Gemini G.E.L.: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1966–2005
The 1970s

In new quarters at the start of the 1970s, Gemini was staffed by a team of up to 18 printers, curators, and assistants. It was a particularly productive time with as many as a dozen different print and sculpture projects underway simultaneously. The diversity of the workshop's concerns may be seen by contrasting Willem de Kooning's Untitled, cast in pewter (14.1), and Edward Kienholz's Sawdy (29.1), which utilized a car door and other materials. Among the more challenging projects at mid-decade was Keith Sonnier's cast paper Abaca Code series (49.6–49.8), which required facilities capable of handling three hundred gallons of paper pulp.

Lithography remained central to the workshop's concerns throughout the decade, as it still does today. Philip Guston and Bruce Nauman are two of the many artists who produced editions there in this medium. Gemini's first major etching project was Michael Heizer's Scrap Metal Drypoints series (22.15–22.20). Completed prior to Gemini's installation of a full etching studio, they were printed on an embossing press rather than on the type normally employed in traditional design. Activity in screenprinting was strongest during the first half of the 1970s. The great flexibility of this medium is evident in the contrast between Joe Goode's lyrical Wash and Tear Series: Untitled (19.11), printed on silk, and Edward Ruscha's photoscreenprint, Sweets, Meats, Sheets (45.6), with its opaque, clearly defined color areas on paper. James Rosenquist's three-dimensional collage lithograph, Star Pointer (43.1), is further evidence that artists and collaborators worked together at Gemini to expand the traditional definitions of printmaking.

Other artists who began their work with Gemini in the 1970s are John Chamberlain, who created a sculpture in 1970 (10.1); Donald Judd, who did likewise the following year (27.1); R. B. Kitaj, who published a single lithograph in 1971 (30.1); Mark di Suvero, who began his first of eight puzzle-sculptures in 1972 (16.1–16.8), and Andy Warhol, who completed a screenprint in 1972 (54.1). Robert Motherwell began to work in lithography with the atelier in 1973 (34.1–34.22), and Wallace Berman created a portfolio in 1974 (6.1.1–6.1.15). After Kenneth Tyler's departure in 1973, Ronald McPherson was the primary technical collaborator until 1975. At that point Serge Lozingot, a printer trained in France, took the helm and remained until the late 1980s.

Art and Technology | The 1960s | The 1970s | Robert Rauschenberg
Ellsworth Kelly | Jasper Johns | David Hockney | Sam Francis | Roy Lichtenstein
The 1980s | Jonathan Borofsky | Richard Serra | The 1990s | Elizabeth Murray
Into the Fourth Decade | Toward the Future