Master Drawings by Picasso Continuous Tone (No Dots) Special Printing Poster, Holiday Sale

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This fine poster reproduces the early Picasso Drawing, "Head of a Woman" from 1909 at the Art Institute of Chicago. … Read more This fine poster reproduces the early Picasso Drawing, "Head of a Woman" from 1909 at the Art Institute of Chicago. This is a high quality work of art using a laborious process to ensure that colors are straight colors and not made up of dots. The continuous tone process which is no long available in the world today, renders a print or poster of a quality only seen if purchasing a stone lithograph or hand printed etching.

This a Continuous Tone Lithographic Poster Published by the Art Institute of Chicago and printed by Black Box Collotype, the last remaining press in the United States that was still using this type of printing. Please do not confuse this with the myriad of cheap reproductions, this is the original poster printed at the time of the exhibition at the Art Institute Of Chicago, the Fogg Art Gallery, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art back in1981. It is on very thick art gallery high quality paper, with a hand torn deckle edge at the bottom of the sheet, and the poster has been stored for over 38 years.

About the Continuous Tone Printing Process:
Screen-less lithography, by eliminating the use of halftone screens and halftone dots achieves extraordinary fidelity, fullness of tone, color and detail, impressive color saturation and clear line resolution. Museums, fine artists and publishers with exacting standards use this remarkable process to re-create their finest works of art. Continuous tone lithography (as in a photograph with no dots) evolved from collotype printing. When Black Box Collotype ultimately closed its doors in 2004, it was one of just a few printers left in the world that had mastered the collotype process. While it was a highly desirable reproduction process for the fine art world, it was a laborious, time consuming (read “expensive”) process. Since there was no screen involved, a collotype print could be 27 colors without fear of a moiré. But in the old days, on Black Box’s one-unit press, those 27 colors had to be laid down one color at a time. So the most complex jobs could take months to complete.

Offset lithography is far faster and less expensive than collotype. Suddenly, four colors and halftone dot patterns were “good enough” because they were so economical. Black Box Collotype was one of the last printing houses in America, if not the world that used the collotype-continuous tone process. See less