Kamagraph

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 kamagraph is this old French press from the 1880s that could duplicate original art, but 99 percent of the time it would destroy the original.

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."