Glass cliché printing
The cliché verre (also Diaphanradierung or cliché verre called) is a graphical technique that was quite popular in the second half of the 19th century when French artists. It is a hybrid of photography and hand drawing. The sheets are photographs made from a manually made negative. Contrary to popular belief, the medium is no simple substitute for other techniques such as etching , lithography or copperplate engraving . The creation of the negative plate is relatively simple, but the production of the prints requires a high level of technical skill in order to obtain clean sheets that are neither too light nor too dark. A trained photographer can - similar to an experienced printer in the graphic arts sector - influence the quality of the prints.
This medium was particularly popular among landscape painters in Barbizon , a place in the Fontainebleau forest in France. Its heyday was short-lived. The medium quickly disappeared from the painters' repertoire and it seems as if it was primarily a joy of experimentation that encouraged them to use the cliché verre . The most important artists who turned to this technique are Camille Corot (approx. 66 sheets in the technique), Charles-François Daubigny (approx. 18 sheets in this technique), Jean-François Millet (two sheets in this technique), Eugène Delacroix (1 sheet in this technique). In the 20th century, artists such as Picasso , Man Ray and Brassaï experimented with the medium.
To produce a cliché verre , a glass plate is coated with an opaque top layer (often dark color, printer's ink or collodion ). On top of that, it can be colored lightly and placed on a dark background in order to have a better overview of the development process. The drawing is scratched into the coating of this glass plate with an eraser . When drawing, the lines appear black on white through the exposed dark background. The plate becomes translucent at the engraved points. If this plate is exposed to a light-sensitive coated glass plate or photo paper, the incised drawing appears as a positive, reversed line drawing and can in this way be photochemically reproduced as desired.
literature
- Thomas Ketelsen (Ed.): Drawn by light - Camille Corot and the experiment “Cliché-verre” (= The un / certain look. Vol. 1). Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne 2010, ISBN 3-938800-03-8 (exhibition catalog).
- Vlado & Maria Ondrej - Atelier for Etching Leipzig (Ed.): "Cliché verre" published by MMKoehn Verlag, Berlin / Leipzig 2014, ISBN 978-3-944903-01-9 (exhibition catalog)