The Sorcery of the Stone

There has always been about lithography a touch of sorcery, and perhaps no man has ever described this more succinctly than Goethe in 1823. Shown some lithographs of a poem he had jotted down only an hour before, he wrote in astonishment. "This is my handwriting--and yet, it isn't." Though a form of reproduction, the lithograph retains all the life and spontaneity of the artist's original design.

Last week, in a glass-covered court and adjoining gallery of the Bavarian State Graphic Collection, originally designed by Adolf Hitler himself as an annex to the Nazi Brown House, one of the most com prehensive lithograph exhibitions ever assembled opened in Munich. There were Munchs and Noldes. Daumiers and Lautrecs, Chagalls and Picassos. But the real star of the show was one of Munich's own sons. His works are a bit clumsy, and he was not really much of an artist. Johann Nepomuk Franz Aloys Senefelder, born in 1771, was lithography's inventor.

How to Make 20 Copies. Senefelder started out to be a playwright; his first play was called Der Madchenkenner (The Man Who Knew Girls), and he played the lead with lusty success. Other plays followed, and they presented the author with a problem. Each script needed at least 20 copies--too few to warrant the expense of a printer, too many to copy by hand.

Senefelder was familiar with etching, but etching a whole script on copper plates would take too much time. One day. his mother asked him to make a list of some laundry she was about to send out. Almost without thinking, Senefelder wrote the list on a flat piece of limestone that had come from the quarries of Solnhofen. He used an etching crayon of wax. soap and lampblack--and got the idea that he might cover the stone with acid that would eat away the part of the surface not protected by the crayon. It worked, but in the traditional way of relief printing. At length, it occurred to Senefelder that he could get a transferable design on his stone without having to eat the stone away with acid. After applying his wax crayon, he wet the stone with a mixture of water and gum arabic, and then covered the surface with ink. The water-resistant crayon markings took the ink. but the moisture elsewhere repelled it. Senefelder could now transfer his de sign to paper in a simple hand press, though the wetting and inking had to be repeated for each lithograph made.

To Lose a Fortune. Senefelder gave up playwriting to devote himself to his invention. The King of Bavaria gave him a patent, but Senefelder decided to go after greater profits in London. There, unhappily, he tried for a -L-3.000 prize donated by George III for a design for a dirigible. He failed to win the prize, sold his lithography patent for a pittance, and left for Vienna. He promptly ran afoul of the Viennese authorities by boasting that he had discovered a way of lithographing bank notes. He went home to Munich only to find that his brothers, to whom he had entrusted his business, had no intention of giving it back. He died at the age of 63, practically penniless.

In his Complete Handbook of Stone Printing, he told all his secrets, and thus, just as Gutenberg fathered the great industry of printing from type, Senefelder gave the world the basic process widely used in offset printing (though now usually from zinc plates rather than stone). But beyond its commercial uses, the lithograph has been especially dear to the artist. Through this medium, he can spread his message wide and yet know that no matter how many copies are made, each lithograph will retain his personal touch.

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