From Pissarro to Picasso

by Phillip Dennis Cate

Color etching flowered in France in the years 1885 to 1910, breaking the centuries-long tradition of artistic printmaking as an exclusively black and white medium. Its development was encouraged primarily by a renewed interest in eighteenth-century printmaking techniques and by the discovery of Japanese woodblock prints whose methods of composition and juxtaposition of unmixed areas of color demonstrated the dramatic and highly decorative effects that could be achieved by the superimposition of colored inked plates on a single sheet of paper. Although color etching began as an art form restricted to a small circle of artists working in Paris who were attracted to its intimacy and technical demands, its great aesthetic potential spawned a movement of considerable consequence by the turn of the century, especially for the circle of young, avant-garde artists including Jacques Villon, Joaquin Sunyer, Francis Jourdain, and Theophile Steinlen, who gathered around the master printmaker Eugen