Raucourt, Antoine. A Manual of Lithography: Clearly Explaining the Whole Art, and the Accidents That May Happen in Printing, with the Different Methods of Avoiding Them. Tr. Charles Joseph Hullmandel. Third edition. London: Longman, 1832. 23 cm x 14.5 cm x 1.5 cm.
ON PRINTINGWood-engraving, etching, and
lead-
casting are just a few of the printing techniques that brought hand-drawn images to multiple viewers before and beyond the advent of modern photo-reproduction.
Lithography, for example, pushed a kind of DIY-revolution in visual culture after its 1796 invention by
Alois Senefelder. For the first time, artists could
draw directly onto printing surfaces, leading to massive innovation.
Later techniques, such as
electrotype and
photo-engraving, often pushed the human hand farther away from reproduced images. In the most recent book in this exhibit,
Block-Cutting and Print-Making by Hand (1930), nostalgia for antique methods and a bourgeois love of personal craft return the hand to the printed picture.
Previous case:
On Drawing