An expressive medium
Critics like Roger Marx championed the artistic value of lithography, citing the medium’s kinship with drawing.
The leading art historian Léonce Bénédite commented that:
‘lithography is simply a drawing with the good fortune that it can be reproduced in an unlimited number of copies.’
Artists could draw straight onto the flat stone, preserving their original intentions and direct expression.
Artistic printers
Although artists were supposed to be closely involved in the creative process from design to lithograph, the labour-intensive technique was really only possible through the expertise of a professional printer.
This required a good working relationship — one that the artist Odilon Redon went so far as to call a kind of marriage. Both parties played a key role in the process. They complemented each other, but also had to avoid encroaching on the other’s territory.
Several publishing houses worked especially for artists, including Ancourt, Lemercier (where the master printer Auguste Clot was employed for many years), Duchatel and Verneau.
Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, A Woman Passing by (Une femme qui passe), 1897
Henri Fantin-Latour, Duo des Troyens from the magazine Revue de l'art ancien et moderne (10 November 1903), 1903
Odilon Redon, Dans le dédale des branches la blême figure apparaissait... from the series Le juré, 1887
Further reading
- Edouard Duchatel, Léonce Bénédite, Traité de lithographie artistique, Paris 1893
- Henri Bouchot, La lithographie, Paris 1895
- Pat Gilmour (ed.), Lasting impressions. Lithography as Art, Philadelphia 1988