Printing in Color

The color printing in old periodicals looks different from the printing in modern magazines. High end works from the thirties, such as the prints in Westvaco or Gebrauchsgraphik, contain greens and purples that glow. The ads in Life magazine from the forties show greyish hams and bright pink complections. A large proportion of the ads in magazines before the 1970’s include only one color if they include color at all.

What changes accounted for the differences in printed color images in the first half of the twentieth century? The simple answer is that printed images were produced using different printing methods, inks and originals. The complex answer is a maze of chemical interactions, color theory and economics. In this short post I will touch on only the subject of the inks used. A later post will cover the photographs in early commercial color printing. For a more in depth look at the printing industry, I recommend Louis Walton Sipley’s “A Half Century of Color”.

Inks

Since the 1970s, most magazines have been printed on offset lithographic web-presses. A roll of paper is run through a set of four to six sets of ink rollers. Each roller set includes a flexible metal plate, a rubber “blanket” which picks up the ink from the plate, and the paper which picks up the ink from the blanket (Benson, 256). The inks are quickly dried before passing on to the next set of rollers. The four colors of ink used in these sets of ink rollers are usually cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Occasionally, a high end client will ask for a fifth or sixth color, called a “spot color” if they can’t get the wealth of hues they need out of the normal CMYK inks. Because the “spot color” is a custom job, it can be very expensive.

I want to emphasize that with the web press set up, any page that requires any color, passes through four sets of rollers, whether it needs four colors or not. Moreover, to produce one ad that does not use the standard CMYK color scheme would require wiping down the ink rollers and adding a different set of inks to the rollers, a process that would take time and money. Under such circumstances, the overwhelming majority of ads in magazines these days are printed in CMYK.

CMYK did not always have such a hold on the color printing system. As late as 1927, it was believed that adding two printing inks over each other in rapid succession would necessarily distort an image (Sipley, 67). Each color page was run through the press as many times as there were inks that needed to be added. By 1951, two color presses were common and cheap (Sipley 129). This still meant that if you wanted color, your ad had to be individually run through the press once for two colors, and twice for four colors. If you had to pay to add some color ink to three rollers anyway, why not use the pink, orange and blue ink that would make your image really stand out?

Partly because of the prevalence of two color presses, using only two colors of ink was very common, especially in specialized magazines which would reach a smaller audience. (Biggs, 73). In 1956, because the plate for each ink was hand altered, fewer colors meant less cost (Biggs, 82). Good designers turned the limitation to their advantage, creating some bold and minimal designs.

 

Fun images of color printing:

Women from 1930’s Japan

George Eastman House color prints by Nickolas Muray

Works Cited:

Benson, Richard. “The Printed Picture.” New York : Museum of Modern Art, c2008.

Biggs, Ernest. “Colour in Advertising”. New York: Studio Publications Inc., 1956.

Hymes, David G. “Production in Advertising”. New York: Colton Press Inc., 1950.

Pollack, Peter, “The Picture History of Photography.” New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1958.

Images Ripe for Reuse

At a lecture at the Brooklyn museum called “Transnationalism and Women Artists in Diaspora”, I had a thought about the value of art libraries to an artist. To really serve artists, an art library should include not only examples of fine art, but also other sorts of visual material.

The transnationalism panel consisted of eight women speakers, but only five talked at any length; the working artists Kira Greene and Chitra Ganesh, the two curators Yasmin Ramirez and Yulia Tikhonova, and the collector Abena Busia. They spoke of several themes, nostalgia for a lost homeland, the body as the battle ground for cultural expression, and how sewing and fabric is related to ideas of femininity.

One theme kept coming up: transcending cultural boundaries. In visual terms, this was expressed as found images which were recontextualized. Kira Greene uses wall-paper patterns, fabric patterns and still-lifes inspired by cook-books. She intertwines and layers the images to express a fusion of different cultures, arts and times. Chitra Ganesh uses Amar Chitra Katha comics and the space of 15th century northern european paintings to resurrect subconscious narratives and eroticism which transcend cultural barriers. Some of the artists mentioned by the curator Yasmin Ramirez also recontextualize images. Firelei Baez uses china patterns and BBW images. Nicole Awai uses nail-polish sample patterns and hardware drawings.

The idea that artists “borrow” images is hardly new. Just look at discussions of the influences in Cypriotic art. I also included an image from The Hundred Headless Woman” for a look at how Max Ernst used found imagery. I suspect, but cannot prove, that through the internet and globalization, artistic borrowing of imagery is more and more common. What interested me was the realization that much of this imagery would not be considered high art. Comics, wallpaper and china patterns are the decorative milieu of everyday life, rather than the crystallization of an idea as good paintings purport to be.
So I return to my original, rather elementary idea. It is good if an art library includes not only examples of fine art, but also other forms of visual media: pattern books, old travel narratives, comics, ads, posters, maps, menus, snapshots and scrap-books.

Obviously artists use the internet for most of their photo references. This does not lessen the importance of print resources. We are all used to having disconnected images thrown at us. Ads proclaim the importance of Mr. Clean, or mint flavored dental floss. Twitpics and facebook links combine the visual flotsam of many different minds into one stream. Users are quite capable of adding in some print images that they have chosen for themselves. Books and magazines can also add a unique context to images because the images are bound in place by the creator, portraying the creator’s vision of how each item is situated in relation to each other item.

With a tight library budget, using money on fugitive, undervalued material seems unwise. However, most of this image matter is cheap, or free. Perhaps allocating the odd dollar towards a book on a collection of comics or stamps would not go amiss. A book on historic playing cards at the Cooper Union is very popular. Even if the material can be gotten for free, making it available to users presents other problems. Picture collections might be a low-effort way of adding material to the collection. At the very least, the popularity of found material provides an argument for keeping these bits of popular culture if they are already in a library.