Woodcut

Since the end of the nineteenth century, woodcuts – images produced by making a print using a wooden matrix carved with a knife – have helped to define the path to the modern painting. A key aspect of such images consisted of the artist’s relationship to the material, colour, the surface of matrix, and the traces left behind by the tools used, all of which worked together to express the artist’s idea. The colour woodcut, as a creative graphic art technique, enjoyed its artistic peak in Central Europe in about 1900. This publication with six chapters presents the international context of Central European art, particularly the innovative transfer of aesthetic elements that know no borders, the plurality of inspiration, and artistic possibilities that could be found among art centres and individual artists. What was the situation like in Vienna after 1900? Or in Prague? What inspiration was found in the work of expressive individuals such as Paul Gauguin or Edvard Munch? The Czech-German artists Walther Klemm and Carl Thiemann are the notional guides who will lead the viewer through this book showing the various forms of woodcuts and shared inspirations. They created an extensive and ambitious work of graphic art between 1905 and 1908.