Then, in , the first laser printers were introduced. At first, the cost of these was very high, but towards the end of the century this became less prohibitive. In , desktop publishing commenced, which would go on to further revolutionise the printing industry by making content creation more accessible and affordable. The printing industry in Europe is in the midst of a digital revolution: Industry 4.
In this new context, it has proven itself to be adaptive, innovative, modern, competitive and here to stay in a digital world. Today, the graphic industry embodies both the traditional and the modern - using traditional printing techniques supported by digital technology and workflows, as well as new techniques such as digital printing. Technology for the more traditional presses i. First half of 20th Century: Boom The many significant inventions and revolutions of earlier centuries ensured that the printing industry in Europe began the 20 th Century as a dominant and growing industry.
Second half of 20th Century: New Technologies By the end of the 20 th Century, print was on the brink of another revolution: digitisation. When the Chinese introduced movable type sometime between and and improved on the design over the coming centuries, bookmaking became much more possible and versatile. Since then, printmaking has spread throughout the world, serving many purposes and artists over the centuries. The earliest European prints date back to the beginning of the 15th century when woodcut prints were used to make paper playing cards in Germany.
The technique soon passed down to artists, who used it to render bold figures against blank backgrounds. As the practice evolved, artists began creating more complicated designs, with architecture and landscapes in the background and elaborate borders. Metal engraving, the first intaglio printing form, arrived a few decades later and soon became the most popular printmaking technique for its refined results.
The images combined tiny dots and short cuts punched into the surface. While not the original inventor, Gutenberg perfected the movable type printing press around and popularized it in Europe. His most famous works, the 1,page Gutenberg Bibles, were masterful prints that used printed gothic type designed to look like hand calligraphy.
In the early 16th century, printmaking masters emerged. His work brought great detail to his subject matter, including religion, history, folklore, mythology, and portraiture. He worked in woodcuts, etchings, drypoints, and metal engravings. Another notable master from the era, Albrecht Altdorfer, was the first to print landscapes as subjects rather than as backgrounds.
The Flemish engraver, Hendrik Goltzius, used his cuts to imitate different surfaces and textures. During the later half of the 16th century, publishing houses and skilled artisans took over the printing world. Printed maps became increasingly popular as people began traveling more frequently. Publishers would also buy plates from their original artists and print them in massive quantities, sometimes ruining the original plates in the process.
As engraving became increasingly commercialized and reproductive, artists in the 17th century turned to etching. Acid etching was seen as more creative, flexible and honorable. As Italy became a center for the technique, printmaker Guido Reni developed the distinctive Italian style of delicate lines and dots. Italy-based French artist Jacques Callot gained the most acclaim as the first printmaker to use repeated acid bitings to create tonal variations.
He also used his own custom-made etching needle to recreate the swelling and tapering lines characteristic of engraving. In the Netherlands, etching saw another creative explosion. Hercules Seghers, a true experimenter, created many unorthodox prints, such as printing on colored canvases or placing white lines on dark backgrounds. He developed a unique style dominated by rocky landscapes.
While many artists in Holland created masterful etchings, the famous Rembrandt has stood the test of time. Through his roughly plates, he rendered everything from religious and historical subjects to the most mundane activities.
He explored every possibility of the etched line and later experimented by combining etching and drypoint. These refined and highly stylized woodcuts depicted everyday life. The first master of the form was Hishikawa Moronobu, who used street scenes, peddlers and crowds as subject matter.
Italy remained the center for European printmaking throughout the 18th century. As a master architectural printmaker, Giovanni Battista Piranesi was prolific, with 3, large etchings to his name. Satirist William Hogarth ushered printmaking into England with his national school. His influence quickly sparked works from fellow caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson. The poet William Blake took printmaking into new experimental forms in his book illustrations. The 19th century injected many aesthetic styles into the art world.
Each artistic revolution brought its respective printmaking masters. The German invention of lithography presented a new medium to artists, while the French influence dominated the European printmaking world.
After a few decades of producing masterful lithographs, the country saw an artistic revolution at mid-century with the Barbizon school. Woodblock printing was also used in Japan and Korea at the time, and metal block printing was also developed at some point during that period, typically for Buddhist and Taoist texts. Moveable type, which replaced panels of printing blocks with moveable individual letters that could be reused, was developed by Bi Sheng, from Yingshan, Hubei, China, who lived roughly from to A.
The first moveable type was carved into clay and baked into hard blocks that were then arranged onto an iron frame that was pressed against an iron plate. Shen Kuo explained that Bi Sheng did not use wood because the texture is inconsistent and absorbs moisture too easily, and also presents a problem of sticking in the ink. The baked clay cleaned-up better for reuse.
By the time of the Southern Song Dynasty, which ruled from to A. Massive printed book collections also became a status symbol for the wealthy class. Woodtype made a comeback in when Ching-te magistrate Wang Chen printed a treatise on agriculture and farming practices called Nung Shu.
Wang Chen devised a process to make the wood more durable and precise. He then created a revolving table for typesetters to organize with more efficiency, which led to greater speed in printing. It was exported to Europe and, coincidentally, documented many Chinese inventions that have been traditionally attributed to Europeans. Goldsmith and inventor Johannes Gutenberg was a political exile from Mainz, Germany when he began experimenting with printing in Strasbourg, France in He returned to Mainz several years later and by , had a printing machine perfected and ready to use commercially: The Gutenberg press.
In order to make the type available in large quantities and to different stages of printing, Gutenberg applied the concept of replica casting, which saw letters created in reverse in brass and then replicas made from these molds by pouring molten lead.
Researchers have speculated that Gutenberg actually used a sand-casting system that uses carved sand to create the metal molds.
The letters were fashioned to fit together uniformly to create level lines of letters and consistent columns on flat media. Gutenberg was also able to perfect a method for flattening printing paper for use by using a winepress, traditionally used to press grapes for wine and olives for oil, retrofitted into his printing press design.
Gutenberg borrowed money from Johannes Fust to fund his project and in , Fust joined Gutenberg as a partner to create books. They set about printing calendars, pamphlets and other ephemera.
In , Gutenberg produced the one book to come out of his shop: a Bible. In general, it allows the spread of ideas and sciences. While woodcutting remains almost unchanged and is limited to the illustration of cheap books, many printmakers improve and vary the intaglio technique combining its methods, while the new method of mezzotint encourages the rendering of tones. The mighty buildings, the wars of the kings of that era with besieged cities and battles stimulate the interest of famous printmakers all over Europe, who create independent prints or series of prints, with buildings, cities and military scenes, spreading the splendour of powerful people of that era.
Others respond to the will of the people to learn geography and get to know other countries. Printmaking helps the publication of illustrated books with these subjects. Reproductive printmaking dominates the 17th century. The most famous creators are copied countless times in prints of unequal quality. Some of them are a poor version of the original work, but some others often look like masterpieces and manage to yield both the details and the tones of the work.
The so-called Landscape with a Lute Player is, in addition to its artistic and technical quality, a good example of reproductive printmaking. In the 18th century, the golden century of printmaking in Europe, intaglio printmaking dominates and its methods are being perfected with colour print-making, the appearance of the crayon manner etching and the aquatint.
Far from adopting an attitude of contempt, the painters themselves create prints and illustrate the great literary texts. The profession of illustrator specializing in artistic or scientific illustration appears.
The great art collectors pay the most important printmakers to reproduce their collection into impressive albums, while large prints, reproductions of the painting creations, are sold each year on art markets.
Countless etchings and engravings having for subject the antiquity and myths give the opportunity to a wider range of people to travel in time and space, illustrating rich publications of travellers-designers and well-known literary texts. More than ever, mythology is also a source for artists to demonstrate their craftsmanship and aesthetic choices. Large scale intaglio prints reproducing paintings of various European artistic schools are made by famous print-makers, whose technique — the accuracy of the design, the rendering of the tones, the sense of depth and the expression of persons — stands out.
Genre scenes representation of aspects of everyday life is fashionable, influenced by the tradition of the Flemish school. Some painters-printmakers, wishing to give their prints the colours of painting, invent new techniques and use two or more plates.
Francisco de Goya, using mainly etching and aquatint, elevates printmaking as an artistic language. The 19th century can be described as the century of the picture. The improvements of two new techniques that appeared at the end of the 18th century — lithography and wood engraving — help to increase the number of printed pictures and of copies that circulate Thanks to new techniques, the public is expanding and the art of printmaking is increasingly attracting artists for whom it is a full-fledged medium of expression.
Printmaking as an original creation — as seen in the majority of works — first embraces lithography, which also marks the triumph of romanticism, then, after , etching, which allows a free black and white writing, while we see over the last decades that the colour gradually takes the place of the black.
At the end of the century, printmaker artists start to sign and number their prints. At the same time, scientific discoveries follow one another. With photography and the successive methods invented, photoengraving marks the beginning of a new era in the history of illustrated books and the big printmaking workshops specialised in the reproduction of paintings gradually abandon the burin and the simple line etching to perfect various industrial techniques which produce high precision matrices for relief printing and intaglio printing.
Soon, the world of publications leaves behind the reproductive printmaking for a reproduction without printmaking. Popular printmaking embraces it and integrates it into its subjects. Litho-graphers keep perfecting this technique during the whole century, from monochrome prints that could be coloured to colour prints, on stone and rapidly on zinc, and with photographically transferred representation. Lithography dominates as a mean of expression for painters since it offers easy tonal transitions, a rich range of colours, and does not require the difficult technique of relief or intaglio printing.
Financially, it is cost-efficient since it allows a high number of copies. Sketch artists and editorial cartoonists adopt this technique in the Press or in albums, famous artists draw posters on stone or on zinc.
Skilful lithographers replicate old paintings or paintings of their time with remarkable vivacity. Thomas Bewick, an English printmaker, was the first one to use wood engraving systematically in his book A General History of Quadrupeds, published in With this technique relief printing is reborn for books illustration.
It combines the ease of printing with the text, the high strength of the block that can withstand many printings and the detailed rendering of the image, similar to engraving. Born in England, this technique is spread all over Europe, the blocks are circulated everywhere, magnificent images illustrate both the Press and literary and scientific books.
Up to the 20th century there are printmakers that choose wood engraving, due to the quality of the rendering of the details, despite the fact that this technique is extremely demanding. After , brothers George and Edward Dalziel, leading printmakers and publishers of the 19th century in England, cooperate with all famous designers of their country for the illustration of books with wood engravings.
At the end of the 19th century, Gauguin engraves wood for two marvellous series, the Noa Noa series and the so-called Vollard series, along with paintings with the same subjects. The 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, for printmaking, are characterised by the rapid evolution of technology with an increasingly difficult answer to the question: What an authentic print is today? Printed images are everywhere available to the public following the development of offset.
Moreover, years ago, artists understood that with traditional lithography — on zinc and printed in the offset press — and the new technique of screen printing, they can easily multiply, thanks to the photo-transfer of their works that the public likes, without the slightest interference on their behalf.
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