Colour printing

In the winter of 1896 Munch moved to Paris. One of the reasons may have been that he now seriously wished to focus on printmaking, and therefore was keen to benefit from the expertise of the great printers in Paris. Another reason behind the move is that many of Munch's friends from Berlin had left the city, many of them for Paris.

The problems which Munch focused on in depth in Paris included various methods of making colour prints and in this field Paris had considerably more to offer than Berlin.Thanks to the increase in the popularity of lithography around 1890, soon a number of painters tried their hand at this technique, and, despite the fact that colour lithography was long seen by many artists and collectors as being an inferior technique, such prints soon won great popularity in other circles. In 1893-1894, Roger Marx put together two graphic portfolios which became highly significant for the further development of graphic art. The selection was daring and it came to be seen as representative of modern printmaking. These portfolios were published by Ambroise Vollard, who published two further portfolios in 1896 and 1897.

Munch arrived in Paris in February 1896 and his natural place at the forefront of modern art was assured when he also contributed a print to Vollard's portfolio, namely the lithograph Anxiety, printed in red and black by the famous lithographer Auguste Clot. The normal principle for colour prints is to use a separate plate for each colour, but in his print for the portfolio Munch simplified this process. Anxiety was printed in two colours from one stone which was rolled with black ink on the lower part and red in the upper part. Whether this was the invention of Munch himself or the printer we do not know, but the process displays an audacity and daring which is entirely typical of Munch.

Munch's masterwork in the colour lithograph The Sick Child, was also printed by Clot in 1896. Munch's good friend from that time, the German painter and printmaker Paul Herrmann, gave an often-quoted description of how that lithograph was printed: 'The lithographic stones with the large head were already lying side by side in rows ready to be printed. Munch arrived, stood in front of the row, closed his eyes, and waved his fingers in the air without looking, ordering 'Print grey, green, blue, brown'. Then he opened his eyes and said to me, 'Let's go and have a schnapps'. And the printer printed until Munch returned and once more without looking ordered 'Yellow, pink, red' and so it went on a couple more times.'

Although the story was told many, many years later and possibly bears the signs of having improved in the telling, in the main it appears credible. Herrmann was not one of the most sensational artists of the period, but some technical finesses in his graphic art show an astounding similarity with Munch, and it is by no means certain that Munch himself was the pioneer in the field. We know, for example, that Herrmann combined lithography and woodcuts in colour printing as early as 1896, while we are not aware of such combination prints on Munch's part until several years later.

Munch produced a couple of pure transfer lithographs with Clot in 1896, Attraction II and Separation II, which are both drawn using lithographic crayon on paper. To obtain texture in the drawing, he used an artist's portfolio as a base, where the rough canvas-like surface has been transferred to the drawing. Both the lithographs are also printed in a few multi-colour examples, but these are fairly discreet and subdued in their use of colour.

The use of metal plates also offered several opportunities for colour printing and during his time in Paris, between 1896 and 1897, Munch completed a number of very fine prints in burnished aquatint, a technique similar to mezzotint.

On a ready-prepared mezzotint plate ink is held densely and evenly over the entire plate producing a completely black print. The motif is then scraped or burnished out. Unlike drypoint, line etchings and most forms of normal drawing, the artist works from dark to light, and forms the motif out of the light parts instead of using lines and contours. The technique is ideally suited to fine, nuanced transitions and soft surface effects, and throughout the nineteenth century was very popular in reproductive work. The technique become incredibly popular in the USA and Britain in particular, and was also used by some artists.

Munch - like Paul Herrmann - used a somewhat simpler method than the original mezzotint technique. Instead of preparing the copper plates with a rocker, he bought zinc plates which were already prepared with an aquatint ground. The motif was burnished out in the same way as in a mezzotint and the plate was then printed either in block or as a colour print. For inking the colours he used dollies, which were dipped in ink and then dabbed in the desired location on the plate (à poupée). Because the plates had to be re-inked for each print, it was hardly possible to obtain two identical impressions. Nor are zinc plates able to withstand very many printings before they wear down, and the maximum number of colour prints is around ten to twelve, as a rule fewer.

It was in Paris that Munch also began to carve woodcuts, and his work in this field came to have great significance for the further development of this type of graphic art.

The artists most often cited as possible precursors of Munch's in this field are Paul Gauguin and Felix Vallotton, but although it is easy enough to find similarities between their art and that of Munch, it is difficult to demonstrate any direct influence in the use of woodcut as a printing method. Munch's earliest woodcuts can rather be seen as logical extensions of his work on lithographs created at the same time. The strong, block lines in lithographs such as The Scream and Anxiety, have led to many misunderstandings as to the technique, and it is common for them to be taken for woodcuts. The large, dark areas in lithographs such as Death in the Sickroom, Jealousy, etc. have the silky, velvet-block appearance of lithographs but clearly show that Munch developed his graphic images by using simple surfaces and lines in a way which was closer to woodcut.

Although he had also obtained many unique effects with his black and white graphics, it is likely that the painter in Munch missed the opportunity of using colour as an element in his art. Possibly the process of colour lithography and burnished aquatint, in the long run, was too time-consuming and complicated for his nature. Woodcut, on the other hand, presented new and almost undreamt-of possibilities. The plates could be inked with different colours in the same way as with burnished aquatint, and they could be divided into separate sections, which could be inked individually. He used a fretsaw for this, and cut out the individual parts with great skill. As far as we know, Munch was the first artist to use such a method. Each separate part was inked with the desired colour and the entire block was reassembled like a jigsaw puzzle and printed in a single operation instead of printing many plates one on top of the other. Dividing up the motif in this way also strengthened the composition, which Munch often exploited as an extra feature.

For such colour printing Munch tended to use a key block where he carved the actual motif itself and a divided plate for printing the other colours. However, Munch could make colour woodcuts even more complicated by inking the plate with several colours at the same time, also in combination with divided woodblocks. A good example of this is Towards the Forest where the entire key block is usually inked with three colours, and the colour block is divided into many sections, which are printed in different colours.

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