Woodcut is the technique of printing designs from planks of wood that have been incised parallel to the vertical axis of the wood’s grain. This method has been used in China since the 5th century CE to decorate textiles. In Europe, printing from wood blocks on textiles was known since the early 14th century, but it saw limited development until the end of the 14th century when paper began to be manufactured in France and Germany. Some cuts with heavy outline and little shading, like the Christ Before Herod, may date back to 1400, while the oldest dated print of German origin is the St. Christopher print from the Buxheim Monastery in 1423. In the early 15th century, religious images and playing cards were first made from wood blocks in Bavaria, Austria, and Bohemia, and the introduction of printing from movable type resulted in the widespread use of woodcut illustrations in the Netherlands and Italy. Albrecht Dürer and his followers Lucas Cranach and Hans Holbein perfected black-line woodcut in the 16th century, while Lucas van Leyden in the Netherlands and Jacopo de’ Barbari and Domenico Campagnola in Italy, who were also engravers on copper, also created woodcuts.
The woodcut process was widely utilized in the 17th century for popular illustrations, but it was not employed by any major artist. Wood engraving, which could reproduce paintings and sculpture more accurately and easily than woodcuts, replaced it in the early 19th century. However, with the development of photoengraving in the mid-19th century, wood engraving lost its popularity. Concurrently, artists at that time rediscovered the expressive potential of woodcuts. Instead of using fine-grained hardwoods as traditionally done in woodcuts, the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch began incorporating the grain of softwood into his designs, while the French painter Paul Gauguin achieved new tones and textures by treating the wood surface with sandpaper. Woodcut consequently became an important medium for the German Expressionists, who were inspired by the vitality of medieval woodcuts and pursued a brutal effect by gouging and roughly hewing the wood. In the 1920s and 1930s, woodcuts gained significance in the United States through the illustrations of Rockwell Kent and artists working in the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Following World War II, the woodcut medium in the United States was further developed by artists like Misch Kohn, Leonard Baskin, and Carol Summers. A revival of woodcuts occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s, largely influenced by changing aesthetics in painting.
During the 17th century, a style of genre art called ukiyo-e gained prominence in Japan, and woodcuts played an important role in its history. These woodcuts were a practical and convenient way to meet the high demand for affordable ukiyo-e pictures. It is credited to Hishikawa Moronobu for creating the ukiyo-e woodcut around the early 17th century, and his designs for popular literature illustrations were immediately successful. Within ukiyo-e, a special branch focused on making miniature prints called suri-mono, which were used to commemorate special occasions. Typically, these prints included a poem and were made on special paper adorned with gold or silver dust. In the 18th century, the art of ukiyo-e reached its pinnacle with the landscape prints created by Hokusai and Hiroshige. Many of these ukiyo-e woodcuts made their way to the West in the late 19th century and influenced avant-garde artists. In the 20th century, the technique experienced a revival through the work of acclaimed Japanese hanga masters such as Munakata Shiko, Hiratsuka Un’ichi, Maekawa Sempan, and Onchi K?shir?.
Other Printmaking Techniques You Should Know
The process of making linocuts is comparable to that of making woodcuts because lino cutting is also a relief technique. However, this style originated in the 20th century when artists like Pablo Picasso, John Banting, and Georg Baselitz used linoleum sheets to carve their images. Linoleum is a softer material than wood, simplifying the process of engraving images into it.
Like woodcut and linocut, engraving requires artists to cut into hard surfaces, in this case designs are carved into metal plates with tools or acid. A type of intaglio printmaking, in engravings instead of covering raised surfaces with ink, artists cover the whole plate in ink, and then wipe it away from raised surfaces before creating a print, leaving only the carved lines behind. This allowed artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Francisco Goya, William Hogarth, Lucas van Leyden, and William Blake to capture very fine details in their prints, but the sensitivity of this method also means artists must be precise when carving images.
Etching is an intaglio technique that differs from carving images on metal in that artists apply a layer of acid-resistant coating on the plate, and then create shallow marks on this coating rather than directly on the metal. The plate is then varnished on the back and exposed to acid, which only removes the unvarnished parts of the plate where the coating was scraped off. Artists have the ability to control the level of acidity and the duration of exposure to acid for each line, allowing them to manipulate the depth and visibility of the lines.
Albrecht Dürer, a printmaker, has only been recorded as having created five etchings during his lifetime. However, in the 16th century, Italian artist Mazzola, using cross hatching, embraced this technique to generate contrast. In the 17th century, Rembrandt emerged as a skilled etcher, able to depict delicate details, create a vibrant ambiance, and exhibit significant variations in lighting in his prints.
Collagraphs are different from linocut and woodcut in that artists do not need to remove material from the printing surface. Instead, they add collaged materials to the surface, then ink the plate and press it against paper or other materials. This technique creates a multi-textured design.
The technique was developed in the 1960s by Glen Alps, who was a professor of printmaking at the University of Washington.
In the 19th century, the technique of aquatint was developed to imitate the appearance of watercolors. Aquatints are made in a similar manner as etchings, where a plate is covered in a substance called rosin and then submerged in acid. However, in aquatint, the rosin is melted onto the plate by heating it before the acid bath. The acid then etches away the areas that are exposed.
Francisco Goya employed aquatint to produce various print series, whereas Robert Havell utilized the same method to depict John James Audubon’s Birds of America.
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