Lithography

Lithography (from Greek lythos – ‘stone’ and grapho – ‘to draw’) is a printmaking method using a stone with a smooth surface; normally it is considered a variety of engraving (although it does not employ engraving methods).

The name explains the method – in translation from Greek, it means “I draw on a stone”. Because the method does not involve any sort of cutting and the printing matrix is smooth, lithography is classified as a variety of planographic printing. The process involves the drawing of a pattern, with a special grease-based crayon, pen or brush, on a carefully polished stone, of a special limestone variety of pale bluish, yellowish or grey tone. Then the surface of the stone is coated with a solution of gum arabic or nitric acid, which does not bite into the lines of the drawing because grease is resistant to acid. Then the lithographer applies to the moistened stone a greasy printing ink, which sticks only along the lines of the pattern and does not affect the bitten areas of the stone. Next, the stone is secured on the press and an impression is pulled.

Lithographs which an artist executes from scratch all by himself, without engaging a printer, are called original lithograpy, original prints or autolithographs (from Greek autos – ‘by oneself, independently’). The end of the 19^th century saw the arrival of colour lithography – chromolithography (from Greek chromos – ‘colour’) using several stones or plates (in other words, the effect of blended colours is achieved by printing three primary colours one over another).

Lithography is one of the most common printing techniques. It was invented nearly by accident, in 1796, by an actor, playwright and musician from Bohemia Alois Senefelder, when he searched for a quick and cheap method for printing music scores. Once he wrote down the amount of money he owed to a laundress with a grease-based ink on a stone and suddenly discovered that impressions could be made from that inscription. He milked the discovery for all its worth, opening a printing shop in Munich in 1806 and publishing a guide-book on lithography in 1818. After that, lithography swept the market of book publishing and illustration printing, stealing the leadership from xylography. Another reason behind its popularity lied in the long-felt need for a printing method that would best of all create the effect of pencilled stroke and dash of the brush, but most importantly, would remove engravers from the process, enabling the artists to execute prints all by themselves. By the way, this explains why lithography gained such a wide acceptance in the 19^th century in book printing in Muslim countries, where non-manual technical reproduction of the Holy Qur'an was forbidden.

Lithography afforded to artists a complete freedom, but not without risks, such as the danger of losing its unique graphic qualities and beginning to look like a drawing made by an ordinary pencil, sanguine, water-colour, etc. Linearity and crisp contours are not suited for lithography, because the beauty and charm of this technique consist in the rough, velvety strokes, the shades of darker or lighter tone, airy intricacy of space. It was the lightness of drawing that made lithography very popular among printers of posters, fashion pictures, magazine illustrations, leaflets. And thanks to its expressiveness, lithography endeared itself to French and English Romanticists, Barbizon artists, Impressionists and Symbolists of the late 19^th century.

In the first half of the 19^th century lithography attracted the attention of Russian portrait and landscape artists, such as Orest Kiprensky, Alexey Venetsianov, Karl Briullov. A little later, in the second half of the 19^th century, lithography started to be used for printing genre scenes, satirical pictures, caricatures and book illustrations. Also, lithography techniques were used up by several prominent artists, such as Ivan Shishkin in his landscapes, Ilya Repin in his genre scenes, Valentin Serov in his portraits. Whereas in the first half and the middle of the 19^th century lithography was regarded first of all as a convenient printing method, beginning from the 1900s lithography was taken up as an art form – artists sought to employ its artistic potential without using it simply as a technique mimicking the media such as pencil, sanguine, coal, etc. The artists successfully exploring lithography as an art included members of the Mir iskusstva [“World of Art”] group such as Alexandre Benois, Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Mikhail Dobuzhinsky, Pavel Kuznetsov.

With the arrival of avant-garde, in the 1910s, lithography was widely used for publishing the collections of Cubofuturist poets. Books illustrated with lithographs by prominent avant-garde artists such as Aristarkh Lentulov, Natalia Goncharova, Olga Rozanova, Mikhail Larionov were immensely popular.

In the Soviet period, some prominent artists too took up lithography. This group included outstanding graphic artists such as Vladimir Lebedev, Nikolay Tyrsa, Nikolay Kupreyanov, Yevgeny Charushin, Konstantin Rudakov, Yevgeny Kibrik, Anatoly Kaplan and others. Experimental lithography workshops afforded rich opportunities for the development and improvement of the techniques.

In the second half of the 20th century lithography became popular among the Soviet unofficial artists belonging to the “second Russian avant-garde wave” – the conceptualists such as Mikhail Grobman, Igor Makarevich, Dmitry Plavinsky, Mikhail Chemiakin and many others.