1980s Diego Rivera Los Angeles County Museum of Art Poster

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Super rare high quality exhibition poster by LACMA, (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Printed one time only for the … Read more Super rare high quality exhibition poster by LACMA, (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Printed one time only for the exhibition in 1986. Gold Inks that easily fingerprint, should be framed once purchased.
This poster was printed by Black Box Collotype in Chicago using the continuous tone process which uses not dots.
About the Continuous Tone Printing Process:
Screenless 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