NEW YORK GIANTESSES.

Franz Gertsch
Museum of Modern Art,New York June 1990.
I was in New York to participate in the exhibition,"New Scottish Prints", at The Mary Ryan Gallery.After taking part in a ruinous interview with an American Print magazine in the morning,I made my way to the Museum of Modern Art. "MoMA" has a lot of "Trophy" Art & there is  much in the way of overblown abstraction.Still nursing a fuzzy hangover from a night in the "Kit-Kat" Club & wandering,I found myself in one of the side galleries where a temporary exhibition was running.
Over the past 30 years I must have seen--or at least attended--many hundreds of art exhibitions,remarkably few of which linger in my mind.However,this collection of wood-engravings by the Swiss Artist,Frans Gertsch,has never strayed far from my recollection.It was perfect in so many ways.
The show consisted of a series of giant prints(8x6 feet),each portraying a single,elegant & enigmatic, female head.In my experience,most contemporary woodcuts & engravings--certainly on this scale-- seem to take their cue from their expressionist counterparts in Weimar Germany,being rough-hewn & looking as if they've been carved out using an axe.These,on the other hand,had been worked on using the smallest of woodcutting tools;the subtlest half-tone gradations being meticulously picked  out inch by inch over the entire 48 square feet of the wood block.In terms of finesse,each image was like The Royal Mail's "Barrington" Edition but bigger--much bigger.

Each impression was printed by hand ,using optical lenses to rub the back of each sheet of specially commissioned  paper from the Japanese specialist Iwano Heizoburo.Sometimes it would take an entire day for Gertsch & his assistants to make just one impression.The finished blocks were each printed in variable editions, each in different--although essentially monochromatic--colourways & variations.
Visually & as an aesthetic experience,the effect of being in a room full of these gargantuan beauties is hard to describe.I've read various encomia to the works of Mark Rothko & the cumulative effect of being immersed in his abstractions.Though I've never quite seen the point of Rothko,being "immersed" in Gertsch's monolithic prints had a similar effect on me.Talk about "eyes following you round the room"--here there was no escape from multiple,silvery hued Natascha's & kittenishly probing Doris's.Looming over you from every line-of- sight, these intaglio'd leviathans eyed you inscrutably from all angles.
This ability to produce multiple copies,or more accurately,"impressions" of your image,is one of the most satisfying facets of  printmaking.One can spend weeks or possibly years labouring over a metal etching plate or woodblock,honing,proofing & otherwise fine-tuning it.It can be a long & arduous process.However at the end of it you have an object,microscopically sculpted in low-relief,which can then be very quickly inked up & printed with normally little effort.Risks can be taken with chromatics & tonalities during the printing, in the full knowledge that if it goes wrong....Hey,you can always bin it & print another one.Having printed many editions myself,I know there are few things more artistically satisfying than seeing a long-worked image in multiple;pristine & stretched out in front of you.
Sometimes quantity--& this show was the finest demonstration of this I have ever seen--definitely does have a quality all of it's own.