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The Color Woodcut in America
1895-1945
By Ann Harlow and Andrew Terry Keats
Hearst Art Gallery
Saint Mary's College, Moraga, California
October 24 - December 15, 1984
American Color Woodcuts, 1895-1984: Provincetown to Pasadena
"The art of print-making is a distinct responsibility. A poor
painting may be a crime, but only one: a poor print is a crime multiplied by the size of the edition. But once the artist
has come to terms with his consicence there is a certain amount of fun in the craft, especially when the medium is wood.
Wood must be humored. It seems to be a sentient thing.
It warps and twists, expands and contracts, it cracks and splits as if protesting its mutilation." ----Walter
J. Phillips
Of all the major printmaking techniques, the color woodcut
is the most rare. Reasons are no doubt that the difficulty, complexity and time-consuming nature of the technique
discourage all but the most dedicated and adventurous of artists. These, and the fact that color printmaking was not
accepted as a legitimate artistic expression for a long time, in part explain the relative scarcity of color woodblock prints
here in the United States.
The first known exhibitionof American color woodcuts
was one at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1895 of works by Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow, an influential teacher and writer,
helped to inspire many other artists to take up this art form adapted from the Japanese printmaking tradition.
Color woodcuts began to appear in large group exhibitions
as early as 1915 when they were included in the print section of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 held
in San Francisco. For the most part, the artists represented were those who were working in Provincetown, Massachusetts,
an area where many artists settled after returning from Europe when World War I began. Included in the Exposition were
such well-known woodcut artists as Gustave Baumann, B.J.O. Nordfeldt, Margaret Patterson, and Elizabeth Colwell.
The "Provincetown Printers" dominated several subsequent
exhibitions, including one at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1919. Concurrently, however, there were many artists
working in the woodcut medium in other parts of the country, particularly the West Coast. It wasn't, however, until
the Brooklyn Museum exhibition, "American Color Prints," held in the spring of 1933, that all of these artists were brought
together. This landmark exhibition, the first ever devoted solely to color prints (including etchings andlithographs),
included 79 artists represented by 298 prints. Almost all of the major woodcut artists were represented, including
most of the Provincetown Printers as well as other leading artists such as Frank Morley Fletcher, Frances Gearhart,
Norma Bassett Hall, Walter Phillips, William S. Rice, and Eva and Ernest Watson, to name a few.
Recently, there has been much renewed interest in this
art form. Museums have rediscovered the color woodcut and have begun to include it in its proper place in the
graphic arts, largely through increased numbers of exhibitions. In 1982, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented
"Prints from Blocks: Gauguin to Now." The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American Art (formerly the National
Collection of Fine Arts) has presented a series of woodcut exhibitions during the past decade. Organized by Janet Flint,
Curator of GraphicArts, these have included "American Color Woodcuts: The Years of Transition" in 1978-79, and the recent
(1983-84) "Provincetown Printers: A Woodcut Tradition," accompanied by the first major illustrated catalogue on the subject
of American color woodcuts.
Briefly described, the process of the color woodcut involves
the cutting of a design into several blocks, usually one for each color. These blocks are then hand colored with either
water-based or oil-based inks made from finely ground powdered pigments and printed onto a sheet of paper in exact registration
to insure the greatest accuracy in transfer of the image. Only when al of the blocks have been inked and printed in
proper succession is the print finished. A variation of this technique is the "one-block method," utilizing a single
block into which the entire design is cut. The colors are then applied in sections and printed one color at a time.
The colors are often separated by grooves cut into the block, which create white lines on the finished print. This process
has become known as the "Provincetown" method, named for the area where it is thought to have originated and was most practiced.
This same technique was used, however, to a lesser extent in other areas of the country.
By virtue of the materials chosen, the color woodcut
lends itself to many artistic interpretations. By using a hard wood such as cherry, fine detail can be clearly
cut and printed. Use of water-based inks allows the artist to include the wood-grain background as an integral part
of the image, if desired. This type of ink is easily absorbed into the fibers of the paper, allowing for very fine,
subtle gradations of tone, thereby producing the most delicate and sensitive of color images. Some American printmakers,
on the other hand, preferred the flat, opaque effects achieved with oil-based inks. Gustave Baumann developed his own
technique for making inks with varnish as a base. In short, American color woodcut artists often took an experimental
approach to working in a medium that was essentially new to them.
These artists worked primarily for their own pleasure,
creating very personal images. Commercial aims and values were not a consideration. As prints were requested,
the artist would print them individually, often experimenting with color combintations, which in part explains the great color
variations seen in the same images. As the expense of fine paper and pigments was a consideration, years might pass
between the finished wood blocks and the final printing. Because prints were often limited to just those requested,
it is not at all uncommon to find color woodcuts with total editions of well under fifty, and since most were not numbered
at all, the exact figure is unknown.
This exhibition brings together artists who worked
in the woodcut medium, showing a diversity of style, technique and artistic interpretation as great as their geographical
distances from one another. In no other printmaking medium is the American landscape better portrayed than in the color
woodcut. The linearity of black and white etching suits city scenes well, but the broad expanse of the out-of-doors
is captured best in its entirety through the color woodcut...the early morning haze of Cape Cod and the rice regions of the
Deep South, the heat of midday in New England, the snows in the Midwest, and the grandeur and solitude of the majestic
mountains of the Pacific Far West. From Provincetown to Pasadena, these prints represent a cross section of color woodblock
printing in America during the first half of the twentieth century.
----Andrew Terry Keats
Katharine Van Dyke Harker
Road to the Coast. Color woodcut, c. 1928
Coloring America:
Regional Approaches to Wood-Block Printmaking
Gibbes Museum of Art
Charleston, South Carolina
May 28 - August 22, 1993
Regionalist Color Woodcuts - Provincetown to Point Lobos
American Regionalist prints reflect the
very parts of the country where they were created. Their subject matter, therefore was for the most part dictated by
where the artist worked. In the broadest sense, what determined the differences in regional printmaking was the subject
matter more than the technique. Of the three major printmaking techniques - etching, lithography, and block printing
- it is the latter which provied the artist with the greatest range of possibilities to explore the American landscape during
the first half of the twentieth century.
Briefly described, the process of the color woodcut involves
the cutting of a design into several blocks, usually one for each color. These blocks are then hand colored with either
water-based or oil-based inks made from finely ground powdered pigments and pinrted onto a sheet of paper in exact registration
to insure the greatest accuracy in transfer of the image. Only when all of the blocks have been inked and printed in
proper succession is the print finished. This is the traditional method of the Japanese color woodcut. A variation
of this technique is the "one-block method," utilizing a single block into which the entire design is cut. The colors
are then applied in sections and printed one at a time. The colors are often separated by grooves cut into the block,
which when printed leaves a white line on the finished print. This process has become known as the "White Line Print,"
or more commonly, the "Provincetown Print" where it is thought to have originated. This technique was first used by
B.J.O. Nordfeldt in about 1915 and soon after by other Provincetown artists. This method greatly simplified the printing
process, but never became popular, and was practiced for a relatively short time, mostly in Provincetown.
By virtue of the materials chosen, the color woodcut lends itself to many
artistic interpretations. By using a hard wood such as cherry, fine detail can be clearly cut and printed.
Use of water-based inks allows the artist to include the woodgrain background as an integral part of the
image if desired. An excellent example of this can ben seen in the prints by California artist Bertha Lum. This
type of transclucent ink is easily absorbed into the fibers of the paper, allowing for very fine and subtle gradations of
color, thereby producing the most delicate and sensitive of images. Charleston born artist, Alive Ravenel Huger
Smith's woodcuts are fine examples; her works being as delicate as and reminiscent of Japanese watercolors.
Some artists, however, preferred the flat, opaque effects achieved with
oil-based inks. The effect is usually more dramatic and the color contrasts greater. In this technique the ink
sits on top of the paper rather than being absorbed by it. Several examples can readily be seen in the prints of Provincetown
artist Tod Lindenmuth and California artists Pedro de Lemos and Frances Gearhart. Some artists experimented with yet
other printing inks - the best example being Gustave Baumann who used varnish as a base.
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