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Prints and Visual Communication
The sophistication of the photographic process has had two dramatic results—freeing the artist from the confines of journalistic reproductions and freeing the scientist from the unavoidable imprecision of the artist's prints. So released, both have prospered and produced their impressive nineteenth- and twentieth-century outputs. It is this premise that William M. Ivins, Jr., elaborates in Prints and Visual Communication , a history of printmaking from the crudest wood block, through engraving and lithography, to Talbot's discovery of the negative-positive photographic process and its far reaching consequences.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 28, 1969
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About the author
William Ivins Jr.
16 booksWilliam Mills Ivins Jr. (1881 – 1961) was curator of the department of prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from its founding in 1916 until 1946, when he was succeeded by A. Hyatt Mayor.
The son of William Mills Ivins Sr. (1851 – 1915), a public utility lawyer who had been the 1905 Republican candidate for Mayor of New York City, Ivins studied at Harvard College and the University of Munich before graduating in law from Columbia University in 1907.
After nine years' legal practice, he was asked to take on the conservation and interpretation of the Met's print collection. He built up the remarkable collections that can be seen there today, and he wrote many prefaces to exhibition catalogues, as well as other, occasional pieces which were later collected and published. His best-known book is Prints and Visual Communication (MIT Press, 1969, ISBN 0-262-59002-6 (first published 1953 by Harvard University Press)), and his How Prints Look (1943, revised edition 1987) remains in print.
The son of William Mills Ivins Sr. (1851 – 1915), a public utility lawyer who had been the 1905 Republican candidate for Mayor of New York City, Ivins studied at Harvard College and the University of Munich before graduating in law from Columbia University in 1907.
After nine years' legal practice, he was asked to take on the conservation and interpretation of the Met's print collection. He built up the remarkable collections that can be seen there today, and he wrote many prefaces to exhibition catalogues, as well as other, occasional pieces which were later collected and published. His best-known book is Prints and Visual Communication (MIT Press, 1969, ISBN 0-262-59002-6 (first published 1953 by Harvard University Press)), and his How Prints Look (1943, revised edition 1987) remains in print.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 28, 2020
As if to reproach the grandiose rhetoric of Marshall McLuhan’s information-age prophecies, Ivins masks the reach of his analysis behind a matter-of-fact title and relatively mannered style (excepting some pointed diatribes against Classicism). Humble as its presentation may be, Prints and Visual Communications is a daring work of art-historical scholarship tracing the determinations of print media on communication, aesthetics, and socio-economic relations.
While detailed studies of print’s impact on the dissemination of knowledge had been undertaken before — chiefly Lucien Febvre’s magisterial The Coming of the Book — few, if any had approached the topic from the standpoint of visual information, as opposed to text. The distinction is phenomenological: text as symbolic cypher contains informational redundancy, such that successive generations of copyists may transcribe it into distinct handwriting styles with minimal loss of data. But language is an inherently abstract medium, being essentially a temporal unfolding of arbitrary phonemes (or individuated visual equivalents) bearing syntactically-contextual meaning, and thus is limited in its capacity to represent particularities; whence its propensity for misunderstandings, but also figuration and poetry.
Language on its own, therefore, is ill-suited for the degree of acuity required for the transmission of accurate data on natural or otherwise mechanical objects, so one must reach beyond language to account for the spread of technical knowledge. Ivins argues that we cannot understand the great breakthroughs of the early-modern period without coming to terms with the development of printed visual information and the technical detail afforded by the image. In tracing the history of visual communication, he evinces a McLuhanian notion of media determination, whereby each successive medium “rescrambles” ocular syntax on the basis of the material and industrial properties afforded.
Hand-drawings, the sole recourse prior to print technology, undergo an informatic erosion across successive iterations, and tend towards an extremum of generality and rational order. Ivins uses this point to account for Platonism’s basis in idealities, and curiously, as a launching pad for an extended anti-Classicist polemic. The woodblock introduces a primitive industrial process of reproduction, but is a coarse and cruel medium, and disallows fine detail. By the early 1600s, the woodblock has been all but rendered obsolete for reproductive purposes by the engraving. The relative precision possible on smooth metal surfaces has two lasting effects: first, skilled draughtsman are now viewed as capable of giving justice in reproduction to existing artworks; second, a more advanced, assembly-line industrial process develops, as etchings are stamped with the idiosyncrasies and styles of particular shops.
Consequently, artworks formerly the province of a specific worldly location host to their “aura” are now available for viewing to a scattered (and wealthy) audience, but only to the degree of transmuting iconography and general form. The formal ipseity of the original piece, its brushwork and sculptural tracings, are all but lost, and the specific style of the engraving itself takes primacy over what it purports to depict (the best example of this is actually on the book's cover, presenting side-by-side engravings of Laocoon which each convey markedly different inflections). Critical reception of art via reproduced engravings is subject to the same mediation, as virtuoso crosshatchings, which are often in excess of the original piece's tonality, are taken as proof for artistic excellency. Thus, for Ivins, the academic orthodoxy of verisimilitude, classically-ordained ‘high’ iconography, and rationality which dominated Western art up until modernity stems foremost from the qualities of the engraving medium.
The lithograph, alongside other developments allowing for low-cost mass-reproduction of visuals in the early 19th century, break the upper-class’ stranglehold on ocular information, and allow for ingenious, yet uneducated men — precisely the demographic responsible for the maverick feats of invention launching the Industrial Revolution—access to formerly restricted trade and guild knowledge.
Lastly, photography, as a non-subjective chemical transfer of light to surface, finally absolves print reproduction of its tendencies towards syntactic idioms. Western aesthetics are uprooted virtually overnight as visual reporting ceases to coincide with visual expression. The normative forms of beauty imposed by previous media no longer hold; in its absence come newfound appreciations for the non-verisimilar art of Asian, African, and Oceana in fin de siècle art. Forever altered too is our purchase on the world—anticipating Baudrillard, Ivins concludes his study with the untimely, now perhaps truistic remark that objective pictorial reporting of events has overtaken events themselves to the extent that what one thinks and acts upon is not a concrete event as such, but rather, its symbolic representation.
While detailed studies of print’s impact on the dissemination of knowledge had been undertaken before — chiefly Lucien Febvre’s magisterial The Coming of the Book — few, if any had approached the topic from the standpoint of visual information, as opposed to text. The distinction is phenomenological: text as symbolic cypher contains informational redundancy, such that successive generations of copyists may transcribe it into distinct handwriting styles with minimal loss of data. But language is an inherently abstract medium, being essentially a temporal unfolding of arbitrary phonemes (or individuated visual equivalents) bearing syntactically-contextual meaning, and thus is limited in its capacity to represent particularities; whence its propensity for misunderstandings, but also figuration and poetry.
Language on its own, therefore, is ill-suited for the degree of acuity required for the transmission of accurate data on natural or otherwise mechanical objects, so one must reach beyond language to account for the spread of technical knowledge. Ivins argues that we cannot understand the great breakthroughs of the early-modern period without coming to terms with the development of printed visual information and the technical detail afforded by the image. In tracing the history of visual communication, he evinces a McLuhanian notion of media determination, whereby each successive medium “rescrambles” ocular syntax on the basis of the material and industrial properties afforded.
Hand-drawings, the sole recourse prior to print technology, undergo an informatic erosion across successive iterations, and tend towards an extremum of generality and rational order. Ivins uses this point to account for Platonism’s basis in idealities, and curiously, as a launching pad for an extended anti-Classicist polemic. The woodblock introduces a primitive industrial process of reproduction, but is a coarse and cruel medium, and disallows fine detail. By the early 1600s, the woodblock has been all but rendered obsolete for reproductive purposes by the engraving. The relative precision possible on smooth metal surfaces has two lasting effects: first, skilled draughtsman are now viewed as capable of giving justice in reproduction to existing artworks; second, a more advanced, assembly-line industrial process develops, as etchings are stamped with the idiosyncrasies and styles of particular shops.
Consequently, artworks formerly the province of a specific worldly location host to their “aura” are now available for viewing to a scattered (and wealthy) audience, but only to the degree of transmuting iconography and general form. The formal ipseity of the original piece, its brushwork and sculptural tracings, are all but lost, and the specific style of the engraving itself takes primacy over what it purports to depict (the best example of this is actually on the book's cover, presenting side-by-side engravings of Laocoon which each convey markedly different inflections). Critical reception of art via reproduced engravings is subject to the same mediation, as virtuoso crosshatchings, which are often in excess of the original piece's tonality, are taken as proof for artistic excellency. Thus, for Ivins, the academic orthodoxy of verisimilitude, classically-ordained ‘high’ iconography, and rationality which dominated Western art up until modernity stems foremost from the qualities of the engraving medium.
The lithograph, alongside other developments allowing for low-cost mass-reproduction of visuals in the early 19th century, break the upper-class’ stranglehold on ocular information, and allow for ingenious, yet uneducated men — precisely the demographic responsible for the maverick feats of invention launching the Industrial Revolution—access to formerly restricted trade and guild knowledge.
Lastly, photography, as a non-subjective chemical transfer of light to surface, finally absolves print reproduction of its tendencies towards syntactic idioms. Western aesthetics are uprooted virtually overnight as visual reporting ceases to coincide with visual expression. The normative forms of beauty imposed by previous media no longer hold; in its absence come newfound appreciations for the non-verisimilar art of Asian, African, and Oceana in fin de siècle art. Forever altered too is our purchase on the world—anticipating Baudrillard, Ivins concludes his study with the untimely, now perhaps truistic remark that objective pictorial reporting of events has overtaken events themselves to the extent that what one thinks and acts upon is not a concrete event as such, but rather, its symbolic representation.
April 24, 2013
EPIC read
November 2, 2015
This is a thought provoking study of technological innovation and its far-reaching consequences. It's about the development of "exactly repeatable visual images" - woodcuts, engravings, lithography, photography, and the like - and their impact on art, art criticism, science, and engineering. The insights are surprising and often counter-intuitive.
June 8, 2022
Summary: The sophistication of the photographic process has had two dramatic results - freeing the artist from the confines of journalistic reproductions and freeing the scientist from the unavoidable imprecision of the artist's prints. So released, both have prospered and produced their impressive nineteenth- and twentieth-century outputs. It is this premise that William M. Ivins, Jr., elaborates in Prints and Visual Communication, a history of printmaking from the crudest wood blocks, through engraving and lithography, to Talbot's discovery of the negative-positive photographic process and its far-reaching consequences.
June 19, 2023
A staple in the literature about printmaking. Very functional.
June 22, 2008
Dry reading but a surprisingly fascinating subject of the transmission of visual information before photography.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews