The Expert's Expert

Cheaper by the dozen, graphics once were not considered refined enough to be one of the fine arts. With the coming of this century, they were generally a means to make posters, illustrations and other hoi polloi images. Most serious artists would scoff at making them in preference to oils. People did buy "collector's prints," fussily perfect etchings of architecture and landscapes that reflected more a mania for the historic past than for the present scene. But that was no more serious than collecting cut glass. The exploding market for modern art has destroyed that indifference.

For the modest collector, prints offer all the pleasure of owning an original at a bargain rate, and the artists have responded by turning out prints that rank among their most important work. Few men realized the brahminization of graphics faster than Jakob Rosenberg, now 71, former print curator of the Berlin State Museum and of Harvard's Fogg Museum, and now in semiretirement, teaching at Williams College. A steady scholar who can and has separated many a Rembrandt from a replica by its brush work, Rosenberg is called "the expert's expert" by Fogg Director John Coolidge. His students are the print experts of the U.S., and he has been affectionately called "Saint Jakob." His final exhibition of 166 modern prints (see color pages), currently on view at Harvard, is not only a tribute to a century of graphic revolution, but also the result of deadeye decision.

Brightness from Stone. For a paltry budget of $300 a year, Rosenberg has assembled an unsurpassed teaching collection of modern prints since his appointment as a Fogg curator in 1939. All of the works in the show-- two-thirds of which were acquired over the years by Rosenberg-- have increased tenfold in value. A Kirchner woodcut bought in 1945 for $90 is now worth $2,000. Klee's 1923 lithograph, Tight rope Walker, cost him $40, and now would command 15 times the price.

A prime cause of the 20th century print renaissance is that artists learned to exploit graphic methods less in imitation of oil painting and more for their own unique potentialities. In woodcuts, gouging against the grain brought out severe voids and sharp forms whose angularity and deep biting technique excited the expressionists. Edvard Munch was one of the first to carve the agony of his tormented visions from wood. Lithography, a fluid method of drawing on stone to yield bright, matte contours of color, appealed to painters who wished to abandon depth for the challenges of surface arrangements. Kandinsky employed it to probe the relation of point and line to the picture plane.

By Line & Stencil. For much of his chameleon career, Picasso regarded graphics as another kind of drawing, but the pure lines contrasting with hard planes of his late linoleum cuts bring out his simplification of nature in a sharper manner than his oils. Matisse found that his late, swimming arabesques could be better executed by stencils than by brush bristles. Miro learned that his love of texture was readily brought out by the relief in paper of etching. In Chagall's 13 editions on the Arabian Nights, he found that colors of lithography achieved a brazen Oriental romance that oils would have subdued with their filmy translucence.

Rosenberg's parting selection originates from Norway to Mexico, from 1899 to 1962. From the looks of it, the revolution is not over. Pop art's precursor, Robert Rauschenberg, found a way to reproduce and overlap news photographs of lifeboat survivors and crowd scenes in his blue 1962 lithograph, Stunt Man I. Each of an edition of 37 now costs upwards of $200, if one can be found. Though no longer so cheap, graphics are still finer for many than are oils. There may be no end to Saint Jakob's ladder.

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