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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\tThe relationship between prints and drawings evolved in the 19th century, with the rise of technologies like lithography. Illustrated newspapers flooded the public with images, and readers gained a new visual familiarity with artists and their work.<\/p>\n
\n\tIronically, it was the advancement of prints and printmaking that contributed to the Romantic fetish for \u201coriginal\u201d works and the aura of the artist\u2019s hand, placing prints lower in the spurious new hierarchy of art. If an image could be endlessly copied, what distinguished a unique<\/em> object? Collectors began to privilege works that seemed to bear the direct, physical presence of the artist through brushwork, line, or touch that could seemingly not be replicated.<\/p>\n \n\tThis tension is what Walter Benjamin would later theorize as the \u201caura\u201d of the artwork in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction<\/em>. Although Benjamin wrote in the 20th century, he was diagnosing a condition that began in the 19th: the more images circulated mechanically, the more the singular object acquired a mystical authority as the site of authenticity.<\/p>\n \n\tBut printmaking complicates this narrative. Prints are sometimes multiples, but just as often they are unique, as in SOLO Impression\u2019s unique lithograph, Opera (Red), <\/em>by French painter and Picasso muse, Fran\u00e7oise Gilot. Equally confounding to this false narrative of prints not possessing the \u201caura\u201d of the artist are the many works which are hybrids, equal parts drawing and print.<\/p>\n \n\tMonotypes\u2014drawings that have been printed, usually just once, ergo \u2018mono\u2019\u2014are foundational for understanding the blurred line between prints and drawings. Edgar Degas\u2019s moody monotype Dancers in Rehearsal<\/em> (ca. 1874\u201376), from Galerie Martinez D., is an exceptional example. To make it, Degas drew with ink on a metal plate and ran it through a press, creating a single painterly impression of evocative, impressionistic figures that still remain recognizable as the artist\u2019s iconic dancers. He was so obsessed with this messy medium that his friend Marcellin Desboutin famously described Degas\u2019s fascination for monoprints as \u201cswallowing him completely!\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tAnother spectacular example of a hybrid work, equal parts drawing and print, will be on view in the booth of new exhibitor Mireille Mosler. The Gatteaux Family <\/em>(1850), by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, was his last\u2014and largest\u2014work on paper. In it, the artist created a time-traveling composition that incorporated engravings after earlier drawings collaged onto a larger sheet and extensively reworked by hand in graphite. Ingres depicted his close friend \u00c9douard Gatteaux, aged 62, as a dapper young man, based on a portrait drawn in 1834. His parents, meanwhile, appear posthumously: his mother having died three years earlier and his father 18 years before the drawing was made. The drawn portraits of their granddaughter Pam\u00e9la and her cousin Eug\u00e9nie represent the living generation.<\/p>\n \n\tIngres created only three other large multi-figure portrait drawings: The Forestier Family<\/em> (1806) and The Stamaty Family<\/em> (1818), both in the Louvre Museum, and The Family of Lucien Bonaparte <\/em>(1815), at the Harvard Art Museums, making The Gatteaux Family<\/em> a museum-worthy acquisition.<\/p>\n \n\tJulie Mehretu has said, \u201c[It\u2019s] in the printmaking that new things are invented, which I then bring into the painting and drawing.\u201d The technical parallels between printmaking and the way Mehretu builds her drawings and paintings through a stratum of imagery that is blurred and transformed underscores the symbiotic relationship between the mediums. Mehretu\u2019s work will be on view in the booth of Gemini G.E.L at Joni Moisant Weyl, and the artist will be in conversation with curator Susan Dackerman at the Park Avenue Armory on Saturday, April 11th.<\/p>\n \n\tOn Sunday, April 12th, the final day of the fair, a talk by Edina Adam (J. Paul Getty Museum) and Jamie Gabbarelli (Art Institute of Chicago), authors Lines of Connection: Drawing and Printmaking, 1400-1850<\/em>, which wonthe 2026 IFPDA Book Award, should dispel any lingering doubts about the false narrative of drawings supremacy over prints, with a focus on the artistic practices of D\u00fcrer, Parmigianino, Rembrandt, and William Blake.<\/p>\n \n\t\u200bThe IFPDA Print Fair will be held at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City, April 9\u201312.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Gilot_OperaRed.png?w=400\")
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