Screen printing pushes ink through a mesh screen onto paper or fabric. From Warhol's Marilyn to protest posters, learn how serigraphy became a fine art medium.
When Marilyn Monroe died on August 5, 1962, Andy Warhol had just started experimenting with silkscreens in his New York studio. Within four months, he had made more than twenty screen-printed paintings of her face, all based on the same publicity photograph from the 1953 film Niagara. The Marilyn Diptych (1962, Tate) repeats her image fifty times across two panels: twenty-five in garish color on the left, twenty-five in black and white on the right, fading progressively as the ink thins and the registration slips. The work is about celebrity and death, but it is also about what screen printing does as a technique. It repeats. It reproduces. And each repetition is slightly different, because the ink goes through the mesh differently every time.
Screen printing, also called serigraphy or silkscreen, is a stencil-based printmaking technique in which ink is forced through a fine mesh screen onto a substrate. Areas of the screen are blocked with a stencil, and ink passes only through the open mesh. A squeegee blade pushes the ink across the screen in a flood stroke, then a reverse stroke presses the screen against the paper or fabric, transferring the image. One color is printed at a time, so a multi-colored image requires multiple screens, one per color, carefully registered to align.
This entry covers how screen printing works, where it came from, which artists turned it into a fine art medium, and how to identify a screen print when you see one. If you want to understand why screen printing became the signature technique of Pop Art and protest movements alike, the answer is in its combination of mechanical reproduction and handmade variation.
The basic setup is simple. A frame holds a sheet of mesh material stretched taut. Traditionally, the mesh was silk, which is why the technique is called silkscreen. Modern screens use polyester mesh, with nylon and stainless steel available for special applications. The mesh count, measured in threads per inch, determines how much ink passes through and how fine the detail can be. A coarse mesh deposits more ink and is used for printing on fabric. A fine mesh produces sharper detail and is used for paper prints.
The stencil blocks areas of the screen where ink should not pass. Early stencils were cut from paper or film and attached to the screen. In the 1910s, printers developed photo-reactive stencils using chromate and dichromate chemicals with gelatin or glue. A positive image is exposed onto the sensitized screen using ultraviolet light, which hardens the emulsion in the exposed areas. The unexposed emulsion is washed out with water, leaving open mesh where the image is. This photo-stencil process allowed photographic images to be screen-printed for the first time, which is what made Warhol's Marilyn series possible.
Printing involves placing the screen above the substrate, pouring ink along one edge, and pulling the squeegee across the screen. The ink fills the open mesh on the flood stroke, then transfers to the paper on the print stroke. For multi-color prints, each color requires a separate screen, and the colors must be registered so they align precisely on the paper. Misregistration is visible as offset color edges, which Warhol sometimes left visible as part of the aesthetic.
Screen printing has its roots in stencil printing, one of the oldest methods of applying images to surfaces. Stencils were used in China as early as the Song Dynasty (960-1279) and in Japan for textile printing through the Ise katagami tradition. Japanese stencils were introduced to the West around 1873, which aligns with the early development of screen printing as it is known today. The technique was brought to Western Europe in the late 18th century but did not gain wide acceptance until silk mesh became more available through trade with East Asia.
The first patents for the screen printing process were granted in 1907 in the UK and 1915 in the USA. For decades, screen printing was used exclusively for commercial purposes: banners, posters, retail displays, and textile printing. It was cheap, fast, and could print on almost any surface. The fine art application came later. In the 1930s, a group of WPA artists including Max Arthur Cohn, Anthony Velonis, and Hyman Warsager coined the term "serigraphy" to distinguish the artistic use of screen printing from its industrial applications. The word combines the Latin "sericum" (silk) and the Greek "graphein" (to write or draw). Velonis published a 1937 booklet called Technical Problems of the Artist: Technique of the Silkscreen Process that established the methods used in the WPA poster shops.
A 2025 book by Gill Saunders, Screenprints: A History, published by Thames and Hudson in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, is the first comprehensive history of screen printing as an artistic medium. Saunders traces the technique's origins to Japanese katagami stencils and French pochoir printing, through its adoption by WPA artists in the 1930s, to its explosion in the 1960s when Pop Art made screen printing synonymous with fine art prints. The book is the first in an annual V&A series covering the histories of individual printmaking techniques. Read more at PRINT Magazine.
Velonis was the first artist to systematically develop screen printing as a fine art technique. Working in the New York WPA poster shop in the 1930s, he established the methods that would define silkscreen printmaking for decades. His 1937 technical booklet codified the process for other artists. Velonis and his colleagues in the National Serigraph Society coined the term "serigraphy" to elevate the medium above its commercial associations. In 1940, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held an exhibition called Color Prints Under Ten Dollars, featuring 70 works, the majority of which were screen prints.
Warhol is the artist who made screen printing famous. He began using the technique in August 1962, initially to reproduce rows of dollar bills and Campbell's Soup cans. When Marilyn Monroe died that same month, Warhol screen-printed her face from a publicity photograph, producing the Marilyn Diptych (1962, Tate) and dozens of other Marilyn works. Warhol described the appeal of the process in his memoir POPism: "With silkscreening, you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple, quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it." The Tate's conservation team recently restored the Marilyn Diptych, removing 60 years of dust and dirt. Read about the restoration at Tate.
Lichtenstein used screen printing alongside his signature Ben-Day dot paintings. His screen prints from the 1960s and 1970s, such as Brushstroke (1965), translate the gestural language of Abstract Expressionism into the flat, mechanical language of commercial reproduction. The irony is the point: a hand-painted brushstroke, reproduced mechanically, becomes a commentary on authenticity and originality.
Paolozzi collaborated with master printer Chris Prater at Kelpra Studio in London to produce As Is When (1965), a portfolio of twelve screen prints based on the life and writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Gill Saunders called it "the medium's first masterpiece." Prater, who founded Kelpra Studio in 1957, was described by Saunders as "almost single-handedly responsible for the metamorphosis of screenprinting into a fine art." Paolozzi's work with Prater demonstrated that screen printing could produce complex, multi-layered images with the sophistication of any traditional printmaking medium.
During the student and worker uprising of May 1968 in Paris, artists at the Atelier Populaire in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts produced hundreds of screen-printed protest posters. The posters were printed quickly, in small editions, and pasted on walls across the city. Screen printing was the ideal medium for protest: cheap, fast, requiring no specialized equipment, and capable of producing bold, graphic images in a matter of hours. The Atelier Populaire posters are now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Screen prints have a distinctive flatness. Unlike intaglio prints, which have a platemark and raised ink lines, screen prints deposit a thin, even layer of ink on the surface of the paper. There is no indentation, no raised texture. The ink sits flat.
Look for layers of opaque color. Because each color is printed separately, you can often see the layering sequence, especially where colors overlap. Early impressions in an edition will have crisp, clean edges. As the edition progresses and the stencil degrades, edges may soften or break. In Warhol's work, deliberate misregistration and uneven inking are part of the aesthetic. The fading in the right panel of Marilyn Diptych is not a defect. It is what happens when ink thins on the screen over repeated pulls.
Screen prints can be made on paper, fabric, metal, glass, or almost any flat surface. The versatility of the medium is one reason it was adopted so widely outside fine art, from T-shirt printing to circuit board manufacturing.
Screen printing is a stencil process, distinct from the three other major printmaking families: intaglio (etching, engraving, drypoint), relief printing (woodcut, linocut), and planographic printing (lithography). In intaglio, ink sits in recessed lines. In relief printing, ink sits on raised surfaces. In lithography, ink sits on a flat surface treated to accept or reject ink chemically. In screen printing, ink is pushed through open mesh, making it the only major printmaking process where the image is transferred by forcing ink through a permeable matrix.
For more on how printmaking techniques compare, read our entries on etching and lithography, or explore our post on how to read a painting to learn more about identifying printmaking techniques in museum collections.
The Tate Modern in London holds Warhol's Marilyn Diptych, recently restored and displayed with conservation information that explains the screen printing process. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has an extensive collection of Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Paolozzi screen prints. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London holds the Atelier Populaire posters from May 1968 and is the institution behind the 2025 book Screenprints: A History.
If you want to trace the history of screen printing as a fine art medium, start with the WPA prints at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, move to Warhol and Lichtenstein at MoMA or Tate, and look at the protest poster tradition at the V&A. You will see a technique that started in commercial print shops and became one of the most recognizable art forms of the 20th century. For more on the broader context of printmaking, read our entries on etching and relief printing, or explore our guide to chiaroscuro and dramatic contrast to see how different printmaking techniques handle light and shadow.
Discover other art terms you might be interested in
Aquatint is an etching technique that produces tonal areas using powdered resin and acid. From Goya's Caprichos to modern printmakers, learn how it works.
An artist's proof is a print pulled outside the numbered edition, traditionally reserved for the artist. From Picasso and Mourlot to today's 10 percent rule, learn how APs work.
Drypoint is an intaglio print made by scratching a metal plate with a needle. The burr creates a rich, velvety line that wears out fast. Learn how Rembrandt used it.
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