Krishna Reddy and Viscosity Printing
Peter Black
Krishna Reddy (1925–2018) played an important role in the development of viscosity printing. The importance attributed to his role in this process differs, to some extent, according to the perspective of the individual. After his move to the USA in 1976, to become Director of Graphics and Printmaking at New York University, Reddy identified himself–and has become, generally speaking, identified with the simultaneous intaglio and surface colour printing technique. In the USA he is famous for teaching ‘viscosity printing’, as he called it, and in 1988 he published a valuable book on the process. For the title, however, he bowed to pressure from S.W. Hayter (1901–1988), a British artist who could be expected to have an opinion, since many regard him as the inventor. Enough good will remained between the two artists for Reddy to come up with a title properly consistent with the history and origins of the technique: Intaglio Simultaneous Color Printmaking: Significance of Materials and Processes. From a non-US perspective, Reddy’s ‘viscosity printing’ grows, as his title suggests, out of the simultaneous surface and intaglio colour process already developed by the British artist S.W. Hayter (1901-1988), and which Reddy had learnt from Hayter.
Hayter founded his celebrated experimental printmaking workshop Atelier 17 in Paris in 1927. He transferred it to New York in 1940, and back to Paris again in 1950, where it continued until his death in 1988. (In New York the workshop continued, but without Hayter’s input, until 1955.) Atelier 17 was a place where artists studied printmaking and shared ideas, and should not be confused with printmaking workshops providing artists with plate-making and editioning services. To put it simply, Hayter’s workshop was the place where many of the most exciting prints of the 20th century were made. The simultaneous colour printing method was only one of many innovations in intaglio printmaking that emerged from the Atelier. Hayter perfected the method of simultaneous intaglio and surface colour printing–or viscosity printing–in New York in 1946.
Reddy was born in India and began his career as an artist in London. He moved to Paris in 1951 in order to study sculpture with Ossip Zadkine (1888–1967), who suggested he join Hayter’s Atelier 17 in order to learn how to make intaglio prints using avant-garde techniques. This was a turning point in Reddy’s career, after which he focused almost entirely on printmaking. Reddy has become identified, especially in the USA, with the process which he called ‘viscosity printing’, and which he taught to many American artists from 1976 onwards. But it is a mistake to attribute the invention to him. In 1951, when Reddy undertook a training in printmaking at Atelier 17, Hayter was already teaching a method of intaglio printing which he called ‘simultaneous printing from surface and intaglio’. Hayter’s whole life was dedicated to improving the capabilities of intaglio printmaking, in particular by finding a method of printing in colour without the technical bother of colour separations and multi-plate printing. In the early 1930s he had realised, through carefully documented experiments, that the solution would be to use the plate surface in combination with the intaglio. In 1943, in New York, Hayter printed a small copper plate, Centauresse, from intaglio and surface simultaneously; he achieved his goal on a large scale with Cinq personnages in 1946.
Ever self-effacing, Hayter involved several of his students from the New York Atelier 17 in this important achievement. He also used silkscreens, and not rollers, to apply the less viscous surface inks because the colours supplied part of the drawing of the print’s complicated image, in counterpoint to the black intaglio line. Both of these facts seem, retrospectively, to have introduced an element of doubt to the question of Hayter’s authorship of the method. Although Reddy would later only make viscosity prints using rollers, the essential point is that inks can only sit on the surface of an already inked intaglio plate if applied in a very thin film. Rollers are the simplest method of applying a film, but it can be achieved by other means. Doubt about Reddy’s claim can and should be dispelled by consulting Hayter’s book, New Ways of Gravure, published in New York in 1949, which celebrates this colour printing milestone. In 1950, Hayter returned to Paris where, always sharing his own technical expertise with his students, he carried on making prints and developing new methods that would allow modern artists to make something better than what he irritably termed ‘the small black-and-white etching’.
Reddy’s invention of viscosity printing is not adequately documented, but it is possible to reconstruct what happened from his point of view. It is referred to briefly by Hayter, who regarded Reddy’s work as contributing to the development of the method. Reddy used to tell an anecdote about his discovery that a more viscous colour is rejected when a less viscous one is rolled over it. But this event, described ex nihilo, leaves out important facts about the circumstances leading to his discovery. Above all, it should be noted that Reddy had taken Hayter’s course in printmaking, from which he learned the technique of simultaneous intaglio and surface colour printing, which requires a descending sequence of viscosities. It is important to point out that this was how Reddy learned the use of rollers to apply surface inks, and the control of viscosity required to separate intaglio and surface colours. The large rollers in use at that date were adapted from lithographic printing. They were leather-covered and relatively soft, but they were not yet referred to as soft because the need for a hard roller that would deposit ink only on higher areas of the plate had not yet arisen.
Reddy relied on the use of a type of ink which Hayter had started using on his return to Paris, and which he had found to be ideal for surface colour. The Atelier, was stocked–in addition to normal, more viscous, etching (intaglio) inks–with high quality colours made by Lorilleux. These were standard in offset lithographic (book) printing, a method that transfers thin films of ink from plate to paper using a rubber roller. In order to provide intense colours in very thin concentrations, offset inks are manufactured with a lower viscosity than standard etching inks. Thus, by using etching inks for intaglio, and offset inks for surface, Hayter’s students could make ‘viscosity prints’ out of the tin. Well, not quite! Hayter carefully restricted his own use of technical terms such as viscosity, which he avoided mentioning in his earliest account of the method. He was fully aware of the need to control the viscosity of the inks, although as he later wrote, viscosity was not the only factor that determines the successful printing of one film of ink on top of another, over an intaglio ink already in the plate. Attending to the viscosity was the principle that had allowed him to apply colours three-deep to the plate for his masterpiece Cinq personnages in 1946. An understanding of viscosity was not new since it is the same principle–that oil and water repel one another–that operates in lithography, a printing technique in use since 1799.
Reddy is a highly original artist, one of Hayter’s few pupils who took, or adapted, Hayter’s techniques and created something distinctive. What can be said in favour of Reddy’s innovation is that he was, by 1954, creating images which exploited plates with deep hollows, partly bitten and partly sculpted, which required an approach to colour inking quite different to the one that Hayter had so far been using. In his own work up until that time, Hayter’s plates generally retained flat areas of unworked copper. From the beginning, Reddy’s quite different approach to printmaking was that of a sculptor. The earliest plates he made at Atelier 17, e.g. Seated Figure, 1951, Discerning, 1954, reveal an artist who thinks in three dimensions, using open bite to create deep recesses in the plate which have the effect of modelling his figures. Discerning has colour printed from areas of the surface that were left blank to receive it; a method similar to Hayter’s at that date. Later Reddy worked his (usually zinc) plates with a Dremel power tool, creating beautiful, jewel-like surfaces, which he worked to a variety of depths, to be inked intaglio and with an often complicated arrangement of rolled surface colours of different viscosities.
The experience of working alongside Reddy (and others) led Hayter to acquire a hard roller for the workshop in 1957. Hayter then made dynamic prints such as Poisson rouge by reserving parts of the plate surface by spattering stopping-out varnish, followed by a deep bite. They were inked with hard- and soft-roller colours, exploiting the rejection of a higher-viscosity ink by one with a lower viscosity, first observed by Reddy. However, the depths of relief, and the inking schemes used by Hayter are generally simpler than those used by Reddy. Inks can be applied to the plate with a more viscous first, followed by a less viscous one, or in a variety of ways. In order for inks to lie on top of one another they must be applied in descending order of viscosity; altering the sequence of viscosities results in different effects. But, to claim that Hayter’s original sequence of viscosities, from high to low, was a less important discovery than Reddy’s, from low to high, creating a different effect, is as “… vain as an endeavour to mingle oil and water, or, in the language of chemistry, to amalgamate bodies of heterogeneous principles”.
