New York, NY, February 4, 2014—For a small but influential group of European and American artists engaged with the art of the book, the medium of the woodcut became an inspiration for stylistically diverse and provocative works in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. What many viewed as the detrimental and alienating effects of new illustration and printing technologies became a catalyst for artists to reinvent the book in creative expressions that elevated it to a work of art, and signaled the era’s meditative moments on the past and future of illustrated books and their makers. From the sublime Kelmscott Chaucer to the proto-graphic novels of Frans Masereel, woodcut illustration was integral to some of the most exquisite and innovative books of the modern age. These publications continue to delight the senses while prompting thoughtful explorations of the potential form and function of the printed book: how we read images and look at texts according to the hands that craft them.
Shakespeare_Die tragische Geschichte von Hamlet 3Artists associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, such as William Morris, Charles Ricketts, Lucien Pissarro and Eric Gill explored the woodcut’s decorative and typographic properties expressive of their interests in the early history of the book and contemporary ideas of social reform. William Nicholson and Edward Gordon Craig adopted the aesthetics of archaic inexpensive forms of illustrated publications, updating chapbooks and almanacs with their fin-de-siècle styles. In France and Belgium, artists with ties to Paul Gauguin and the Symbolist movement, such as Émile Bernard, George Minne, and Alfred Jarry, investigated the woodcut’s associations with religious imagery in books and popular prints, while Félix Vallotton, Edward Wadsworth, and Aristide Maillol cultivated the medium for original expression in artists’ books and avant-garde magazines. The medium’s semantic association with proletariat causes helped to shape the visual representation of American identity during the Great Depression in illustrations by Rockwell Kent and J. J. Lankes. In the final years of this period, often referred to as the woodcut revival, the medium’s democratic underpinnings and inscriptive properties were explored in works by Frans Masereel, Lynd Ward, and others, who exploited its potential for narrative expression through the wordless novel.
The more than ninety illustrated books, drawings, prints, and wood blocks in Medium as Muse: Woodcuts and the Modern Book are drawn almost entirely from the collection of The Morgan Library & Museum.