London Original Print Fair Online : Royal Academy 2020

Michael Parkin FA, London 
Private Collection, UK
Sally Hunter FA, UK
Osborne Samuel, London

Stephen Coppel, Linocuts of the Machine Age, Scolar Press, Aldershot in association with National Gallery of Australia, 1995, Cat No SA 13
Sybil Andrews Linocuts: A Complete Catalogue, Hana Leaper, published by Lund Humphries in association with Osborne Samuel, 2015, no. 15

Printed from 3 blocks in Chinese orange, spectrum red and Prussian blue

Redfern Gallery
Private Collection, UK

Stephen Coppel, Linocuts of the Machine Age , published by Scolar Press, 1995, no. SA 24
Hana Leaper, Sybil Andrews Linocuts: A Complete Catalogue , published by Lund Humphries, no. 26

Printed from 3 blocks in venetian red, viridian & Chinese blue. Signed, titled & numbered TP1 (Trial Proof), aside from the edition of 60

Osborne Samuel, London

Contemporary Lithographs published two series of lithographs in 1937 and 1938. A leaflet published in early 1937 states, each lithograph has been drawn on the stones by artists at the works of the Curwen Press.’ Though all the other prints in the first series were indeed autolithographs, Bawden’s Cattle Market , the first print in the series, is self evidently transferred from a linocut. Curwen by then had been transferring Bawden’s linocut images to wallpapers and posters for more than ten years.

The Contemporary Lithographs leaflet referred to the edition of each lithograph as 400 copies, but the venture was not a commercial success and far fewer copies were made and sold.

Private Collection, Canada

Printed from 4 blocks in blue oil paint, crimson oil paint, viridian printing ink and black printing ink. On oriental laid tinted with a wash of yellow-ochre watercolour, mounted on stiff brown paper backing.

Craig Hartley, Etchings of Lucian Freud: A Catalogue Raisonne 1946-1995, 1995, no.30
Craig Hartley, Freud and Auerbach Recent Work , Print Quarterly , Vol. 9 No. 1 (March 1992), p. 13 (Fig. 12)
Starr Figura (ed.), Lucian Freud: The Painter’s Etchings (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007), Cat. 31, p. 61

The sitter is the artist’s daughter Bella Freud

Lucian Freud made his first etching in Paris in 1946, using the wash-basin in his hotel room as an acid bath. Five small-scale etchings date from this decade, following which Freud ceased printmaking for thirty-four years. Thereafter, beguiled by its ‘ element of danger and mystery’ , he steadily created an impressive contribution to the medium.1

Freud’ s etchings from the mid-1980s onwards are distinguished by their size and technical command. Standing his copper plates upright on an easel, for the first time, he was able to work with greater force and fluidity. He claimed to find etching easier than drawing, candidly acknowledging the role that redrawing can play in printmaking. Sometimes Freud would ask the printer to erase sections, to crop an image or to scrap a final printing in favour of earlier proofs. Working closely with Marc Balakjian, at Studio Prints in Kentish Town, Freud was always present at the biting and proofing of his plates.

Bella (1987), a portrait of his daughter, is defined by dense hatching, marking the head’ s weight against the pillow, its wisps of hair and the face’ s contours. Freud sought further contrast within the image, however. Giving the printer a proof shaded with grey wash to indicate where ink should be left on the plate after wiping, the etching was reproofed until he was satisfied. Craig Hartley describes the result as ‘ seductively tonal’ , one of Freud’ s most beautiful portraits.2

Elsewhere, through the use of generic titles, Freud sought to deflect attention from his sitters’ identity. He remarked,

Many people are inclined to look at portraits not for the art in them but to see how they resemble people. This seems to me a profound misunderstanding.3

Portrait Head (2001) is more delicate than Bella in its use of line, its lack of background detail placing the strongly characterised face in relief. The sitter appears contemplative, perhaps weary, an effect emphasised compositionally by the downward pull of her scarf, loose hair and shadowed gaze. Reviewing MoMA’ s exhibition in 2008, which juxtaposed Freud’ s portrait paintings with his etchings, Donald Kuspit noted the latter’ s ‘ rough emotional urgency’ and tendency to be ‘ more individual – more uniquely themselves’ .4

1. Lucian Freud, in Starr Figura (ed.), Lucian Freud: The Painter’ s Etchings (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008), p. 15.

2. Craig Hartley, ‘ Freud and Auerbach Recent Work’ , Print Quarterly , Vol. 9, No. 1 (March 1992), p. 5.; also Hartley, The etchings of Lucian Freud: a catalogue raisonné 1946-1995 (Marlborough Graphics, 1995), p. 22.

3. Freud, in Freud at Work: Photographs by Bruce Bernard and David Dawson (Jonathan Cape, 2006), p. 32.

4. Donald Kuspit, ‘ Lucian Freud: Museum of Modern Art/Marlborough Graphics’ , Artforum International , Vol. 26, No. 7 (March 2008), p. 360-61.

D. Krut, William Kentridge Prints, Johannesburg and Iowa, 2006, no. 68.

“The print marked Act IV, Scene I from the Ubu Suite provides the compositional motif that Kentridge expounds upon in the large Sleepers, a series of 4 prints published in 1997. The artist, Ubu, lies naked on a table suggestive of hospital beds, mortuary slabs, dissecting tables or torture chambers. There is nothing sexual or voyeuristic about this portrayal of the male nude (the artist again) who exists rather as an asexual figure of suffering and resignation, an interesting counterpoint to the tradition of the reclining female nude in western art. South Africa gained its independence under Mandela in 1994, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission began its arduous process of confession and healing. Kentridge was working on large-scale charcoal drawings of Ubu at this time and in order to bring a sense of the body abused, damaged and humiliated into the drawings (in accordance with the histories revealing themselves on the radio every morning in the TRC broadcasts), he rode over the paper on a bicycle, flagellated the paper with a charcoal-impregnated silk rope and invited, “children and cats” to trample upon and desecrate the image. To carry these marks onto a plate through printmaking, Kentridge used a range of materials and objects and pressed them into a soft ground painted onto the giant Sleeper plates, leaving footprints, scrapes and scratches.

This extract is taken from Kate McCrickard’s essay, “William Kentridge Prints” which was commissioned by Edinburgh Printmakers to accompany an exhibition of Kentridge’s work, curated by David Krut, that was shown during the Edinburgh Printmakers’ Festival from July to September 2007.

107 Workshop, Wiltshire

D. Krut, William Kentridge Prints, Johannesburg and Iowa, 2006, pp. 66, 68-69.

In 1996 Kentridge embarked on a series of etchings to coincide with the centenary of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. In Ubu tells the Truth Kentridge transposed Jarry’s spiral-bellied comic anti-hero with the figure of a naked man based on photographs of Kentridge performing the part of Ubu in his studio. The series was the basis for a theatre production written and directed by the artist, Ubu & the Truth Commission (1997), which in turn was the genesis of The Sleeper prints. 

‘I had worked on a series of messy drawings of a naked man, sometimes enclosed by the white Ubu line drawing, trying to get some feel of the theatre production in them. With the first set of drypoints I had used a thumbprint and printed the heel of my hand to suggest the flesh texture. With the large drawings one has to pull shape and texture into the drawing on a larger scale. I wheeled a bicycle across the paper, hit it with charcoal-impregnated silk rope, invited children and cats to walk over it, spattered it freely with pigment. The Sleeper prints used a range of materials and objects placed on soft ground to try to effect the same damage upon the paper’ (William Kentridge, in: William Kentridge Prints, David Krut Publishing, Johannesburg and New York, 2006, p. 66)

Purchased direct from the Publisher, David Krut Fine Art Editions
Private Collection, USA

D. Krut, William Kentridge Prints, Johannesburg and Iowa, 2006, p. 66.

Printed from 4 blocks in permanent blue, viridian green, ochre & pale chrome

Private Collection, UK

Gérald Cramer (ed.) Alistair Grant & David Mitchinson, Henry Moore. The Graphic Work, 1931-72, vol. I, London, 1973, no.14, illustrated.

Based on a drawing Standing Figures 1948.

The estate of Felice Ross, NYC
Osborne Samuel, London

Linocuts of the Machine Age , Stephen Coppel, published by Scolar Press, 1995, CEP 16, p.94
Cyril Power Linocuts: A Complete Catalogue , by Philip Vann, published by Osborne Samuel & Lund Humphries, 2008, illustrated in colour, p.59, no.16

Cutting Edge: Modern British Print Making , Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, June – September 2019

The Merry-Go-Round, like Power’s other great linocut ‘Appy ‘Ampstead is a real tour de force of Power’s vision and skill in producing intricately cut and inked lino-blocks to produce an image of such incredible kinetic energy.

The Merry-Go-Round is surprisingly printed from only two lino-blocks, in Chinese and chrome orange and Chinese blue in an edition of 50 impressions.  Like his linocut The Giant Racer, The Merry-Go-Round was observed by Power at the Wembley Exhibition Fun Fair in west London, not far from his home in Brook Green in Hammersmith.

Power’s linocut is a stark contrast to Mark Gertler’s wonderful 1916 painting also titled Merry-Go-Round which is in the Tate Collection. In Gertler’s famous painting the figures are geometrical in shape, giving them the appearance of dolls, painted in blue, red and yellow. It is almost sedentary compared to Power’s whirling Merry-Go-Round that seems almost out of control as the riders spin around at breakneck speed, the central column appears to be bending under the momentum, the blue and orange patterning above the canopy of the merry-go-round creates a vortex of energy, the silhouetted black cut-out figures in the foreground look almost out of focus conveying the speed of the merry-go-round as the riders hold on for dear life!

Stanley Jones, the Master Lithographer from Curwen who printed this lithograph for Scott

Linocuts of the Machine Age, Stephen Coppel, published by Scolar Press, 1995, LT24

Printed from 3 blocks in dark blue, light brown & light blue.

Printed from 2 blocks in black and red on thin cream oriental laid paper.

Redfern Gallery / Jan-Feb 1986, British Prints:The Post-War Years 1945-1960, with essay by Gordon Samuel, Cat No 111 in b/w

Redfern Gallery, Summer Exhibition 1951, June-August 1951 (Including a selection of prints by The Society of London Painter-Printers), Cat No. 786