In the history of 20th-century American art, printmaking has often taken a secondary role to painting and sculpture. Once limited in importance, relegated to the umbrella of “graphic arts” and closely linked to illustration and commercial image production, the print has long had to assert its legitimacy as a fine art form, resisting dismissal as “mere” craft or valued only for its reproducibility. In the 1940s and 1950s, as artistic attention veered toward the subconscious probing of Surrealism and the gestural immediacy of Abstract Expressionist painting, printmakers across the U.S. began engaging in process-based experimentation. Contrary to the critical view that the planning required in printmaking stifled spontaneity and gesture, the medium emerged mid-century as a site of radical freedom, liberated from the expectations of both market and critic.

Originally founded in Paris by artist Stanley William Hayter in Paris, the printmaking workshop known as Atelier 17 played a major role in this shift in printmaking’s visibility. The Atelier, which moved to New York in 1940 with the rise of fascism and artists fleeing Europe, introduced innovative techniques to American artists and seeded a network of educational programs at universities across the U.S. with access to robust print facilities and collaboration with artists who catalyzed new directions in the medium. Following World War II, the G.I. Bill enabled many veterans to pursue formal arts education, and the West Coast in particular became a fertile ground for experimentation as troops returned from the frontlines, bringing together more established artists with lesser known voices.

Because the immediate and collaborative role of the artist in the printmaking process and wider arts community would diminish in the decades to follow with the rise of highly professionalized print publishers—and, in turn, reduced the direct involvement of the artist as the print’s visionary maker—this mid-century period’s importance reverberates.

The result was a stylistic and geographic diversity unmatched by other media, particularly the male-dominated arena of Abstract Expressionism championed by critic Clement Greenberg, whose allegiance to the New York School enforced a rigid hierarchy of mediums. Rejecting this dogma, painters and printmakers—many of them women frequently omitted from historical accounts of the period—immersed themselves in the print’s potential as a means of surrealist automation and expressionist, intuitive production.

One such artist was Deborah Remington, an active voice in the Beat Generation and co-founder of San Francisco’s influential “6” Gallery in 1954. She is represented in the collection by her color lithograph Alice in Dixieland, created that same year. According to dealer Daniel Lienau of the Annex Galleries in Santa Rosa, California, Remington approached printmaking not to produce a final image but as a method of open-ended exploration. In her own words:

My work concerns the paradoxes of visual perception, the enigmas and quirks, and how it all forms the basis for our realities. The impact, excitement, and energies created by incongruity, juxtaposition and opposites all interest me.

While many painters explored the print, the most dynamic printmakers of the Abstract Expressionist era were not always the best-known painters. In a 1953 review of Sylvia Wald’s exhibition at the Arts Club in Louisville, Kentucky, a critic observed that her work defied the era’s assumptions about printmaking’s constraints, noting that “the very mechanics of this graphic art medium seem to militate against spontaneous work.” A painter and printmaker known for her innovative use of serigraphs (a screenprinting process typically associated with commercial reproduction), Wald built her images by layering coats paint that she would then push through screens without preparatory studies. Her prints emerged as spontaneous, bold fields of color rather than prescribed designs.

In her soft ground etching L’Arraignée (1963), Minna Citron used the medium’s potential for depth and texture to express psychic and emotional intensity. Art historian Christina Weyl notes that Citron understood Abstract Expressionism as a continuum between spontaneity and disciplined control. Like many of the artists mentioned here, Citron was affiliated with Atelier 17, which brought together artists of diverse backgrounds and skill levels. Among them were Jackson Pollock, represented in the collection by Untitled CR1081 (P18) (1944–56), created at Atelier 17, and Louise Nevelson, whose etching and drypoint Trees (1953–55) counters the flatness of commercial prints. Citron had a particularly close relationship at the Atelier with Nevelson who likewise brought textural depth and invention to her surfaces.

Developing images gradually and mixing qualities of the painterly and printed mark, works such as S#3 (1951) by Robert McChesney rivaled the paintings of the period.  Relinquishing control, his use of multiple screens to layer smeared and bleeding colors yielded compositions that embraced the unpredictability of the process itself. San Francisco-based William Byron McClintock also embraced lithography’s capacity for fluid abstraction. In his Untitled Abstraction, light seems to emanate from within the composition as ink soaks into the paper. McClintock—who studied at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) under Edward Corbett, Richard Diebenkorn, and James Budd Dixon—developed a method of scraping and layering a single stone to achieve atmospheric depth. According to art historian David Acton, CSFA fostered an ethos of individuality and rejected the hierarchy of painting as a superior medium. Printmaking, he writes, gained its “own language and look, its own creative pace and rhythm.”

This focus on surface—both as image and as material—defined much of the print experimentation of the time. Beulah Elsie Stevenson, a Brooklyn-based artist and former student of Hans Hofmann, transformed the woodcut into a gestural medium by overlapping colors and leaving behind visible traces of movement. Stevenson was active in numerous artistic circles and organizations, including the New York Society of Women Artists (where she served as president) and the National Association of Women Artists.

On the West Coast, artists like Dennis Beall, James Kelly, Dorothy McCray, Sam Tchakalian, and Ruth Wall pushed the boundaries of lithography within the Bay Area’s Abstract Expressionist scene. James Kelly’s Red Lithograph (1952), produced at CSFA, exemplifies the visceral intensity of printmaking. Using a method of rubbing paper on chemically treated plates, Kelly created explosive calligraphic forms. Art critic Thomas Albright dubbed the effect “volcanic gesturalism.” The materiality of the plate—zinc or aluminum treated to accept oil-based marks—gave Kelly’s work its forceful physicality. Such experimentation dates back to the 1930s, when artists like Boris Margo developed novel techniques like the “cellocut.” In Into the Sky (1955), Margo used cardboard shapes, aluminum sheets, and viscous celluloid melted onto plywood, altering the surface with etching tools or acetone once the material solidified. His method combined precision with fluidity, yielding vibrant, tactile images.

Wall, an experimental printmaker, pursued abstraction despite prevailing expectations around femininity and exhibited at unconventional venues like the legendary 12 Adler Place, then a lesbian bar and gallery. Like many of her peers, she studied at CSFA on the G.I. Bill. Lienau notes that she often worked at night in the empty studios, granting herself the solitude to fully immerse in the process.

Edmond Casarella likewise emphasized the print’s materiality in Split (1956), a work built using his signature paper relief process developed in 1949. Layered paper inked with heavy oils gives the print its sculptural dimension. “With his bold shapes and colors,” Lienau writes, Casarella evokes “a slice of geological strata as a ballet of movement,” revealing a deeply physical, full-bodied creative process.

Bernard Childs brought an almost industrial sensibility to printmaking, using power tools—rotary burrs, grinders, and electric drypoint instruments—to incise plates. His Experimental Plate #3 demonstrates how such methods fused surrealist automatism with a fascination for raw material exploration, producing prints with the intensity and gesture typically reserved for abstract painting.

Other artists turned to abstraction to evoke landscape, spirituality, or cosmology.  In Genesis 1:5 (1962), Harold Emerson Keeler used black gestural lines around a red disc to suggest the explosive emergence of the sun, referencing the biblical creation story. Reginald Neal’s Mutations (1959) and Leonard Edmondson’s Winter Garden (1957) modulated between defined and amorphous shapes. Similarly, Jan Gelb’s Winter Moon (1962) conjures a landscape of memory, or “almost remembered” forms and sensations, drifting through color and line.

Though committed to abstraction, many printmakers of the era did not entirely reject figuration or cultural reference. Artists like Jacob Kainen, George Miyasaki, and Warrington Colescott Jr. retained the human body in works such as Stranger in the Gates (1953) and Figure No. 43 (1957). For artists who had experienced war firsthand, the act of scratching into a plate could itself carry the resonance of destruction, survival, and renewal. Leon Goldin (1923–2009), for example, made In Limbo (1952) while teaching at the California College of Arts and Crafts. The abstracted, body-like form stretched across the composition—rendered in frantic, scratched marks—evokes a state of psychic dislocation. Such works revealed the simultaneous expression of emotional and technical change, which is further explored in our visual essay, Body Techniques and Technologies of Human Touch at Atelier 17.