellation of tones, not much more than a cluster of smudges. But when the paper emerged from the press, still damp and pliant, those little marks became flesh, hair, fabric: a nose and mouth in one line; a gloved hand, corrected and redrawn. They became a spotlighted cafe singer, bawdy and as aggressive as the strokes that made her. The spontaneity and energy in that little print lifts the medium into art.

Monotype is a painter's medium. Although launched in the print shop, it was born of the painter's imagination and restlessness. A perfect tool for improvisation, it waited from the time ink was wiped off the first engraved plate. The only explanation for its taking so long is that artists designed plates but rarely printed them. I'm sure there were several unique images discarded in some printer's trash, the occasional escape from the tedium of this repetitive craft. If Rembrandt and Segers had not taken etching to the edge of the totally unique print, it might have taken still longer to improvise with ink alone.

The Process

Monotypes are unique impressions of ink transferred to paper from a relatively nonporous surface upon which an image has been painted. While there are as many approaches to making these images as there are practitioners, a discussion of the medium can be simplified to include a description of the printing surface, the application of inks, and the method of printing.

Because of its historic relationship to etching, the first surface used was the metal plate, such as the type of copperplate used by Castiglione for his etchings. Etching ink was used and the image was printed under the slow, constant pressure of the etching press. It was probably an early discovery that the amount of pressure needed was very similar to that used to drive the damp paper into the thin grooves of the etched or engraved plate. It can be assumed, I think, that the process used in the earliest monotypes corresponded in nearly every way to the process of printing traditional intaglio prints with the major exception that there was no fixed image - all the ink lay on the surface of the plate.

From the beginning there have been two manners of applying ink and painting the plate. The subtractive or "dark-field" manner involves the coating of the surface with a consistent layer of brown or black ink. The early method would again have corresponded to the preparing of an etched plate before "wiping" but in sufficient quantity to produce an overall tone when printed. In this subtractive manner, the image is wiped out of the darkened field, with rags, fingers, or sticks, which are most likely the shafts of paint brushes that can later be used to brush ink back into a contour, to correct an edge, or build a tone. Removing ink in this way reveals sections of the metal plate which print as luminous areas or crisp white lines.

The second traditional manner is the additive or "light-field" manner. Here the clean plate serves as an empty field upon which the image is drawn, very much like painting on a clear canvas. If in the dark-field or tone-prepared plate, the ink is viscous and dense, in the light field, it is thinned down with a solvent (turpentine) and resembles a watercolor wash. Dark contours or areas can still be dense, but if delicate halftones are wanted, more solvent must be added to the pigment. The milky quality in some of these tones can be the result of over-thinning.

As the processes of printmaking changed and its technology became at once more sophisticated and more personal, so did the monotype. Ink rollers, made first from leather, then rubber and plastic derivatives, could be used to prepare tonal areas or offset images and play their part in the mixing, layering, or separating of black or colored inks. The changing viscosity of inks could be used to gain results from the different ways these inks behaved in the printing process. And the scale change from the traditionally small plate to increasingly larger formats has had its effect on the choice of tools used in painting and printing.

Other surfaces and manners of printing are part of the technical history of this medium. Monotypes can be press-printed from wood blocks or litho stones, as well as the variety of metal plates used today by printmakers. Lightweight metals and plastics make sense with the increased size of plates. Monotypes can be hand-printed from many surfaces, though glass has frequently been used. Gauguin's monotypes show the use of paper as a transfer material, either for use as an offset or, with a stencil, as a porous surface through which wet watercolor could be applied.

Simple pressure and lightweight paper has often been enough to secure a rich print. Many painters, ranging from Toulouse-Lautrec to de Kooning, have "printed" from sections of wet canvas, others have worked from their palettes in an effort to take an impression of a particular form or color event.

However the monotype is made, it is characteristic that some residue is left on the printing surface after the print is taken. Second prints of this ligher image are called "cognates" for their kinship with the first impression. While etchings, engravings, in fact all print processes can yield lighter impressions without reinking, these cognates play a special role because they create a new set of tonal values to which new material can be added.

The existence of so many variant procedures in monotype is partly explained by the very lack of interest in documenting the monotype process. Since its beginnings it has not so much been taught as rediscovered and reinvented by each artist who uses it. And each artist brings to the medium the experience of his particular vision and craft.

Inventive additions to the craft of printmaking seems to follow this pattern. An artist wants to reproduce in a print the quality of some aspect of another medium. The tautness of a line from a quill pen becomes an engraving. The search for tonality with this tool ends in the crosshatch or a wash drawing translates into aquatint. These print media, in turn, expanded the possibilities of the material they started out to reproduce. And so it is true of monotype and monoprint media.2 They bring to printmaking a new vitality just when it seems to be regressing into reproduction.

The Problems

A "painterly" print is still a print. The image is reversed and rarely, if ever, prints exactly as it looks on the plate or block. A great deal of surprise is built into printmaking. Lifting the paper off the printing surface is a tense and revelatory moment. The image is composed of layers of ink and often changes if the viscosity of the inks or paints print differently, especially in the subsequent or cognate impressions. A lot can go wrong. Too little ink may seem sufficient on the plate but will print as a light color instead of the desired rich hue. Too much ink ends in a spreading, glossy disaster. If the pressure of the press or quantity of ink isn't just right, other unpredictables occur. The clean, frozen line made by the brush handle in the deep black field of ink can disappear entirely - hardly what one expected (hence the magic of those few white-line monotypes by Matisse!). And so we must inevitably come back to craft, not quite the printmaker's elaborate, often fussy craft, but craft nonetheless. For in monotype, as in other media, spontaneity is tempered by discipline; energy and expressive gesture by a certain detachment and control.

I know artists for whom the medium is inappropriate. You won't find them making monotypes bacause it isn't at all suited to the way they work. Even painterliness, after all, isn't all there is to painting. Linear draftsmen, in love with the hard edge or contours of the forms they draw, won't make monotypes. And neither will those who require every mark to keep its integrity, who build their tonalities with careful strokes of a hard pencil or small nibbed pen. They will stay away. The medium works best when images are evoked from the material and not imposed upon it. Detail is best suggested rather than employed. I have always been drawn to those monotypes whose ambition was not to be imitative of a fully performed painting. I prefer to print before it reaches that level of completion. But even as I say this, I know someone will come along and make a particularly nonpainterly monotype; will use elaborate stencils for the hardest of edges, will find a way to transfer detail that would make the stipple engraver jealous.

The time it takes to make a monotype is short compared with most media. Although ink stays workable for a longer period than is expected, the print is usually pulled within an hour and often less. This factor tends to exclude artists who work slowly, but appeals to those of us who are impulsive and thrive on the intuitive leap. Because of the constant lure of the cognate, the chance to add new material to the residue of the plate, the process keeps me working for hours in what might best be described as a "run". This cannot be a daily experience. A common experience for many of the artists using the medium is a series of spurts of activity, producing several prints during a session. Because of the intensity of concentration, because the image cannot simply be put down, these sessions can exhaust both the artist and his ideas over a short span of time.

The Provocation

The recent history of printmaking is complicated and involved with commercial pressures which have had the result of moving the artist away from a direct relationship to the printing process. Many artists, even those most directly involved with print media, have replaced immediacy with technology. The resulting work is really reproduction, crafty and sterile. There has been a discernible reaction to this among painter-printmakers. Editions are smaller and there are more examples of monoprints and hand coloring. These additions from the artist's hand individualize prints, rarify them, and give them a unique quality, a sense of the artist's touch. If they are more direct and simple in technique, they seem all the more mysterious to the viewer. I have never received more questions about craft than I do about monotypes, for the very reason, perhaps, that they are closest to the painter's indescribable impluse and intuition.

If artists are diverse in their technical approach, so do they differ in their reasons for employing the monotype or monoprint media. It is probably true, as in printmaking generally, that the monotype image has its source in the artist's work in another medium. A motif developed first as a painting or drawing is adopted and varied in the monotype. More occasionally, the medium is used to test ideas before they become paintings or prints. A third alternative is the use of the monotype for original material limited to the experience of this medium alone. Degas illustrates all of these possibilities but reserves as a subject for his monotypes those images (from the maison close series and Halévy's La Famille Cardinal) which belong to the narrative and sequential possibilities uniquely suited to this medium. It is this use of monotype which transcends source and provides for those of us who use it a very special opportunity and a reason, perhaps, for the contemporary resurgence of interest in the medium.

A monotype sequence is not simply a group of variations. A monoprint, having some fixed element or matrix on the printing surface, is analagous to a musical theme or motif which, though varied, can be repeated at intervals throughout a piece. A monotype is a totally unique image, it goes forward in one direction. Each new image informs, and is informed by, the next. This aspect of the monotype gives both the viewer and the artist something very rare; the chance to study the development of an idea as it unfolds. I like to save my complete run of images from a day's work, even if they are eventually rejected, just to replay the way I worked. The history of a painting is private and fleeting. There are layers of ideas reworked and passages, often beautiful in themselves, overpainted to improve the unity of the picture. While this can happen in the painting of the plate, the option to print it at any point allows the artist to document his process. The same opportunity exists in the proofing of a print, in comparison of one state to the next. But in monotype, this experience is compressed and intensified. Reaction and response are important elements in this process.

The traditionally small scale of prints is given a special meaning in monotype. We experience in them a breadth of mark that is characteristic of larger scaled works. It is certainly this element in the work of Degas that makes his small monotypes so explosive by comparison to his work in other media. It is as if we experience a level of magnification which brings us closer to the mark itself.

Of all the decisions made in the course of this procedure, the decision to print is most crucial. The artist's personal definition of "finish" determines when he prints. Sometimes the image on the plate reaches a certain inevitable stability that defines it as a finished image, one that has come to conform to the artist's preconception. At other times it is not so much a state of completion or rest but a moment of "becoming" which has other qualities perhaps more important than stability. Then the sequence moves along, idea to idea, in a kind of free-associative improvisation. It is the journey, not the arrival, that matters.

All art media are at least partly about their own process. When we look at a given work, we see it not simply as an idea but as a thing, full of information about itself. We experience the hand and brush through the marks they leave, marks which chart the course of the picture. Understanding this process gives us an insight into images, much as maps allow us to understand topography. But the impact of the image is more than process. It is an alchemy of the material into a spiritual substance. This brings me back to the Cafe-Concert Singer. Like a work one revisits before leaving an exhibition - a picture that must be remembered - it epitomizes the spirit of working with this medium. It sends me back to the studio wanting to make monotypes, wanting to continue the process, the dialogue, wanting to transcend the material.

1. I was introduced to monotype at the exhibition devoted to Degas's work in this medium at the Fogg Art Museum in 1968. Many artists I know and associate with this medium have cited Degas as a source, either from this exhibition and its remarkable catalogue by Eugenia Parry Janis or from a familiarity with his oeuvre.

2.Monotypes differ from monoprints in that they lack a fixed matrix which can be repeated in the manner of a traditional print process. The monoprint is a unique impression or variant of an image that could be used in an edition. In the monotype, only the cognate can be said to bear a resemblance to the original impression. But because it is printed from the fragile residue of the original inking, it is usually greatly diminished in tonal strength. Except where used to superficially repeat an image, monotype is a medium in constant transition and flux with no return to the common basic structure offered by the monoprint matrix.

3. Collaboration is very much a part of the history of printmaking and has figured in the monotype experience. Monotype "clubs" were common at the beginning of the twentieth century; in our generation many artists have worked together with the medium. Nathan Oliveira and I have compared notes about working with other artists; he with Wayne Thiebaud and Richard Diebenkorn, and others in California; I with Mary Frank, Jim Dine, and other friends in Boston and New York. Artists have primarily been responsible for the revival of interest in the medium and this is as true now as it was in the past. Matt Phillips initiated a great deal of interest in monotype in the mid-1960s.