Screen Printing

Screen printing is a printing technique in which a fine mesh screen, made impermeable to ink everywhere except where a stencil leaves it open, is used to transfer ink or dye onto a surface below it, typically by pulling a squeegee across the mesh to push ink through the open areas; using a separate screen for each color allows multi-colored designs. The technique descends from Chinese block-printing and Japanese stencil methods, reaching Western Europe by the late 1700s, though it only became commercially significant once silk imported from Asia made a suitable mesh material widely available. Developers in the 1910s began using photo-reactive chemicals to create photographically exposed stencils, and in the 1930s a group of WPA-era artists coined the term serigraphy to distinguish fine-art screen printing from industrial uses; Michael Vasilantone's 1960 invention of a rotatable multicolor garment-printing press made high-volume screen printing of textiles practical and helped make garment printing the technique's dominant application in the United States, while Andy Warhol's screen prints of the 1960s, including his 1962 Marilyn Diptych, popularized the technique as a fine art form.