I first met Elleree Erdos, David Zwirner’s dark-haired, diminutive director of prints and editions, in her light-filled office tucked at the end of a hallway in Zwirner’s 20th Street headquarters last summer. I had been curious for some time about the prints and editions market, which has been experiencing a bit of a renaissance recently as more of the big galleries get involved. Then, earlier this year, I was reminded of those conversations when Zwirner hosted Breakthrough: Prints from ULAE—an exhibition from Universal Limited Art Editions. The Long Island publisher worked with some of the artists I’ve been writing about these past few weeks, like Helen Frankenthaler and Jasper Johns. If you’re free tomorrow, there’s one last day to catch the show, at the gallery’s 21st Street location.

If you can’t make it, I won’t torture you too much with what you’re missing. But there are some fascinating works by Frankenthaler, including the mesmerizing Bronze Smoke, from 1978, along with prints by Lee Bontecou, Marisol, and Robert Rauschenberg. The show also features the 1957 portfolio of lithographs that served as the original collaboration, between artist Larry Rivers and poet Frank O’Hara, that launched ULAE under the direction of Tatyana Grosman. The publisher would evolve under Bill Goldston, adding new artists and working with different equipment and techniques, always experimenting to keep the artists engaged while attracting new ones like Carroll Dunham, Kiki Smith, and Lisa Yuskavage.

One picture in the show drives home an important point about the appeal of artists and printers working together: the camaraderie and egalitarianism. The image features a dozen people crowded around a table. The dishes are gone. Only a scattering of mostly empty glasses, a few coffee cups, and some large pitchers of what could be iced tea remain. The caption tells us that the staff and printers, including Grosman and Goldston, are having lunch. Without it, you’d be hard-pressed to know they’re working with a famous artist: Jasper Johns, who was an obsessive printmaker throughout his career and had a long association with ULAE. The artist is also seated at the table, but not at the head or in a position of honor. He’s squeezed into a corner, hunched over with his elbows on the table, almost hiding.

The ULAE show got me thinking about the economics of printmaking again. So I called Erdos to ask for a tutorial. That’s when I learned many of my assumptions were wrong.

From the outside, prints look like a great opportunity for artists to test the market—to take successful images and make them more accessible by producing them in multiples and selling them at much lower prices than paintings. Although some of that is undoubtedly true, reproducing images is merely one aspect of printmaking. The world of prints and multiples allows artists to engage with experts in their craft and explore creative possibilities. “The print world is very warm and collaborative,” Erdos told me. “Everyone wants everyone to learn. The whole printmaking ecosystem is very welcoming.”

Her role is to help Zwirner’s artists—and artists who are not part of the Zwirner stable—find the right creative outlet with the right shop. Rather than being market-driven, the impetus for printmaking is often an artist’s need for a change of pace. A palate cleanser, if you will. “A great time for an artist to work on a print,” she told me, “is right after they’ve completed a big body of work.” Indeed, the collaborative nature of printmaking gets artists out of their studio and into a more social environment, where they can experiment and “see what clicks.” Erdos says the output can be quite different from what the artist went in expecting.

That’s where a publisher like her comes in. For the artists who are not part of the Zwirner machine, Erdos takes some of the risk away by putting up the money first and allowing the artists and their galleries to access printmaking without potential financial loss. “We work really collaboratively with galleries,” she said of the artists Zwirner doesn’t represent. “We publish, but then give them access to a certain number of prints.”

Of course, there are many artists, in Zwirner’s orbit and beyond, who are invited to collaborate with print shops that publish their own editions. That’s where things can get wild. After speaking to Erdos, I got in touch with David Lasry of Two Palms Press, a SoHo-based studio that works with artists like Dana Schutz, Mickalene Thomas, and Amy Sillman. Two Palms just finished a suite of 32 etchings by Peter Doig in editions of 28, inspired by poems that Derek Walcott wrote in response to Doig’s own paintings. That ouroboros was recently the subject of a New Yorker slice-of-life scene that captured Doig signing the etchings in a London warehouse.

Before I had a chance to get on a Zoom with Lasry; his wife, Evelyn; and their head of sales, Alexandra Slattery, Lasry sent me a thousand-word disquisition on the printmaking business that answered all of my questions, as well as many I had not even begun to pose. “We work by invitation,” he explained at the outset, trying to get at the distinction between print studios that are publishers in their own right, like Two Palms, and shops that have expertise in their craft but cannot—or don’t want to—take the risks of publishing and distributing their own prints. “We are not contract printers. We pay for the production and co-own the projects with the artists. Most often we don’t know what we are going to make in advance.”

Sanguine to the vagaries of his business, Lasry explained that the costs of distributing through art fairs, which can run as much as $100,000 per event, are often not covered by the sales of their modestly priced artworks. A decade and a half ago, they went through a really rough patch, but they’ve mostly climbed out of it and benefited from the pandemic boom in art buying. Outlets like Artsy have been a boon to their business and account for about a third of their sales. Art-curious buyers are more likely to spend a few thousand dollars online than tens of thousands—and, of course, the internet is more accessible than any art fair.

Lasry is also encouraged by major galleries like Zwirner getting into the printmaking business. Hauser & Wirth publishes prints by their own artists, and Gagosian sells prints and editions created by their artists for other publishers. Pace has Pace Prints, though that is now a separately owned publisher. Lasry told me Gladstone has recently hired a director who will focus on prints.

Even though Lasry says sales have cycled down since the pandemic spree, he isn’t willing to make work in response to the market. “Our business—if you can even call it that—has always been guided by a somewhat romantic premise: that printmaking offers artists a chance to discover something new,” he wrote. “Ideally, we help them make work they can’t produce in their own studios, using processes they haven’t tried before, and often something we ourselves haven’t attempted.”

He continued: “Our position has always been artist-first, not market-first. Markets chase liquidity and return; artists chase possibility. Perhaps naively, we think that if you make something really interesting to look at and think about, it will do well in the marketplace.”

What a place to end. Have a great weekend, everyone.

M