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We live today in a sea of color images - printed and electronic – and we find it hard to imagine a time when reproductions in color were a prized commodity. - Jay T. Last
This weekend The Huntington Library has installed a fascinating new exhibit titled “The Color Explosion”. Based on 250 pieces from the newly acquired collection of 135,000 examples of 19th Century American Lithography. The entrepreneur, scientist and art collector Jay T. Last donated this collection to the library along with an endowment to support a curator of lithography. This donation deepens the library’s already extensive collection of reproduced art and ephemera.
Product label for Rancho Chico Muscatel Raisins, lithographed by A.L. Bancroft & Co (San Francisco), 1880
If the modern age can be said to be the age of images, the age when the image became more important than the word. The age of the preeminence of the image began with the invention of the lithography process by a young German playwright, Alois Senefelder at the end of the 18th Century. He discovered that by simply drawing on the surface of a piece of limestone with a grease pencil the grease would keep the ink from being absorbed by the stone and allowing it to be transferred to paper. While this technique had been around for awhile he perfected it by applying a layer of gum arabic, fixing the surface and allowing for hundreds and even thousands of copies to be printed from the original stone. While there had been various means of creating color images before this time, paintings of course, but also wood block prints and so on, suddenly the reproduction of images could be done cheaply and in great quantity.
Product Label for Yule Tide Brand Oranges, lithographed by Los Angeles Lithographic Co., ca 1895
This technological breakthrough brought in a number of innovations.
Before lithography a family might own a single painting, painted in the folk art style that today we prize so highly, like the art of Grandma Moses. After this innovation a middle class family could afford to place many more color images in their home as decoration and this could be changed and refreshed regularly. Schools could include maps of the world and bright interesting learning aids in the classroom. Towns and cities could have pictures of local attractions printed to promote community pride and to increase tourism.
"American Autumn", lithographed by Thomas Sinclair (Philadelphia), 1867
Before lithography most consumer goods were sold as commodities, crackers (or soap) for example would be stored in barrels (hence cracker barrels) on the store floor with, perhaps, some identification on the outside of the barrels as to the contents. It may be hyperbolic to suggest, as it often has been for many events, that lithography has “Created the modern world”. In the sense of consumer culture, advertising, graphic design and branding; this in reality really began with lithography. Suddenly cans, boxes and other packages were wrapped in bright color labels not just identifying the contents but making claims to the quality and value, providing a brand name and mark so that the satisfied customer could return to purchase the identical product.
Packages printed on lithograph printers became the keys to commercial success; posters advertising products, events, political movements and candidates became indispensible for success, a fact that continues to this day.
Product label for El Darien Tabacco, lithographed by Heppenheimer & Maurer (New York), ca. 1880
General View of the Pressroom, Schmidt Label and Lithograph Company, San Francisco showing the many printing presses each a seperate color.
The process of stone lithography used transparent inks and much of the process included techniques such as combining blue and yellow to create the color green, but the use of four color process that is used in much of modern lithography and exclusively employed in color ink-jet and laser printers didn’t occur to the stone lithography industry. Instead the printer employed up to 48 different presses each with a different color ink. This results in the richness and subtlety in these images that far surpasses what modern technology produces with the 8 color presses most common for modern printers (4 process colors, varnish and 3 positions available for color specific inks like Pantone colors)
Trade Card for Clipper Lawn Mowers, unidentified lithographer, ca. 1895
Because of the time period of the greatest amount of activity for stone lithography, much of the art and design reflects the importance of Art Nouveau in the late part of the 19th Century.
Toulouse-Lautrec is well known for the many lithographic prints of his work, but very often he would supply the lithographer with only sketches and the work would depend deeply on the artistic eye and the skill of the artist making the plates who not only had to interpret the work, but do in backwards (as the print was a mirror image) and separate the colors. In the creation of the posters of Toulouse-Lautrec, the art was a collaboration of the unknown lithography and the artist.
Advertising poster for Mandeville & King Superior Flower Seeds, lithographed by Karle Lithographic Co. (Rochester, N.Y.), ca. 1895 showing an Art Nouveau influence.
For more about "The Color Explosion" exhibition: "The Color Explosion" Website
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