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Silkscreen prints take their name from the silk mesh that used to be stretched between a wood or metal frame before being inked and squeegeed onto a sheet of paper to produce an image. Today, most silkscreens are made of polyester mesh rather...
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Silkscreen prints take their name from the silk mesh that used to be stretched between a wood or metal frame before being inked and squeegeed onto a sheet of paper to produce an image. Today, most silkscreens are made of polyester mesh rather than silk, hence the use of terms such as screenprints or screen prints. Since the 1940s, the word serigraph has also been used to describe screenprints intended as prints sold in the fine-art market rather than for industrial or commercial purposes. Although forced-ink printing techniques have been around for thousands of years, silkscreening is usually attributed to the 10th-century Japanese, who glued paper stencils onto sheets of silk mesh, which was porous enough to allow ink to be forced onto a sheet of paper underneath it. Eventually, the practice of using multiple stenciled screens to add more colors and imagery to a print, as well as the advent of photo-sensitive screens, would vastly improve the quality and detail of silkscreen prints, but the process itself has remained essentially the same for roughly 1,000 years. Credit for industrializing the silkscreen goes to Samuel Simon of Manchester, England, who, in 1907, began to use silk mesh attached to a frame to produce everything from wallpaper to advertising signs—the production of both was made far more efficient thanks to this simple technique of mechanical reproduction. Around 1914, a San Francisco printer named John Pilsworth is said to have invented the practice of using multiple screens to add additional colors and graphic detail to a print. Some of the first multi-color screenprints were produced to encourage recruitment during World War I. After World War II, screenprinting was increasingly embraced by fine artists, which is what led to the founding in 1940 of the Silk Screen Group, which was soon renamed the National Serigraph Society. In the 1960s, Pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Peter Blake, who is probably best known for...
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