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The painter and lithographer Walasse Ting, who died earlier this year, occupies a unique place in the dialogue between American and European art in the 1960s. Ting was an outsider to both cultures. He was born Ding Xiongquan in Shanghai in 1929. After studying briefly at the Shanghai Art Academy, he left China in 1946, living initially in Hong Kong before sailing to France in 1950. In Paris, Walasse Ting came under the influence of the artists who made up the avant-garde group CoBrA, most notably Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel, and Asger Jorn. In 1958, Ting moved to America, where his closest associate was the Abstract Expressionist painter Sam Francis. In 1964, Walasse Ting and Sam Francis collaborated on one of the greatest artist�s books of the period, a collection of Ting�s stream-of-consciousness Pop Art poems illustrated with original lithographs by a total of 28 artists, entitled One Cent Life . Unfortunately I don�t have a copy of this, but it�s a remarkable work, and particula

Copper plates were, until about 1820, the only metal on which intaglio prints, either engravings or etchings, were made. As Bamber Gascoigne explains in his excellent book How to Identify Prints , steel plates were first used in the 1820s "to print long runs of banknotes which would remain identical throughout the run and which would be so finely engraved as to make forgery difficult." The harder metal was more difficult to work with, but enabled very fine detailing, and the plates never wore out. Steel plates became popular for various kinds of subjects, notably topographical views, which might be printed in large numbers to appeal to tourists. From the 1850s it was possible for artists to work on the more forgiving copper plates, which were then subsequently "steel-faced", a process in which a thin layer of iron is electro-plated to the surface of the copper, thereby extending the life of the plate. Steel plates remained the choice for banknotes and postage stamps

"Everything in nature takes its form from the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder," wrote Paul C�zanne. It was the major C�zanne retrospective in Paris in 1907, together with Picasso's discovery of African and Oceanic art around the same time, that gave rise to the Cubist movement which propelled art into the twentieth century and the machine age. Picasso's famous 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon shows Cubism in its earliest formative stage; its fractured perspectives derive, I believe, from Picasso's memories of the endless reflections he had glimpsed in the heavily mirrored brothels of the barrio chino in Barcelona, where the painting is set. In 1907 and 1908 Picasso, in close collaboration and friendly rivalry with Georges Braque, worked out the template for Cubism, an art in which the single perspective of a static onlooker is replaced by the multiple perspective of an all-seeing eye. Pablo Picasso, Three Musicians Pochoir after a painting from Eugen