Lithographie

Alois Senefelder, a Bavarian playwright and inventor, accidentally discovered the principle of lithography in Munich in 1796. Lacking money for paper, he wrote a laundry list on a piece of Bavarian limestone with a grease-based crayon. When he tried to etch the stone with acid as an experiment, he found that the greasy writing resisted the acid while the bare stone was etched. He realized that grease and water repel each other — that a stone drawn on with greasy crayon, then wetted and inked, would hold ink only where the crayon had been.

Lithography — stone-writing — required no cutting, no acid-biting of metal, no physical pressure on a drawing surface. The artist drew directly on the flat stone as if drawing on paper. The printing surface was truly flat (planographic) rather than raised (relief) or incised (intaglio). This made it far easier to achieve tonal gradations and fine detail. By 1800, Senefelder had a patent and had published his Vollständiges Lehrbuch der Steindruckerey (Complete Manual of Lithography).

The implications for commercial image-making were enormous. Lithography made it possible to reproduce images cheaply, quickly, and in large numbers. By the 1820s and 1830s, lithographic prints were in wide circulation — portraits, caricatures, maps, sheet music covers, theater posters. Honoré Daumier used lithography in the French satirical press from the 1830s onward, publishing thousands of caricatures that shaped French political opinion.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec elevated the lithographic poster to high art in the 1890s, creating advertising for the Moulin Rouge and other Paris venues that transformed commercial printing into collectible art objects. Today offset lithography — a descendant of Senefelder's stone process, now using metal plates and rubber rollers — prints the majority of the world's books, magazines, and packaging.