Techniques: Multi-Originals & Selected Reproductions

Few artists turn up their noses at color reproductions of their works. Most, like Andrew Wyeth, whose Christina's World in 1966 sold 7,000 copies at $7.50 each in Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, feel that color copies are a testament to the public's love of their work, accept the fact that U.S. art presses alone roll off an estimated 350 million prints "suitable for framing" each year. But hardly any artist professes himself completely pleased with the results, since most color reproductions leave much to be desired. Offset lithography, the commonest technique used for wall pictures, produces colors that under the best of conditions are only partially true. Even the far more costly and time-consuming method of collotype, which offers near-perfect color veracity, does not capture the raised daubs and whorls of the artist's brush.

Hand-Painted & Destroyed. Now new processes are beginning to be used for reproductions that fool not only the eye but the sense of touch as well, duplicating both the color and raised brush stroke of oil on canvas. Surrealist Painter Max Ernst, for one, was astonished when technicians in France showed him duplicates of his 1966 work, The Phantom Vessel: "I was absolutely incapable of detecting that they were not my original."

The technique used to reproduce Ernst's painting is called "kamagraphy," and its invention was announced last December by an enterprising Parisian combine headed by Engineer André Cocard, 49, and backed by Master Vintner Alexis Lichine. Kamagraphy faithfully produces 250 perfect copies of a painting on a special press, destroying the original in the process (color lithographs, by comparison, can be printed as many as 500 times, though first-quality press runs, signed by famous artists, are normally limited to between 30 and 250 prints). Each kamagraph looks as though the artist had painted it by hand. The French call this type of work a "multi-original," because the machine can work only with a painting painted for it on a specially treated canvas plaque. Lichine & Co. have so far recruited Ernst, Rene Magritte and Edouard Pignon for their stable of pilot kamagraphers, plan to put their output on sale in the U.S. in the autumn, priced at $150 to $900.

In Manhattan, Tiffany Color Inc. is experimenting with producing oil paintings from color photographs on canvases that are printed with marks imitating the artist's brush strokes. In Bavaria, West Germany, a reclusive engraver named Günther Dietz, 48, has developed a variant on the silk-screen method that has already produced copies of Rembrandt, Dufy, Chagall, Degas, Cezanne and Marini that are almost indistinguishable from the originals.