Licht-druck

Alert to its duty as an education institution, New York's Museum of Modern Art opened its top floor last week to a new departure in exhibitions: reproductions in full color of famed paintings of the last 50 years.

The show is frankly intended for art teachers and students. In September it will pilgrimage to colleges and schools throughout the land. The show started art critics off again on their interminable argument of whether copies of great paintings are a help or a hindrance to art students. Most of the opposition comes from sensitive people with memories of the rows of forbidding brown photographs in golden oak frames that usually decorate U. S. schools. The moderate view was well expressed last week by Hearst Critic Malcolm Vaughn:

". . . Such an exhibition is at best but paint by proxy. A reproduction, however fine, can never match the original. . . . It cannot impart the warmth, the verve, the emotional message which in art, as in love, is the communication we most treasure. Yet the great picture . . . must contain much more than its emotional message only--for example, felicities of thought, of form, of design, of organization, of linear and color harmony. Such aspects of painting (and they are the aspects in which the public is least conversant), excellent color reproductions can excellently communicate. . . ."

The Museum of Modern Art authorities avoided the copy v. original argument entirely but published an unanswerable reason for launching their exhibitions of reprints :

". . . It has been felt that exhibitions of any but first-class originals would not adequately serve an educational purpose. . . . Each of the four exhibitions . . . can be sent to a school or educational organization.in New York at a cost of four or five dollars, including all expenses of insurance and transportation. An exhibition of mediocre original paintings would cost the institution about 20 times as much."

A school with $20 to spend for the four rooms of prints would more than get its money's worth. Handsomely framed in white was Corot's Woman with a Pearl, probably his greatest figure painting, the original of which is in the Louvre; Daumier's exciting Drama from Munich; a fine Tahiti Gaugin from Frankfort; Winslow Homer's Nor' Easter from New York; Renoir's Paris Boulevard from Dresden; Picasso's gigantic Mother & Child from Berlin; a fine Cezanne still life, an attenuated Modigliani, a good Matisse Odalisque and dozens of others.

From a technical viewpoint, perhaps the most successful painting reproduced was Manet's Boy With a Fife, the original of which is one of the star exhibits of the great Manet show now being held in the Orangerie in Paris. It was printed by the venerable Munich firm of Hanfstaengl & Co. Lithographer Franz Hanfstaengl helped develop the process by which all the reproductions exhibited last week were made, a process known as Licht-druck in German, Colotype in English.

Unlike other color printing processes, no screens, no system of colored dots are used. Printing is done from thick gelatin coated glass plates, one for each of the primary colors. The process has been in use for nearly 70 years, is constantly being refined, is not yet practicable for large scale commercial printing.

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