0.3 Introduction: the birth of american artist printmaking  (Page 8/9)

The New York Etching Club ushered in the age of American artist printmaking by inspiring the creation of countless etchings bytheir members and hundreds of other artists, and thus left in their wake a priceless legacy of art work—a tiny portion of which is reproduced in thisvolume. The club’s beginnings took place in the midst of the growth of a wider market for works on paper, for decorative books, limited-edition illustratedbooks, and the first American “artist books” incorporating original prints. In the wake of the etching boom, there remained used etching presses (includingsome that made their way into schools), new technologies, and a new generation of largely self-trained printmakers, some of whom would pass the skills of their craft on to others. In less than a decade, these first adepts grew from amateurpractitioners of etching to artist printmakers concerned with every facet of the making and marketing of fine prints. This remarkable explosion was part of agenuine paradigm shift in the arts.

Some writers have suggested that the demise of the New York Etching Club was largely due to the collapse of the commercial market foretchings, brought on by a combination of over-saturation of the retail market with mediocre work by minor artists in concert with the actions of greedypublishers and unscrupulous dealers. While these factors did play a role, there were other, greater forces at work. The 1888 release, Important New Etchings by American Artists , Important New Etchings by American Artists . New York: Frederick A. Stokes&Brother, 1888. which contained prints by Otto Bacher, Charles Platt, J. D. Smillie, and William St. John Harper, alsoincluded an essay by J.R.W. Hitchcock, entitled “Future of Etching,” in which Hitchcock warned that the advent of photogravure posed a threat to etching.Hitchcock attributed the growing interest of artists in the medium to photogravure’s superior reproductive qualities, a familiar intaglio process, anda growing popularity with the public.

It is not known why The New York Etching Club minute- taking came to an end. When the minute records abruptly stop in December 1893,the mood seems optimistic and forward-looking despite a faltering national economy. In the 1893 New York Etching Club exhibition catalogue, James D.Smillie had referred to the “bright future” of etching, and he expressed similar optimism in such journals as the Quarterly Illustrator . By 1894, however, some critics were discussing etching as a thing of the past. The Sun published an extensive article that year, entitled “The Fate of Etching,” which chronicled the decline of etching as it lambasteddealers and publishers for etching’s drop in popularity.

There were other distractions for artists and the public. By the early 1890s, the Art Nouveau movement was in full swing on theeast coast, the Plein Air movement was in high gear on the west coast, and woodcut artists and potters were helping drive an expanding decorative arts andcrafts movement on both coasts. There was also a national trend towards the collecting of Asian arts. The New York Etching Club further aided and abettedits demise in the face of these trends by strictly controlling its formal membership, thus excluding many promising young artists who might have sustainedthe club well into the twentieth century. The fact that many of the early club members were established as artists in other media also helped hasten thedecline. When the market for etchings ebbed, many of the early artist etchers— Stephen Parrish, for example—fell back on their painting careers.