Employee Picks: David’s Stone Litho Favorites

David Sobey is the bookkeeper and a web associate for MovieArt.

My favorite posters in the MovieArt collection are the beautiful stone lithographs from the early 20th century. Aloys Senefelder invented lithography in Munich in 1798.

The artist begins by drawing freely on a smooth block of limestone with a greasy crayon as well as a greasy liquid called tusche. The stone is then chemically treated to fix the image securely. The grease in the crayon or tusche will repel water in the lithographic process, but the unmarked part of the stone will absorb water. Next, the stone is cleaned with a solvent making the drawing invisible on the stone. Then, the printmaker wipes the stone with a wet sponge prior to applying the ink. The part of the stone’s surface that absorbed the water will repel the oil-based ink, while the part marked with the crayon or tusche will retain the ink. Then, the printmaker uses a press to force the paper against the ink. A separate stone is used for each color and the paper carefully aligned before each pressing.

French artists like Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Bonnard, and Vuillard used stone lithography to achieve a widely reproducible art. Stone lithography excels at creating areas of vivid colors as well as subtle shading and tonal effects. It is this “painterly” effect that makes these posters so stunningly beautiful. MovieArt has many stone lithographs in its inventory, but five of my favorites are: