How can I tell the difference between the two? The picture in question is framed and under glass. Is there a way to tell by looking at it? For the record the picture is by Peter Max and this is it. The link is for posters, but the one I have was given to my father at the NHL all-star game. It is numbered and personalized to my father. I emailed the PeterMax.com customer (dis)service but they said they needed a picture of the object and $45 (which may lead to a Pit thread).
Any ideas?
[stuyguy removes his “that guy from NYC who keeps going on about stupid Big Apple trivia that only Ukulele Ike gives a damn about” hat and put on his “print production” hat.]
Looks like a lithograph to me.
A serigraph is a silk screen print. Given the nature of the process serigraphs tend to have “blocky,” solid-color print areas – a square of red here, some blue lettering there, a slash of black someplace else. Also, the colors, which come from thick paint-like inks, tend to sit on the surface of the page – you can actually feel them if you run your finger along the surface of a serigraph.
Lithography (especially photolithography, aka offset printing) can achieve near-perfect blended-color images. It uses extremely fine dots of four inks (colors: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow & Black) to create just about any color in the rainbow. And, because the ink is very thin and seeps into the paper, it’s nearly impossible to feel the print image on the paper.
Your prints looks like a photolithographic reproduction of the Max painting. Since you can’t give it the “feel” test, try examining it up close with a magnifying glass. If you see teeny-weeny dots of color – as small as the color dots in a picture in a good magazine – then the odds are that it’s a lithograph.
Oh the humanity, one poster combining the styles of my two least favorite painters, LeRoy Neiman and Peter Max!!
I should note that not all lithographic processes use halftone dots that stuyguy described, particularly processes like stone litho. But Peter Max doesn’t know squat about stone litho so this is probably a cheap offset litho. It could also be an Iris Inkjet in which case you definitely shouldn’t buy it because it will fade rapidly. I agree with stuyguy, this looks like a photographic reproduction of a painting, which means it’s a poster rather than a print. The website describes it as a poster rather than a print. Posters are produced from an existing artwork or painting without any involvement of the artist, prints are made with the direct involvement of the artist.
If you like this print, buy it because you like it, but if you’re thinking of buying it as an investment, I can almost guarantee it will not increase in value, and will assuredly decrease radically in value over the short term. Max is flooding the market with cheap reproductions and I can’t count all the people I know who have bought Max prints and paintings at inflated prices and then been crushed when they found out what they’re really worth. I mean seriously, he sells this stuff through television infomercials on QVC!