The Art of Printmaking: Part 1. The Tools and Techniques of the Printmaker

There are four major techniques for making original prints. A brief descriptlon of each of these -- relief processes, incised processes, planographic processes, and stencil processes -- is found in the following paragraphs. Most art museums today seek the means of reaching a wider public than is actually counted through the turnstile and, as a result, art objects have come to be a commonplace in public places of all kinds, civic and commercial. Art has even taken to the road in circulating exhibitions, art-mobiles and the like. The present series of exhibitions has been organized as an effort in this direction, to provide a first hand contact with works of art of high quality from two public collections which are ordinarily "at home" in Washington, D.C. and Lincoln, Nebraska. These works will be seen in eight communities over the state during a period of some fifteen months. They will be seen under circumstances that not only provide for leisurely examination and re-examination, but also the conditioning amenities of space, light, and background, and immediately accessible sources of further information. Thanks to our collaboration with the Nebraska Public Library Commission we have such facilities, in effect, a chain of branch galleries across Nebraska, where these and other exhibitions can be seen and enjoyed. To know something of the art of printmaking can be a source of various pleasures-pleasure in the mastery of tools and techniques, pleasure in simple information about people, places and things, pleasure in the inventions of the imagination, pleasure in the viewpoints of philosophy. All these possibilities are included in the hundred plus prints which comprise these exhibitions and they are available through the simple act of looking, the experience of the eye.