Collecting Guide: The Silkscreen

Silkscreen printing is a method of image making that has both commercial and artistic applications. There have been many iterations of the technique in the medium's long history but none were more elaborate than Warhol’s pioneering approach. Warhol used photographs, torn sheets of paper, lines drawn with a pen and paint applied by brush to create a series of stencils, all of which would impact the final design. Each stencil and each colour were applied one layer at a time, with the ink being pushed through a mesh screen onto paper or fabric by hand. This form of printing requires a high level of expertise and is far more arduous and labour intensive than other printing techniques. However, it is unmatched in its ability to create a vibrant, painterly finish and it allows for subtle variation between each print.

This medium has ancient roots. Early iterations of silkscreen printing were developed in East Asia, dating back over a thousand years. However, the method was only embraced in the West at the end of the 19th century. Through the start of the 20th century, silkscreen printing became abundantly utilised for commercial functions. The medium was used to reproduce images for advertising campaigns and to print designs onto wallpaper, fabrics and t-shirts.

A major benefit of the silkscreen, over other artistic mediums, is that it allows for the production of multiples. Warhol capitalised on this, creating prints on paper in multiple editions. However, he also created fresh, one-of-a-kind artworks that were realised through the silkscreen process onto canvas. Sometimes these pieces were finished with hand painting but, perhaps more frequently, they were not: the printed image represented the completed work of art. The act of creating a painting through a printing process was a powerful innovation in the history of art, challenging the traditional definition of ‘painting’. The result is vibrant, novel works of art with an extremely smooth finish and a complete absence of visible brush strokes. Symptoms of the artists labour had never been less present on a painting, a fact that Warhol playfully acknowledged with the glib remark: ‘the reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine’.

The artistic movement that dominated American art during the 1950s was Abstract Expressionism. The likes of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko were its chief protagonists and through gestural expressive brushwork they created abstract paintings which explored metaphysical themes. Pop art rebelled against this artistic approach, seeking instead to create art that was inseparable from, and an expression of, contemporary culture. The silkscreen was a defiant symbol of this contrasting approach to image-making. The emphasis placed by the Abstract Expressionists on the artist’s gesture was completely juxtaposed by the silkscreen through which the artist could create paintings on canvas that left no clear marks from its creation, just like the images across magazines and advertisements from which Warhol drew so much inspiration.

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