8 THE DRAWN BLANK SERIES
The Drawn Blank Series Graphics Collection
Prior to the seventeenth century most artists had viewed printmaking (or Graphics as they are also known nowadays) as a preparatory technique, using the medium to create sketches for their final paintings.
The Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) was one of the first artists to use printmaking as a form of art in its own right. Although initially a painter, he became devoted to the medium of etching; creating approximately three hundred etchings during his lifetime. His importance and renown within the art world in this context is of such significance that, when the medium was revived during the twentieth century, artists such as Picasso fervently aspired to be as skilled as him in this medium and, during the 1930s went on to create, amongst many fine art graphics, a series of etchings which featured imagery of Rembrandt. The series was entitled ‘The Vollard Suite’, named after the renowned art dealer and critic Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939) who commissioned and published it. Vollard was one of the most important art dealers of the early twentieth century, and worked with artists such as Edgar Degas (1834-1917) and Camille Pissarro (1830-1903). Importantly, it was Vollard who pioneered the idea of painter as printer, bringing printmaking back into fashion and establishing it as a reputable art form that artists enjoyed and enthusiastically used. As Vollard himself commented: “…the painters themselves became more and more interested in the new form of expression. Some of them even made complete albums for me…”
After the Second World War the centre of printmaking predominantly moved from Europe to America and some artists began to dedicate their entire oeuvres to print, which came to be viewed on the same level as
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