NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {T} he International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) annual art fair is one of my favorite events. I’ve been going for at least 30 years. For the uninitiated, a print is a work of art made from ink, paper, and a press. Prints almost always start on a surface other than paper. An etching, for instance, starts on a metal plate. The artist coats it with a special wax and then draws his design on the waxed plate. He places it in an acid solution that bites his lines into the metal. He inks the plate, chooses his paper, mates paper and plate in a printing press, and, voilà, an etching is born.

My example, simple enough, disguises endless quirks, qualifications, and bits of irrational exuberance. All figure in the best art. Paintings top the art hierarchy for their juicy surfaces, fancy frames, singularity, and color, though today prints in all manner of Technicolor are to be had. And printmakers challenge the old classifications — etching, engraving, woodcut, lithograph, among them — all the time.

The fair this past weekend showed the wares of around 90 dealers. Mel Bochner’s mammoth What Am I Doing Here?, offered by Two Palms Press, welcomed me to the Javits Center. Two Palms is a printer. It’s got a hydraulic press the size of a tank and lots of other gadgets. Its technology and savvy help artists defy tradition, making them partners in pushing the envelope.

“What Am I Doing Here?” That depends on who’s asking, but, for me, it’s easy to answer. I’m there for quality and to be challenged by new things. I’m there for the friendly, inquisitive, egalitarian vibe that marks a print fair. Paintings still top the art hierarchy for their lush, viscous surfaces. There’s a romance to paint. Ink is the skinny girl with thick glasses and freckles. Paintings are unique, but today prints can be, too. Paintings have color but Technicolor prints run rampant now. Ink fades with too much exposure to light, but with new inks and new glass for frames, they don’t have to live in boxes anymore except for delectation by candlelight.

The Bochner’s there to be sold, of course, but also to challenge, since I rarely see a print that’s also sculpture. It’s a work on paper, and that’s essential to printmaking, but it’s cast paper. The text juts out two or three inches. Bochner makes his medium from paper mush and fills a mold with it. It dries in the mold for a few days.

Bochner (b. 1940) was, in the ’60s, one of the first artists to use language in art. For him, the idea, or concept, powers the art as much as the materials and aesthetics. Conceptual art goes in many directions, and it’s good to stay clear of the thicket. What Am I Doing Here? is part of a group of works based on common expressions conveying exasperation or resignation such as “Do I have to draw you a picture?” or “It is what it is” or “Blah, blah, blah.”

They’re fun. His expressions never tire. The bulbous letters in What Am I Doing Here? are insistent and ugly on the one hand, but, on the other, the surfaces are textured, like cake frosting. And, as questions go, “what am I doing here” is among the most philosophical. Bochner’s What Am I Doing Here? is selling for $65,000. It’s unique, not a multiple, and there’s no printing press involved. It’s molded. Is it even a print? It’s not a work on paper but of paper.

I’ll go with the flow. Bochner’s not my thing, but he’s doing something that’s new and compelling.

Shark’s Ink, like Two Palms, is a printer. It’s working with the painter Barbara Takenaga (b. 1949) on a print series getting the same pearlescent colors as her works in oil. Her art is sublime. She works in that wedge of a space where pure abstraction and representation meet. Falling, a lithograph from 2016, could be an abstract arrangement of lines, dots, and circles, or it could be a meteor shower.

Untitled V, from 2022, could be a curtain or an arrangement of pastel green, yellow, and orange forms set beneath serpentine strings of multi-shaped white dots. Untitled V is a monotype. Monotypes start with a glass plate. The plate’s inked, though even oil paint can be used, and then gently pressed onto paper to make a soft-edged, atmospheric print. The entire surface of the plate is inked. There are no lines etched or engraved into the plate, so it’s not a linear medium. In effect, it’s a painting pressed onto paper, with pressure helping to make marks and forms. The paper can be said to drink most of the ink or paint on the plate, so there’s only one image.

Takenaga’s prints sparkle, and for around $3,000 each, they’re one of the best deals I saw at the fair. They’re very beautiful.

Old Master print dealers and dealers of prints before, say, 1970, once dominated the Print Fair. This has changed over the past 20 years. Most buyers younger than Baby Boomers want art from their era. Religious art does nothing for them. They want a now look, which means big, color, and shapes not known to nature. They also want to supply their own narrative. As demand changed, so did supply if only from the Old Master dealers of yore retiring. There were fewer than a dozen purveyors of old art at the fair.

David Tunick has been selling Old Master prints since 1966. He’s now the president of IFPDA, and he does sell modern art here and there but specializes in Old Master prints that I’d call ne plus ultra. He’s offering an impression of Dürer’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, from 1498. The image is famous, and there are hundreds of impressions.

It’s a woodcut made from a design carved on a woodblock. Etched metal plates are delicate. After hundreds of run-ins with the printing press, etched lines tend to wear, making details less crisp. Woodblock lines are tougher. The Four Horsemen is part of a series of woodcuts that Dürer made to illustrate an edition of the Bible. Most of them have text in back, in German for the 1498 run and in Latin for books made in 1511.

Print connoisseurship is an exacting field. Though prints are made in multiples, the inks, paper, and printing quality vary dramatically and minutely even in the confines of a single image. Tunick’s Dürer impression is a proof. There’s no text on the back, so we know it was made early in the print run. Unlike nearly all impressions of The Four Horsemen, Tunick’s has tiny, ultra-fine lines here and there that don’t print after the proof stage. The lines were too delicate and nuanced to survive the pressure from the press. This makes his impression possibly the earliest we know. It’s in the upper six figures, pricewise.

In the Book of Revelation, the Four Horsemen bring conquest, famine, war, and death. They’re never far from us, and there are lots of dopes who seem to will them to make an appearance.

Tunick also has a brilliant impression of Dürer’s Coat of Arms with a Skull, an engraving from 1503. A patrician woman dressed for a dance does some serious slumming in flirting with a wild man who looks like Tarzan after a winter in a cave. She’s a coy flirt. On the man’s heraldic shield is a skull positioned exactly as the lady’s head. The “coat of arms” is the way of all flesh.

It’s one of my favorite Dürer images since it combines wacky German flourishes — the wings and garland, creatures who lurk in the woods — and a Dance of Death. Tunick’s got history as well as unrivaled connoisseurship chops. He sold this impression 47 years ago. “It came back,” in dealer lingo, which means he built a relationship with a collector that has lasted for years. It also means he’s seen it all. He’s asking low six figures for it. As an object, it’s one of Dürer’s triumphs.

Paramour Fine Arts Gallery is a husband-and-wife shop based in Franklin, Mich. They’ve been in business since the late ’70s. The gallery is a work of passion, initially part-time while Ed Ogle taught in the Detroit public-school system, a profile in courage in itself. He and his wife, Karen, specialize in 20th-century prints, European and American.

Paramour, a good name for the firm, is old-school Print Fair. These days, most of the dealers bring whatever prints they can hang on the walls in their booths. Paramour, William Carl, and a few others bring their print racks. Visitors flip through, not knowing what they’ll discover. In ye olden days, that’s what most of the dealers did, so the Print Fair was an adventure. In going through the racks, I saw that Paramour had a thrilling group of prints by Stow Wengenroth (1906–1978) and Paul Landacre (1893–1963).

They’re not household names, but Wengenroth was America’s great artist in the medium of lithography, and Landacre was his equal in wood engravings. Wengenroth’s New England Village, Castine, Maine, is the subtlest, dreamiest thing at the fair, and it’s only $900. For $900 you can have a fantastic work of art, guys and gals. When it was invented in the 1790s, lithography was a medium meant to evoke drawings. Lithographs are still prints that suggest spontaneity, but Wengenroth balances the spontaneity of changing light with the stillness and timelessness of a cloister.

I’ll end with Picasso. He died 50 years ago this past April, an anniversary triggering a raft of memorial and reappraisal exhibitions. Picasso is mostly known as a painter, a Cubist, and a creep when it came to women. Like all worldly people, I discount the last and expand the first two. Most of Picasso’s work was in the medium of prints, and, in reality, only some of it is squares, rectangles, ovals, and cubes. Lots of it is pure abstraction, and lots of it is what I call fabulist realism.

Ursus Books on Madison Avenue and 78th Street sells rare books, art-reference books, and books with prints embedded in them. Corps Perdu, or Lost Body, published in 1950, is a collection of poems by Aimé Césaire illustrated with 32 engravings, etchings, and aquatints by Picasso. It was made in an edition of 220. Césaire, born in Martinique, was a very good French poet, communist politician, and leader of France’s Negritude movement. He served in the French parliament for years. Ursus’s volume of Corps Perdu is lovely, in wonderful condition, signed by Picasso and Césaire, and with its original wrapper. Césaire’s poetry isn’t “woe is me,” but “look at me and accept me as human, like you.”

Prints are often bound in volumes — Piranesi’s 18th-century prints are a good example — or set as illustrations in limited-edition books. Picasso’s etched profile portrait of Césaire is dynamic. Ursus wants $22,500 for Corps Perdu. Goodness, with 32 Picasso prints, it’s a steal, but only philistines and louts dismantle books.

John Szoke Gallery specializes in Picasso prints as well as works on paper by Edvard Munch, but I consider Szoke the go-to dealer for the highest-quality work by Picasso. Picasso made thousands of works of art over a career that ran from the late 1890s to the early 1970s. He was the most experimental of artists as well, going from period to period and from fascination to fascination.

Szoke is offering a group of linocuts, but I’ll illustrate Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, from 1962. A hundred years earlier, to the year, Manet painted the big, fancy, and formal lunch scene with two elegant dudes casually picnicking with two very naked women. It’s Manet’s salute to the Renaissance artists Giorgione and Raphael, but in Paris in the 1860s, properly dressed men didn’t lunch in public parks with improperly undressed women.

It’s facile to think of Picasso’s Blue Period and Rose Period and Synthetic Cubism Period as delineations by pretentious art historians. Picasso tended to focus on a single subject or approach with an intensity that was manic and sharp. He’d plumb it until he felt he’d exhausted it. Then he’d move to the next challenge. The linocut riveted him in the late ’50s and early ’60s.

A linocut starts with linoleum, which, in its zenith, was a durable, versatile material used mostly for floors. In printmaking, an image is cut into a sheet of linoleum. Why linoleum? Unlike wood used in woodcuts and wood engravings, linoleum has no grain and doesn’t split. Forms are crisp and clean, like pieces in a puzzle. Linocuts are difficult and maddening when the pieces of linoleum ever so slightly move under the pressure of the printing press. As a medium, the linocut is consistent with Picasso’s lifelong drive to pare an image to its simplest, most competing elements.

The problem’s a misalignment of forms, especially when multiple colors are involved. Each color required a different inking of the forms or shapes to be colored and a new run through the press. A smidgen of a shift made the desired image look tipsy. Picasso devised a way to use one linoleum sheet, gouging it over and over and, before printing, wiping the ink from the previous run-through.

Picasso, in 1962, takes Manet’s Déjeuner apart, as he did in his Synthetic Cubism phase, and puts it back together in electric yellow, red, blue, gray, and green. Having saluted Manet and pushed the linocut medium as far as he wanted, he moved to what was, for him, the next big thing. By 1963, he was back to painting, sculpture, and ceramics, and sedulously. He made Déjeuner when he was 81, with lots more to do.

Szoke’s linocuts run from $70,000 to $300,000. Not cheap, but he has the best. All of the print dealers at the fair bring passion and connoisseurship, which is why the IFPDA fair is always a pleasure. This year is the 30th version of the fair. I suspect I’ve been to all of them. This is the last year it’s at the Javits Center, praise the Lord. It’s so out of the way, it might as well be in New Jersey. Next year it’s returning to the Park Avenue Armory, a classy venue where people like to spend lots of time.