The history of woodcuts at the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin
From 3 June to 11 September 2022, the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin presents "Woodcut. From 1400 to today", an exhibition surveying the history and development of woodcut printmaking.
Source: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Image: Carl Moser, "Breton Wedding", 1906
The exhibition includes some 100 works by the great masters of the medium, from 15th and 16th century artists such as -of course- Albrecht Dürer (including his famous "Rhinoceros") to contemporary works by Ester Fleckner and 20th century artists such as Edvard Munch or Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.
Reviewing the history of woodcuts, the Berlin State Museums explain that "in all ages artists have sought ways to produce colour prints. Sometimes this has led to totally unexpected results. includes hand-painted prints from 1460 onwards, as well as early colour prints by Hans Burgkmair and Lucas Cranach the Elder, who competed to invent this technique. On the other hand, there are also 16th century multi-coloured chiaroscuro woodcuts from Italy and the Netherlands, extravagant colour prints from the Rococo period and 20th century plates produced from more than 20 colour plates which, inspired by Japanese woodcut masters, are more reminiscent of watercolours than woodcuts". The "Breton Wedding" (1906) by Carl Moser is a good example of the latter style.
The exhibition also highlights how woodcuts continued to play an important role during the 20th century, and even today. "Around 1900, expressionists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, following in the footsteps of Paul Gauguin, rediscovered woodcut. They saw the technique as an expression of a new originality and created masterpieces in a reduced formal language. It is surprising to see the variety of ways in which artists continued to work with the technique in the second half of the 20th century. The exhibition shows abstract compositions by Helen Frankenthaler, Hans Hartung or Esther Fleckner, as well as figurative to photorealist works by Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz or Franz Gertsch."

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