This article from Triton Press, Inc., about the COLLOTYPE printing process is brought to you by Pink Flamingos. Triton Press was a renowned fine art printer based out of New York City from the 1940s through the 1980s. My parents obtained a number of their collotypes in the 1970s, including the delicate florals from Dorothy Platt and the unusual large still-life pictures of the Lobster and Watermelon by Agnes Potter Lowrie. I've reproduced the article in its entirety for your learning and enjoyment.
Emily Mayes holding Agnes Potter Lowrie's "Watermelon" collotype, printed in 1950.
Triton Press was founded in 1949 for the express purpose of bringing fine art printing to the U.S.A. and specifically to create COLLOTYPE art prints. Almost every day we are asked: "What is COLLOTYPE?" Simply stated, COLLOTYPE is a continuous tone, photo-mechanical printing process. Because of the quality of the final product, it has been used for fine art reproduction and is regarded by many as an art in itself. COLLOTYPE has been called "the greatest imitative process." At Triton Press we admire it for its faithful portrayal of an artist's intention. COLLOTYPE is superlative among the graphic art processes because of its amazing ability to reproduce tone and detail.
COLLOTYPE came from the efforts of innovative French and German printers over a century ago. They were trying to blend the old art of lithography with the new science of photography. This remarkable marriage was called COLLOTYPE, from "Kolla", the Greek's word for glue. They began by coating stones, then later glass and finally aluminum plates with a gelatin coating made sensitive to light. (COLLOTYPE has been cloaked in secrecy since its beginning with jealously guarded formulas and techniques.) What appeared to be a simple process turned out to be exacting and difficult to control due to the complex nature of its many parts. Gelatin, the crucial ingredient in COLLOTYPE, is a tender and temperamental substance, demanding exact temperature and humidity control. Little wonder that the nineteenth century COLLOTYPE ateliers had an air of alchemy about them. At Triton today technology controls the process, but the basic principle is still the same.
There is an important difference between COLLOTYPE and other printing processes. All other methods of printing break up the image in one way or another into a series of dots or screen patterns, or screenless random ink spots. None recreates the image in its true continuous tonal values. A photographic image such as a snapshot is also a continuous tone image, hence its great accuracy in reproducing detail. No other mechanical means can attain definition so fine that it stands close examination under great magnification. So COLLOTYPE shares with photography the unique ability to record nuances of tonal gradations of an object, or a scene from life, or a painting. It is for this reason that COLLOTYPE has remained the traditional method for reproducing fine art for almost a century.
A closeup of Lowrie's "Watermelon" collotype print (top) shows the gradual changes in ink, whereas a closeup of Schenk's "Peach Hibiscus" offset lithograph (bottom) reveals tiny dots.
The process of COLLOTYPE has other similarities to that of photography. Both depend on the action of light on a sensitized surface. In photography the sensitized surface is the negative in the camera. In COLLOTYPE, it is the aluminum plate coated with gelatin which has been made chemically sensitive to light. In photography, the negative is exposed onto a sheet of sensitized paper to make the photograph. In COLLOTYPE a negative is exposed onto a sensitized gelatin-coated plate. Then, the image is transferred onto paper after the plate has been fastened around the cylinder of a printing press and inked. To further clarify the COLLOTYPE process it might be useful to compare and summarize COLLOTYPE and offset lithography, the most popular form of commercial printing:
The acceleration of industrial need and the technology to fulfill that need brought about the development of the offset process. However, where quality and fidelity of reproduction were of paramount importance as in fine art reproduction, COLLOTYPE could not be replaced. In fact, it has proven to be preeminent for over a hundred years.
A COLLOTYPE at Triton begins at the camera. Color separation negatives are taken directly from the original artwork. (Other processes use color transparencies as an intermediate step...another chance for slight distortion that might change the mood of the original.) The negatives are then prepared by highly trained, skilled artists. Each negative is carefully worked upon or refined to ensure that the desired results are attained. A sequence for printing the various colors is determined and negatives are created for any special colors that may be needed. The average number of colors is usually eight. This means that eight separate negatives requiring numerous man hours are created. After this lengthy process, each continuous-tone negative is then ready to be exposed with a printing plate.
Triton was a pioneer in developing techniques in photographic color correction (masking) long before these techniques came to be accepted by other printing processes. Recently these same color correction techniques have been greatly improved and are now so sophisticated that their execution can only be utilized by COLLOTYPE because of its continuous tone image.
The COLLOTYPE printing plates are carefully prepared almost daily at Triton. Aluminum plates, spinning in a whirler, are coated with a gelatin solution. Centrifugal force spreads a thin coating over the surface. Then the whirler doors are closed and heaters bake the plate until the gelatin is properly hardened. After a brief seasoning time, the plate is placed in a vacuum frame with one of the color separation negatives. All parts of the plate exposed to the light will harden. In a sense the gelatin is "tanned." After being exposed, the plate is soaked in water. The hardened or most tanned areas absorb the least amount of water; the softer areas absorb more water.
COLLOTYPE is based on the mutual repulsion of grease and water. When greasy printing ink is rolled onto the dampened plate the ink adheres to it in proportion to the amount of moisture present. The moistened gelatin coating on the COLLOTYPE plate has the unique capability to accept varying amounts of ink in direct proportion to the amount of tanning the surface received. The harder the image, the more ink it will take.
Closeup of Triton Press trademark on collotype print of "Geranium" by Dorothy Platt, 1950.
The pressmen at Triton are true craftsmen. Four of them operate each of our turn-of-the-century presses. The humidity and temperature in the pressroom must be carefully controlled to pamper the gelatin surface of the plate. (Triton was the first COLLOTYPE plant in the world to institute complete temperature and humidity controls throughout its entire printing facilities.) After inking up the giant rollers, each sheet of paper is hand-fed onto the press. Triton uses neutral pH, fine art paper. COLLOTYPE allows the use of uncoated papers, the same papers many artists choose for their original work. Printing is slow and deliberate. Pressmen can manipulate the plate by modifying the amount of ink in different areas of the plate...other processes don't allow this. As the printed paper is lifted from the press it is carefully slip-sheeted (COLLOTYPE usually has a heavier deposit of ink than other processes).
Closeup of collotype print of "Geranium" by Dorothy Platt, 1950, Triton Press.
The same precision is repeated for each of the color separation negatives. The COLLOTYPES are inspected meticulously several times during their production. This makes our production slower but it is time well spent. Craftsmen and artists cooperate at Triton to insure the fidelity of every edition.
When we complete an edition at Triton we can take justifiable pride in the COLLOTYPES. The artist's approval and signature are the final confirmation that Triton's COLLOTYPES are of the highest quality.
The greatest advantage of COLLOTYPE over all other printing procedures is its unique flexibility. This flexibility makes it possible for the experienced COLLOTYPE craftsmen to make enormous changes to improve the resulting print. Areas of the color separation negative and the plate can be manipulated to challenge the skill of the craftsmen. So great is this challenge that COLLOTYPE has evolved as a close knit team effort in which dedicated, inspired craftsmen working with artists have produced prints that are heightened interpretations of the original painting.
After all, an exact facsimile reproduction of a painting in which every square inch of the original has been minutely and scientifically reproduced would be a forgery. This is neither possible nor desirable. COLLOTYPE, like no other process, allows the craftsmen to make artistic judgements and aesthetic decisions to enhance the concept of the artist's work.
Andrew Wyeth has often said that a reproduction must be viewed as a new creation. Because of differences in scale (size), surface texture (impasto), and so on, no reproduction print can be identical to an original painting. What the original has is the ideological concept. The reproduction must strive to be faithful to that concept.
Triton has been devoted to the art field exclusively for more than 30 years. Our expertise in COLLOTYPE fine art reproduction has been acclaimed throughout the world. We pay tribute to our COLLOTYPE craftsmen who have made this possible.
