cover image Ink, Paper, Metal, Wood: Painters and Sculptors at Crown Point Press

Ink, Paper, Metal, Wood: Painters and Sculptors at Crown Point Press

Chronicle Books, Kathan Brown. Chronicle Books, $45 (288pp) ISBN 978-0-8118-0469-1

Founded by Brown in 1962, Crown Point Press of San Francisco has served as a printmaking workshop for many well-known contemporary painters and sculptors. This informal scrapbook, splicing interviews and commentaries with 165 color and 50 black-and-white plates, showcases an impressive body of work by 56 artists including Helen Frankenthaler, Wayne Thiebaud, Eric Fischl, Chuck Close, Francesco Clemente, Al Held, Ed Ruscha, Judy Pfaff, Sol LeWitt, Alex Katz, Sylvia Mangold, Richard Diebenkorn and Christian Boltanski. Notable are Elaine de Kooning's Torchlight Cave Drawings No. 1, April Gornik's romantic, verdant silhouette landscape Charente, John Cage's color etchings based on the I Ching and evoking Zen, Pat Steir's conceptualist rummagings through history. The text is filled with knowledgeable firsthand observations on printmaking, and print quality and authenticity. (Sept.)