An engraving workshop is a working atmosphere. When we change it, it happens that the engraving also changes. Edda Renouf says that her engraved line became more incisive and nervous when she went to work at Tanguy Garric’s, where there was a more informal atmosphere than in the American workshops that she had attended until then: “something has been released in me” she says .
The engraving we call original is almost always a work of collaboration. The printer brings not only his technique and his instruments but a method of work and a human relationship that will be printed, too, leave on the print a distinctive mark that gives a certain air of family to all works coming out of the same workshop, as different as the artists are.
It takes time to build a style. But the period is much less favorable to the duration than at the time of Fernand Mourlot and Roger Lacourière. The longevity of the workshops has diminished considerably as evidenced by the disappearance of many of them in recent years. The crisis has had other effects, less direct, which affect the very conception of the profession. In an active art market, a large print industry devoted itself to offering big names in painting at affordable prices (see the operation in the sixties). As the market for these has collapsed, the print has refocused on rarer and more complex works that also respond to the renewed interest of artists for works on paper, drawing to photography. In recent years there has been much rediscovery: ancestral processes (such as monotype, woodcut, stencil) or more recent ones (such as collotype or gravure) but which also correspond to a concern for the origins, in particular this is the beginning of photomechanical printing. We also witnessed the renewal of certain techniques that have extended their scope and their plastic possibilities screen printing is no longer limited, far from it, to the flat and bright colors that won him the favor of Cinetism, Pop art, from the narrative Figuration she became polyglot, translating both the photographic glaze and the smoke of the charcoal, arriving at subjects that could be thought of as reserved for lithography that we look at the editions of an Eric Seydoux for s to convince. Logically (because the history of print often sees the continual recycling of commercial processes for artistic purposes), techniques such as offset acquire their nobility under the impetus of artists who deliberately use them for what they are, not as substitutes for anything else.
The last aspect of this evolution, the most important probably because it substantially modifies the uses of the profession, is the circulation of techniques. In the United States, a long time ago we find generalist workshops, practicing concurrent intaglio, lithography, screen printing, adapting itself to this sense of the technical combination where the American artists are masters since Rauschenberg and stella. In France, most of the workshops have retained their specialization, the world of intaglio and lithography remaining relatively foreign to each other. The current trend seems to call into question this tightness, with workshops simultaneously practicing flat processes, relief, recessed, integrating the photographic transfer to traditional methods of engraving can be cited in this respect the very different examples of Arte, d Item or Michael Woolworth. Even in the workshops that remain attached to their original technique, we perceive ferments of versatility, with the incorporation of collages and manual rework, with the use of media other than paper, with an intrusion in the field of artist’s book. The period is all-out prospecting and this attitude overflows the print beyond its usual limits.
On a different level, it is in the same spirit of openness that we must put the exchanges maintained by the French workshops with the international art scene. Many foreign artists continue to make their prints in France and, in the depressed context of the French market, some workshops even work more for foreign sponsors than for the Hexagon.
This decompartmentalization is accompanied by many of them an expansion of their status as strict artisans they were, they became publishers of their own prints, both for commercial reasons and willingness to engage more artists who work at home, to defend a personal option on the art scene. For example, some workshops are involved as publishers in major international events such as Arco or the Basel Fair, without