Kenneth E. Tyler’s printmaking empire gets a scholarly reckoning in New York
At the IFPDA Print Fair in New York, the National Gallery of Australia is using the spotlight to mark a major publishing milestone: the debut of Tyler Graphics: Catalogue Raisonné, 1986–2001, a three-volume record of the workshop founded by Kenneth E. Tyler (b. 1931). The publication arrives alongside a renewed look at the artist’s influence on modern printmaking, from his early Los Angeles ventures to the New York studio that became a magnet for some of the most exacting artists of the late 20th century.
Tyler’s path into the art world began in 1965, when he founded Gemini Ltd in Los Angeles. The workshop became Gemini GEL the following year, and by 1973 Tyler had left to establish Tyler Graphics in New York. That same year, in a moment that proved pivotal for both Tyler and the National Gallery of Australia, the museum acquired 621 prints, rare proofs and related drawings from him after critic Robert Hughes recognized the value of the work and urged the NGA to buy it. Jane Kinsman, the museum’s adjunct curator and editor of the catalogue raisonné, says the acquisition came at a difficult professional moment for Tyler and a formative one for the museum.
James Mollison, the NGA’s inaugural director, saw modern printmaking as a serious artistic field, Kinsman says, and the museum’s holdings grew into what is now the largest collection of Tyler workshop art, research and archival material from 1965 to 2001. Over the next nearly three decades, Tyler Graphics collaborated with artists including Helen Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, Donald Sultan and Kenneth Noland before closing in 2001.
The workshop’s reputation rested not only on editioned prints but on technical invention. Warwick Heywood, a curator at the NGA, points to Tyler’s development of pulp-paper works in the mid-1970s, which brought printmaking into closer conversation with painterly and sculptural methods. For Kenneth Noland, that meant tactile tonal works that used paper pulp as an expressive material rather than a neutral support.
The catalogue raisonné also makes visible the labor behind the finished works. Nick Mitzevich, the NGA’s director, says the documentation traces proof stages through to the final edition and shows how the workshop helped solve problems and shape each project. Donald Sultan will discuss that legacy with Heywood and scholar J. Cabelle Ahn on April 11 at 4pm, while the NGA’s exhibition Proofs and Processes: The Kenneth Tyler Collection remains on view in Canberra until August 2.
Tyler’s legacy now reads as both technical and institutional: a workshop culture that changed how artists made prints, and a museum collection that preserves the evidence of that process for future study.
