Prints make modern art accessible to a far larger audience.
The movement known as Modern Art, beginning with Impressionism in the 1880s and continuing more or less until the advent of Pop Art and Post-Modernism in the 1960s, brought into question nearly all of the assumptions about art that had formerly been taken for granted. One of the aspects of traditional art that the Modernists did embrace was the making of prints. Modern artists were prolific creators of prints of all kinds, and many of them are eagerly collected today. Due to its innovative and anarchic nature, Modern Art encouraged artists to take risks with their techniques, and helped to move print making into new and unexplored territories.
History
Beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modern artists quickly saw the benefits of printmaking. Techniques of reproduction enabled artists to reach a far wider audience than was possible by creating one painting or drawing at a time, and advances in printmaking made very high quality work possible. Many artists, notably Vincent van Gogh, were directly influenced by the earlier woodcut traditions of Japan. Artists such as Paul Gauguin and Edvard Munch popularized the use of woodcut prints within Modern Art.
Techniques
Modernists used three primary techniques to make prints. Woodcuts were made by cutting a design into a flat wooden surface. Members of the German artists' group known as Die Brücke, including Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, made extensive use of woodcuts. Etching, similar to woodcut, was done by applying acid to a metal plate, and enabled modern artists to make much finer designs than were possible with woodcuts. Etching was used extensively by Salvador Dali, as its precision was advantageous to his style of work. Lithography used a flat stone surface with wax applied wherever the artist wanted a blank space on the paper. Lithography was fovored by Joan Miró
Modern Prints
Many prominent modern artists, including Dali, Miró, Pablo Picasso, Yves Tanguy, and Dorothea Tanning, were involved in printmaking. The broad fields of color in many modernist works, exemplified by the work of Miró, make them excellent works for print reproduction. Many thousands of modernists prints are now in collections around the world.
Limited Editions
Limited edition prints are generally the type of prints that are collected. A limited edition is made by creating a predetermined number of prints, then destroying the plate with which they were made. This guarantees that no further copies will be made, thus leading to a potential increase in value and rarity. The popularity of print collecting progressed in conjunction with the advance of Modernism throughout the 20th century; the wide availability and affordability of prints made them appealing to Modernism's broad audience.
Collecting Modern Prints
Modernist print collecting has become popular for several reasons. High-quality prints sometimes approach the quality of an original painting, and thus are collected purely for aesthetic pleasure. The availability of prints makes collecting the works of very prominent artists a possibility for people without vast wealth. Dali, for example, created over 1,000 editions in his lifetime, making his prints far more common than any of his original drawing or painting.
Digital Revolution
The prominence of digital technologies has begun to blur the lines in the world of printmaking. Formerly definite categories are being replaced by new technologies and techniques. One of the main digital printing techniques is known as giclee (from the French "gicleur", meaning "nozzle"), the creation of prints using an ink jet computer printer, canvas and archive quality inks. This blurring of lines and categories reflects the onset of postmodernism and the fading of the dominance of Modernist art, although Modernist prints remain in number to be collected and enjoyed.
