"After-Images": A Review of Recent Studies of Reproductive Print-making

Abstract

leading. For start, such distinction usually has aesthetic overtones; not all prints had artistic pretensions, and it now requires some effort to be aware of the many functions carried out by prints, since most of these are now performed by other graphic processes. It was the spread of photography which eventually confined print-making to purely artistic purposes and made it vehicle solely of the printmaker's self-expression. No doubt it is right that attention should be concentrated upon the output of the painter-etchers of the past, but their work represents only fraction of the prints which have been made, and it is perhaps strange that more interest has not been paid to the great mass of engraved work which had more utilitarian aims, but which was often better known to the public and is therefore often of greater historical importance. It is now thirty years since William Ivins argued very forcefully that prints should be looked on not only as works of art, and that it should be appreciated that their existence was a precondition of the development of scientific and technological If his important book Prints and Visual Communication (1953) has not yet exercised its full influence, the explanation is perhaps that it was received primarily as book for print scholars; it was, for example, initially reprinted in 1969 as part of the Da Capo Press Series in Graphic Art (since 1980 it has been available in paperback under the MIT imprint). It remains to be seen in what ways historians of science follow Ivins' lead in their analysis of the role of prints in the development of, for example, medical or botanical studies. Much useful work has already been done on medical illustration, while works such as Blanche Henrey's monumental study British Botanical and Historical Literature before 1800 (1975), make easier the task of tracing the influence of certain images. To attribute the spread of ideas to prints must always be done with caution, particularly in creative activities such as architecture, but architectural history would not have been able to develop without close attention to the engraved sources available to architects in the past. It is significant that so many facsimiles of the architectural plate books have been published and most architectural historians are as aware of these as they are of buildings which survive. What progress has been made in art history? A large part of Ivins' book is devoted to the trade in prints of paintings. He discussed, for example, the way in which the need for copper plates which could print large numbers of impressions of uniform quality led to the evolution of certain styles of engraving. He also stressed the way in which knowledge of painting often depended more on such prints than upon the original paintings-both for other artists as for the public as whole. Most artists had accumulations of prints-'collections' would imply more interest in the objects themselves than was usually displayed-which served as quarries for ideas or as models for details. Art historians are, of course, aware of this and that is why they welcome such ventures as the Illustrated Bartsch being published by Walter Strauss of Abaris Books, New York, which will make available pictures of all the prints made by painter-etchers. Specialist print scholars, who study prints for their own sake, cannot allow the wider interest of such publication to influence their assessment of its scholarly merits. Similarly they remain generally indifferent to prints after paintings, unless the reproductive print has been done by the painter or by great print-maker, because they judge these prints not as historical documents but as works of art.