The Discovery of Lithography
In the 1890s Toulouse Lautrec working with Jules Chéret helped to revolutionise poster design in Paris; whilst the printer Auguste Clot collaborating with the Pointillist artist Paul Signac experimented with newly developed inks that resulted in delightful transparency of colour. Picasso and the printer Fernand Mourlot working after the Second World War, experimented working in series, counter-etching stones, deleting and redrawing images and editioning each resulting state proof.
More recently the American printer Kenneth Tyler, whose philosophy has been 'Everything goes and anything is possible' has been responsible not only for some extraordinary prints, but also for some of the most ambitious technical feats in printing ever seen. Tyler who was one of the first Master Printers to be trained at the Tamarind Institute, later set up his own studio called Gemini. Recently he donated to Tate Modern, his life-time collection of prints made with artists with whom he has collaborated during the last forty years. Including work by artists such as Frank Stella, James Rosenquist, Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell, to name but just a few; the sheer scale and complexity of the prints resulting from these collaborations necessitated the development of new presses, machinery and techniques never before employed.
Most techniques used in printmaking however have tended to derive from innovations made first in industry and in lithography this has generally equated to the adoption of plates, photoplates and more recently digital technology.The idea that grained zinc plates could be used instead of stone had been tested by Senefelder as early as 1817, however zincography did not become popular in Europe until after 1840. The real impetus for the development of plate lithography was of course economic and by the end of the nineteenth century as the rotary press became automated and steam-driven, plate lithography had all but replaced the use of stone for most printing purposes.
The use of aluminium plate was a later development and was not introduced until the final decade of the nineteenth century, when the material became more readily available in thin metal sheets similar to zinc. The prevalence of aluminium plate lithography or algraphy as it was once known became firmly established with the development of offset printing during the twentieth century and even today the use of aluminium is almost entirely synonymous with this process.