To Annalee
I should say that it was the margins made in printing a litho-
graphic stone that magnetized the challenge that lithography has had
for me from the very beginning. No matter what one does, no matter
how completely one works the stone (and I have always worked the
stone the same way I paint and draw-using the area-complete), the
stone, as soon as it is printed, makes an imprint that is surrounded by
inevitable white margins. I would create a totality only to find it change
after it was printed-into another totality. Theoretically a lithograph
consists of the separation between the imprint and the paper it is on.
Unfortunately it never works that way for me. There is always the in-
evitable intrusion (in my lithograph at least) of the paper frame. To
other, they also form an organic whole-so that as they separate and
as they join in their interplay, their symphonic mass lends additional
clarity to cach individual canto, and at the same time, each canto adds
crop the exdruding paper or to cover it with a mat or to climinate all
gins by "bleeding" (printing on papers smaller than the drawing
on the stone) is an evasion of this fact. It is like cropping tofa painting.
It is success by mutilation.
The struggle to overcome this intrusion-to give the imprint its
necessary scale so that it could have its fullest expression, (and I feel
that the matter of scale in a lithograph has usually not been consid-
ered) so that it would not be crushed by the paper margin and still
have a margin-that was the challenge for me. That is why each canto
has its own personal margins. In some, they are small, in others large,
still in others they are larger on one side and the other side is mini-
mal. However, no formal rules apply. Each print and its paper had
to be decided by me and in some cases the same print exists with two
different sets of margins because each imprint means something dif-
ferent to me. In painting, I try to transcend the size for the sake of
scale. So here I was faced with the problem of having each imprint
transcend not only its size but also the white frame to achieve this
sense of scale.
These eighteen cantos are then single, individual expressions,
each with its unique difference. Yet since they grew one out of the
its song to the full chorus.
I must explain that I had no plan to make a portfolio of "prints".
I am not a printmaker. Nor did I intend to make a "set" by intro-
ducing superficial variety. These cantos arose from a compelling ne-
cessity-the result of grappling with the instrument.
To me that is what lithography is. It is an instrument. It is not
a "medium"; it is not a poor man's substitute for painting or for draw-
ing. Nor do I consider it to be a kind of translation of something
from one medium into another. For me, it is an instrument that one
plays. It is like a piano or an orchestra, and as with an instrumen
interprets. And as in all the interpretive arts, so in lithography, crea-
tion is joined with the "playing"; in this case not of bow and string,
but of stone and press. The definition of a lithograph is that it is
writing on stone. But unlike Gertrude Stein's rose, the stone is not a
stone. The stone is a piece of paper.
I have been captivated by the things that happen in playing
this litho instrument; the choices that develop when changing a color
or the paper-size. I have "played" hoping to evoke every possible in-
strumental lick. The prints really started as three, grew to seven, then
eleven, then fourteen, and finished as eighteen. Here are the cantos,
eighteen of them, each one different in form, mood, color, beat, scale
and key. There are no cadenzas. Each is separate. Each can stand by
itself. But its fullest meaning, it seems to me, is when it is seen together
with the others.
It remains for me to thank Cleve Gray for bringing me to
lithography, particularly at the time he did, Tatyana Grosman for
her devotion and encouragement and patience in my behalf and
to Zigmunds Priede for his sympathetic cooperation on the press.
Barnett Newman
