kamagraph

The special press used to create reproductions by kamagraphy.

Max Emst, the well-known dada and surrealist painter; Edouard Pignon, a French abstractionist; and the late René Magritte, the extraordinary Belgian surrealist who died this year, have all executed special work for the kamagraph.

I learned from this book, for instance, that kamagraph is a name for a 'special printing press that faithfully duplicates up to 250 copies of a painting, including raised brush strokes, destroying the original in the process.

A reproduction produced by this process.

Each kamagraph looks as though the artist had painted it by hand. The French call this type of work a “multi-original,” because the machine can work only with a painting painted for it on a specially treated canvas plaque.

The procedure that Takis devised for moving the stiff pages of the book and the nails already fits the initial description of a multiple given by Franc5ois Barre/, in 1967, who applied it to small and medium runs (kamagraphs, multiples), mass produced work (design, graphics) and polycyclic structures (Eugenio Carmi): “The multiple is therefore essentially composite: it is a construction, it is a fixed or mobile system, sometimes the gernator of multiple combinations included in its design, which often make it a work of art."