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Relief & All That Jazz Giclee Print Turner Dyke,... 16 in. x 20 in. Buy at AllPosters.com Framed Mounted The woodcut is a relief process, i. e. one in which the drawing stands out from the background of the block. Areas that are not meant to print off are hollowed out. This technique had already been used in connection with fabric printing, many centuries before the woodcut. The invention of paper in Europe at the end of the 14th century, in China somewhat earlier -- made possible the woodcut as we know it to-day. The first German woodcuts -- Germany led in this technique -- were devotional pictures, printed on single sheets. The blockbook, invented round 1430, consists of a series of woodcuts, printed from blocks, containing both text and illustrations.
It is the predecessor of the illustrated woodcut book, printed with movable type. Diirer was one of the supreme masters of the woodcut. His technique of closer shading rendered unnecessary the hand-colouring that had been used until his day. But from then on, artists only made the drawing and entrusted special craftsmen, called xylographers, with the making of the blocks. The coloured woodcut, as a substitute for hand-colouring, was an invention of the Renaissance (Cranach, Burgkmair). It consisted in printing a layer of green over the drawing with a further block. Another method is to cut lines into this block, leaving white areas on the print (also called chiaroscuro printing). This marks the beginning of the coloured woodcut, printed with several blocks, which plays such an important part in the graphic arts of to-day and which had already reached a very high stage of development in 18th- and 19th-century Japan.
In Europe, the copper engraving gradually displaced the woodcut from the time of Dürer onwards. It was revived by Thomas Bewick in the early 19th century. Instead of cutting the wood along the grain, it was now cut across, using a burin or copper engraver. The resulting wood engraving can possess the most delicate tones and lines. This technique is also highly suitable for cheap reproductions, but is for this very reason easily debased. Munch, Nolde and others, dissatisfied with lifeless technical perfection, revived the old form of the woodcut. These artists once again made their own blocks and brought out the characteristic features of this process, such as rough, heavy lines. The modern lino-cut and the brick-cut techniques are variants of the woodcut and only differ from it in that they use blocks not made of wood. Various experiments had already been made by the end of the Middle Ages with the metal cut (steel cut), with the use of a punch in place of a knife on the wood and with printing wood blocks on paper held in position with dough.
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