LITHOGRAPHIC TECHNIQUES

The third engraving technique is planographic printing: LITHOGRAPHY. While it is very difficult or almost impossible to pinpoint a precise date of origin for woodcut and intaglio printing, we have both an inventor and a date for lithography. In 1796, Aloys Senefelder began using a particular type of limestone to print images. The process is very simple: this stone has the property of retaining grease when dry and repelling it when wet, so on perfectly smooth and dry matrices, a special greasy pencil is used to draw, the stone is wet, which has the particularity of absorbing and retaining water for a long time, and then inked. The greasy ink will be retained on the drawn parts and repelled by the wet ones, after which printing is carried out using a special horizontal press. The ease and speed of preparing the matrices immediately made it a success and led to its widespread use in the publishing industry. Within a few years, the CHROMOLITHOGRAPHY process was developed, which allows colour prints to be obtained by using several stones inked with different colours and printed in succession. It should also be noted that once a lithographic plate has been cleaned, it can be used an almost unlimited number of times. In the field of original engravings, lithography allows direct drawing on the matrix (albeit mirroring the image obtained after printing), thus bypassing the long steps of transposing and reversing the initial image on the matrix - as is necessary for woodcut and intaglio printing - and faithfully reproducing the original freshness of the mark. It is precisely because of these characteristics that many artists have used lithography to create original graphics. These range from linear works such as those on display here by Pablo Picasso, in which he uses the tip of his pencil to trace extremely fresh figures that fill the compositional space, to those by Carlo Carrà, who adds light hatching to raise the forms.

Pablo Picasso: Couples and female nudes, 1969

The flexibility of this technique allows for very soft shades, not unlike those of mezzotint. Another lithographic technique widely used by various artists is chromolithography. It is well documented in the exhibition by Giorgio de Chirico, who uses it in the same way as camaieu colouring, and by Massimo Campigli, where the different colours interpenetrate, blending into soft compositions that border on rarefaction. Campigli prepares the matrices sparingly, as if they were woodcuts: he covers them with greasy ink (which would give a flat tint when printed) and gradually cleans the design by removing the ink and sparing the parts that will then be printed. The mark of the cleaning is not clear, thus creating that particular muffled atmosphere. Stronger, almost screaming colours are those of Joan Miró's chromolithographs. He uses saturated primary and secondary colours, imprinted in impetuous overlays and combinations.