Transfer

About

Some images are made by pressing, rubbing or tracing a picture that already exists elsewhere, and modern artists let that indirect route show. Paul Klee developed an oil transfer technique around 1919, drawing through a sheet coated with black oil paint so that a blurred line appeared below. In the 1950s Andy Warhol made blotted-line drawings, pressing wet ink onto a second sheet. For his Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante's Inferno (1958–60), Robert Rauschenberg dampened magazine photographs with lighter fluid and burnished their ink across the sheet with a ballpoint pen, leaving faint, hatched ghosts.

Older uses were practical. Fresco painters pricked the outlines of full-size cartoons and dusted charcoal through the holes onto plaster. English potteries of the 18th century pressed inked tissue from engraved copper plates onto ceramics, and blue-and-white Willow pattern spread the method through homes. Look for reversed text, dotted outlines and broken, ghostly lines.