Why don't you etch? Although virtually all the great twentieth-century artists produced prints—ranging from etchings and woodcuts to lithographs and screen prints—the subject remains oddly underrated by many collectors. Martin Gayford, who last year sat to Lucian Freud for an etched portrait, explains their compelling attraction

Walter Sickert told the story of an ambitious art learner at a tea party in the 1880 who lamented the fact that he could not draw. There was a pause in the conversation, and then a young lady asked, 'Why don't you etch?' It is a suggestion that artists have been taking up with great enthusiasm in the intervening hundred and a quarter. They have not solitary etched, but also made lithographs, wood-engravings, silk-screens, aquatints, dry-points--all the multifarious varieties of artistic prints.

Prints have been made by means of artists both predictable and unpredictable, through painters and sculptors, both figurative and abstract. Many of the greatest names of the period--Picasso, Matisse, Miro, Morandi, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Barnett Newman--have been prolific print makers. Numerous major living artists are masters of print making--from Freud Hockney and Paula Rego to Jake and Dinos Chapman and Tracey Emin. The list goe upon and on. One might ask the question, why?

After all, these techniques are nothing other but outdated methods of reproduction. They were devised with the aim of multiplying images; we have lengthy had efficient photographic processes for doing exactly that. in the way that why continue to scratch at a cent plate with a needle and then dip the ensue in an acid bath, an elaborate rigmarole completeded in the seventeenth century? And for what cause [i]or[/i] reason fiddle around with lithographic stones? Strangely, all these courses became increasingly popular among artists just as they were becoming past for practical purposes--that is to say, around the period when Sickert attended that tea party.

Indeed, old-fashioned although it might be in the age of photographic, digital and electronic media, print-making has continued to make technical progres An obvious way in which this has happened is sheer scale. recent prints are in some cases enormous. Richard Serra's Weight and Measure (1993) made with sum of two units etching plates, is nearly sum of two units metres high. As a be the effect is has an impact almost as visceral as his massive carbonized iron sculptures. Prints by Tapies and Freud sometimes have the dimensions of sizable paintings.

There had always been great painter-printmakers-from the fifteenth hundred onwards. But the art print as we know it was created in the late nineteenth hundred when the limited edition was invented. Whistler is credited as the first artist to number and sign each separate sheet that he approved (although manufacturers of commercial engraved reproductions originated the practice). Previously, editions had been thus unlimited as to stretch towards eternity. The station of Goya's Disasters of War altered and adapted by means of the Chapman brothers was plucked many years after Goya's death (making the fuss about their suppos vandalism unnecessary). Major engravings through Hogarth can still be bought for unassuming sums, because they were plucked from plates--still in use in the early nineteenth century--that had been bring through the press thousands of times, and repeatedly re-cut of that kind practices have been anathema since Whistler's day.

The production of recent prints is controlled as closely as that of bank notes (perhaps more so) I was near once at the signing observance of an edition of prints by dint of Lucian Freud. I was struck not single by the care with which the whole operation was leadershiped but also by the number of impressions--beautiful enough to my eye--that were cast asideed for having minute flaws. Print collectors, it was explained, are an extremely fussy crowd

The limited edition has prov of course, a hugely happy method of creating value. Price is partly a function of supply: restrict the latter and you increase the former. While individual can still buy a Hogarth or Piranesi for a moderate sum total a limited edition Picasso print has reached a record $1036500 at auction. Nonetheless, prints show the best chance--for those of us who are not millionaires--of owning a work by means of a famous artist. That is no doubt for what cause [i]or[/i] reason the contemporary print market has burgeoned

a certain quantity of artists of the past--Hogarth sometimes, for example--thought of prints as a way of publishing their paintings. Today photography takes care of that. The alone point in making a print is to do something that can solitary be accomplished in that fashion. Having sat to Lucian Freud for the two a painting and an etching I had a drawn out long time to reflect upon the distinction between the sum of two units media. In his work at least, etching is a more intimate conduct The fineness of the etching line the one and the other requires and allows a greater closeness--of the artist to the plate, and of the artist to the original The viewer's experience of an early Freud has been compared to that of a take wing crawling over the surface of the sitter's skin. Freud's novel etchings combine that detailed examination with the monumentality of his later paintings.

As that suggests; more [i]or[/i] less of Freud's prints rate among his finest works. His large After Chardin, 2000 for instance, is more forceful than any of the paintings he did from the same aged Master model (Chardin's Young Schoolmistress in the National Gallery, London). Hockney's Rake's Progres remains single of the very finest things he has done, as was Picasso's Vollard Suite and Matisse's Jazz.