The Fine Art Print Fair Delivers Old and New Beauties

Goya, Picasso, and James Turrell star in a virtual show.

W ith the COVID hysteria machine sputtering and its masked gasbags in deflation mode, we’ll soon be going to art fairs again. I miss them. Nothing beats looking at art in abundance, on the walls, in racks, and tucked under tables. It’s the best kind of discovery, since you can actually buy something and take it home for private delectation.

This week I visited the well-done, evocative, educational but, I hope, last virtual iteration of the annual show of the International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA). It’s the biggest and most celebrated print fair in the world, and I believe I’ve gone to almost all its iterations since it started in New York in the late ’80s. IFPDA, capped at 150 members, is the premier professional association of dealers of works on paper — etchings, engravings, woodcuts, and lithographs.

The fair’s free to enter and to explore and runs through May 28.

It’s one of my favorite art fairs. The art world still has hierarchies, and paintings are on top for prestige, price, and wall power. I suppose drawings are next. Each drawing is unique, and that gives it allure. Drawings connoisseurship amounts to a secret society of insiders. A squiggle for a cloud might tell us that an Italian drawing is Cremonese, while a diddle for a foot screams “Mantua” or “Parma” or “Verona” or wherever else Cole Porter sent his Taming of the Shrew troupe. I’m not a natural at this, and, in any event, I’m a scholar of American art. American drawings are among the most boring objects in the history of human creativity.

Prints don’t have the glam factor of being unique — they’re almost always multiples. But the alliance, battle, or connivance of artist, ink, paper, and press makes for its own magic.

This year, 90 dealers are presenting well-designed virtual booths. They’re beautifully done, and I learned a lot from the biographical statements that began each micro-site. I know many of the dealers but didn’t know the exact breadth and depth of their expertise.

Each dealer presents half a dozen or so works of art with great details, a feature for sizing the art to a buyer’s home, and then a listing of a larger inventory of what the dealer is promoting. This is usually 20 or so objects. Most include prices. I’m sure people are buying “at the fair,” but the virtual fair also drives people to dealer websites.

I’ve known the owners of Allinson Gallery for years, for instance. This specialist in British prints always has the best, but I didn’t realize that the firm is an Internet pioneer. It’s had a site since 1982, when such questions as “Is the Internet a fad?” and “Will credit-card companies accept online sales?” seemed urgent.

This year, they’re highlighting a lovely etching, Christmas, by Robin Tanner (1904–1988). It’s $6,000. The gallery sells British art from the 18th-century Stubbs to the 1950s, so the Tanner, from 1974, is a chronological stretch, but it’s a nostalgic beauty and very much at home with two exquisite Samuel Palmer village scenes.

The owners, a husband-and-wife pair of academics based in northeastern Connecticut, introduce their booth with a poem. “Greetings from Connecticut! I’m guessing / You’re here to come up and see my etchings.” On it goes with a line or two on every print. I found it charming and unpretentious. Prints are usually small and for cherishing, usually by a single viewer. Each of Allinson’s prints, from Whistler to Tissot to Brockhurst, has the wow factor in beauty and rarity — these works were printed in small editions — but the viewer keeps the “wow” to himself. This is often so in the world of prints.

G. B. Boerner opened in 1826 in Leipzig in Germany. Goethe was among the firm’s first clients, and that’s pedigree. For much of the print fair’s history, Old Master dealers like Boerner ruled the roost. Today, it’s a fraction of the booths as younger collectors want to look at what living artists are doing. Still, it’s offering a complete first-edition portfolio of Goya’s Los Caprichos, and that’s something young and old ought to notice and worship.

It’s in perfect condition and, as a first edition, each print is fresh. Etchings are made from plates etched with fine lines. Over time, with each application of the press, the lines are ever so slightly worn. First editions are often the best, and they’re hardly ever found today since they’ve been dismantled over the years and sold as individual sheets. This set is $340,000.

I always look at what Cade Tompkins shows. She is based in Providence and doesn’t dance to the New York beat. The Israeli artist Orit Hofshi’s Evenfall, from 2010, is a woodcut, etching, and aquatint. It’s $3,500. It’s beautiful and an essay in print connoisseurship since it’s three different processes.

Like some dealers at the fair, Frederick Mulder, Ltd., from London, focused on one artist — Picasso — and one thin slice of his work — linocuts. Picasso (1881–1973) personifies 20th-century avant-garde art because of his large personality, long lifespan, consistent but not constant quality, inventiveness, and incessant productivity. Most know him as a painter, but his real genius and endless experimentation are to be found in his prints.

A linocut is made from a sheet of linoleum placed on a woodblock. It’s a hard material on which a line is carved in the surface. The surface allows few lines — unlike, say, an engraving or a woodcut — because the linoleum tends to degrade quickly under the pressure of the press. So the artist is forced to make his images bolder and more direct, or, as Picasso did in Portrait of a Young Girl After Cranach, use five different linoleum blocks, one for each color. Mulder is offering the unique black-and-white “registration print,” the proof done to check on the alignment of the five blocks with the artist’s design.

All the major fairs — including the IFPDA, the big TEFAF fair in Maastricht, and the American Art Fair — have changed over the years, mostly in offering the work of living artists to draw younger buyers and collectors. The print fair has done this with unique brilliance. Most of its contemporary art is offered not by dealers but by publishers who work with artists to produce new work.

Publishers like Stewart and Stewart, Universal Limited Art Editions, Stoney Road Press, and Paupers Press are best seen as partnering with artists to take a vision and realize it using the publisher’s advanced equipment or technological savvy. Since lithography’s invention, artists working in this medium partnered with printers in part because the presses for lithography were so different. Ellen Lesperance naturally went to an expert printer — the Tamarind Institute — in making The Final Path of Feminye in 2020. Now, artists and expert printers work together in every form of printmaking that pushes boundaries. These publishers work with many artists, so their booths usually have variety, but they are more than dealers and know the work intimately since they’re part of the creative project.

Paupers Press in London is offering prints by the light artist James Turrell that are outrageous in process but stunning in beauty. How can Turrell (b. 1943) make prints? His medium is light. In Turrell’s Aqua Oscura etchings from 2019, a pinhole and angled mirrors placed in a buried water tank in Cornwall capture images of tree canopies and sky above ground, with an exposed polymer plate in the tank registering the image, which is then etched. It’s a reversal of Turrell’s normal process, which saturates purpose-built spaces with light. The old water tank, dating from the 1890s, is a found environment, as are the trees and the shifting light from the sky.

Many of the publishers specialize in unique paper. Over the centuries, that’s certainly part of the beauty of prints. Whistler, for instance, often used 18th-century handmade French paper. All the best etchers and engravers are aware of the texture and weight of paper, how it absorbs ink, and how its color complements design. Mixografia, a Los Angeles printer and publisher, is offering Aggregation 10 #1, by Kwang-Young Chun, from 2010. The paper is gorgeous and like sculpture. An impression is $4,000.

For beauty alone, ethereal, quiet beauty, I’d select Itu Shinsui’s Minstrel at Ikenohata, from 1921. It’s offered by Scholten Japanese Art, a New York dealer, for $18,000. It’s a colored woodcut created by one of the pivotal figures in Japanese Modernism. Shinsui (1898–1972) was known in the 1920s primarily for woodblock prints depicting beautiful women in traditional kimonos. His 1921 Minstrel was an experiment. On the one hand, it’s a scene of everyday life with a more Western-style treatment of space. On the other, his contrast of a darkening blue sky, wispy branches, and gauzy light is a Japanese staple.

I suspect there’s lots of discussion behind the scenes on whether or not to reinstate a live, annual print fair. Of course, I miss seeing the dealers. For a live fair, dealers usually bring not a dozen objects but hundreds. Just flipping through the racks is an adventure, but it’s also great training for the eye. I’ve often suggested to new collectors that they go to the IFPDA fair. It’s good connoisseurship training, and the dealers are the best teachers. I’ve rarely met a snooty print dealer but, insofar as paintings dealers are concerned, the split’s closer to even. Since the IFPDA promotes prints, prices are lower. No one wants to lose a young collector to sticker shock.

That said, this year’s virtual IFPDA fair is very nice indeed. The production values are high. The virtual fair allows concentration and repeat visits. I hate the Javits Center, where the fair has happened the last few years. It’s near nothing except New Jersey.