Contact: Art and the Pull of Print - by Jennifer L Roberts Paperback

About the Book

"A leading art historian presents a new grammar for understanding the meaning and significance of print. In process and technique, printmaking is an art of physical contact. From woodcut and engraving to lithography and screenprinting, every print is the record of a contact event: the transfer of an image between surfaces, under pressure, followed by release. Contact reveals how the physical properties of print have their own poetics and politics and provides a new framework for understanding the intelligence and continuing relevance of printmaking today. Focusing on the material and spatial transformations of the printmaking process rather than its reproducibility, this beautifully illustrated book explores the connections between print, painting, and sculpture, but also between the fine arts, industrial arts, decorative arts, and domestic arts. Throughout, Roberts asks what artists are learning from print, and what we, in turn, can learn from them."--

Book Synopsis

A leading art historian presents a new grammar for understanding the meaning and significance of print

In process and technique, printmaking is an art of physical contact. From woodcut and engraving to lithography and screenprinting, every print is the record of a contact event: the transfer of an image between surfaces, under pressure, followed by release. Contact reveals how the physical properties of print have their own poetics and politics and provides a new framework for understanding the intelligence and continuing relevance of printmaking today.

The seemingly simple physics of printmaking brings with it an array of metamorphoses that give expression to many of the social and conceptual concerns at the heart of modern and contemporary art. Exploring transformations such as reversal, separation, and interference, Jennifer Roberts explores these dynamics in the work of Christiane Baumgartner, David Hammons, Edgar Heap of Birds, Jasper Johns, Corita Kent, Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu, Robert Rauschenberg, and many other leading artists who work at the edge of the medium and beyond.

Focusing on the material and spatial transformations of the printmaking process rather than its reproducibility, this beautifully illustrated book explores the connections between print, painting, and sculpture, but also between the fine arts, industrial arts, decorative arts, and domestic arts. Throughout, Roberts asks what artists are learning from print, and what we, in turn, can learn from them.

Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Review Quotes

"[Contact: Art and the Pull of Print] is an indispensable manual on the medium of print and key histories of its varied manifestations across the world. . . . This book celebrates a medium that is far-reaching, that has impacted the way we share and look at images today, that is technical, rule-based, capricious, and mystical at the same time - in short, this is a work in praise of process."---Lyrene Kühn-Botma, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte

"Revelatory. . . . Part of the genius of Roberts' book is its elaboration of printmaking elements in relation to the works of individual artists exploring and exploiting them. . . . Roberts reads the prints she selects as about the elements of printmaking. She shows, in short, how art prints have printmaking in mind. Prints have minds for Roberts not in the sense that they are alive, but rather because they are animated by--meaningful by dint of--the people, processes, and materials used in producing and reproducing them. . . . Roberts' book on printmaking . . . ask[s] us to consider the broad purchase of material intelligence, or knowing by hand."---Lisa Gitelman, Journal of Communication

"I have waited 25 years for this book. . . . [Contact] fills a vital gap in contemporary art historical scholarship and criticism. . . . Roberts' close reading of, or into, the materiality of print yields unexpected and illuminating results. Familiar, functional terms are opened up and become revelatory of hitherto unrealized reverberations, connections and, thus, possibilities. . . . [A] rich and enthralling analysis."---Ruth Pelzer-Montada, Printmaking Today

"Contact offers one of the most comprehensive studies of modern and contemporary printmaking published to date, while also framing the field as one that is alive, exciting and full of potential."---Britany Salsbury, Burlington Magazine

"[Contact] offers a fresh perspective on printmaking, synthesizing simple maneuvers like reversal and pressure to account for the medium's expansive influence. . . . The book is both conversational and accessible. . . . A must read. . . . Contact introduces a new way of thinking about print."---Ann Shafer, Platemark Podcast

"On every page of this book there is an idea with the potential to transform the reader's perspective, not only on print, but also on culture more broadly. . . . In a burgeoning field of art-historical studies that take the fine-grained specifics of materi­ality as their focus, Contact is one of the most exciting contributions to date."---Christina J. Faraday, Apollo

"An articulate, creative exploration of this unique artist-medium relationship."-- "Choice"

"[Roberts] redeems a process we dismiss too breezily. . . . A chronicle of creativity as well as a redemption of printmaking."---Jeannette Cooperman, Common Reader

"Roberts deals expertly with the deeper meaning of making something meant to be made again. . . . Intellectually rich and provocative."---Murray Whyte, Harvard Magazine

About the Author

Jennifer L. Roberts is the Drew Gilpin Faust Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. She is the author of Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America, Jasper Johns/In Press: The Crosshatch Works and the Logic of Print, and Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History.