Lithography

Lithography is a method for printing on a smooth surface. It can be used to print text or artwork onto paper or another suitable material. It can also refer to a method of manufacturing semiconductor and MEMS (Microelectromechanical Systems )devices.

Lithography As An Artistic Medium

During the first twenty-five years of the nineteenth century, the practice of lithography was predominantly restricted to cheap reproductions of paintings and drawings. However, around 1825 the French artists Ingres, G?ricault, and Delacroix embraced the process as a way to avoid the problems inherent in wood-block and copper engraving, namely, the near necessity of middlemen like draughtsmen (who transferred the image to the wood or copper plate) and engravers (who carved the image out of the plate).

The advantage to lithography (for an artist's point of view) was that he or she could draw or paint directly onto the lithographic material and avoid entirely the intermediate steps and craftsmen involved in engraving. Therefore, an artist's drawing and a lithographic print made from it were nearly identical - no reworking or transfer to another medium was necessary. It also afforded, at the time, the most complete range of line color from white to black.

Goya's lithographs The Bulls of Bordeaux (1828) and Delacroix's illustrations to Goethe's Faust were the groundbreaking "artist's lithographs" that sparked a flood of (mostly French) artists who dabbled in lithography, including Prud'hon, Cezanne, Manet, and, of course, its greatest practitioner, Daumier, whose prints began to appear in the 1830s.

For the first time in history, an artist was able to send out into the world his or her own drawing, not in unique specimen but in editions. Each impression had all their personality, skill, and genius, with no recourse to intermediary persons and technological steps.