Graphics: Hewers of Woodcuts and Drawers of Watercolors

From the woodcuts of Dürer to the etchings of Goya and the lithographs of Lautrec, graphics have displayed a cutting edge in art; but for most serious artists, major statements are expected to be made in oils. Recently, however, graphics have assumed a new dignity in the artistic hierarchy as a pioneering medium. The major precedent was set by U.S. pop artists, who demonstrated that art directly inspired by commercial techniques could be—well, if not beautiful—at least socially significant. Today, more and more artists around the world use lithographs, engravings, aquatints or silk screen as a means of developing new ideas.

Bridging the Curtain. A showcase for some of the most sophisticated two-dimensional art now being created is Yugoslavia's summer-long International Graphics Exposition. Ever since this year's show (the seventh) opened in Ljubljana, the Slovenian capital has attracted avant-garde collectors, curators, dealers, artists and critics. More than 1,100 works by 201 contributors from 43 countries are on display—and the average print in the exhibition costs $50. Hardly a one is traditionally representational, except for the proletarian peasant block prints of the Russians. Instead, the cool walls of Ljubljana's stuccoed Moderna Galerija are hung with an extraordinary melange of esoteric wit, gaudy pop sensuality, opgeometry, surreal fantasy and cloudy abstractions.

Americans (16 artists), Japanese and British have weighed in with the most varied national selections, but the Czechs, the Poles, and above all the Yugoslavs, demonstrate that behind the Curtain originality is no longer a crime. Zoran Krzisnik, 45, a cheerful peasant's son who won his job as Slovenian arts commissioner on the basis of his wartime prowess in captured German tanks, feels that Ljubljana's expositions, which he has been organizing since 1955, have helped make graphics "a real bridge" between the artist, his private coterie and the public at large.

Wax Arm & Ruler. "The trend to be frankly controversial," says Krzisnik, "is manifested far too harshly in the big canvases painted nowadays. But a peculiar kind of alienation takes place when colors are affixed to a copperplate, or what have you, and the work becomes still more depersonalized when a sheet of glass is placed over it. A print possesses a screen of anonymity that relieves it of some of the inner torment, of the rawness of the protest."