It’s not every day that an exhibition surveys the entire history of a country’s involvement with an artistic medium, but this is what “Singular Impressions: The Monotype in America” sets out to do, making for an unusually broad and absorbing show at the Terra Museum of American Art.
In recent years, only “The Modernist Tradition in American Watercolors,” at the Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, similarly explored a long-neglected aspect of American art history. But the period of that exhibition spanned fewer than three decades, whereas the present show takes in more than a century.
The monotype is also less well-known than the watercolor to a general audience, so the exhibition and its 212-page catalog will have the added virtue of being the means by which monotypes are introduced to many viewers.
Monotypes are prints made by drawing with ink or oils on a smooth surface such as a plate of glass. A sheet of paper is pressed firmly against the plate before the drawing dries, thus transferring in reverse most of the image to the sheet. The strongest impression is the first, hence, singularity is emphasized: monotype.
Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, a painter in Genoa during the first half of the 17th Century, made some of the earliest known monotypes with the backs of metal etching plates. Visionary poet William Blake, using stiff cards, took up the practice in England in the 18th Century. The most famous artist to create a great many monotypes during the latter part of the 19th Century is Edgar Degas, though by that time the medium had achieved some popularity.
Monotypes have much of the spontaneity of painting, but that accounts for only part of their attractiveness to artists. Probably the larger part comes from the sensuousness of working with inks and papers, for different qualities of absorption result in different textural effects, and the artist’s images do not lie upon a surface (as most paint does with canvas) but literally are pressed into paper, becoming one with its rough or fine fibers.
Some years after Degas completed his raw monotypes of brothel scenes, the medium was adopted by American artists who chiefly used it to create a softer Romantic atmosphere. The first print pulled from a plate was, you recall, the strongest; but the second would often yield beautifully hazy and subtle effects, which we see exploited throughout the show, from Frank Duveneck to Michael Mazur.
To take full advantage of the medium’s spontaneity, most artists worked directly on their plates, without the guidelines of preliminary drawings. However, a great exception was the painter who originated the term monotype, Charles Alvah Walker. His prints are large and highly finished: so finished, in fact, that they stand apart from the majority of pieces on view, having sacrificed directness for tremendous delicacy.
Longtime visitors to the museum perhaps will remember the exquisite show of Maurice Prendergast monotypes held at the old quarters in Evanston. The Terra then had the largest public collection of such works. What a pity more of them are not on view now. Prendergast was a pioneer in introducing oil colors to the monotype, and the present exhibition would have benefited from a larger complement, even a subsidiary show, of his personal, marvelously dazzling work.
Instead, viewers will encounter several minor figures, such as Xavier Tizoc Martinez, who as early as 1915 created an image called “Valkyrie of the Sea” that anticipates the campy decorativeness of the Art Deco period. One might have thought more serious American modernists, particularly those who gathered around Alfred Stieglitz, would take to the medium as readily as they did to watercolor. But the show and catalog present examples only from two of the group’s lesser lights, Abraham Walkowitz and Alfred Maurer, leaving viewers to assume monotypes attracted in the first two decades of the century more academics and realists than American avant-garde artists.
The contemporary contingent, on the other hand, does not at all disappoint. Some of the strongest work on view was done in the last 30 years by artists as different as Joseph Goldyne, Robert Cumming and Nathan Oliviera. These pieces give the most compelling reason for a visit to the exhibition, and one is particularly happy it should be so, for art of our time has not always fared as well at the Terra.
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Organized by the National Museum of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution, the exhibition continues at the Terra Museum of American Art, 666 N. Michigan Ave., through Nov. 9.
