PRINTMAKING: Impressions, Editions, and Reproductions

This chapter focuses on traditional forms of printmaking, understanding such forms to involve a process that can be described roughly as follows: A work is a print if and only if it involves the transfer of pigment from a matrix (e.g. etched plate) to a support (e.g. paper). Christy Mag Uidhir makes much of the observation that, unlike painting and sculpture, prints and printmaking have been resistant to serious academic investigation and analysis. As printmaking transformed during the 20th century, emphasis was placed on the novel notion of an original print, in contrast to reproductive prints, largely due to the need to properly situate this ostensibly commercial enterprise within existing art world culture and extant marketing practices. A reproductive print, according to Robert Hopkins, is a print “that takes another picture as its source, and that attempts to depict whatever the source does, at least insofar as difference in medium allows”.