Out of the book and onto the wall

The earliest single-sheet prints in the West performed both secular and sacred functions. On the one hand woodcuts were used to produce sets of playing cards, on the other they provided devotional images to be pinned up as personal icons or pasted on to furniture of into the backs of psalters.

It is prints inside books, where they were protected from degradation by light, that have been able to survive until today. The structure of paper is irreversibly weakened and ultimately destroyed by exposure, which helps to explain the low level of lighting in art galleries where paper curators are charged with the conflicting duties of exhibiting their treasures at the same time as preserving them for posterity.

Although large sheets fare worse over time than little ones and deductions must be based on prints extant today, Renaissance prints were of comparatively modest dimensions. The cheapness of wood nevertheless enabled it to exceed the size of most matrices in metal. Most of Dürer's woodcuts measured around 39 x 28cm, whereas his engravings, said to have cost the buyer four-and-a-half times as much, rarely exceeded 25 x 19cm.

Very occasionally, sixteenth-century prints assumed outsize proportions. The dramatic cut of Pharoah's army in the Red Sea, after Titian, 122 x 223cm, was clearly meant to function as a mural. Yet it was formed by twelve blocks printed on separate sheets which later had to be glued together. The fact that connoisseurs preferred to keep the sheets separate in portfolios rather than paste them together for display accounts for the work's survival. The longest side of the most ample single-sheet prints, cut after Titian and Rubens to publicize their paintings, was usually under 60cm. These woodcuts, according to Hyatt Mayor, were the last masterpieces in a medium that dwindled to ballad sheets and minor ornaments.

The 'disappearance' of the woodcut

The myth of the disappearing woodcut is encountered in all the conventional 'print-as-art' histories, which assert that wood was ousted by intaglio printing because it was unable to compete with the detail possible from metal when people needed to communicate more and more information about an increasingly complex world.

Certainly for the majority of single sheets and quality book illustrations, printing from metal did take the lead in the 1600s, despite the fact that intaglio engravings had to be printed by a method incompatible with the relief printing of text. Then, before 1800, Thomas Bewick sparked off a revolution in Victorian book and periodical publishing, restoring the relief print to the book by using fine tools on end grain wood and thus matching the detail possible from metal. Although often dismissed by those who use words such as 'illustrative' or 'reproductive' pejoratively, the works that he made possible provide as many miracles as any other branch of art.

In relating this development, conventional art history ignores pictorial wallpaper. Yet if we note the connection between the makers of religious woodcuts and the earliest stages of wallpaper manufacture, and accept the latter into the domain of art, statements about the total eclipse of the woodcut need to be reassessed. Certainly there is a continuity between sixteenth-century chiaroscuro prints and the panoramic wallpapers printed in distemper from woodcuts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. One ate of these - depicting the adventures of Captain Cook in the South Seas - was recently acquired by the Australian National Gallery. This tendency began when eighteenth-century gentlemen had a tessellation of ‘serious’ prints pasted on to their walls between decorative woodcut borders and John Baptist Jackson (1701-77), who developed chiaroscuro into large-scale full-colour relief printing in Venice in the 1740s, saw his works used as panel wallpapers in the parlour at Strawberry Hill by the connoisseur and MP, Hugh Walpole. The fact that Jackson's pictures not only reproduced old masters but applied them to ephemeral wallpaper seems to have obscured the fact that he anticipated full-colour Japanese Ukiyo-e prints by two decades. Our tendency to categorize objects hierarchically as fine art, applied art, and even non-art, distorts our understanding of the history of image making.

The 'original' relief print

From the second half of the nineteenth century, partly to assist marketing and partly as an overreaction to the camera as a machine, but also as an understandable response to the increasing debasement of mass-produced pictures, the art world determined that only limited edition 'original' prints were of interest. An original print was defined, in contradistinction to a reproduction, as a print for which the matrix had been cut (and, ideally, printed) by its originator. The outlawing of photography that resulted meant that Aubrey Beardsley was virtually alone in realizing the creative possibilities of the photomechanical line block.

This rather simplistic way of inferring quality has distorted understanding of print production. Printmaking, particularly for the illustrated book, has always been an essentially collaborative undertaking involving many hands. It is decidedly ironic that a huge stimulus to original printmaking and art-for-art's sake came from the woodcut books and albums of Japanese Ukiyo-e. For these prints, resembling our pin-ups or postcards, were the products of a tripartite division of labour directed to purely commercial ends, able none-the-less to give rise to some of the loveliest woodcuts in the world.

The influx of these prints from Japan came at a moment when experience rather than appearance had become the motivation for art and European artists of the 1890s as diverse as Félix Vallotton, Paul Gauguin and Edvard Munch found in the woodcut an astonishing range of expressive possibilities. Their rejection of over-refinement in printmaking led to the assimilation of forms from outside the Renaissance tradition, including not only Ukiyo-e but unsophisticated and primitive sources such as folk prints and African and Oceanic wood sculptures.

Block books from the incunabula of German relief printing undoubtedly inspired the woodcut manifestos of the first group of German expressionists, Die Brücke (The Bridge). In the early days, these Dresden artists produced portfolios for subscribers containing images considerably smaller than Venetian sixteenth-century prints. In all their cuts, which they produced single-handed, they aimed at an unrestrained vehemence, making the marks of the tools apparent on the splintery wood. Not surprisingly, they were banned as degenerate by the Nazis. Similar influences, although more gently lyrical in effect, were at work on the artists of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), led in Munich by Kandinsky. His book, Klänge, in which he moves from figuration towards abstraction, paved the way for a number of non-objective single-sheet relief prints by members of the Abstraction-Creation group between the wars.

During this inter-war period in England white line wood-engraving and private press books inspired by William Morris held many printmakers in their thrall. Some intriguing colour prints from lino, however—notable in the hands of Claude Flight and his Australian followers—diluted the more extreme Futurist tendencies to extol the dynamism of machines and gladden the sitting room of the average householder.

After World War II, Picasso employed lino to positively magisterial effect and Expressionism surfaced again in the man-high woodcuts of Leonard Baskin, whose prints were among the first which could not be adequately viewed unless they were hung on a wall. Their scale was occasionally matched during the early sixties by Michael Rothenstein's abstractions, often printed from found driftwood, in which he lent new emphasis to the nature of his material.

The Pop generation, who rarely used relief techniques, led prints temporarily away from hand-crafted work in the sixties yet continued to challenge the scale and function of painting. The hand-made relief print returned in the seventies with the German Neo-Expressionists, such as Penck, Baselitz and Immendorf. In works at least four times as big as those of their countrymen in the first decades of the century they achieved equal freedom and abandon. The effect of their panache on other artists can be measured in the stylistic changes Jim Dine made between his first Woodcut bathrobe of 1975 and the huge recent version nearly 2m high, cursively cut with power tools.

Widely popular in the last few years, the relief print has displayed incredible variety ranging over the ghostly scratchings of Susan Rothenberg and the ineffable floating colour blends by Helen Frankenthaler, the bold cacophonies of Bruce Porter and the giant narratives by Jay Bolotin.

The workshop-assisted print has gone from strength to strength, as well as back to older forms. Francesco Clemente's watercolour, Morning, was translated into woodcut by latter-day Ukiyo-e craftsmen under his supervision, while Frank Stella admits that the grandeur of his recent complex combinations of wood and magnesium relief plates printed over specially made multicoloured papers would have been impossible without the help of his printer, Ken Tyler. Tyler has had much influence on increasing the size and importance of contemporary prints and the kind of technical support he provides is still unimaginable in Australia.

Nevertheless, in her beautiful self-portrait, an astonishing colour half-tone etched on to lino blocks and made in Heath Robinson conditions, Australian artist Bea Maddock has demonstrated yet again the relief print's never-ending capacity for renewal, surprising us with a sophisticated invention using the simplest of means.

Pat Gilmour

Fifteenth-century block books, for which words and pictures were cut from the same plank of wood, established the convention that letterpress text and relief illustrations belonged together. This long-standing association has been strengthened in the twentieth century because photolithography permits text and illustrations to be set up and printed simultaneously.

Most early woodcuts were designed to imitate drawings by printing in black line on a white ground. The block was cut ‘on the plank’, parallel with the grain, and a large part of the surface had to be cut away to leave the lines of the design standing proud. As the fruit woods used were comparatively soft and the lines were exposed, they tended to wear and the block would break after repeated used. Engraved metal intaglio plates, which were not only more durable than wood but could register a wealth of detail, began to displace the woodcut in the generation after Dürer, whose cuts on plank wood brought the art to perfection in the sixteenth century.

The invention of wood-engraving

In the 1770s Thomas Bewick applied the burin, the metal engraver’s principal tool, to the polished end grain of a small block of boxwood, that is, to a surface of this hard wood cut at right angles to the grain instead of parallel with it. Bewick’s engravings produced delicate counterchanges of white line out of black and black against white.

The advantages of this innovation were the cheapness of durable boxwood blocks as against metal plates, the shorter time it took to engrave on wood and the compatibility of wood-engravings, or metal duplicates cast from them, with type. The potential of Bewick’s discovery was enormous as literacy became more widespread, and the demand for pictorial information increased in step with the development of public education.

William Harvey, Bewick’s favourite pupil, took wood-engraving to London. He went from strength to strength designing illustrations for Charles Knight of The Penny Magazine (1832-45) and The Pictorial Museum of Animated Nature (c.1832).

As the demand for wood-engraving grew, a class of professional engravers emerged. They tended to congregate in workshops such as those run by Harvey of the Dalziel Brothers, which were among the most famous in Victorian England.

In the early days, the artist made his drawings on the block in pen and black ink, sometimes adding white gouache to show highlights, then in the engraving workshops the cutter engraved through the drawing. Later in the 1860s it became technically possible photographically to transfer drawings to a sensitized emulsion on the block for cutting.

From the ‘Golden Age’ to William Morris

Moxon's edition of Poems by Alfred Tennyson, published in 1857, signals the beginning of often called the Golden Age of wood-engraving in English illustration, which lasted for over a decade. Work produced at this time included important Pre-Raphaelite engravings after William Holman Hunt (1827-1919) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82) but the industrialization which made possible the production of the large edition books of the so-called Golden Age did not foster good design.

William Morris, the English poet, decorator and designer, saw in such publications evidence of a general decline in beauty and individuality which he felt characterized the mass-produced articles of his time and in 1888 he founded the Kelmscott Press at Hammersmith, London, based on fifteenth-century models.

'I began printing books', wrote Morris, 'with the hope of producing some which would have a definite claim to beauty while at the same time they should be easy to read and should not dazzle the eyes, or trouble the intellect of the reader by eccentricity of form in the letters.'

The masterpiece from Morris's press, popularly known as the 'Kelmscott Chaucer' (1896), is a book richly adorned with decorative borders and initials designed by Morris. It is illustrated with eighty-eight wood-engravings after drawings by Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98).

Inspired by the Kelmscott Press other private presses appeared in England, such as the Vale (1896-1904), Eragny (1894-1914) and the Golden Cockerel (1920-60). William Morris's example was particularly influential in the United States and in Germany. Count Kessler’s Cranach Presse at Weimar (1913-31), for which Aristide Maillol illustrated Virgil's Eclogues in 1926, closely followed the Kelmscott model.

Morris's dream of creating beautiful books which could be the property of all remained only a dream. His wish to create easily read typefaces that would not distract the reader was also largely unrealized, although his ideals inspired thousands of designers as the Arts and Crafts movement prepared the way for the development of the modern movement at the turn of the century.

The young aesthete Aubrey Beardsley (1872-98) challenged Morris on his own ground by designing the illustrations for Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur with the relatively new line block process in mind. (To make a line block a line drawing is photographically transferred to a zinc plate which is then etched in successive stages to leave a facsimile of the drawing standing in relief). Beardsleys illustrations have been interpreted as a parody of the Morris/Burne-Jones style.

The modern book

In France during the 1890s influential bibliophiles maintained that wood-engraving and woodcut were the only legitimate means of illustrating fine books, because they were compatible with letterpress text.

Lithography, especially in colour, became extremely popular in France during the 1890s and the wood-engraving school fought hard to maintain its supremacy. In 1896-97 the Société Corporative des Graveurs sur Bois Français (Corporate Society of Wood Engravers), published a monthly periodical, L'Image, which became a manual of all the techniques in use at that time.

One artist who rejected the reproductive role of wood-engraving was Paul Gauguin (1848-1903). In 1901 he wrote to Daniel de Monfried: 'wood-engraving as illustration is becoming more and more like photogravure—detestable!' Gauguin himself exploited the marks of the tools on his material and Expressionist artists of various tendencies followed his example.

In 1909 André Derain (1880-1954), a member of the Fauve group in France, whose art was inspired by African Negro sculpture and ethnographical finds, illustrated L'Enchanteur Pourrissant (The mouldering magician). Written by the young French poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), the book includes full-page 'primitivist' woodcuts of standing nudes which suggest a curious range of influences from Gauguin's Tahiti to the sculpture of Africa and ancient Egypt.

In Munich in 1913 the book Klänge (Sounds) was published, containing poems and fifty-six woodcuts by Wassily Kandinsky. In this book Kandinsky, co-founder with Franz Marc of the Blaue Reiter group of German artists, traces his artistic development from Jugendstil (German Art Nouveau) towards abstraction.

Expressionist artists of Die Brücke, the group founded in Dresden in 1905, included Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884-1976) and Erich Heckel (1883-1970), all of whom are represented in the small catalogue of their exhibition at the Galerie Arnold, Dresden, in 1910, which they illustrated themselves. The care these artists gave to ensuring the compatibility of their hand-cut lettering and woodcut illustrations is a feature of all the catalogues, posters and portfolios they produced, many of which remind one of early German block books with which the European printed book tradition began.

Developments from 1939

Many of the finest painters and sculptors of the twentieth century have continued to use relief prints to produce masterpieces of book design although the increasing scale of the illustrations has led to the inclusion of separate sets of proofs for framing and display.

Henri Matisse chose linoleum for his illustrations to two sections of Henri de Montherlant’s verse play Les Crétois (Pasiphäé and Chant de Minos), published in a single volume in 1944. He incised lines into the lino to show as white paper against the black printed background. He was anxious to balance the illustration against the comparatively white pages of type beside them, a problem which he solved by bringing the two pages together to form a unit. He introduced severe, classically inspired capitals and head and tail-pieces printed in red, which relieve the grimness of the black-and-white pages.

Matisse’s Pasiphäé is one of several ambitious large-scale experiments in relief illustration which took place in mid-century. Two projects, by Derain and Joan Miró, involved new approaches to the colour woodcut.

For Pantagruel (1943) by Rabelais, a French satire dating from the sixteenth century, Derain’s illustrations suggest the tarot cards of the author’s time, but instead of cutting a separate block for each colour in the print, Derain cut a white line around each colour patch to separate it from its neighbours. Each of these patches was then inked separately by brush in the Japanese manner; when this process was complete the colours were printed simultaneously.

Joan Miró’s illustrations to Paul Eluard’s A toute épreuve (1958) are a labour of love on which the artist and the Spanish craftsman, Enric Tormo, spent ten years. The artist’s aim was to allow the physical properties of wood and the form of the tree itself to shape the abstract forms.

Jim Dine’s Apocalypse (1982), illustrated with his recurring imagery of bathrobes, tools and hearts, is vivid evidence that contemporary artistis continue to find relief prints appropriate for the enrichment of a text.

Tony Palmer

Linoleum, which is chiefly used as a floor covering, was first patented by its English inventor Frederick Walton in 1860. Traditionally, it consists of solidified linseed oil and crushed cork pressed onto coarse canvas backing. It is not known precisely when artists first cut linoleum to make prints, although wallpapers and posters are said to have been printed from linoleum blocks from the 1890s and certainly by World War I several fine artists were experimenting with it. Among the earliest practitioners during the first two decades of the twentieth century were the German Expressionist artists Erich Heckel and Christian Rohlfs and the Australian expatriate artist Horace Brodzky. Brodzky, living in London from 1908 to 1915, produced several powerful linocuts from 1912 and he is believed to have introduced the technique to the young French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Gaudier-Brzeska's vigorously executed Wrestlers (1914) was shown in the first British exhibition of linocuts in 1929.

The linocut, like the woodcut, is a relief print. The block is cut with knives and gouges, leaving the surface to be inked standing in relief. Ink is then applied to the block, usually by roller, and an impression is taken either by rubbing the back of a sheet of paper laid on the inked surface or by placing both paper and block in a press. Whereas plank wood has a grain which may resist cutting, linoleum is far softer and this facilitates removal of unwanted material; because of this ease of cutting and its cheapness, lino has long been favoured for teaching art to school children.

Matisse in the late 1930s and Picasso between 1959 and 1964 demonstrated that major artistic statements could be made with lino. More recently, Michael Rothenstein in Great Britain and Bea Maddock in Australia have continued to extend the technical possibilities of lino by etching it with caustic soda, while in Europe the German artist Georg Baselitz is taking advantage of its almost limitless size to make statements on a grand scale.

Claude Flight at the Grosvenor School

It was the English artist and teacher Claude Flight who made the technique of linocutting known to a wider audience in the late 1920s and 1930s. Flight advocated the technique persuasively through his teaching at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art established in London in 1925 as well as through his textbooks and public lectures and in the regular linocut exhibitions he organized between 1929 and 1937 in London. Similar exhibitions toured England, the United States and elsewhere, including Australia, for several of his most gifted pupils were Australian.

The prints by the Grosvenor School linocutters listed and illustrated here largely express speed, movement and the dynamism of modern city life, although other aspects of their work included a celebration of nature and depictions of foreign places. Claude Flight adopted somewhat belatedly the modernist ideas of speed and dynamism of the Italian Futurists who noisily proclaimed the aesthetic of the machine age in their manifestos and appearances prior to World War l. 'Hurrah for motors! Hurrah for speed!', cheered the Futurist leader F.T. Marinetti and his English associate C.R.W. Nevinson in Vital English Art in 1914. Although Flight was not motivated principally by Futurist theory, which included a rejection of the past and the glorification of the machine, he often asserted that art should be the expression of a 'vital experience' akin to the spirit of its day. In perhaps his best known linocut, Brooklands (c.1929), Flight celebrated the exhilaration of speed and the demonic energy of the racing machine. This print, which refers to the gruelling six-hour motor race instituted in 1927 at the Brooklands circuit outside London, can be seen as a fulfilment of Marinetti's first inflammatory manifesto published nearly twenty years before. In 1909 Marinetti had launched Futurism with the impassioned declaration that 'a racing car, its body ornamented by great pipes that resemble snakes with explosive breath ... a screaming automobile that seems to run on grapeshot, is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace'. (The Winged Victory is the well known Hellenistic sculpture in the Louvre.)

‘Abstract ideas’

In his teaching and his technical books Flight recommended linocutting as an excellent discipline for essential design. The technique demanded the rigorous analysis of the subject in terms of flat masses of superimposed colour and shapes. Hence it was better suited to the expression of what Flight called 'abstract ideas' than the faithful representation of nature. Although Flight sought a geometrical structure in his linocuts, the subject was always recognizable despite its simplification. Reduction to flat colour and basic shapes provided the elements for the rhythmic organization of the composition. Rhythm became the stylistic hallmark of the linocuts of Flight and his pupils, denoting 'ultra-modern' art to their contemporary public.

The colour linocut was vigorously promoted by Flight as the new art form which, by its comparative cheapness, introduced modern art to the ordinary person. Flight intended colour linocuts to adorn the walls of modern houses or apartments at a price which wage-earners could afford. Although Flight promoted the linocut as a democratic art form, the prices asked for colour linocuts at the large exhibitions he organized ranged from two to three guineas. In 1935, during the Great Depression, when the working-class male in Britain earned an average weekly wage of 49 shillings, colour linocuts were beyond the pocket of those with less than a middle-class income.

Dissemination

Among the pupils attracted from abroad to study at the Grosvenor School were the Australian artists Dorrit Black, Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme.

They were largely instrumental in bringing Flight's conception of the colour linocut to Australia and promoting it enthusiastically through small exhibitions, mostly in Melbourne, during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Flight was not unknown to the Australian public. In 1923 a travelling exhibition of European art which went to Sydney and Melbourne had included several of his rhythmically designed watercolours and oil paintings among the examples of 'ultra-modern' art and these had provoked some critical contention.

Exhibitions featuring linocuts were not new in Australia, but the attention they received from the press in the late 1920s and early 1930s was partly due to the determination of Claude Flight's former pupils. Eveline Syme included linocuts in a Melbourne exhibition of her watercolours in 1928. Arthur Streeton, doyen of Australian artists and influential art critic of the Melbourne Argus, reviewed an exhibition of linocuts by several local artists in December 1930. Although Ethel Spowers received favourable mention, Streeton at first considered that linocutting was not aesthetically equal to traditional printmaking methods and believed that its future lay in commercial use. His opinion of linocutting changed after viewing a later Melbourne show in April 1932, which he praised as containing 'new art of the best'. The technique received its widest public exposure with the major exhibition of colour prints and wood-engravings brought from London's Redfern Gallery to Melbourne in December 1932. This included the rhythmical colour linocuts of Flight, Cyril Power, Sybil Andrews and Lill Tschudi as well as those of the Australian artists.

Promotion of the colour linocut was pursued in other ways. During the different periods in which they received instruction in linocut from Flight, Black, Syme and Spowers each sent vivid descriptions of the Grosvenor School to local art society magazines in Melbourne and Sydney. On return to Australia Ethel Spowers acted as Flight's agent in Melbourne, taking orders for linocuts produced by his circle, while in Sydney in 1932 Dorrit Black publicized the linocut through exhibitions at her newly opened Modern Art Centre. The Australian linocut artists each attempted to introduce modernism to Australia, but it was Dorrit Black who perhaps came closest to the spirit of her teacher in her print Music (1927-28). With its energetic dancers expressed in lively agitated rhythms this work exemplified the vitality of the jazz age.

The linocuts of Claude Flight and his circle represent a modest artistic achievement in Britain and Australia between the wars. Strong rhythmic designs, bold colour and simplified forms characterize these decorative prints which were seen both by the artists and their contemporaries as expressing a modern vital art in a relatively new technique. While today their art may seem somewhat traditional even for their time, the importance of Claude Flight and his school rests in their role as enthusiastic artists, teachers and exhibitors of the linocut.

Stephen Coppel, Department of International Prints and Illustrated Books, 1984.