Woodblock printing

Woodblock printing, also known as “xylography,” is the technique of using carved wooden blocks to make prints on a surface and is related to woodcut printing. Xylo- comes from the Greek word for “wood” and includes most forms of wood-based print making. Woodblock printers use a variety of techniques. Sometimes the wood fiber is extracted from the block against the grain and others along the grain line. The wood may be cut with different types of instruments, such as burins or gouges, depending upon the technique and print surface. Woodblock printing was developed in China by the fifth century CE and remained an important method for art and text printing in the country into the nineteenth century. The Japanese school of woodblock printing has a long trajectory to this day, and its most famous historic form is the style known as ukiyo-e. In Europe, woodblock printing developed by the fifteenth century.

Background

Originally, purists made distinctions between wood engraving and wood cuts, claiming that the term “xylography” corresponded solely to the first method. Today, woodblock and woodcut printing, despite some differences in technique, are used more or less synonymously. Its most basic form is woodblock printing, believed to have its origins around the time that paper was invented. In Europe, it expanded and had its maximum expression in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when artists such as Albrecht Durer (1471–1528), Lucas Cranach (1472–1553), and Hans Holbein the Younger (ca. 1497–1543) used the technique in their work. With time, artists began to prefer etching in metal because it offered more durable materials and the possibility of finer lines. Without woodblock printing, many of the Renaissance works would have been lost to posterity. Woodblock printing made possible the serial reproduction of art works, so that many were able to survive.

Woodblock printing includes drawing or printing an image on a wood tablet. In case a print with several colors is desired, it is necessary to make several woodblock engravings, one for each color. The image is incised or engraved directly on the wood with an appropriate instrument, usually a gouge or burin. Once finished, in order to print, the wood tablet is inked and then pressed against the material on which an imprint is desired. Another method presses the paper against the plate and then rubs upon the paper to transfer the image. In the twenty-first century, woodblock printing is used for artistic purposes.

Woodblock Printing Today

Woodblock printing as an artistic genre has been adapted by different movements and given different styles and purposes. In the 1910s, artists began to use woodblock printing to create stories without words, known as “woodcut novels.” In a style that would be adapted by comic books and graphic novels, these novels provided a visual narration in sequences of images produced in woodcut or wood-engraving techniques. The only difference was that these images lacked written text. One of the most renowned artists to use woodblock printing is the Flemish artist Frans Masereel (1889–1972), who employed the technique to develop political works depicting stories of class struggles in urban settings. One of the benefits of this type of work was that it could tell a story in ways that transcended language and literacy barriers.

The woodblock-printed novels took off across Germany and central Europe and gained a foothold in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. In the United States, Lynd Ward (1905–85) became well known for using woodblock prints to create stories about the Great Depression and its consequences. Uruguayan immigrant Antonio Frasconi (1919–2013) reinvigorated woodblock printing in the United States during the twentieth century and has been hailed as the greatest woodcut artist of his time.

In Mexico, the practice of lithography stimulated print making in the early nineteenth century. Engraving became particularly important in Mexico during the Mexican Revolution, in the early twentieth century. It imposed a new ideology on the art form and was considered by artists as the perfect medium to raise political awareness and nationalism among the often illiterate masses. In the 1930s, woodblock and other artisanal forms of printing were repurposed by a new generation of artists who espoused a leftist ideology aligned with intellectuals and popular campesino and working-class labor movements. The movements sought to reproduce popular art forms in order to bring art to the masses, and woodblock printing seemed one of the best vehicles by which to accomplish it. Meanwhile, an influx of modernist currents influenced the movement, when in the late 1930s, Slovak artist Koloman Sokol (1902–2003) brought modernist trends and taught print-making arts at the University of Mexico. Another important group of artists who used woodblock printing in the twentieth century were the German expressionists. Expressionism was a movement that developed from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1920s. Although it had many approaches, it found its most significant dissemination through German artists. Among the most important themes that concerned these artists were primal, intense emotions, the naked body, the excitement and alienation of urban life, the consolations of nature, and the catastrophic experiences and repercussions of World War I.

For expressionist artists, woodblock and woodcut printing are the ideal medium to disseminate their ideas. Among the features that made woodblock printing popular with German expressionists were the possibilities of texture added by the line and grain of the wood, the strong tonal contrasts it allowed, and that it involved the artist from the creation of the drawing to the printing of the image. German expressionists are among the most renowned modern artists of the twentieth century, and they continue to have a deep influence on contemporary artists worldwide.

Bibliography

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