The artist’s printmaker: a conversation with Judith Solodkin

Printmaker Judith Solodkin has been collaborating with notable artists on exceptional fine art prints for fifty years. The first woman to graduate as a Master Lithographer from the notable Tamarind Institute in 1975, she founded her own printing press, SOLO Impression, in 1975. Solodkin was an ardent champion of women artists and became renowned for materially experimental prints and editions of unparalleled quality. Today, SOLO Impression editions can be found in the collections of prestigious institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and the Tate Modern in London.

From 12-26 February, Christie’s is proud to offer 24 such works in Oeuvre: Works from the SOLO Impression Archive, as part of Contemporary Edition. The online sale features 22 prints by Louise Bourgeois, with whom Solodkin had a rich creative partnership and friendship. Rounding out the selection are works by Betye Saar and Howard Hodgkin, also close collaborators of the printer.

In 2020, Solodkin was honoured by the International Print Center of New York for her printmaking achievements. In addition to running her legendary press, Solodkin teaches at Columbia University, Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts and, today, makes incredible hats in her practice as a milliner. She spoke with Christie’s from her studio in Riverdale, the Bronx, about the possibilities of the printmaking form, how she helps artists realise their visions, and the importance of saying yes.

What attracted you to printmaking?

Judith Solodkin: ‘WelI, I went to Columbia University, got an MFA in Fine Arts, and when I finished, I wanted to continue with my drawings but I wanted to be able to exchange the colours. So I started making silkscreen prints, and soon the litho press beckoned, and that was where I stayed. Lithography is very direct. You just draw and what you draw is what you can print. You have a greasy crayon or liquid, and it's very immediate. The colours are very intense.

The print shop you founded, SOLO Impression, had a profound impact on fine art printmaking and publishing. What were you doing differently from others at the time?

JS: I think every print shop has the imprint of its owner, and what they produce really reflects that. At mine, I really enjoyed the collaboration, interacting with artists, explaining all the techniques available to them and guiding them with whatever they wanted to do. It was a female-run shop, which gave it a unique sensitivity and a different point of view.

How do you approach making a print or an edition with an artist?

JS: I went to the Tamarind Institute, where I was the first woman to graduate as a Master Lithographer in 1975. The whole process there focused on inviting artists in and working with them to create their editions. I always continued in that tradition of working with artists. I had one press when I started my business in 1975. It was called SOLO Press at the time, and in 1992 I incorporated to SOLO Impression Inc. Over that period of time, I had five different locations, and in each I had multiple different kinds of presses — lithograph presses, letterpresses. At one point, I had a gallery — SOLO Gallery. The shop morphed and grew. It was vital, and it reflected the needs of the art world and also the artists I was working with.

Did you find it to be a very male dominated field at that time? What challenges did that present?

JS: Yes. We're talking about the 1970s. In the late ’60s, early ’70s, women seemed to have two options. You could be a nurse or you could be a teacher. Being active in the art world was an anomaly. You had artists at the time like Judy Chicago, taking a stance in a wrestling ring and doing the Womanhouse in Los Angeles. There were consciousness-raising groups and this whole upturn in women trying to get to be seen. Museums were rarely showing women. Galleries were not taking on women. It was a desert as far as opportunity.

You’ve long championed women in the arts, collaborating with trailblazing artists including Louise Bourgeois, Lynda Benglis, Françoise Gilot, Betye Saar and Judy Chicago. How did you connect with these artists and why was it important to you to work with them?

JS: When I first started, I had a friend who was part of A.I.R. Gallery and I was lucky to get to print six of the works, by artists including Nancy Spero and Howardena Pindell, for a series the gallery was doing. They were not complicated prints, but that got me started as far as business goes. I called it the ’old girls’ network’, working with people who know people.

I decided I was going to hang up my shingle and start a business. I met Dorothy Pearlstein, the wife of one of my former teachers, Philip Pearlstein, whom I studied with at Brooklyn College, at an opening. I gave her a card, and she sent me Lois Dodd and Alice Neel and a couple other artists. I hustled.

Was it challenging breaking in?

JS: I enjoyed doing it. The challenge is not breaking in; the challenge is doing a really good job. I'm not motivated for the limelight. I really love making prints, and I love doing it with artists. So as long as I could do that, I was very happy.

How did you meet Louise Bourgeois? And what was it like working with her?

JS: It was a very gentle meeting. She was my neighbour in Chelsea. I’d see her walking with her cart to the hardware store, and I knew she was an artist. One day I invited her over for lunch and she brought a nice bottle of wine. I also invited Joyce Kozloff, and we got to know each other as women in the neighbourhood who were in the arts. I suggested Louise work on a stone, so I hauled the stone over to her studio, and it ended up in the basement. She scratched the hell out of it because she's a sculptor, and it was kind of unprintable. Then I became associated with a printer in the neighbourhood, and that's how The Song of the Blacks and the Blues (1996) came about. She had this huge sketch, and she wanted to do a big woodcut.

JS: She asked me, ‘Can you sew these pieces to the paper?’ And I said sure. I had to use my sister’s old sewing machine and figure out how to manoeuvre this huge piece of paper — eight feet long — and manoeuvre like an alligator into the sewing machine. I figured it out as I was going along. I'm pretty good at learning a skill and then making believe I'm an authority on it. The original sewn maquette from which the print was made is in the collection of MoMA.

Louise has become a goddess and so revered, but to me, she was just a very intense, focused, dedicated, lovely artist, and I loved her. It was really nice working with her. I had a wonderful assistant Rodney Doyle, and she adored him and would feed him ice cream. It was just a pleasure to be in her studio. It was a rich experience of working with somebody on a human level.

Tell me about working with Betye Saar on Blow Top Blues: The Fire Next Time (1998), which has these incredible hand-painted and collaged elements.

JS: At the time Xerox was very popular with artists. You know, whenever a machine is obsolete, artists get a hold of it. In this work Betye used a Xerox of an image she took from a cereal box, which was like a mask without eyes. We cut out the eyes and then on the original she wrote a word on the figure’s turban: liberation. Then the whole thing was Xeroxed and then glued to a lithograph. What's particularly interesting about that print for today's context is that there were fires in Los Angeles at the time, and she went in her backyard and photographed flames. Then I photo-interpreted the flames in a different way. Usually you print CMYK, but instead I took all the separations and printed them in flamelike colours, so we get those very vigorous orange and red flames flickering behind the head.

How did you come to work with Howard Hodgkin, whose Mourning (1982) is offered in the upcoming sale?

JS: I met an assistant to [the gallerist] Bernie Jacobson on the street and gave her a card — this is how most things happened. You bump into people and talk about it. She sent Howard to my little studio on 8th Avenue. He had come in from England and was staying in Gramercy and he was so excited. When he came up, he just drew directly — a small image on large paper, and he tore off all the borders and hand coloured them all. And I didn't even recognise the print afterwards. But he was very happy. It made him very happy to do it that way.

So we continued working, hand-colouring, almost in a style of choreography as we very specific about how we moved, how we used the gouache. We printed very greasy so that the paint would reject the grease and create these reticulations on the print, which he loved. We did quite a few of his prints, including Mourning. And each time he would come he would just go into my studio, pin up a white sheet of paper and then sit in this scruffy Queen Anne chair from my mother — the majesty of this man. We would leave him alone, and he would just concentrate. Then he would take this huge sponge and draw on the plates.

From your perspective as a printer, what does the printmaking form enable artists to do?

JS: You know, you're this collaborator with the artists, and you can connect them with these new tools to make art. With Louise Bourgeois, for example, she would ask me to do things, and the only answer I had was yes. And then I’d have to figure it out and help her realise it.

There’s a misconception about printmaking as reproduction. But what I do with these artists is not reproduction. Each artist is making a unique and original work. It's a multiple, so there are many copies or variations. But each one is unique.