Kenneth E. Tyler
Tyler established leading print workshops and publishing houses on both West and East coasts of the United States and made several innovations in printmaking technology.
His technical expertise and willingness to experiment on a bold scale drew many famous and influential artists to his workshops, among them Frank Stella, Helen Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg, Anthony Caro and Jasper Johns.
[1] Ken Tyler remains active as an educator and promoter of fine art printmaking, and mentor of a younger generation of printers through his various training and collecting institutions in Singapore, Japan, Australia and the US.
In 1963, Tyler received a Ford Foundation Grant to study printing at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles[5][6].
Durassier, who was noted for his technical skill, had worked at the French lithography workshop, Mourlot Frères, with some of the great artists of the School of Paris, including Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró.
The following year Tyler, with the backing of his partners, Sidney Felsen and Stanley Grinstein, began to develop this print and publishing workshop into a large and influential organisation that attracted American artists including Josef Albers, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.
Works such as Robert Rauschenberg’s iconic Booster (1967), which was an experimental and labor-intensive "hybrid" of lithography and screen printing, exemplify this approach.
[10] Certain artists in Tyler’s stable, such as David Hockney, Frank Stella and Roy Lichtenstein, continued to work with him over several decades and through many stylistic progressions.
His contributions to printing technology were driven by his industrial background and his recognition that "most traditional [printmaking] methods, as well as some recent practices of the hand-printing crafts, were not compatible with the images of major contemporary artists.
[7] In 1978 Tyler patented and registered Tycore, a rigid archival honeycomb paper panel, and a decade later, from 1988–90, he designed and constructed a computer-controlled, power-driven combination lithography and etching press with a five-by-ten foot printing bed.
This began with a project with Robert Rauschenberg in 1985-94, who explored handmade papermaking in his series Pages and fuses at the paper mill in Ambert in France.
Later, Frank Stella explored the notion of papermaking further in his Moby Dick Domes series, notable for their technical complexity and their three-dimensional nature.
After years of research to work out ways of making shaped paper, Tyler developed a vacuum method to produce the required sculptural form.
[4] Very large triple ply washi (Kozo fibre) papers were created especially for this ambitious project, as was a custom-built printing press.
