Alyssa Dumire, Director of Education
Solemn Spaces: Works by Robert Kipniss, which just closed this past weekend, showed off the distinctive, mysterious style of one of our archive artists. Kipniss’ misty landscapes and shadowy interiors lend themselves particularly well to today’s term, the printmaking medium of mezzotint. In the work above, notice the rich, deep black tones and fuzzy edges, all thanks to the unique properties of mezzotint.
From the Italian mezzo (half) and tinta (tone), mezzotint is an intaglio process that results in smooth gradations of value, particularly notable for those inky blacks. Developed in the first half of the seventeenth century, mezzotint was the first printing process to yield half-tones without the use of hatching, cross-hatching, or stippling. The image, unlike that in a drypoint or etching, is created by tone rather than line. The printmaker (often an apprentice) roughens or “grounds” the surface of a copper plate with a rocker (left), a specialized tool with fine teeth that incise the entire surface with a network of tiny dots. They steadily rock the tool back and forth across the plate in multiple directions. This creates small pits, and since the material is not actually removed from the indentations as by carving, it gets pushed out to the sides, creating a burr, both of which hold the ink. If the plate was inked and printed at this point, the result would be an even, dark black. See the passages of black in the closeup of At the Edge of the Village, below.
To lighten areas of the image, the artist scratches away at the burr with a scraper or flattens it with a burnisher, bringing any white areas to a smooth, high shine. Generally, great care is taken to avoid scratching the plate with the tip of either tool, which would result in a drypoint line, rather than a smooth transition of value. You can see the network of dots in the mid-tone areas! This process is subtractive rather than additive as most drawing, painting, or printmaking methods where the artist adds color and value to demarcate an image. In this way, the mezzotint process shares more with a carved marble sculpture, where the subject slowly emerges from a block of stone (or, in this case, a plate covered in tiny dots). As an intaglio method, the ink is rubbed into the recessed areas of the plate, then it is run through a press with a dampened sheet of paper.
Mezzotint developed nearly concurrently by two amateur artists in seventeenth-century Amsterdam (apparently independently of each other). The first, German soldier Ludwig von Siegen, used a roulette tool, a textured metal wheel on a handle, to roughen his plate, working from light to dark. Prince Rupert of the Rhine, famous as a cavalry commander during the English Civil War was living in exile in Amsterdam when he, too, took up the technique. He is credited with inventing the rocker and working in the subtractive process more common in today’s mezzotints, and taking the technique back to England. Mezzotint enjoyed a brief heyday in eighteenth-century England, where it was most often used to reproduce portraits (the soft areas of tone were well-suited to mimic paintings); however, because copper is a relatively soft material and the burr kicked up around each dot is quite delicate, the plates degrade quickly, limiting the number of prints in a run. They would sometimes be reworked to create additional “states” of a print. Soon, however, aquatint was developed and eclipsed mezzotint as the more popular tonal intaglio technique.
Grounding a copper plate with a rocker is a labor-intensive process, but it also requires none of the acids or other chemicals used in etching and aquatint. It does mean that mezzotints tend to be small in scale, but more recent works in the FWMoA collection are quite large. Other artists experimented with other techniques for grounding, like Dox Thrash, who used carborundum grit, a material used to grind down lithography stones. A resurgence of mezzotint in the 1960s and 70s included Kipniss and Leonard Baskin, capitalizing on the medium’s expressive qualities and pushing it far beyond its early purpose of reproduction.
Steven Sorman, American, b. 1948. a book of days. Mezzotint on paper, 2001. Gift of the Artist in Memory of David Shaprio, 2014.238. Image courtesy of FWMoA.
Frederick Mershimer, American, b. 1958. Niagra. Mezzotint on paper, 2021. Museum purchase with funds provided by the McMurray Family Endowment, 2022.387. Image courtesy of FWMoA.
Frederick Mershimer, American, b. 1958. Moonlight. Mezzotint on paper, 2010. Museum purchase with funds provided by the McMurray Family Endowment, 2014.317. Image courtesy of FWMoA.
Donald Furst, American, b. 1953. Up and In. Mezzotint on paper. Museum purchase with funds provided by the McMurray Family Endowment, 2022.71. Image courtesy of FWMoA.