Reinhard Spiegel's Art of Heliogravure

Finished, it’s finished, it’s nearly finished...
Endgame, Beckett
Reinhard Spiegel would like to see a line from Samuel Beckett’s play “Endgame” as the epigraph for this book.   Before relating this line to Reinhard Spiegel, printer and artist, we need to breathe deeply and reflect. It’s not easy to apply this forlorn sentence from a dark play to him. Admittedly, he looks at the course of events with an unsparing eye - everything that is to be seen in this book represents half of his lifetime and soon will no longer exist. He will miss this and he knows it. Yet as in Beckett’s play, the outcome is open, while the awareness of our finality is ever present. The possibility of continuing this art form vanishes with the “disposal” of the materials and equipment; what remains is the knowledge in the mind and heart of Reinhard Spiegel and – naturally – drawers full of paper filled with the work of a man who dedicated half a century to this art. This book is hence not so much a tribute to the work of an artist as a eulogy to a graphics technique invented in 1878 and soon to become extinct.
Reinhard Spiegel founded his printing workshop in Wiesbaden in 1968 and here initially he printed artists’ etchings produced with or through him.   For over 20 years he has specialised in heliogravure, a sophisticated printing technique from the early days of photography. Now, 50 years later, he is ending this work and giving up his workshop. The photographs by Monika Houck in this book capture the atmosphere of an artist’s workshop, the various stages of production from preparing the printing plates, the work at the printing press and then the finished print. This is painstaking work   -   something that can almost be tasted and smelt in the pictures.
Reinhard Spiegel is a printer and photographer and became an artist through this unique blend of craftsmanship and creativity.   Art emerges from these two poles and hence they call for our special appreciation. There is a tendency to forget or even suppress the fact that it is technical crafting ability that first makes creative expression possible by placing it in a visual context and letting it assume form.   The tenacity of a creative craftsman drives Spiegel to master the quirks of this technique and the nature of the material, including some artistic rule breaching, so as to find a form of expression that chimes with his own aesthetic understanding.  
Something that is banal and routine for the artist working on it can appear to be quite complex, even mysterious to a participating visitor or someone looking at these pictures. The technical eye of the layman glimpses the poetry inherent in the objects and seemingly ritualized actions. With bated breath we follow the intricate metamorphosis of a photographic negative to a reproducible printing plate. We note the accompanying activities like the preparation of handmade paper for printing and the mixing of ink to a printable liquidity. And finally, reverential awe as the first print is drawn from the plate. Now, at last, is the moment when the artist’s vision becomes substance, the vision that must have overcome him with the photographer’s motif before him, now, after all the processing he can hold the final result in his dirty fingers – the heliogravure!
So what is a heliogravure? Using pigmented paper a half-tone film is transferred as a jelly layer on to a copper plate.   The copper is etched in various acid baths and the image is printed on to handmade paper using the intaglio process. This sophisticated photographic process is the most precious and durable process known to photography. The acid test for this kind of art work is, of course, the camera. The printmaker cannot conjure up something the photographer has not seen.
In his most recent and final motifs the photographer concentrates on trees. Apulia is the area in which Spiegel finds most of the often very old olive trees with their mighty, usually divided trunks which seem – like infinitely slow-moving dancers – to wind and coil around themselves. He circles these in search of the ultimate perspective. Here the photographer finds a motif from nature that is alive, defying the perpetual onslaughts of the elements, fulfilling its most pressing task of producing olives. The time span engraved into the gnarled surfaces of the trees brings home the fleeting moment of our existence.   The photographer captures this and relays it to the printmaker, who gives the best expression to suspended time in the form of a heliogravure, thereby belying in the endgame of the artist’s time that it draws to an end. 

Bernd Brach, September 2017