Unfinished Print - Hardcover

Peter Parshall

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0853318204 ISBN 13: 9780853318200

Publisher: Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd, 2001

When does a work of art achieve aesthetic resolution? Artists, collectors, and theorists since the Renaissance have been intrigued by this question in their attempt to understand the artistic endeavour. Prints claim a special place in this history. The Unfinished Print investigates the changing taste for prints that reveal the traces of their making, a subject never before considered across its full historical sweep, from the fifteenth to the early twentieth century. An artist working on a print will usually take 'proof impressions' to check the progress of the plate, allowing us to trace the rethinking that attends the making of any work of art. Yet, unlike other media, proofs establish an exact record of discrete stages in the history of an image. Amplified by experiments with variant states and impressions, printmakers generated a creative interest in process and stages of completion, a phenomenon with complex implications for the history of art. Locating the issue of finish in printmaking within a broad intellectual and cultural context, this book examines the evolving concern with artistic process and aesthetic self-sufficiency in the work of Rembrandt, the rococo taste for proof states in the wake of Watteau, the fractured architectural visions of Piranesi, the romantic fascination with the artistic fragment, and the complex investigations of technical experiment that dominated printmaking in late-nineteenth century Paris.

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Review:

'...a useful addition to academic libraries. General readers; undergraduates through professionals.' Choice --Stacey Sell

Synopsis:

The question of "finish" in the artistic endeavour has been regarded with increasing fascination since the Renaissance. In the graphic arts this question has involved what it means to achieve aesthetic resolution in printmaking. This book investigates the history of finish and unfinish in printmaking from the 15th to the early 20th century. Historically speaking, proof impressions establish a partial record of the artist's procedure and, like drawings done in preparation for a painting or sculpture, they allow us to trace the thinking that attends the making of any work of art. Yet unlike these other media, printed proofs record exact stages in the evolution of the actual image itself. Printmakers have always been aware of the value of this process; certainly for Rembrandt, printmaker among printmakers, the revelation of creative process through successive states and differing impressions became fundamental to the concept of invention. But over time, collectors began also to take an interest in the various states of a print, which acquired value in their own right.

The opening essay of this work examines the problem of finish in printmaking in its broader intellectual and cultural context. The second essay examines Rembrandt's radically experimental series of sketch-sheet etchings, and the final essay analyzes the extraordinary set of proof impressions of a multi-plate colour etching by Jacques Villon, a project that unveils the artist's break out of the aesthetic of the belle epoque and into modernity.

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