Word: woodcut
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Following Belgian Artist Franz Masereel, Lynd Ward's Gods' Man (TIME, Nov. 25, 1929) was the first U. S. novel-in-woodcuts. A few titles to sections helped keep readers' fingers on the story's thread. Wild Pilgrimage, his third woodcut "novel," must be "read" without benefit of caption or title, but it tells so straightforward a story that no clues are needed. Artist Ward adopts one innovation: pictures printed in black show the events of the narrative; in red, what the hero is thinking...
...normal effect in a woodcut is a white line on a black ground. To make black show against white, the boxwood must be cut away on either side of the line, a delicate operation. Wood-engravers' tools are a series of little chisels and gouges known for the marks they make as scorper, square scorper, graver, tint tool, multiple tool (eschewed by severe wood cutters 'as giving a pretty effect too easily) and spitzsticker. An amateur of wood engravings should be able to tell from the marks they leave just which tool was used on every part...
...rise of the modern woodcut dates from 1898, the year of the "First Exhibition of Original Wood--Engraving" in London. Two of the artists in that exhibition are now represented in the present exhibition, Lucien Pissaro, with a portrait of his father, Camille, a gift of H. S. Bowers '00, and William Nicholson with a decorative print, "Horse Race." Nicholson in this cut shows a daring use of solid blacks offset with buff and touches of other colors...
...book now in the Fogg Museum at Harvard is a folio of one hundred and fifty-seven leaves. It contains twelve ornamental initials and one hundred and one woodcut illustrations. The book is rubricated in red and blue, and initials and illustrations are colored by hand, according to the custom of the time in Germany...
...master of drawing and the woodcut that Burgkmair is most highly esteemed. Without the peculiar intensity, the "problematic nature" of Duerer, he still possesses fertility of imagination, charm, and a technical ability that give him indisputably a rank second to Duerer in this field, in which so many German artist's have been outstanding. The newly invented art of printing called for illustrators who would help to make of each book a genuine work of art; and it is here that Burgkmair is most distinguished. His wealth of imagination shows itself nowhere more convincingly than in the long and brilliantly...