Global Perspectives on Lithographic Printing Symposium, 6 March 2026

Building on Michael Twyman’s pioneering scholarship, this symposium will explore lithography as a truly global medium. It will consider lithography’s circulation across borders and oceans, its adaptation to diverse linguistic, artistic, and commercial contexts, and its embeddedness in cultural and political life from the nineteenth century onward.

The symposium includes invited papers, demonstrations on a reconstructed Senefelder Pole Press and sessions featuring material from University of Reading and private collections. It is in hybrid format for the papers & is free and open to all.

PROGRAMME

Friday, 6 March

Speakers & their talks

Hannah Rose Blakeley, Princeton University
Belgian lithography and book illustration ca. 1900
This paper will explore the development of lithography in Belgium in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, considering the ways in which book illustration and intermediality were central to the Belgian avant-garde. Focusing on a key example, Léon Spilliaert’s series of ten lithographs, Serres chaudes (Hothouses), printed in 1918 to illustrate poems by Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, this talk will show how artists, writers, publishers, and printers formed a core network in and around Brussels, and how their collaborations helped to shape the trajectories of Belgian modernism.

Dr Helena Rose Blakeley received her PhD in art history from Princeton
University, where she is now a faculty member in the Princeton Writing Program. Her current book project explores how Belgian artists James Ensor and Léon Spilliaert transformed carnival from a social practice into a radical artistic strategy, offering a new and emphatically visual conception of the carnivalesque. She has published "Le 17e siècle de Rops : vers la modernité" with the Musée Félicien Rops in Belgium, has an upcoming article on James Ensor in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, and recently recorded a short video interview with leonspilliaert.be. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Scholars program and the Belgian American Education Foundation.

Helena de Barros, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro
Material logics of printed colour in European and Brazilian chromolithography
This talk examines chromolithographic production and practices in Europe and Brazil from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, drawing on research carried out at the University of Reading’s Department of Typography and on Brazilian archival collections. Grounded in Michael Twyman’s documentary approach, the study investigates technical, material, and chromatic evidence in ephemeral prints, children’s books, and progressive proofs. Special attention is given to the material logic of printed colour, understood as the interplay between tonal construction, sequential presswork, chromatic decision-making, and the economic and cultural factors that shaped lithographic workflows. Through magnified analysis of colour-layer structures, a purpose-built chromatic scale with descriptive universal naming, and visualisations of complex datasets, the study outlines a methodological framework that highlights the layered complexity of chromatic techniques and offers a material-based perspective on printed colour across different cultural contexts.

Dr Helena de Barros is an associate professor in the Design programme at
ESDI/UERJ, where she teaches graphic design, digital imaging, and visual technologies. She received the CAPES Award in 2019 (doctoral thesis) and in 2025 (supervision) and was a Research Fellow at Brazil’s National Library (2018–2019). She is a member of the CNPq research group Memoráveis and coordinates the Special Interest Group on Graphic Memory of the Brazilian Society for Information Design. In 2025 she was a visiting researcher at the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing, University of Reading, where she studied chromolithographic techniques in the Michael Twyman Collection. Her work as a researcher, designer, visual artist, and collector of printed artefacts explores visual language, graphic techniques, graphic memory, books, and ephemeral prints, with emphasis on Brazilian chromolithography.

Asiel Sepúlveda, Babson College
Picturing “the fog effect:” Lithography and the spectacle of sugar manufacturing in nineteenth-century Cuba
This paper will examine the cloudy visuality of Cuban sugar plantations. It focuses on the representation of fog, smoke and steam that emerges from industrial machinery, boiling houses and burning landscapes. During the early nineteenth-century, Cuban planters became avid technocrats. They invested in industrial machinery, railroads, steamships and many other technologies including lithography. This modernizing campaign attracted European artists who began to produce images for local elites. The paper argues that “capturing the fog effect,” a phrase that one lithographer used in his image, became an imperative to represent the modernization of the Cuban landscape. The fog, I add, also served to obscure the relationships between industry, environmental destruction and the exploitation of slave labor.

Dr Asiel Sepúlveda is Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at
Babson College. His research focuses on the development of lithographic arts in late colonial Cuba. Sepúlveda’s forthcoming book Picturing the Planters’ Metropolis: Art, Slavery and Global Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Havana, explores how lithographic artists imagined a modern Havana built under the cultural regimes of Spanish colonialism and plantation slavery.