Warhol’s 1950’s Printmaking: The Blotted Line

Long-Sharp Gallery has amassed rare works for an Andy Warhol exhibition which explores his earliest form of printmaking – use of the blotted line.  A rare selection of dual page blotted line drawings illustrate how Warhol explored changes in composition using this method with ink alone and the addition of color.  Andy Warhol’s 1950’s Printmaking: The Blotted Line can be viewed on the IFPDA website, in the gallery’s virtual viewing room, and inside of Conrad Indianapolis.

About this exhibit, Long-Sharp Gallery states: Andy Warhol was a pioneer in many ways, including his renowned innovation with screenprinting in the early 1960s. His foray into printmaking, however, started a decade earlier and can even be traced to his college days in the late 1940s. Evidence of this is apparent in his “blotted line” drawings from the 1950s.

Warhol’s use of the blotted line technique, where one fresh heavily inked drawing is pressed against a blank sheet of paper to create a corresponding image, is similar to letterpress or etching in that the reproductions are made from an inked single source (plate).

Warhol went beyond this. Each next inked impression was often altered, with the addition of line, composition, or color, to create the next work in its journey to finality. Compiled here are a rare group of dual impressions (all adhered by Warhol) that illustrate his early printmaking.

Each work was in the artist’s possession upon his passing (and thus bears the stamp of his estate), was then authenticated by the Andy Warhol Authentication Board (stamped), and was archived with The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (The Foundation). The Foundation’s archive number for each work is written by hand on the back of the work.

 The works are on view through summer 2025.