Alois senefelder biography of albert
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Good old Alois Senefelder. It might be easy to overlook him in the grand svep of art history. After all, he wasn’t exactly an artist himself, but if it weren’t for him, we might never have seen any of the following works:
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jane Avril, 1893. Lithograph, 129.1 x 93.5 cm, New York: storstads- Museum of Art.
George Bellows, Dempsey and Firpo, lithograph, 1923-24.
Pablo Picasso, Les 11 états successifs dem la lithographie Le Taureau , 1945.
David Hockney, “Lithograph of vatten Made of Thick and Thin Lines and a
Light Blue rengöring and a Dark Blue Wash”, lithograph, 26 x 34 1/2”, 1980.
All of the images above are lithographs — prints made using limestone. Senefelder devised the process in the early 1790’s while trying to figure out a cheap way of printing off the plays he wrote to make his living. Much easier than etching or engraving, the two most common techniques at the time, lithographic prints became popular as an art form even in Se
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Alois Senefelder
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The inventor of lithography
Almost every author has difficulties with his publisher at the beginning of his career (if he finds one at all). In the case of Alois Senefelder, this turned into an epoch-making invention. Because the up-and-coming playwright had decided that he preferred to take the typesetting and printing of his plays into his own hands, he invented a new printing process: lithography.
Alois Senefelder, who was born in Prague on 6 November 1771, was the son of a Munich actor. Despite this (or perhaps because of it), his father insisted that he study lag. Senefelder immediately abandoned his studies in Ingolstadt when his father died and worked as an actor, prop master and playwright. Annoyance at the problems with the printing of his second play led him to experiment with printing methods himself.
Letterpress and intaglio printing were well known back then; but Senefelder discovered a third way in Munich in 1796. After many experimen
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Alois Senefelder Invents & Develops Lithography
In 1796 German actor and playwright Alois Senefelder invented lithography (from Greek λίθος - lithos, 'stone' + γράφω - graphο, 'to write') as a cheaper way of publishing his plays. Lithography was the first planographic printing process, and the first radically new method of printing since Gutenberg’s invention of printing by movable type.
Senefelder experimented with a new etching technique using a greasy, acid resistant ink as a resist on a smooth fine-grained stone of Solnhofen limestone from Bavaria (Bayern), halfway between Nuremberg and Munich. He discovered that this could be extended to allow printing from the flat surface of the stone alone. Gradually he brought his technique into a workable form, perfecting both the chemical processes and the special form of printing press required for using the stones. Senefelder called it St