Robert Blanton | brand x editions

Written by Miranda K. Metcalf | Published 29 jan 2020

Robert Blanton is on a first name basis with many people who have exhibited a screenprint in a solo show at The Met: Chuck, Jeff, Rashid, Roy, Frank, David, Helen, and Brian - who you know as KAWS - all come up in our interview. Blanton has been the founder and master printer of Brand X Editions in New York City for the past forty years. He has seen recessions come and go, galleries change the face of Chelsea, tax shelters create a boom and bust for editioning studios, and has worked for and printed with our art heroes. This is an incredible accomplishment, one that many of us print lovers can look to for inspiration and with more than  a touch of admiration, but what I discovered while speaking with him is that throughout four decades, four studio moves, and printing for some of the biggest names of the twenty and twenty-first centuries, his dedication has never strayed from the craft. The commitment to unwavering standards, quality, and the love of the medium is at the heart of Brand X. Blanton speaks of his accomplishments with well deserved satisfaction, and not a touch of ego. The story of Brand X is in many ways the story of editioning in the United States. It is a story of passions and personalities. One built of the talents of artists and love of printers, the big money to be made on the original multiple, and the changing face of the New York art scene.

Blanton was born quite a ways from the arts district of New York City. He grew up in Kentucky and studied printmaking in his undergraduate degree at Western Kentucky University. He studied under Ivan Schieferdecker, who taught him a very classical approach to printmaking, emphasising the quality of the work and the professional standards of the medium. Blanton came to New York in the early 1970s to go to Pratt Institute for his MFA and set out to look for work in the city to help support himself. During his undergraduate degree he worked at a commercial screen shop producing t-shirts, signs, and banners, and in 1973 was able to parlay this experience into a job printing at Styria Studio. At the time, Styria was printing for Robert Rauchenberg, Roy Lichenstien and Andy Warhol. This is where Blanton first experienced screen printing at the highest professional standard first hand.

When he left Styria, Blanton spent a few years doing independent consulting for people interested in setting up studios, but he wanted something more stable and decided to open his own. He had the skills and the connections to make it work. It was 1979, and he found a reasonably priced space on West 27th street just about a block away from the Chelsea Arts District. This was about ten years before galleries started to move in and change the neighborhood into the famous destination it is today. Drawing on the connections he had made through Pratt and Styria he began to bring in artists. When he speaks of it, it seems so simple - a professional decision that was the next logical step - but admits, “I don’t see how young people can start today. Back then it was affordable, now the overhead has gotten to be so serious.” He says that at that time people were working from the love of prints. An artist would go to their gallery and propose the publication of the print, the gallery would facilitate and fund the publication, and Blanton would get the job of collaborating with the artist and producing the work. “Everything was much more relaxed… Sure, it was harder to get paid by the publishers back then, but you had a lot more fun doing it.'' At the time Tatyana Grosman started making Jasper Johns’s prints she was doing a small edition of 30 or 40 and selling each one for $50. Now those same prints are priceless. “I don’t even want to venture a guess at what those prices would be,” Blanton says.

Growing the business was an organic process for Blanton. He could rely on the reputation of Styria to get him rather far, but he also allowed personal connections to work their magic. “If I wasn’t approaching an artist through their gallery, usually Jim Rosenquist might know someone who could introduce us,” Blanton says of those years when he was establishing his own reputation. Projects wouldn’t always come into being right away. Sometimes it was planting the seeds of something that would come to be a year or more down the road. It could be slim at times, but they always managed to make ends meet. In those early, hungry days Blanton never let the work suffer. His philosophy is that if you under quote an edition, the worst thing you could do would be to cut corners and do a less than perfect job. If he did that he’d be losing out twice: once on his money, second on his reputation. “My printers and I push our quality limit to make sure that we’re happy before we show it to an artist. We don’t want an artist talking about our part of the job, he’ll be talking about the art part of the job. The quality of the work should be secondary to the aesthetic. I want people to say first that’s a beautiful piece of art and second it’s printed really well, and if that happens we’ve done our job,” he says.

One day Blanton received a call from the now closed Petersburg Press. They were producing a series of large prints by David Hockney and Roy Lichtenstein and they wanted to know if Brand X could handle doing the large scale prints. Blanton said that they could, which gets at one of the best pieces of advice he has for young, aspiring master printers. “No one wants to hear how hard it’s going to be to make what they’re asking of you… Sometimes I get off the phone with someone and say, ‘Well, how are we going to do that?’”. The printers of Brand X figured it out and Brand X got a well-deserved reputation for excelling at large prints. Pretty soon, Frank Stella was on the phone asking for a large print and they were off and running.

Brand X’s reach started to expand. The artists, galleries, and publishers of New York City knew that they could come to Blanton for not only large prints, but experimental ones as well, all of which were done to the highest standards. The biggest names of the day started showing up in the studio. Blanton says that working with each artist is always unique. “Sometimes an artist will be at the studio and say ‘Hey can you show me something like mine?’ Well, no, because no one else does something like you, and you’d probably be a little mad if I could… You have to spend a lot of time getting to know an artist and working with them.” This is how Blanton became a master translator as well as a master printer. He can hear an artist describe how he or she would get to a color by mixing oil paints, and will understand the qualities the desired color needs to have: transparent, greyed out, or vivid. He then knows how to achieve that by mixing silkscreen pigments.

“You have to listen to the artist and understand what they’re trying to get, but not necessarily what they’re trying to say. The collaborative process, we’re never just reproducing a piece of artwork. We’re trying to get the spirit of what they’re trying to do. If you’re going to do a reproduction you might as well do a digital print. Chuck Close will never say make that that color. He will say, ‘the relationship between these colours is wrong.’ Or, if there’s a quadrant of colours, he’ll say, ‘this area is wrong.’”

While Blanton has rubbed shoulders with the big names, often associated with big personalities, his attitude is that often the more demanding artist is the easier they are to work with. He just finished printing a series of screen prints for KAWS now on exhibition at The National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and Brian Donnelly knows what he wants. He’ll demand that the color is exact, that the edges are perfect, and that the surface has the precise quality he’s looking for. Working within these explicit parameters is an environment that Blanton thrives in. He says it’s the artists that keep you up in the air with their expectations that are hardest to work with. Without a firm idea of what he’s supposed to be working towards, Blanton’s talent has nowhere to be channeled.

Helen Frankenthaler was similar to collaborate with. Blanton went into their first meeting cautiously, the stories Bob heard from other printers made him apprehensive about working with Frankenthaler. His anxieties were by no means helped by the fact that Frankenthaler was late to the studio because she had been at the dentist getting a root canal. However, Blanton soon learned that she simply knew what she wanted, and was direct about asking for it. “She was great to work with,” he recalls.

Even working with the famously perfectionist Jeff Koons has created challenges that are more logistical than personal, such as screen printing on top of cut steel shaped like his iconic balloon animals. The end results are flat sculpture pieces up to 10 x 10 ft in size.  Koons had called Blanton and proposed the project, and as Blanton had never done anything like it before, he told Koons that he would have to do some research and get back to him. Three days later, Blanton took a call saying the plates were going to be delivered by the end of the week. It looked like the project was moving forward regardless of Blanton’s yet-to-be-conducted research. Speaking of the size of the piece and the screen used to print it, Blanton says, with his characteristic modesty, “I don’t know if they’re the biggest [screens] ever made, but they’re the biggest I’ve ever seen.” The plates were printed by hand, which meant that a printer was needed on each side of the table to hold the squeegee for printing. However, on one side of the plate, the cut out tail prevented Blanton from walking the entire ten foot table. This required fellow printer Steve Sangenario walking from one side of the ten foot balloon monkey and passing the squeegee off to Blanton in the middle without changing speed or pressure. The pressure and speed can’t change because a line will appear, and even then, they could have done everything right for the first fifteen layers and have a speck of dust appear in the ink, a speck of dust that would never get past Koons’s eye. Blanton points out, however, that between him and Sangenario they had almost 100 years of screen printing experience on that side of the table. Not surprisingly, the project was completed perfectly. Recalling it, Blanton says “Jeff’s mantra might be ‘Do you think you can do it better?’ He demands a lot but he’s very clear about what he wants”

Yet, for Blanton, it has often been those very demanding artists who have been the most interesting to work with. Brand X makes many unique works in collaboration with Adam Pendleton. Printing on canvas, mylar, and at times mirror polished stainless steel, Blanton and the team at Brand X create these pieces to the exacting requirements set out by Pendleton. Many of the stunning, graphic, black and white works will be on exhibition this summer at MOMA and not to be missed should you find yourself in New York in 2020.

“Silkscreen was never meant to be this big,” Blanton says of his own practice. From the beginning, Brand X has been pushing the medium to extremes. When they first started in the 1970s lithography was all the rage, and he would often get requests for his prints to look like lithographs. As technology has changed, Blanton has embraced the advances. Each artist he works with comes with their own distinctive developed aesthetic that he is looking to capture using whatever means at his disposal. With Rashid Johnson it has to be raw, with Helen Frankenthaler there needed to be a freedom of line, and with KAWS it is all about precision. Blanton says of the process that he and his printers will just keep pushing and pushing the medium until they can look at it and say, “That looks like Rashid.”

When it comes to advice for aspiring collaborative printers, Blanton recalls two things that he learned back when he was at Styria. First, the artist is correct, they know what they want. Listen to the artist because they are the master, they are the ones that are in the museums. Second, artists and publishers don’t want to hear how hard it’s going to be, they just want to know that you can do it. It’s the artist’s job to make it as beautiful as they can and it’s the publisher’s job to pay for it. “They don’t need to know how hard it’s going to be, but you can charge them for it.” Blanton says.

Making the artist happy has always been the driving motivation behind Brand X for the past forty years. “The moral and aesthetic thing to do is make sure that the art is done properly. If you’re not going to do the best job possible regardless of if you're getting paid for it, you’re in the wrong business. We do good work and we’ll worry about the money later.”

Being in business for forty years makes Blanton feel extremely lucky. Not a lot of other independent print shops have survived this long. This incredible accomplishment is being celebrated through not only an exhibition at Pace Prints, exhibited at the end of 2019, but also through a new endeavour of philanthropic work Blanton has begun, The Brand X Foundation. The first project has been to put together a portfolio of eight artists where all profits go to help fund arts education in the New York City Area. With many more fundraisers and print jobs on the horizon, Blanton has ensured that the reputation of Brand X continues to be one of quality and integrity, and gives the next generation of aspiring printmakers a clear and direct goal to aim for.

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