an
a color print be produced by printing a relief-etched plate two
times, one impression over the other on the same sheet of paper?
Yes. The authors have done it, but it requires behaving very differently
from Blake: thoroughly wiping ink and colors between pulls, and
either following guide lines four times per impression with extreme
care and precision or using sheets longer than those we know he
used. Even then, traces of the second printing are never completely
erased. One does not need to resort to recreations, though, to make
the case against the two-pull theory. Wiping ink and colors between
pulls is inefficient, and we know from the visual evidence of the
prints themselves that Blake did not do it. Nor did he employ the
mechanism of bottom sheets necessary for dual registration. The
white lines along the escarpments between relief plateaus and etched
valleys indicate that color and ink were printed simultaneously.
The two-pull theory requires us to believe the impossible, that
the Blakes perfectly registered over 650 prints in 1794-96 while
at the same time misaligning their plates relative to the edges
of the paper. And it requires us to believe that Blake’s “skillful
carelessness” was an inauthentic ploy to fool us by disguising his
unsurpassed skill in the mechanics of registration. But the main
reason for rejecting the two-pull theory is that modes of production
may fall below the threshold of vision but cannot hide from magnification
and computer enhancement.
Like old bones to the forensic scientist, prints give up their secrets
if you know where and how to look. This is not a situation in which
there is evidence on each side of the issue, nor is it a matter of textual
interpretation in which the force of one’s rhetoric makes one view more
persuasive than another. This is a matter of material facts and physical
events. Either Blake used two-pull printing or he did not. All
the material evidence indicates that he did not, with the single extant
exception (“Nurses Song”) discussed in detail above. It is impossible
for Blake to have regularly used two-pull printing.
Phillips has misread his key pieces of evidence and ignored,
or rejected without explanation, what did not fit his theory, including
published counter-arguments. The full evidence provided by Blake's
techniques and the illuminated prints themselves does not support
his interpretation. What goes unexplained in the two-pull theory
is, however, easily explained by à la poupée printing without
bottom sheets, the most direct contact Blake as artist could have
had with the plate and image-making process. And this brings us
to William of Occam’s famous razor: the simplest explanation is
usually correct. We have found this principle an accurate guide
in all our investigations of Blake’s graphic methods. The verbal
content of Blake’s illuminated books is fearfully complex, but we
cannot extrapolate from that observation that his graphic techniques
must be equally complicated. For some modern commentators, the idea
that illuminated printing was for Blake nearly as direct and autographic
as writing and drawing on paper is somehow to underestimate his
genius. [28]
It does not matter what Blake said of his technique in his 1793
prospectus “To The Public” (E 692-93) because it cannot be that
simple and straightforward. The technique must be as intricate as
his mythopoesis. But precision in line engraving and love of complex
ideas do not automatically lead to precision in printing or love
of mechanically registering one object to another. Advocating a
very complex way to produce color prints may seem Blakean, but it
is actually Urizenic and at the expense of the artist Blake.
To fail to believe that Blake color printed in a very complicated
manner, Phillips argues, is to somehow diminish his skills as a printmaker.
[29] We argue just the opposite. We
do Blake a great disservice by imagining him to be simply a better-than-average
conventional printer obsessed with exacting and machine-like procedures
when more efficient, direct, immediate, and artistically exciting ways
of achieving the same results were available to him. Indeed, Blake’s
color printing, even more than relief etching, fully realized Blake’s
objective of combining in one seamless process printmaker, poet, and
painter. Blake surely would have agreed with Hayter, who thought multiple-pull
printing was “typical of the practice of a skilled artisan rather than
a process by which the original thought of the artist becomes visible
directly in a print” (59).
Moreover, we contend that the two-pull hypothesis is refuted
by the fact that all of Blake’s color-printing effects can be produced
in one pull, as the color printed facsimiles of “The Human Abstract”
demonstrate (illus. 71,
72, 73),
and by the inherent contradictions of the hypothesis. Blake’s very
idea of prints, as reflected in his not producing correctly registered,
similarly sized, uniformly legible, identical looking color and
colored prints in large print runs, is evidence enough to indicate
that Blake did not prize mathematical precision. Blake was forward
looking—not to the mechanized color printing of the mid-nineteenth
century, but rather to the monotypes, open-etched plates, multileveled
printing, and painter-printmakers of the next two centuries. Indeed,
Blake anticipates modern practices and ideas of the printmaker as
artist. Both his writings and his graphic works indicate that Blake
sought a more direct connection among thought, image, and object
than was offered by reproduction, repetition, and replication.
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