New Greenwich Printmakers member Bess Frimodig writes about the history of printmaking and its impact on society.
Print reaches far back into the history of human expression, and roads crossed between principles and commerce in the print shop. There it is, print holding both the history of art as well as the social, because words alone are sometimes not enough for telling a story. Insights are also formed by feelings prompted by images, and knowledge is spread pictorially. Early prints superseded vocabularies. The particularity of an object is enhanced by its truthful illustration, communicating beyond a national tongue. Yet an image is curiously both ambiguous and exact at the same time.
There it is, print holding both the history of art as well as the social, because words alone are sometimes not enough for telling a story
In its European late medieval beginnings, print was not an art form, but a political positioning of outsiders’ graphic craft readable by the illiterate masses, who were barred access to the elite’s paintings and books. The history of print is rich in unexpected connections between shifts of knowledge and technology, intermittently interwoven with social upheaval.
Closely linked to the industrial, print enhanced the spread of inventions and literacy. Eisenstein argues that it is the whole print – i.e. word and image combined – which transformed European thinking. So far the printing press has been more acknowledged as a revolution in ways of knowledge in Eisenstein’s "The Printing Press as an Agent of Social Change" and in McLuhan’s "The Gutenberg Galaxy", but the print as image has its place in cognitive revolutions. Historical social ‘workings’ of the print can be classified as cross-disciplinary in that the early prints served a role in the terms of the devotional entertainments, the political, science, the navigational, and engineering in an circular exchange from India, China to Europe. Europe became a culture of warfare, seafaring, ideas and revolution through pictorial multiples – the print.
Prints were the receptacles of knowledge, far-flung places and illuminations of new thinking systems. Even the terminology of philosophical thought borrowed from the continuously inventing forms between industry and expression of printmaking, such as intaglio or etching by acid on copper. A thought, a memory is etched, imprinted, stamped upon the mind, as if the mind was a sheet of paper.
Prints were the receptacles of knowledge, far-flung places and illuminations of new thinking systems. Even the terminology of philosophical thought borrowed from it... A thought, a memory is etched, imprinted, stamped upon the mind, as if the mind was a sheet of paper
The impact of prints on the advancement of knowledge and societal shifts may be linked to the necessary collective and collaborative environment in a print studio. Tapping into prints’ money-making potential by one image being able to be sold over and over, monasteries set up print shops rolling out mass-produced indulgences on the cheap, or producing herbal apothecary diagrams in the 1400s to satisfy the rapid rise of a new science – medicine. Professional laymen convened with the monks around the woodblock print inside the cloisters, a serendipitous meeting place for usually opposed disciplines, enabling a dialogue between the Individual, the Idea and the Collective. Inventions were developed to print multiples more easily, from the etched or carved image to the German broadsheet in the 1450s. Within the medieval walls, reciprocal intellectual relationships flourished. The emergence of a richer and larger middle class created a new market and an even wider distribution of the multiplied image. Politically and technically, the print became the echoes of a rapidly changing society.
The woodcut was ideal to spread protest on two levels: the image could be understood by the vast illiterate, and for those few who could read, a caption underlined its message. It was also easily reproduced, and print became a public phenomenon. As centuries unfolded in repeated turmoil of political change and economic upheaval, the print reflected stories of daily life.
Distribution outside the establishment’s institutions took on a theatrical aspect and prints were pulled through the streets on a cart, with actors, trumpets and fiddles, telling lewd stories of the debauched life of the nobility or dissent towards new taxes and oppressive reforms
Distribution outside the establishment’s institutions took on a theatrical aspect and prints were pulled through the streets on a cart, with actors, trumpets and fiddles, telling lewd stories of the debauched life of the nobility or dissent towards new taxes and oppressive reforms. Smaller prints were plastered on wooden pillars in pubs and city walls. Ministers, priests and kings saw themselves ridiculed and openly vilified in etchings, woodcuts and lithographs.
Throughout history, the print witnesses the ordinary turning the mirror back to the rulers by reflecting the private, individual joys and tragedies of the unseen masses.
In the artist’s print, daily life and private feelings speak. Pain or the pleasurable habits of family life is not glorious enough for the grandiose ambitions of a nation, and seldom makes it into the history books. By its very multiple nature, the print communicates the voices of the collective through individual artists responding as citizens, empathising with the people who are not invited to leave any traces in the annals of time. Outside the bastions of power and money, the print – inexpensive and multiple – has been an ideal democratic form of art, and remains accessible to the lover of a picture beautiful.
Dr Bess Frimodig has recently joined Greenwich Printmakers and explores themes including human rights, sustainability and social engagement through her creative practice and teaching. Her prints are available in the gallery. For further information, visit her website here.
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