Resolutions

HOWARD HODGKIN | Flowering Palm & Night Palm

Hodgkin’s ‘Palm’ sequence of 1990-91 was his most ambitious graphic work to date and comprises, in our view, some of the most beautiful prints ever made by anyone. They are also a testament to the remarkable creative relationship Hodgkin forged with printmaker Jack Shirreff at 107 Workshop, a close collaboration that fundamentally shaped his graphic career.

‘Hodgkin’s fascination with large travel posters, seen in the Metro in Paris in the late 1950s or early 1960s is expressed in a series of four large intaglio prints made with carborundum: Night Palm, Street Palm, Palm and Window and Flowering Palm. They are equivalents to the travel posters in that they are huge, bright, spontaneous and straightforward. These large posters by artists such as Adolphe Mouron Cassandre (1901-68), Bernard Villemot (1911-89) and Raymond Savignac (1907-2002) were the only kind of prints that Hodgkin consciously tried to imitate. The Metro posters were loud, brightly coloured advertisements for companies such as French Railways, Air France and the French National Tourist Office. Hodgkin tried to achieve a similar immediacy, spontaneity and directness in the group of palm prints ... Spontaneity is important in his prints - a quality that his paintings lack ...

The execution of the marks should look, as indeed it does, unpremeditated and direct. The yellow paint in Flowering Palm looks as if it has been spontaneously and freely applied, whereas every stop and movement of the brush was calculated. When the yellow paint accidentally covered the red form at the centre of the print, the printer was instructed to wipe it off carefully. The green paint of Night Palm was intended to drip ‘spontaneously’ but within certain parameters.’

Extract from ‘Howard Hodgkin - The Complete Prints’, Liesbeth Heenk, 2003

HENRY MOORE | Standing Figures & Woman Holding Cat

Henry Moore was a pioneer of the collograph technique that adapted commercial colour separation methods to fine art printmaking in order to give the artist a greater control and freedom than the traditional lithographic process would allow. These two examples that Moore produced on the invitation of Ganeymed Press are a ground-breaking foray into a technique that would later also find expression in Moore’s famous ‘Shelter Sketchbook’ portfolio. The creative potential of the medium and its wider importance in the development of printmaking in post-war Britain is related in this description of the printing of one of the colour separations for ‘Standing Figures’:

‘The positive wash drawn for the yellow and the print made from it, show the extraordinary sensitivity of the process and it is a revelation to compare this yellow trial printing with the redrawn yellow on the completed print, in which the densities of the wash are redistributed in such a way that the figures now emerge three-dimensionally from their background in an unclouded clarity of blue. Moore relates that the moment when he saw the sum of his separate washes and drawings amalgamated into the first proof had something of the excitement of the potter viewing a glaze emerging from the kiln, or a sculptor seeing his plaster original cast in bronze. ‘Now when I make a plaster for metal, I know what will happen nearly exactly’ says Moore. ‘Then it used to be an excitement but also a trepidation. Well, the collograph was the same’.

‘Publishing experimental prints at the time, even by an artist with a name as illustrious as Moore’s, was a considerable act of faith. Although a healthy market had existed, especially for etching, at the beginning of the twentieth century, wars and economic crises severely crippled development and that later flowering, which has since been dubbed the British Print Renaissance, did not really get under way until the late 1950s and early 1960s. So, these collographs represent an exceptionally early stirring of the post-war interest in artists’ prints.’

Extract from ‘Henry Moore Graphics in the Making’, Tate Gallery, 1975

TERRY FROST | Timberaine D

The Timberaine series is a compelling meditation on pure colour and Frost sustained the idea across a sequence of 10 variations in total. Timberaine D is from a relatively small edition of 16 and good examples very rarely come to market. Frost’s publisher, Charles Booth-Clibborn provides background to the series:

‘The idea for the Timberaine woodcuts originated from a large painting of stripes that Terry had recently completed, which itself was inspired by the trunks of trees in a forest. Terry referred to the painting as ‘a jungle’ and concocted the title from the words ’timber’ and ‘rainforest’: ‘I wanted a title that described what I was doing. ‘Timberaine’ is a rainforest. It is about timber and trunks.

’Terry wanted to develop the stripe theme further and felt that this was best served by exploring it in a series of six different ‘jungle’ scenarios through the medium of woodcut. Woodcut also allowed him to accomplish the quality and clarity of design he envisioned, contrary to the painting in which the edges of the stripes were inevitably softer. Terry made one full-size preparatory sketch from which Hugh cut the woodblocks. One block was cut for each colour stripe, with a total of ten blocks. Under the guidance of Hugh, Terry chose a specific grain of wood - ash, this time - to create the most appropriate surface texture for the series. The same blocks were used for each triptych, using different colour variations. Terry relished playing with the value and weight of colours, relating them to each other and arranging them in different sequences.’

Extract from ‘Terry Frost Prints - A Catalogue Raisonné’, Dominic Kemp 2010

EDUARDO CHILLIDA | Urrutiko

Examples of Chillida’s graphic work are a rare find and large format examples such as this are rarer still. His work is always a welcome addition to the collection and allows us to further explore the dialogue between printmaking and sculpture - a subject that has been a particular fascination for us in the gallery in recent years.

‘Chillida began working in lithography, etchings, silkscreen and woodcuts in 1950, and printmaking represented a significant part of his artistic output thereafter. His graphic works are not mere references to his sculptural work, but artistic expressions in their own right and like his sculpture, they display a preoccupation with form, space and framing. Absence is therefore as important as presence. The balance of dualities such as black/white, heaviness/lightness and emptiness/fullness give Chillida’s work a universal importance: a forum to contemplate our boundaries and freedoms.

In Chillida’s early graphic works, the composition was often dominated by unconnected strokes. During the 1960s he also developed black panes with white internal lines to form compositions and this idea continued well into the 1970s. These black block-like surfaces, with straight lines and perfect angles, gave the appearance of recognizable shapes and helped to infuse the works with a sense of order. Chillida worked mainly in etching, embracing the full materiality of the technique. Instead of using the basic rectangular plate, he would often cut the etched plate into a shape leaving the shaped plate mark when pressed: the embossing becomes part of the composition. From the 1980s, Chillida used embossing or relief, to give a more pronounced third dimension to his graphic works. This use of embossing became increasingly important until it became one of the most significant features of his etching technique.’

Extract from ‘Eduardo Chillida Graphic Works’, Adam Gallery, 2009