Ken Tyler processing lithography stones drawn by Helen Frankenthaler during her 'Reflections' series, Tyler Graphics Ltd., Mount Kisco, New York, 1994.
Kenneth E. Tyler, AO (born December 13, 1931) is a master printmaker, publisher, arts educator and a prominent figure in the American post-war revival of fine art, limited edition printmaking. Tyler established leading print workshops and publishing houses on both West and East coasts of the United States and made several innovations in printmaking technology. His technical expertise and willingness to experiment on a bold scale drew many famous and influential artists to his workshops, among them Frank Stella, Helen Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg, Anthony Caro and Jasper Johns.[1] Ken Tyler remains active as an educator and promoter of fine art printmaking, and mentor of a younger generation of printers through his various training and collecting institutions in Singapore, Japan, Australia and the US. The largest collection of prints produced at Tyler's successive workshops is currently held by the National Gallery of Australia.
Ken Tyler was born in East Chicago, Indiana in 1931.[2] His father was Romanian and his mother Hungarian, and his parents both emigrated as young children to United States.[2] There Tyler’s father (whose family name was Tyira, converted to Tyler in the US) worked in the Indiana steel mills from 12 years of age and also learned the trade of a stonemason. This background gave Tyler an early appreciation of the need for technical excellence.[3]
Encouraged by his school music teacher, Tyler developed an interest in the visual arts and subsequently studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, from 1950 to 1951. Coming from a family of modest means, Tyler sought paid employment throughout his student years. From 1951 to 1952, he studied liberal arts at Indiana University, which, according to Tyler, consisted of "one semester at the campus in Bloomington, Indiana and one semester at Gary, Indiana extension while I worked full time in the Gary steel mill and attended evening classes at the extension".[4] Originally Tyler had planned further studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. It was during the Korean War, and while applying for his passport in September 1952, he was drafted for military service. After undergoing basic training, he excelled as an officer candidate and won the opportunity to return to college, where he was given the title of ‘Regimental Staff Artist’, maintained an active private painting studio and also edited the Officer Corps newspaper.
Tyler studied further following his time in the army, earning a bachelor's in art education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1957. Tyler then studied lithography under Garo Antreasian at the John Herron School of Art (now Herron School of Art and Design) in Indiana, graduating with a Master of Art Education in 1963.
Tamarind Lithography Workshop
In 1963, Tyler received a Ford Foundation Grant to study printing at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles.[citation needed] This workshop, co-founded by June Wayne and Clinton Adams, was established in 1960 with the intention of reviving the ‘dying’ art of lithography. Here Tyler worked under technical director Irwin Hollander and also later studied under the French master printer Marcel Durassier. Durassier, who was noted for his technical skill, had worked at the French lithography workshop, Mourlot Frères, with some of the great artists of the School of Paris, including Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró. Here Tyler acquired a broad technical skills base through research and practice, and from 1964-5 was appointed Technical Director of the Workshop. It was in this role that Tyler had his first major collaboration with Josef Albers, an artist who became, in Tyler’s words, "the catalyst of my career."[5]
Gemini Ltd. and Gemini G.E.L.
In 1965, Ken Tyler established his own print atelier, Gemini Ltd., at 8221 Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles with his former wife Kay Tyler. From this modest workshop was born Gemini G.E.L. (Graphic Editions Ltd.). The following year Tyler, with the backing of his partners, Sidney Felsen and Stanley Grinstein, began to develop this print and publishing workshop into a large and influential organisation that attracted American artists including Josef Albers, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. The clean, crisp look and flawless finish of many Gemini G.E.L. prints, as well as Tyler’s apparent preference for collaborating with well-established artists, was criticized by some commentators. Participants in the 1971 Gemini G.E.L. exhibition Technics and Creativity, for example, were accused of commercialism and too great an emphasis on technique.[6] These criticisms tended to ignore Tyler’s use of many complex, time-consuming traditional methods, which he often combined with less orthodox printing processes. Works such as Robert Rauschenberg’s iconic Booster (1967), which was an experimental and labor-intensive "hybrid" of lithography and screen printing, exemplify this approach.[7] Tyler's work with well-known artists also created the economic and technically innovative foundation for lesser known artists to print and be published through Gemini G.E.L.
Tyler Workshop Ltd. and Tyler Graphics Ltd.
In 1973, after selling his collection of printer's proofs and drawings to the National Gallery of Australia, Tyler parted ways with Gemini G.E.L. to seek new direction on the East Coast of America. There he established Tyler Workshop Ltd. in Bedford Village, New York. The following year this workshop became Tyler Graphics Ltd., and in 1987 expanded its premises to Mount Kisco, New York.
When Tyler made the "difficult decision" to retire from printing in January 2000, he had built up a massive operation that was staffed by highly trained specialists and serviced by state-of-the-art printing technology.[9][8] Print production has ceased at Tyler Graphics Ltd., following the establishment of The Singapore Tyler Print Institute in 2001.
Contributions to print technology
Ken Tyler has had a formative influence on the art and science of printmaking for close to five decades. His contributions to printing technology were driven by his industrial background and his recognition that "most traditional [printmaking] methods, as well as some recent practices of the hand-printing crafts, were not compatible with the images of major contemporary artists. As a collaborator I left the ranks of this revival to aid the major artist in his search for new graphic expression and new work environments."[5] Tyler became renowned for printing works on paper that were massive in size and required the co-ordination of complicated mixed media and multiple printing matrices (Frank Stella’s The Fountain, for example, measures over 2 metres x over 7 metres, used hundreds of plates and was printed on a specially constructed press). Tyler also custom-designed paper and equipment to his own specifications; built his own paper mill, which contributed to a resurgence in the use of handmade papers among printmakers; and travelled to Japan to investigate traditional printing and papermaking methods.
In 1965, Tyler designed the first of several hydraulic lithographic presses, and two years later he received a federal arts funding grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for research and development into paper, embossing and three-dimensional works.[5] In 1978 Tyler patented and registered Tycore, a rigid archival honeycomb paper panel, and a decade later, from 1988–90, he designed and constructed a computer-controlled, power-driven combination lithography and etching press with a five-by-ten foot printing bed.
To ensure that the workshop’s momentum continued, Tyler encouraged artists to return for additional projects using a variety of methods and materials, maintaining that "you couldn’t just keep inviting [artists] back to make a lithograph or inviting them back to make a silk screen. You [had] to keep giving them something new to chew on".[4] According to Tyler, it was sufficient to offer the option to work on a large scale. He also wanted to present artists with the opportunity to work with handmade paper. This began with a project with Robert Rauschenberg in 1985-94, who explored handmade papermaking in his series Pages and fuses at the paper mill in Ambert in France. A further collaboration using handmade paper occurred between Tyler and David Hockney, who produced a series of paper pulp works in 1978. Later, Frank Stella explored the notion of papermaking further in his Moby Dick Domes series, notable for their technical complexity and their three-dimensional nature. After years of research to work out ways of making shaped paper, Tyler developed a vacuum method to produce the required sculptural form.
In a later collaboration between Stella and Tyler, The Fountain ‘mural’ print (1992) exemplifies Tyler’s ability to offer mixed media prints on a grand scale. The Fountain measures over 2 metres x by 7 metres, and three woodblocks and 105 intaglio plates were employed to produce the sixty-seven coloured print Stella required in his original collage composition. Tyler once commented, "My choice of wood-block was made based on the large size of the print. Both Frank and I knew we were going to use some of the existing metal plates from the Moby Dick prints series. It was determined that the black image would be printed from the woodblock and the colors would be from metal insert plates".[4] Very large triple ply washi (Kozo fibre) papers were created especially for this ambitious project, as was a custom-built printing press.
Following his retirement from printing, Ken Tyler remains committed to making use of the latest technologies. Work is currently underway on Tyler’s personal inventory site, and he has also commissioned comprehensive virtual archives of Tyler material at such institutions as the National Gallery of Australia.
Collections
Tyler's legacy will continue through his contributions to many international collections, both of artworks and archival material. In the United Kingdom, the Tate Gallery holds a significant collection of prints focusing on the latter half of Tyler's career. In the United States, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, has a comprehensive Gemini G.E.L. collection and has also produced an online catalogue raisonné. Other major collections of Tyler prints include those at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, USA; the Center for Contemporary Graphic Art in Fukushima, Japan; and the Singapore Art Museum. The latter collection was acquired with the assistance of the Singapore government, who in 2002 also supported the establishment of the Singapore Tyler Print Institute. The Institute contains all the original printing presses and equipment shipped from Tyler's workshops in America, including a 100 tonne hydraulic platen press.[10] In Canberra, Australia, the National Gallery of Australia holds a collection of over 7000 Tyler works, as well as an archive of related film, sound and photographic material.
Honours
Honorary Officer of the Order of Australia — "For service to the Arts, particularly through the Kenneth Tyler Collection at the National Gallery of Australia and through philanthropy." December 2, 2011.[11]
Lithography is a planographic method of printing originally based on the immiscibility of oil and water. The printing is from a stone or a metal plate with a smooth surface. It was invented in 1796 by the German author and actor Alois Senefelder and was initially used mostly for musical scores and maps. Lithography can be used to print text or images onto paper or other suitable material. A lithograph is something printed by lithography, but this term is only used for fine art prints and some other, mostly older, types of printed matter, not for those made by modern commercial lithography.
Robert Hamilton Blackburn was an African-American artist, teacher, and master printmaker.
June Claire Wayne was an American painter, printmaker, tapestry innovator, educator, and activist. She founded Tamarind Lithography Workshop (1960–1970), a then California-based nonprofit print shop dedicated to lithography.
Grahame Edwin King was a master Australian printmaker, who has been called the "patron saint of contemporary Australian printmaking". He was responsible for the revival of print making in Australia in the 1960s. He helped set up the Print Council of Australia, of which he was the first Honorary Secretary and was later President. He taught printmaking at The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) from 1966 to 1988. In 1991, he was awarded an Order of Australia for his services to education. As well as teaching, King produced his own art work, concentrating on lithographs and monotypes. He was also a skilled photographer and used his photography both in his teaching and in his practice.
Vitreography is a fine art printmaking technique that uses a 3⁄8-inch-thick (9.5 mm) float glass matrix instead of the traditional matrices of metal, wood or stone. A print created using the technique is called a vitreograph. Unlike a monotype, in which ink is painted onto a smooth glass plate and transferred to paper to produce a unique work, the vitreograph technique involves fixing the imagery in, or on, the glass plate. This allows the production of an edition of prints.
Gemini G.E.L., formally Gemini Ltd., is an artists‘ workshop, exhibition space, and publisher of limited edition prints and sculptures, located at 8365 Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, California.
Tamarind Institute is a lithography workshop created in 1960 as a division of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, NM, United States. It began as Tamarind Lithography Workshop, a California non-profit corporation founded by June Wayne on Tamarind Avenue in Los Angeles in 1960. Both the current Institute and the original Lithography Workshop are referred to informally as "Tamarind."
Udo Sellbach (1927–2006) was a German-Australian visual artist and educator whose work focused primarily around his printmaking practice.
Donald Jay Saff is an artist, art historian, educator, and lecturer, specializing in the fields of contemporary art in addition to American and English horology.
Brian R. Shure is an American printmaker, painter, author and educator. He is best known for his mastery of printing techniques, knowledge of lesser known art techniques and has published multiple books about the art of chine-collé.
STPI - Creative Workshop & Gallery, Singapore is a creative workshop and contemporary art gallery based in Singapore that specialises in artistic experimentation in the medium of print and paper. To date, STPI has collaborated with over 90 artists from all over the world.
Barbara Tisserat (1951–2017) was an American artist and lithographer born in Denver, Colorado. She taught lithography at Virginia Commonwealth University's School of the Arts. She was a member of One/Off Printmakers and also taught at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Robinson House lithography workshop with Marilyn Bevilacqua. She was active with the Richmond Printmaking Workshop and served on the Advisory Board of Studio Two-Three in Richmond, Virginia. She was a member of the Summer 2007 graphics faculty at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and was a visiting artist and lecturer in the Lyceum program at Emory and Henry College.
Israeli printmaking refers to printmaking by Jewish artists in the Land of Israel and the State of Israel beginning in the second half of the 19th century. The genre includes a variety of techniques, including woodcutting, etching and lithography.
Irwin Hollander (1927–2018) was an American artist and master printmaker, based in New York City. He helped revive lithography as a fine art around the 1960s. He had a printing studio called Hollander’s Workshop.
Michael Kempson is an artist, master printmaker, academic and curator. His work is held in collections on Australia. Since 1986 Kempson has taught printmaking, currently at Sydney University and The University of New South Wales. Internationally he is a visiting professor at the Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts in China, and from 2014 to 2016 he was the International Member at Large for Southern Graphics, based in the USA.
Australian poster collectives were artist collectives established in the late 1960s, 70s and 80s in the capital cities of Australia, largely led by women and focused on various forms of political activism.
Alice Hinton-Bateup is an Australian artist and print-maker. In the 1980s she was active in Garage Graphics, a print workshop in Mt. Druitt, Sydney, which included a number of Aboriginal artists. They produced posters that became important in the struggle for Aboriginal rights in Australia.
Master printmakers or master printers are specialized technicians who hand-print editions of works of an artist in printmaking. Master printmakers often own and/or operate their own printmaking studio or print shop. Business activities of a Master printshop may include: publishing and printing services, educational workshops or classes, mentorship of artists, and artist residencies.
Barbara Nancy Brash was a twentieth-century post-war Australian artist known for her painting and innovative printmaking. In an extensive career she contributed to the Melbourne Modernist art scene, beside other significant women artists including: Mary Macqueen, Dorothy Braund, Anne Marie Graham, Constance Stokes, Anne Montgomery (artist) and Nancy Grant.
This is a timeline of 20th Century printmaking in America.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
