For 25 Years: Brooke Alexander Editions, January
27 - May 18, 1994;
Wendy Weitman, Department of Prints
and Illustrated Books.
Brooke Alexander began publishing prints and multiples in the fall of
1968. The range of artists that he initially chose - from painterly realists
such as Jack Beal and Fairfield Porter to hardedge abstractions such as
Joseph Albers - was an early
clue to the versatility and scope that have characterized his productive
career. Consistently working with both established and emerging artists,
he has published over 1,500 editions with more than 75 painters and sculptors.
Surveying his publications thus offers a particularly dynamic view of
American printmaking of the last quarter century.
In 1961, after graduating in classics from Yale University, Alexander retuned to his native Los Angeles and involved himself in the city's burgeoning art world, meeting artists Joe Goode, Ed Moses, Bob Irwin and Ed Ruscha, among others. In 1965 he accepted a job at Marlborough Gallery and moved to New York. He was given responsibility for the gallery's print inventory, both modern master and contemporary, and gained his first real exposure to prints. He later managed the New York office to the London-based Editions Alecto where he coordinated his first publishing project, Larry Zox's series of six screenprints, Diamond Girls. By the late 1960's American print publishing was thriving, but Editions Alecto was reducing its scope and Alexander decided to begin publishing on his own.
In November of 1968 he and his wife, Carolyn, opened
Brooke Alexander, Inc, in a storefront on East 68th Street. They began
publishing slowly. One of their first projects, Richard
Artschwager's set of multiples, Locations,
1969, evidences Alexander's venturesome eye and collaborative
approach to publishing. Struck by an exhibition of the artist's formica,
furniture-like sculpture at Leo Castelli Gallery, Alexander determined
to invite Artschwager to make a multiple edition of his objects. The innovative
six-part piece contains the artist's signature form, rounded rectangles
that he called "blps" made of horsehair, Plexiglas, wood and
pieces of mirror that can be installed in any configuration in any space.
Locations was Artschwager's first multiple and signaled the beginning
of a fascinating body of projects by the artist and publisher. Three years
later Alexander published one of Artschwager's more haunting prints, the
screenprint Interiors. Its shadowy, gray printing of a repeated room contributes
a murky, almost sinister, sense to the elegant surroundings.
The Alexanders moved the gallery twice in the next few years and by 1972 had their first proper exhibition space, at 26 East 78th Street. One of the early exhibitions there was of their publications entitled "Hand Colored Prints," 1973, in which 26 artists created editions, for the most part, black and white prints to which they added watercolor, ink or crayon. Alexander described the contemporary print world at the time as having reached a "static point". In the hopes of jumpstarting the field again, he decided to look back to a different tradition, one that included Ensor, Gauguin and Degas. Inviting a wide range of artists to participate guaranteed a variety of responses, from the humorous watercolor figures outlines in etching of Red Groom's 45 Characters to the punched holes and minimal pencil line of Richard Tuttle's In Praise of Economic Determinism.
Alexander's early and abiding interest in painterly
realism has consistently inspired his publishing. After seeing the exhibition
"Aspects of a New Realism" at the Milwaukee Art Center in 1969
he decided to publish a portfolio representing this aesthetic idea. Six
New York Artists, published in 1969, included Jack Beal, John Clem Clarke,
Alex Katz, Malcolm Morley, Philip Pearlstein and Bob Stanley. Alexander
continued to work with several of these artists after this early venture.
The portfolio began a long and fertile relationship with Alex
Katz which whom he collaborated to create over 40 editions, most notably
the illustrated book Face of the Poet, containing 14 color aquatints and
published in 1978. The book evolved after Alexander saw a series of cut-outs
of several poets in Katz's studio. Katz was very involved with the St.
Mark's Poetry Project and knew these poets personally. Alexander immediately
recognized the potential for a book with poems accompanying the portraits.
In the resulting aquatints, Katz's austere heads float on the large white
page, his stylized forms bringing an abstract quality to the heightened
realism.
Another artist whose work concerned issues of abstraction within a realist
style is Jennifer Bartlett. Her monumental, five-part print Graceland
Mansion, 1979, incorporates drypoint, aquatint, screenprint, woodcut
and lithography, each with its own idiosyncratic markings, not unlike
her panel paintings at the time that also combined disparate styles. Bartlett
was particularly ambitious to employ five different printmaking techniques
in this project as she has worked only in drypoint up to this point. Each
medium represents a different time of day: the delicate marks of drypoint
depicting dawn, the bright dabs throughout the silkscreen panel for high
noon, and the trio of darker brushstrokes in the lithograph for dusk.
For Alexander this project demanded careful coordination between a variety
of printers. Bartlett worked on all five images simultaneously; meetings
were held with all the printers to establish ink colors and paper type
so as to insure a measure of uniformity between the panels. Bartlett understood
the subtleties of each medium and Graceland Mansion, in all its
complexity, marked the first of many, large-scale, multi-panel prints.
The early 1980's witness a return to an expressive figurative style after a decade when conceptual and minimal trends had been prominent. Alexander had been publishing work by conceptual artists such as Richard Tuttle, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Ed Ruscha and Allen Ruppersberg throughout the 1970's. In the early 1980's however, his publishing slowed somewhat as he began to focus on the painting of the new generation of emerging figurative artists. The gallery, located on 57th Street since 1975, regularly exhibited both paintings and prints during these years. Among the younger artists whose work he did publish in depth at this time are Richard Bosman and Robert Longo.
Alexander has always been fascinated with printmaking's
inherent potential for works in series. " Prints created in series
can reveal the core of an artist's concerns and intentions…You can
be very ambitious in projects of that sort and show something that cannot
be shown in any other way." The project that most successfully exploited
the potency and flexibility of the print series are Donald
Judd's three untitled woodcut portfolios of 1988. Judd, a passionate
print collector himself, first met Alexander in the late 1970's while
looking for a print by Barnett Newman. He had made prints intermittently
since the 1960's but nothing as ambitious as these three sets. He began
with 18 schematic drawings, nine pairs exploring the negative and positive
space of rectangles with horizontal or vertical lines bisecting or trisecting
them. The set became increasingly complex, and ultimately, ten prints
in which the idea carried through most clearly where chosen. Interested
in the spectrum of choices the printing process provides, Judd chose to
print these ten woodcuts in black, red and blue editions. In 1990 he added
further complexities to his system, layering additional bold colors in
stencil onto his woodcut compositions in an untitled series of ten prints.
Many of Alexander's recent publications are within the conceptual framework of those he published in the 1970's. Several prints by Bruce Nauman, Richard Long, Lawrence Weiner and John Baldessari examine the dialogue between image and language, one of the central themes of conceptual art. Alexander also co-published the first print by Lorna Simpson, one of the younger generation of conceptual artists. Her Counting, 1991, is composed of three vertically stacked images adjacent to statistics that poignantly allude to socio-political issues of identity, race and feminism.
As a publisher without a workshop, Alexander has
had the freedom to work with a wide range of printers and maintain a fresh
and varied approach to his projects. (In the early 1980's he thought of
opening a workshop and bought a large flatbed offset press, even editioning
a few large prints on it before deciding that it was more of a burden
than an asset.) He moved the gallery to Soho in 1985, and opened a separate
space devoted entirely to prints in 1989. This new space has been used
to mount several in-depth exhibitions, which have included rarely shown
proofs and working materials, providing the rare opportunity to observe
an artist's method in developing a print. In addition, he has produced
numerous catalogues on contemporary prints, including the catalogue raisonne
of Artschwager's multiples and several with original prints or covers
by Red Grooms, Jasper Johns
and Robert Motherwell. For 25
years Brooke Alexander Editions has published work of a singular quality
and merit as well as contributed to the understanding of contemporary
art through its discerning exhibitions and catalogues. Its sustained support
for the field of printed art continues to be a significant asset to contemporary
art today. (end of text)
Today Brooke Alexander Editions is located at 59
Wooster Street in Soho where historically significant exhibitions such
as Jasper Johns and Barnett Newman and Dan
Flavin/ Donald Judd: Sculpture and Works on Paper, have been a part
of its regular program. He continues to publish prints and multiples with
today's leading contemporary artists such as Richard
Tuttle, Matt Mullican, John
Baldessari, Raymond Pettibon
and Franz West.
(All quoted material appearing in this text is taken from
an interview with Brooke Alexander,
conducted by the author on November 5, 1993)
New Publications
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