Printmaking is both one of the simplest and most complicated artistic techniques. Many of our first art projects likely were prints, from rubber stamps to stone rubbings, while techniques like lithography use a complex series of chemicals to pull an image from a limestone base. And yet print’s simplest techniques, upon reflection, turn out to be not so simple. Take rubbings, the process I turned to as a seemingly approachable way to initiate my investigation into lithography and to explore the significance of using stone as a printing matrix, or base. Traditionally associated with tombstones and memorials, rubbings often seek to capture what has or will be left behind – not unlike the stones’ own role as carriers of history as geological artifacts.1 In order to create a rubbing, however, you must conceal the form you seek to capture. On a November morning in the Cambridge Old Burial Ground, I held a sheet of tracing paper tight against the top of a tombstone with my left hand, obscuring the very curling filigree I hope to engage. Blinded, I had to trust in touch as I pressed a flat tablet of greasy crayon against the paper and watched those very forms generate, surfacing through the paper itself (figures 3, 4). The curls, skull, urn, and text came out thin and ghostly and conveyed the process of their transfer – the variance in pressure, the compiling of forms – more than the solidity of the stone itself. The rubbings appear in metamorphosis as dynamic forms that result from the reawakening of the past.2 In its use of blindness, rubbing allows the artist to ‘see beyond’ the visible – coaxing out from the depths of their objects the secrets, pasts, and ghostly forms that live within them.3
This entangled relationship with the past sparked my fascination with lithography. Besides the lithographic stone’s material connection to geological time, lithography is entwined with history by its birth date: 1796, when natural historians exploded perceptions of time with the concept of earthly history, or “deep time,” and when the French Revolution shook western notions of historical change.4 As lithography spread at the beginning of the nineteenth century, thanks in part to the explorations of the new technique by French troops stationed in Germany, it quickly became the most popular medium to represent the Napoleonic past.5 Théodore Géricault’s 1818 Return from Russia, the first lithograph I researched, encapsulates the nostalgia and loss at the core of so many of these images in its depiction of battered French troops in retreat after Napoleon’s failed Russian campaign. The moment depicted in this print marked a turning point towards his downfall in 1815 (figure 5). As I looked at Géricault’s print, I was struck by the two faint figures who seemed to sink into the background. They became even more striking as I learned that the physical ink of those figures quite literally sunk into the pores of the stone from which they were made. It seemed certain to me that lithography’s own intimate connection with history could facilitate new understandings of the past. Does a lithographic stone hold memory, and how so? Moreover, how does its unique materiality provide artists with a temporally dynamic realm in which to explore how we (attempt to) forget, how we remember, and how those memories become generative?
Lithographic stones work as printing matrices precisely because of their ability to metamorphose: the lithographic process relies on the ability to program each pore of the stone to absorb either water or grease. After grinding the stone to an even, clean surface, the artist draws directly upon it with a greasy material. Seductive and satisfying, the stone is cool and soft beneath the palm and facilitates the seamless movement of the drawing material. While working with my first lithographic stone I had to actively restrain my hand, reminding myself not to fall prey to its charms or else risk the greasy track marks of my palm. Eventually, I caved: lifted hand morphed to fully-inked fingertips and I pressed my greasy hands on to the stone. After drawing is complete, a syrup of gum Arabic and nitric acid is gently massaged on the surface to etch, or fix, the forms (figure 6). Next comes the trust exercise: wash out the acid, gum, and drawing with lithotine. The image disappears, leaving only the faintest shadows behind and requiring the artist to trust that the stone had listened – had received his or her touch (figure 7).
After cleaning the stone with the pine-smelling lithotine, the next step is to feed it once more with grease and water, filling up each pore with either the water or greasy asphaltam it has been conditioned to crave. While struggling to wipe away particularly sticky asphaltam, I fell prey to lithography’s mischievousness: my image did not appear in the asphaltam as expected.6 Frustrated, I almost resigned for the afternoon before deciding to roll ink on to the stone anyways: like magic, the ink stuck to our image just as it should. Like the gravestone rubbings, I needed to trust the invisibility and blindness that is essential to lithography’s generative process. The stone had captured everything, even my fingerprints, whose greasy image would sink deeper into the stone’s pores over time. Stones are often reused due to their expense and laborious preparation. Sometimes, in the case of an improperly cleaned stone or a particularly persistent image, when rolling the stone with ink old images reappear alongside new ones. Lithographers call these typically unwanted images “ghosts,” as forms thought to be erased or dead surface like memories.7 These strange, ephemeral, and self-determined memories were what I most wanted to understand.
The stone I ultimately worked with was ideal for my lithographic ghost hunt: Dimitri Hadzi’s stone had absorbed approximately 25-years’ worth of acrylic paint, solvents, and ambient grease during its time as a quasi-invisible presence in the third-floor studio of Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Hadzi was a twentieth-century sculptor and Harvard professor, and I came to use his lithographic stone mainly due to convenience as one of the limited ones available to me.8 I liked the idea of working with a used stone as most nineteenth-century lithographers did. Moreover, I was intrigued by the contrast of Hadzi’s bold and assertive forms with the gentleness of the ephemera that had settled upon it, from paint drips to fingerprints. It posed the opportunity to engage with different types of past acts: the predetermined and the accidental. My first task to prepare for printing was to clean the stone of some of this debris to facilitate the lithographic chemicals. I initially cleaned gingerly, and later, more forcefully, as I saw my gentle efforts were fruitless (figure 8). After cleaning, I decided to ink the stone and pull a print without etching to see what it would yield even after years of neglect. The stone proved resilient, loudly pressing the black ink of its form into the paper (figure 9). Alongside Hadzi’s work came the noise from the decades past: paint blobs, grease specks, and handprints all ingested ink and transferred it to paper. As I etched the stone to fortify the drawing, so too did I fortify these ephemeral records of the stone’s life (figures 10, 11).
Figures 9, 10, 11 (left to right, click on image to enlarge): Stone before removals after inking up: notice how the invisible noise around Hadzi’s forms take ink; Detail of large paint blob that took ink on lower border of image, lithographic proof; Detail of squirts and drops of paint along the right edge of the image, lithographic proof.
Having solidified the image, I next sought to manipulate it. I had planned to conduct selective erasure of the center of the image in hopes of ‘centering’ the more liminal and ephemeral paint drips and grease flecks on the stone’s margins. Eugène Delacroix’s fantastical lithographic illustrations for Goethe’s Faust inspired this thinking with their wild marginalia (figure 12). Delacroix found in the margins a place to make permanent the impermanent: to ‘fossilize’ his dynamic doodles and give them generative power as prints. But I soon realized that Hadzi’s image demanded something different: while Delacroix treated the lithographic stone like drawing paper, Hadzi used it to sculpt. His image was not a band of illustrations, but a colossal bronze sunk into the depths of the limestone. I focused then on three geometric forms of deepest black within the image: the skinny rectangular leg on the far left, the oval in the center, and the square form with a concave curve on the right. Rubbing sandpaper against the forms, I gently scrubbed at their middles and traced their edges. The blacks gradually lightened, as if I had begun to see through the surface of the form.
Printmaker Chris Wallace had told me that in lithography, what you see on the surface of the fully-inked stone is what you will get on paper. Satisfied with my partial removals, I retired the sandpaper for the ink roller, curious to see what the effect would be. What I failed to realize about Chris’ remark is that this only holds true for the first impression pulled, especially in the case of lithographic ghosts. As I fed the stone more ink for subsequent impressions, my selective removals began to fill in (figure 13). The ghosts of the past inserted themselves into the image, asserting their agency as they grew stronger with each impression.
At first, I was frustrated by the stone’s stubbornness after the time I had dedicated to sanding and rubbing at the surface. In a match of strength and memory, the stone had won. Yet this was precisely the phenomenon I was interested in: the generative, dynamic past had asserted its liveliness beneath my hands. If I wanted to make my own intervention into the stone’s history, I needed to get beyond its surface. I needed to sink something deeper than Hadzi’s sunken sculpture.
Unlike metal printing plates, as organic objects, lithography stones are subject to and beholders of the spontaneous effects of the earth. Sometimes, when grinding a stone in preparation for an image, a lithographer would find a fossil: the cast of a life of millennia past. Fossils were common enough in lithographic stones for the medium’s inventor, Alois Senefelder, to note that “very small deep veins, which often are fine as hairs, yellowish and grayish spots, impressions of fossil plants and fishes, etc., are not harmful” in his treatise on lithographic technique.9 The best lithographic limestones historically came from the quarries of Solnhofen Bavaria, whose fine texture made it the ideal ground both for lithography and for fossils.10
In the studio, I searched for materials to make my own fossils. I settled on a thick copper plate, inspired by the deep emboss it would make in the paper of the lithograph that I intended to layer it on. I turned again to the geometrical shapes I had attempted to erase from the image and took those as my lead. Using a bandsaw, I cut the metal into an oval, rectangle, and L-shaped forms (figure 14). The copper resisted the blade of the saw and the metal grew too hot to touch from the energy of the machine – a vivid reminder of the molten origins of the metal plate. The shaped copper proved as seductive as the lithographic stone, particularly the oval, which sat like a precious jewel or mirror in the palm of my hand.
Fossils capture the ephemeral: as the organic body decays, stone replaces the precise outlines and textures, capturing not quite life itself but its index. With my copperplate fossils, I decided to attempt fossilization of the ephemeral. I placed the rectangle and oval plates in an aquatint box, left to capture the chance residue of a cloud of rosin dust traditionally used to make the even tones of aquatint. Before melting the rosin to fix it, I pressed the tips of my fingers into the rosin on the oval plate and blew one deep exhale along the length of the rectangle. Placing the plates into acid to etch, I was reminded of the lithographic etch of my greasy fingertips. On the final, L-shaped plate, I used water and hard etching ground to create aqueous, organic forms and patterns.11 I splashed water on the plate and dripped bubbles of hard ground into the water, watching them grow like swirling cells or tentacles (figure 15). I left the watery ground to dry overnight, the brown forms crystallizing as the water evaporated, before applying aquatint to etch and capture the wavy forms of the exposed copper.
Dario Robleto’s work on nineteenth-century pulse waves also seeks to capture the seemingly-ephemeral: the human heartbeat. In thread-like gold structures (from the series “Unknown and Solitary Seas (Dreams and Emotions of the 19th century),” 2018), prints of smoke (from the series “The First Time the Heart (A Portrait of Life, 1854-1913),” 2018), and audio, Robleto reanimates the heartbeats of bodies long passed. While the nineteenth-century physiologists and printmakers distilled the heartbeat from life to pulse wave to woodblock print, Robleto reverses this process, starting with the printed image and moving it back through the soot and smoke that would have originally been used to capture it.12 Fossilization is turned inside out through his engagement with the ephemeral: he solidifies the inner beat and dynamism of life, while its bodily casing and frame disappears. Robleto specifically references the fossil in relation to his smoke prints of the waveforms and the “archaeological operation” of their uncovering, which he likens to “‘excavating the foot of a hummingbird, the little bones.’”13 Jennifer Roberts writes that the waveforms in his fossil-like prints have “been dug out of the atmosphere.”14 Fossils thus can not only capture the ephemeral, but also emerge from within it.
Returning to the lithographic stone, I too sought to excavate the ephemeral and to grasp the ghostly forms that persisted within it. Having shaped my copper plates that I intended on burying, I next sought to dig into the depths of the stone to a degree and intensity I had previously resisted for fear of permanently erasing the original image. I took an intaglio scraper to the stone and pressed hard, shaving away the deep black that had returned to my chosen shapes (figures 16, 17). The scraper left marks not dissimilar from the lithographic crayon: granulated, streaky lines of black that bore witness to my harsh movements (figure 18). As I persistently scratched away with my metal tool, I felt myself move deeper into the stone as I watched black turn to cream and saw the buildup of muddled shavings gather at the edge of the scraper. With the sandpaper, I had removed enough to catch a glimpse through the lid of the geometrical forms. Here, I scraped and excavated my way through the material density of the shapes and emerged on the other side.15
After I was satisfied with my removals, I etched the stone, following the ritual to preserve my interventions. Upon inking the plate, streaks of black began to creep back into the spaces I had so forcefully created (figure 19). These black ghosts grew along the lines of my scraping, but also along those of Hadzi’s original image – see for example the tail of a curved line that extends into the rectangular shape I attempted to purge. The ghosts intensified as I gave them more ink, parched pores still soaking up the grease (figure 20). I had not dived far enough through the image to move past the forms. I had only pushed them deeper and witnessed their return, like a buoyant object in water predestined to surface.
Pushed to the topmost surface of the stone, it was there that I ultimately decided to work. After rolling the stone with ink and witnessing the by now familiar persistent return of black, I wet the corner of a rag with lithotine and began to wipe (figure 21). Gently swirling the solvent through the geometric shapes, I watched the ink turn to creamy spirals and reveal more of the stone. I thought of Dario Robleto, who used lithotine and a brush to break through the soot of his prints to ephemeral lifeform beneath.16 To finally reach through the depths of the forms, I had to work at the surface: not deeply scratching, but gently wiping away the ephemeral ink. All of my excavations had brought me not deeper but inside and out: like Jasper Johns’ Skin with O’Hara Poem, I had both to “sink into and emerge from the surface of” the stone.17 It is at the surface level too that lithographic technique operates: involving no carving, no engraving, it is through the planographic contact of image and acid at the surface that the depths of the stone’s pores metamorphose.
Present Past / Past Present: Within Memory
I often equate the sculptural experience with basic geological phenomena. It is not unlike the layering of sediment deposits – the metamorphic phase where those sediments (experience) are compressed by time (contemplation) and action to convert or transform (crystallize) ideas into new images. Then, of course, the igneous or volcanic, the violent upheavals or the internal pressures that completely and dramatically alter and transfix concepts into solid reality. Therefore, creativity goes in various directions, some slow, some rapid, but always changing.
Dimitri Hadzi’s statement proved prophetic for my work: my final step was to layer my copper plate fossils into the lithograph I had pulled from his stone. I first placed the copper plates roughly aligned to their corresponding forms in the lithograph, placed the paper down, and ran it through the press. I peeled off the paper and reshuffled the copper plates. Without re-inking and without cleaning the press bed, I placed the copper forms, laid the paper, and pulled another impression (figure 22). In their different iterations, the same forms interjected themselves into varying layers of the lithograph (figure 1). Some sank deep and dark, their thick emboss a testament to their forceful downward pressure. Others are airy and light, like the wayward rectangle on the left margin that seems to drift, smoke-like, away from the scene. In not re-inking the plates, I created my own ghosts to coexist alongside those of the stone. The marks of ink from the dirty backs of the plates too became ghosts, transforming the press bed itself into a matrix to yield up ghosts of ink at its will, like the stone. The final print is then truly a monotype – or a compilation of monotypes that yield new generations of Hadzi’s form that float and procreate within the world of the image. Perhaps, the echoed shapes are not new generations birthed from the press, but rather visible evidence of the shapes’ decay. With every pull of the press, the ink fades and paper and plate are battered.
The final print, however, showcases rather than erases the temporal history of the image: rather than meld, the layered eras of the image coexist. The shapes, tones, lines, and textures occasionally visit each other throughout the stratigraphy, but they retain the individual identities that bear witness to the many temporalities of and within the work. In their movement through the stratigraphy of the image, they both generate and decay: birthing new forms and sinking themselves deeper into the image’s memory. Dimitri Hadzi’s statement speaks to this phenomenon. In his words, it is precisely temporal compression and sedimentation that metamorphoses forms into new images. “Creativity,” he writes, “goes in various directions.” Not backwards or forwards, but both: to swim within and without time and memory is the catalyst of artistic genesis.
The reader may be surprised to learn that I discovered Hadzi’s striking description of the creative process only after my decision to layer copperplate ‘fossils’ into the lithograph (it was at this moment of discovery that I felt sure my intuition was a sound one). Perhaps, however, it is not surprising at all. Taking my cues from Hadzi’s stone and the image it holds, I engaged with the original artist more deeply than I could have anticipated. Not only the memory of the stone’s image but that of its creative process became accessible as I sunk myself inside it alongside Hadzi’s sculptural form. As Dario Robleto’s work reveals, objects presumed dead may only be hibernating. These matrices still hold stories to be uncovered: stories that may not have been possible to uncover at the time of their making.18 We can thus approach the past not from the outside but from within it, moving through the complex yet porous layers of time and memory to come to something new.
Excavating a Gendered Past
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, multiple female artists experimented with the new medium of lithography. Women had long contributed to printmaking as engravers, illustrators, printers, publishers, and booksellers, even in an industry coded, then and now, as masculine due to its heavy presses, political bent, and physical work.19 Like their male colleagues and counterparts, they were exposed to the new medium in painting and drawing ateliers, by technical treatises, and in their printshops. Lithography’s as-yet unfixed status in the hierarchy of arts and mediums may have provided fertile ground for experimentation. Like Géricault and his lithographer, Charles Motte, female artists like Joséphine Formentin often printed scenes of Napoleonic veterans. She also worked on a series of portraits of the famous personages of the 1789 French Revolution. The vast majority, if not all, of those famous figures were men. Men indeed were the most recognized and powerful politicians of the revolution, the Napoleonic Empire, and the Restoration that followed, their dominance secured by the official exclusion of women as voters, soldiers, and representatives, despite women’s frequent and effective participation in revolutionary culture and protest. It could be said that in centering male icons, these lithographs perpetuated this patriarchal structure of politics and history.
However, in representing these figures, these female artists claimed roles as makers of history. Formentin participated in the diffusion of Bonapartist nostalgia that marked both early lithography and the Restoration period, when she etched and printed Nicolas Toussaint Charlet’s 1825 She has a French heart!…the old woman! (figure 23). Lithography, I believe, may have allowed female artists not only to represent the past, but to renegotiate and reinterpret its narratives. The medium’s adaptable and fluid materiality perhaps facilitated the crafting of a history that was also more fluid, more receptive of reinterpretation by hands who may have been excluded from official records. While Formentin did not compose the drawing or formulate the scene, it was her hand that processed the image and teased out its nuanced tones, her press that set it to paper, and her business that guarded its stone matrix. As in the Return from Russia, on the margins of the scene a cluster of ghostly soldiers marches into the distance (figure 24). Within their smudged hats is a shadow reminiscent of a thumbprint: a marker, literal or not, of the female hand that made their image, and a hand like the female hand at the center of the scene that nourishes the troop but that was excluded from fraternity at the core of the Bonapartist vision. Archives largely deny us records of these female artists. It is difficult to uncover even their names, let alone traces of their thoughts on the dynamic political and cultural change that marked their historical moment. But, as I learned while working alongside Hadzi’s stone, materials themselves hold memories. We may not have their recorded statements, but the marks, corrections, movements, and perhaps even bodies of these female lithographers are held in the stones they worked and the prints they made: their subjectivities that are not lost, but live on in the materials they formed, always sustaining the possibility to create.
Many thanks to Professor Jennifer Roberts and Professor Matt Saunders for their 2019 seminar Critical Printing, which provided the material, technical, and theoretical ground for this project, and thanks printmaker Christopher Wallace for his sessions and guidance on lithography.
1. Allegra Pesenti and the Menil Collection, Apparitions, Frottages and Rubbings from 1860 to Now. (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum; Houston: The Menil Collection, 2015), 20.
2. Pesenti, 15-19.
3. Bornstein and Saunders, 143, see also Pesenti, 11-15, 23.
4. Noah Heringman, ‘Natural History in the Romantic Period’ in A Concise Companion to the Romantic Age, edited by Jon Klancher (Hoboken, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2019); Maria Stavrinaki, “We Escape Ourselves’: The Invention and Interiorization of the Age of the Earth in the Nineteenth Century,’ Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics Vol. 69-70, no. 1, 2018; and Les origins du monde: l’invention de la nature au XIXe siècle, ed. Laura Bossi (Paris: Musée d’Orsay, 2020).
5. See Stephen Bann, Distinguished Images: Prints in the Visual Economy of 19th Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Michael Twyman, Breaking the Mould: The First Hundred Years of Lithography (London: British Library, 2001).
6. I unfortunately have no image of this moment – a true testament to my faith in the failure of the project.
7. Lithographer Chris Wallace was an invaluable resource to me throughout this project. He explained the phenomenon of lithographic ghosts and in discussing the removals process, he noted that the effect created on the stone is fairly representative of what the stone will give on paper. I also want to thank Kevin Liu, classmate and often partner in our concurrent explorations of lithography.
8. Matt Saunders was essential in permitting me to use Hadzi’s stone as the basis for this project, and I thank him for his confidence in my undertaking.
9. Alois Senefelder and J. W. Muller, The Invention of Lithography (New York: Fuchs & Lang Manufacturing Company, 1911), 104.
10. Susan Dackerman, The Paleontology of Print, lecture given at the Getty Museum, 18 April 2017, 4-5, as shared with me by Jennifer Roberts.
11. Critical Printing Teaching Fellow, Parker Hatley, suggested this technique and assisted in its execution.
12. Jennifer Roberts, Dario Robleto: Unknown and Solitary Seas: Dreams and Emotions of the 19th Century (Cambridge, MA: Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, 2019), 23-24.
13. Roberts, Dario Robleto, 24.
14. Ibid, 24.
15. Jennifer Roberts presented this idea of “through the other side” of print in relation to Johns’ Skin with O’Hara Poem in her Critical Printing seminar of Fall 2019. See also Jennifer L. Roberts, Jennifer. Quick, and Harvard Art Museums, Jasper Johns/in Press : The Crosshatch Works and the Logic of Print (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 2012).
16. Roberts, Dario Robleto, 24.
17. Roberts, Jasper Johns, 56.
18. A seminar with Dario Robleto in October 2019 was formative for these ideas of historic objects and memory.
19. This section draws from my dissertation in progress, focused on female printmakers in France from 1789-1848.
Sarah E. Lund is a PhD Candidate in History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University where she specializes in female artists and graphic arts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Her dissertation examines the work, materials, and political engagement of French female printmakers from 1789 to 1848.
Visit her website to learn more about her work.
Find her on Instagram: @sarah.e.lund