Prints charming at the Art Gallery of WA

STEFANO Carboni has made significant and much-needed changes at the Art Gallery of Western Australia since his appointment in 2008.

STEFANO Carboni has made significant and much-needed changes at the Art Gallery of Western Australia since his appointment in 2008.

The most conspicuous of these has been the series of annual international loan exhibitions, beginning with last year's show from the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in his native Venice.

This initiative has been a welcome break from the rather parochial focus of the gallery in previous years. An agreement with the Museum of Modern Art in New York this year will result in a series of four annual exhibitions from next year.

Even more important, but less noticeable from interstate, Carboni has rehung the permanent collection. He inherited at the Art Gallery of Western Australia the worst and most wilfully incoherent hanging of any gallery in the country.

Carboni has replaced this mess with a simple and straightforward chronological sequence and - who would have thought it? - the whole collection is more intelligible and more engaging when works are hung in the company of their contemporaries. At the same time, he has initiated a deeper review of the gallery's holdings, with a series of collection focus exhibitions. The first of these is devoted to international prints, of which the gallery owns more than 1400 items, some of them outstanding.

Prints, of course, are much less expensive than important paintings but give the viewer an exceptional access to the thinking and sensibility of the past five centuries of our history. Their appreciation requires perhaps a little more knowledge of the relevant techniques than painting or sculpture.

An exhibition such as this is a perfect opportunity to learn to understand prints. The works on display cover all the main techniques of artistic printmaking, including woodblock, engraving, etching, aquatint, mezzotint, lithography and screenprinting, as well as the Japanese variant of woodblock used in the coloured ukiyoe prints.

Woodblock was the earliest technique of printmaking and is made by drawing a design on a piece of wood, cutting away the areas between the lines of the drawing, inking the resulting block and impressing the inked design on to a sheet of paper. This kind of print is called a relief print.

When printing was developed in the middle of the 15th century, woodblock allowed illustrations to be included, for the pressure required to print letterpress and image was the same; the slightly later techniques of engraving and etching need far greater pressure and if engraved plates are to be included in a book, they have to be printed separately and tipped in.

Engraving, etching and the other related techniques are, in contrast, known as intaglio prints, meaning the printed image corresponds to lines cut into a plate, generally of copper or zinc. Engraving involves cutting grooves directly into the plate with a burin. Etching uses acid to bite these grooves: the plate is coated with an acid-proof resist on which the artist draws with a needle, scratching away the resist before submerging the plate in an acidic solution that dissolves the metal where it has been exposed. The plate can be recoated, redrawn and parts selectively exposed to the acid to create darker areas.

Areas can be further emphasised by using drypoint, which scratches directly into the surface, raising a burr, and later innovations such as mezzotint and aquatint allow the creation of areas of non-linear tone. But in all intaglio prints, it is the incised lines and pits, not the raised areas, that will constitute the image. For this reason, inking takes more time and effort, for the ink must be forced into the grooves, then the excess wiped off the remaining flat surface; and considerable pressure is required to force the ink from the grooves on to the paper.

The result of each of these techniques is a distinct aesthetic effect that can easily be grasped in the present exhibition in the happy pairing of two versions of the Death of the Virgin - one in woodblock by Albrecht Duerer (1510) and the other in etching and drypoint by Rembrandt (1639). Leaving aside the stylistic differences between Duerer's Renaissance frontality and Rembrandt's baroque diagonal, the first thing that may strike one is the contrast between the black-and-white aesthetic of the woodblock and the subtler tonality of the etching.

The reason for this is that the whites of the woodblock correspond to voids on the block, so that the paper remains completely untouched in those areas. In the intaglio methods, on the other hand, the paper is everywhere in contact with the surface of the metal plate and some residual ink, known as plate tone, tends to remain and serves to provide a tonal unity to the composition.

Other factors also contribute to this fundamental difference of tonal effect, including the fact woodblock tends to be cut in rows of lines rather than in hatching and the practice of rebiting selected areas; the result is that while Duerer's composition uses light and shade judiciously, Rembrandt's is characterised by a stronger, more dramatic chiaroscuro.

Etching also permits an entirely different freedom of the drawn line, as we can see in the loose, sketchy drawing that makes up the clouds in the upper part of the print, whereas all the lines in a woodcut have to be deliberate and of a certain thickness. All of this makes it interesting to note that the somewhat earlier etching by Jacques Callot, of an old woman with two cats, seems almost to emulate the aesthetic effect of a woodblock: all the lines are strong and deliberate, there is virtually no hatching, and the plate wiped so thoroughly it shows no signs of tone.

Nearby are several etchings by Francisco Goya, another of the supreme printmakers, with the entirely different and richly painterly effects obtained by using aquatint, a form of resist made of rosin powder that allows the etcher to bite the surface with countless minute pits: these can be used to establish light or dark areas of tone according to the length of biting, and patches can be burnished back to flatness to create highlights. In Goya's hands this inherently moody and atmospheric style is perfectly suited to the expression of drama, anguish and horror.

Perhaps the most striking of the works is an image of two men killing a bull, a picture of violence and cruelty, yet also an image of the most consummate art; a perfect illustration of the way an artist may be drawn to a subject for its disturbing, even repulsive nature yet change it into a thing of formal beauty.

Among other works of exceptional interest, there is an evocative Carcere oscura (1743) by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, a precursor to the later Carceri d'invenzione series, a selection of the beautiful Job series by William Blake, a gargoyle by Meryon, a couple of fine etchings by Whistler, a portrait of Cezanne by Pissarro and many other things. Of the modernists, there are many who, like Emil Nolde or Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, turn away from the subtlety and modelling of etching in its various forms and revert to the earlier medium of woodblock in search of simpler and more dramatic forms, in keeping with the general interest in neo-primitivism of the early 20th century.

One of the most striking of these modernist prints is Kaethe Kollwitz's Losbruch (Outbreak) of 1902, the fifth plate in her series devoted to the Bauernkrieg, the Peasants' War of 1524-26 that was of special historical interest to Marx and Engels. In the foreground, the witch-like figure of a woman called Black Anna eggs on the peasants, who rush forward with knives and axes, their brutal faces distorted into masks of savagery. Clearly Kollwitz sympathises with these people as the victims of injustice, but she nonetheless depicts them as primitive brutes.

Ironically, Allied propaganda would later portray the German people as a whole in much the same way during World War I, while the mindless violence she evokes as left-wing rhetoric from the comfort and stability of a prosperous modern state at the turn of the century would become the literal and traumatic reality of two world wars.

One of the most intriguing works in the collection is a little print by Picasso from 1908-09, the years in which he and Georges Braque were beginning to develop the cubist style they practised in the last years before World War I. It is executed entirely in drypoint, the direct method of scratching that allows the process to be carried out with the greatest spontaneity but usually does not produce a plate capable of a large print run; Picasso nonetheless managed a run of 100, of which the gallery's sheet is the 53rd.

As with other fine prints in the exhibition, close attention is rewarded by seeing the artist's process unfold, by witnessing, as it were, his thinking. Here we can follow Picasso's translation of the motif - a still life with a fruit dish (compotier), pieces of fruit and vases - into the artifice of form. We can feel the way his needle searches out the distinctive forms and contours of each object, and how emphatically he defines characteristic shapes.

At the same time, his manifest indifference to symmetry shows that he regards each particular contour as a separate act of perception; the resolution he searches for is not to be found in the motif itself but in the way each element is woven into the tissue of pictorial composition.

Plates, Blocks and Stones: Five Centuries of International Prints
Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, until November 28