Word: woodcuttings
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This exhibit of Avery's work now at the Fogg Museum gathers together prints of all 60 of the images he produced between 1930 and 1955. Avery worked in the opposing techniques of woodcut and drypoint: in drypoint, the artist cuts into copper the line he wants to print, while in a woodcut he digs out what he doesn't. The results in each style are very different, but Avery has command of both techniques. He controls his line to model and shade, indicating the subtleties of mass and movement...
Avery suffered a heart attack in 1949, which forced him to turn from the strenuous drypoint technique to the easier one of cutting in wood. He produced eighteen woodcut images in six years, mostly birds or seascapes almost childlike in their simplicity. Again, in search of energy, Avery strives not for sophistication but for the power of a basic form--a way to demonstrate the vitality of his world. He expresses all the pride and grandeur of a fan-tailed pigeon with nine zig-zagged lines. A dancer caught in mid-turn prepares to leap from the page...
...JOHN HELD JR. 144 pages. Stephen Greene. $19.95. Half a century has not diminished the charm of John Held Jr.'s prototypical leggy flappers or dulled the gaiety of their cork-nosed, raccoon-coated boy friends. This well-produced selection also includes his little-known, deft watercolors and woodcut cartoons that gently mock the 1890s ("Horse whipping the masher and good for him"). Shallow stuff, but as Held would say, ah, those dear dim days...
...suspense tale. It makes the cruise of two Edwardian Englishmen in tidal waters around Germany as immediate and harrowing as last summer's cruise to Cuttyhunk. Any sailor who hasn't read the book should do so. Unhappily, this special edition is tarted up with Rorschach-like woodcut and wash color illustrations, thus sabotaging the realism of tidal charts, maps and seamanlike detail. Readers with unlimited budgets might consider tearing out the pictures and billing the Imprint Society...
FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER Robert Bresson? Surely not the Robert Bresson. The director whose work (Diary of a Country Priest; Mouchette) has the bite and permanence of a woodcut? It seems inconceivable that Bresson could have confected this pastel romance. Everything in it has been said before in cheap yellowbacked French novels. A boy, Jacques (Guillaume des Forets), spies a girl, Marthe (Isabel Weingarten), on the bank of the Seine. Marthe is in tears; her lover has abandoned her. She consoles herself with Jacques. Hélas, the affair is only a dream; in the end it is shattered...