Sandy Walker: What is the state of printmaking in the Bay Area?

David Bonetti: I really don't have a lot to say because there might be a lot going on, but I don't really know about it. I, of course, know about Crown Point Press, which is a real treasure in San Francisco. In the future when people look back on the last half of the twentieth century in San Francisco and wonder what was important in that culture, one of the most important things will be the activities of Crown Point Press. They have made wonderful prints over the years. They have brought important artists from all over the world to work here as well as working with local artists. That is one of the most important things that's gone on here in the last twenty-five to thirty years.

Printmaking is almost a hidden experience because so little of it is shown in the museums and galleries. The major modern art museum in the city has shown absolutely no interest in works on paper. I've quizzed them about it, and what they've said is, "We are a museum of limited resources, and we have established a Department of Architecture and Design and we've established a Department of Media Arts. We are only interested in prints and drawings if they're by artists that we have established an interest in with other media."

For instance, they recently acquired something like 35 drawings by Wayne Thiebaud. They have several paintings by him, and they are interested in acquiring more. So they will keep their interest in his prints and drawings. But in editioned prints, they don't seem to have an interest in them unless they are by an artist that they already have a connection with. The other major museum, the Fine Arts Museums, is primarily interested in historical works on paper. They have acquired the Anderson Collection, which is sort of making up for lost time. I am really glad they have it, and I am always pleased to see the exhibitions drawn from it.

But there's not a lot of prints in the museums here, whether by local, national, or international artists.

SW: You have talked about the climate in Boston and compared that to here. Do you want to reiterate that?

DB: I moved here in 1989 from Boston, which was, in comparison to San Francisco, a city that was very much interested in works on paper and prints. The museum there is very active in collecting works on paper and has one of the great works on paper collections in the world. Many of the commercial galleries there were primarily print galleries, or had a major interest in prints, and many of the collectors there were print collectors.

The gallery that I worked for in the late 1970s-the Thomas Segal Gallery-showed many different media, but it always had prints. People would immediately come to purchase the prints before they were gone or before the prices went up. The disadvantage there at that time was that people in Boston tended not to be interested in collecting painting and sculpture. The only area where they seemed to be interested in keeping up with the latest development was in prints.

SW: So it's almost an inversion in that you do see the interest in painting and sculpture here? Do you see it on the private level?

DB: This has never been a city where people or museums collected art. There have been a couple of exceptions - photography for instance. There have been fabulous photography collections here. San Franciscans, with a few exceptions, didn't collect art. They put their money into the opera and they put their money into fashion. People here bought art as decoration for their houses, and they often didn't care if they had reproductions or not. Look at catalogues, at Butterfields, the local auction house, where the Fine Arts Museums has divested itself of works it no longer wants, and you'll find dozens of bad paintings, many of them copies, of scenes in Venice. That's all that San Franciscans really wanted. It's only in the last ten or fifteen years that things have changed-changed in a very big way, and there are some very wealthy people here who buy very expensive objects. These people have educated themselves, and they really know what they're interested in. They're forming distinct collections. But they're not interested in drawings or prints, for the most part, from what I've seen.

SW: Why is that?

DB: Well, drawings and prints are quiet. They require a level of connoisseurship that nouveau collectors are not prepared for.

SW: Is it an issue of education?

DB: Well, of course, it's an issue of education, but they're not going to be getting an education in prints when the museums don't consider prints a high priority.

SW: So it goes back to the museums again.

DB: Isn't that where most people get their exposure to art? Very wealthy people don't have to get their information primarily from museums. They have access to all sorts of sources-dealers and curators, and other collectors who travel endlessly to museums all over the world. But the average person gets his/her first knowledge of art through a museum.

SW: We're talking about a few very wealthy people buying paintings and sculptures by modern masters. Why aren't there young collectors who are happy to buy a less expensive work of art and build a collection that way?

DB: In San Francisco, those people buy photography, and San Francisco has some of the best photography galleries in the country. The Museum of Modern Art has an excellent photography department that always has exhibitions. Right now, they've got two major simultaneous exhibitions, Carleton Watkins and Daido Moriyama, two very different photographers from two different centuries, two different countries. And on a regular basis, you can count on seeing a major photography show there. So that's what people are savvy about.

SW: And perhaps photography is by its nature more accessible to a new collector.

DB: San Francisco photography collectors are very conservative, for the most part. They buy traditional photography. In the larger world, there are many divergent voices in photography now. It's not necessarily so easy. Photography is just as complex and rich a field as prints. I think that one of the interesting issues in printmaking is whether, in some cases, it really is a secondary expression, while in others, it's a major expression. This discussion isn't going on at all in San Francisco because there's no place for it to take place. The place where it would go on is in the museum. Since they don't have many print exhibitions, and since the curator of prints at the Fine Arts Museums, which is the one institution that does collect prints as a medium, is hostile towards contemporary art unless it's figurative, you don't get this kind of discourse at all. This topic is something that back in Boston people did talk about. People there were very savvy about the status of the print, about whether it was a fresh expression or just an inexpensive alternative to a major work. People here don't even know that this is an issue.

SW: But, in fact, the interesting thing is if you read the history of printmaking, or even the last thirty years in printmaking, there's an awful lot of work beside Crown Point that has taken place here. Fortunately, there is a larger number of significant presses here, more than anywhere except New York. What is curious is that they're not building support for the art of printmaking.

DB: Let's be frank, the museums here have been terrible. They've been working really hard in recent years to improve. It's rather late in the game, of course, especially if the Fine Arts Museums want to purchase Old Masters paintings. The Los Angeles County Museum has been spending a lot of money for Old Master paintings, more than most people realize. Thank God the Fine Arts Museums have the collection it already has. But its curator and the director there are more sophisticated and professional than their predecessors. They're looking and they're thinking in critical ways about how to build a comprehensive collection with limited acquisition funds.

SW: Why do they pick the artists that they pick? The Fine Arts Museums, why do they right now have a Oldenburg show?

DB: Who else? What would the alternative be?

SW: Well, good question. Let's see, who would be a significant printmaker today, who should be shown, as opposed to a famous artist who makes prints?

DB: The gallery at the Legion of Honor is devoted to the Anderson Collection, and so the work in that gallery is drawn from the Anderson Collection. Even though it includes over nine hundred prints by many artists, the curators are not totally free to go out and do any show they want. It has to be based on that collection. And that collection is mostly big names. Besides, Oldenburg is a major printmaker. He has thought independently about the nature of the printmaking medium. His prints are not just reproductions of other work.

SW: Karin Breuer of the Achenbach is very sympathetic to the art of independent printmakers. What she told me was, in essence, that she would love to show the broad base of printmakers here, but they will not draw the crowds that the museum must have to draw.

DB: Well, that's all museums' problem today, except for a handful of museums that can get away with doing what they want, like the Getty. They don't have to worry about who's going to come because they're coming anyway, and they have the money to do it.

SW: How do you decide what to review?

DB: The papers here are woefully inadequate in their coverage of cultural issues, except for movies and television. They are very thorough with star profiles. Movies are always going to be covered in the newspaper because they take out the most expensive ads-that happens everywhere, the New York Times as well as the smallest papers. It goes without saying, movies will always get the most coverage because of the advertising and television, too, because that's what most people experience. But I think it also is a fact that movies are the local field of expression, movies are made in California. In other arts, there's thorough coverage of the opera here in San Francisco. From around the world people are aware of San Francisco's opera. It is still the second largest opera house in the country. It has always been a point of pride to the people of the city. Most newspaper coverage of visual arts is of museum activity, and until recently the museums here have been terrible.

SW: What's your take on Thomas Albright and his writing before you came to the Bay Area.

DB: I haven't thought about Thomas Albright in a long time. I thought he was too boosterish. Many people on the San Francisco scene do not want to change, but the scene has changed because of necessity, in the same way that our whole world has changed, because of communication. You can fly anywhere easily, you can see images beautifully reproduced in books, newspapers and even the internet. That probably changed the art market. San Francisco's moment of pride was the 1950s when all of these means of communication didn't exist. It had established a great opera house, it had its own artists, the only city in our country outside of New York that had modernist artists who produced modernist paintings.

Then the conditions all changed, but the art scene didn't change; it held on to what already existed. Regionalism died because there was no need for it anymore, because of improved means of communication. Albright seemed to me to be looking at the past, rather than looking to the future.

SW: Are you aware of the other publishers-printers in this area?

DB: I am familiar with the Arion Press. Then there's Paulson Press in Berkeley. What else?

SW: Experimental workshop?

DB: Oh, they still exist? That gallery I worked for in Boston had three major shows of work that was done there. I didn't think they existed anymore. We had great shows of theirs. We were the first gallery in the country to show some of the work done there. Wonderful handmade paper pieces by Robert Arneson and Roy de Forest.

SW: Do you know about Kala in Berkeley?

DB: I've heard about it but I've never checked it out.

SW: What about David Kelso?

DB: He's the one who writes nasty letters to the San Francisco Chronicle about Kenneth Baker. I think it takes incredible courage for him to do that. Unfortunately it's usually kind of nit-picking.

SW: Do you get letters?

DB: I get very little response to anything, especially from people in the public who are goingto be dependent on a review. They might hate your guts, they might talk about you behind your back, but they're not going to write a letter to the paper damning you because they don't want you to turn on them in the future. It's human nature.

SW: What do you think about that? Would you like them to write?

DB: It all depends. I like getting responses, sometimes negative ones are the best. The only letters I've responded to have been negative.

SW: Well, you've become a symbol, you're the highlight, you're the engagement.

DB: That's what it's all about, isn't it? You don't know if anybody saw your article, or if anybody had any reaction or not. So, when there is a letter, even if it's from a crackpot, I kind of enjoy it. If they're threatening my life, I don't like that. Some people take these issues all too seriously.