lithography

lithography (Greek: lithos, ‘stone’, and graphein, ‘to write’). A method of printing from a design drawn directly onto a slab of stone or other suitable material. The design is neither raised in relief as in woodcut nor incised as in line engraving, but simply drawn on the flat printing surface; initially this surface was provided by a slab of special limestone, but metal sheets are now usually preferred, as they are less cumbersome. The process is based on the antipathy of grease and water. The artist draws his design with a greasy ink or crayon on the stone, which is then treated with certain chemical solutions so that the drawing is fixed. Water is then applied. The moisture is repelled by the greasy design but is readily accepted by the remainder of the porous surface of the stone. The stone is now rolled with greasy ink, which adheres only to the drawing, the rest of the surface, being damp, repelling it. A sheet of paper is placed on the stone, they are passed through a press, and an exact replica of the drawing is transferred, in reverse as with all prints, to the paper.

The most recent of the principal printmaking techniques, lithography was invented in 1798 by Aloys Senefelder, a Bavarian playwright who was experimenting with methods of duplicating his plays; he records that the idea came to him when he made a laundry list with a greasy pencil on a piece of stone. Senefelder appears to have realized at once the significance of his invention and how it could be used. He called it ‘Chemical Printing’, insisting that the chemical principles involved were of more importance than the stone on which the designs were made, and in this he was right, for metal plates produce virtually identical results; zinc was first used in about 1830 and aluminium in about 1890. Senefelder also introduced the use of transfer paper, whereby the design is drawn on paper and transferred subsequently to the stone for printing—a method much used by artists ever since.

As its inventor foresaw, lithography has proved to be a highly flexible medium, capable of producing the most varied effects of transparency and texture. Instead of being drawn with pen or crayon, the design may be painted on the stone with a brush; the washes may be opaque or dilute, they may be scratched or scraped to produce white lines on a background of black, or they may be textured in any way the artist's ingenuity can suggest (Toulouse-Lautrec, one of the greatest masters of the technique, sometimes created tonal effects by spattering ink on the stone with a toothbrush). Colour lithographs, first made in the 1830s, are produced in much the same way as in any other graphic method, that is by preparing a separate stone for each of the colours in the design.

The lithographic principle has also been widely used in the commercial printing industry. Offset lithography, in which the ink is printed from the stone or metal onto a rubber-coated cylinder before being transferred to the paper, allows the design to be made the right way round instead of in reverse and also enables a very thin film of ink to be used, thus permitting the reproduction of the finest lines. Photo litho offset involves the photographic printing of an image, usually by means of a half-tone screen, onto a sensitized metal plate, which is then, after certain chemical treatments, printed on an offset lithographic machine. By contrast with these complex commercial procedures, the simplicity and directness of lithography in its basic form has attracted many artists of the 19th and 20th centuries to use it as a means of original expression (the artist need do nothing more than draw on the stone, plate, or transfer paper—the printer can handle all the technicalities).

Goya, in his old age, was one of the first major artists to take up the new medium. Those who followed him included Géricault, Delacroix, Daumier (the first great artist to execute the bulk of his life's work in lithography), Manet, Degas, Whistler, Redon, Bonnard, and Vuillard. Meanwhile, in the USA, the firm of Currier & Ives was producing a series of lithographs that had little in common with the sophisticated European prints of the period but show us a cross-section of the life of the American nation in terms of a genuinely popular art. Among more recent artists, Picasso has been one of the most notable exponents of lithography, producing a large and varied oeuvre in the medium.