View Full Version : another cliche-verre
Ray Heath
01-06-2008, 07:49 AM
another cliche-verre experiment
what is it;
a photo?
a print?
an image on photographic paper?
a hand wrought image contact printed?
a form of printmaking? (in the non photographic sense)
comments/critiques/opinions?
Katharine Thayer
01-06-2008, 10:42 AM
Ray, as you probably know, the cliche-verre ("hand-drawn, light-printed", as the Glassman and Symmes "bible" of cliche-verre refers to it) dates back to the earliest photographic experiments by Henry Fox Talbot and others, so it certainly belongs well within the photographic tradition. And since the print is made on light-sensitive material, and since the negative, while hand-drawn, requires drawing in reverse tones so as to print as a negative, I think of it as a photographic print. Thanks for showing these. I don't have any thing to offer as far as critique, since I don't do open-ended critique, but maybe if you had specific questions.
kt
David A. Goldfarb
01-07-2008, 06:09 PM
The Polish artist and writer Bruno Schulz used the method of cliche verre to produce a book called The Booke of Idolatry (Xięga Bałwochwalcza), which is quite magnificent. He printed different variations between 1920 and 1924, and you can Google up some of the images from it, or find them in The Drawings of Bruno Schulz, published by Northwestern University Press. There is also an older Polish printed edition from the 1970s of just The Booke of Idolatry, but the reproductions aren't as good as the more recent Northwestern edition.
He used blackened glass plates and etched the image into them with a sharp stylus, so that they would print black on white.
There are some examples included in this article--
http://www.imageandnarrative.be/iconoclasm/heuckelom.htm
Katharine Thayer
01-11-2008, 04:18 PM
Today's New York Times has a short review of a show of 19th century cliche-verre work by Corot, Daubigny, Delacroix, Millet and Rousseau. At Peter Feeman in Soho, NY, Broadway at Prince.
David A. Goldfarb
01-11-2008, 05:32 PM
Thanks for the tip. I'm out of town at the moment, but if it's still up when I get back, I'll try to catch it.