Woodcut as Modernist Medium?

Paul Westheim’s Das Holzschnittbuch (1921)

Kirsten J. Burke

Every medium motivates a different style of history.1 The history of European painting has Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550), a narrative predicated on a notion of the medium’s ancient, quasi-mythical origin, its artists part of an illustrious history in medias res. Print, however, has its origin in a more matter-of-fact technical breakthrough. The press and its earliest products can be localized to a particular place in time, in Johannes Gutenberg’s Germany, yet its history has been shaped, much more belatedly, by modernity. The trajectory of the woodcut’s success or failure is complicated: it has been determined not only by its aesthetic qualities and its relation to individual artists but, in large part, by the replicative imperatives of print as a means of mechanization rather than as medium or matter. And although relief printing is the original form of mechanical reproduction, the rise of intaglio processes rapidly rendered the woodcut obsolete as a “mass” medium—until its reinvention as a modernist medium, celebrated for its very obsolescence and retrofitted with its own twentieth-century-style nationalistic backstory.

What motivated a return to the woodcut in the twentieth century? The appeal lies not in its longretrograde technical properties or reproducibility as a type of print per se but in a more intangible matrix of ideological constructions involving proximity to collective experience, nature-bound authenticity, and references to nation-state identity through a physical grounding in the unmediated matter of the image. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the woodcut medium emerged as part of a nationalistic art-historical context for progressive German printmakers. This emergence is the story of Das Holzschnittbuch (The woodcut book, 1921), a history of the woodcut by GermanJewish art critic Paul Westheim (1886–1963) that spans five hundred years from Gutenberg to German expressionism.2 Yet the woodcut does not feature prominently in canonical accounts of modernism, and Westheim’s reclamation of the woodcut for a modernist enterprise seems paradoxical in projecting utopian ideals onto the retrograde aesthetic registers of an obsolescent medium, as well as a supposedly “national” history intercut by international exchange. This essay attempts the first in-depth analysis of Westheim’s Holzschnittbuch and its underlying question: why woodcut? Westheim saw in the woodcuts of late medieval anonymous artisans an authenticity representative of the people and an architectonic quality comparable to German Gothic cathedrals. A model of print history as national history thus emerges as Westheim locates the origins of the woodcut in Gothic culture, accords it an authenticity based in medium specificity, and celebrates German expressionism as an apotheosis of the late medieval woodcut tradition restored to universal legibility.

Best known as the editor of the Berlin journal Das Kunstblatt from 1917 to 1933, Westheim was a critic of modern art, a supporter of Neue Sachlichkeit and German expressionism, and a prolific author. 3 In 1933, he fled Germany for Paris, where he continued to publish essays and became a vocal critic of Nazi policies.4 From 1941 until his death in 1963, Westheim lived in Mexico City and gained acclaim as an expert on both ancient and modern Mexican art. 5 Westheim also returned to his 1921 work on woodcut, publishing a Spanish edition of the Holzschnittbuch in 1954 with a new chapter on the woodcut in postrevolutionary Mexico.6 Yet Westheim’s Holzschnittbuch remains virtually unknown among premodern and modern art historians alike. Arthur Hind’s Introduction to a History of the Woodcut (1935) was widely read as the first authoritative history of the medium and is still seen as the only synthetic treatment of print’s early history in English, following shorter surveys such as Max Friedländer’s Der Holzschnitt (The woodcut, 1921) in German-language scholarship.7 Westheim’s expansive timeline, which extends from the Middle Ages into modernity, is remarkable.

Westheim begins Das Holzschnittbuch by framing the woodcut as a celebration of collectivity, claiming that printmaking arose in part out of social and ethical imperatives. Gutenberg’s goal, he asserts, was to provide an alternative to elite manuscript culture in the fifteenth century.8 Westheim also points to the proliferation of cheap printed playing cards around the same time as an example of the woodcut’s new accessibility to the masses, before focusing on one single-leaf woodcut—one of the earliest surviving woodcut images on paper—of St. Christopher carrying the Christ child (p. 18 top).9 This print remains a subject of art-historical debate due to two diverging opinions projected onto it: the so-called pragmatist view, which insists that early woodcuts resulted from the collaboration of an artist and a block cutter; and the “romanticist” argument that the blocks must have been cut by the same person who designed the image, as early artists could not have so successfully designed such a woodcut without a deeper material understanding.10

Westheim articulates an extreme version of a “romanticist” argument in his analysis of St. Christopher. He sees the image as nothing short of monumental: it looms large from only a few contour lines, while at the same time preserving the fundamental flatness and clarity of the woodcut surface. Every linear segment is functionally necessary without creating the impression of excessive rigidity or systemization—this is a work of art, not mere mechanics, Westheim emphasizes. The carver’s consciousness of the physical constraints of carving means that he must cut to the heart of the matter, and the stark contrasts and planar effects of the graphic medium make symbolic meaning instantly legible.11

Westheim turns then to the proliferation of fifteenth-century block books, a laborious process in which image and text were hand-carved directly into the surface of the wood prior to the widespread adoption of movable type (p. 18 bottom). He contends that such woodcut images were produced in the hands of simple artisans free from illusionistic impulses or “artistic, speculative designs.” The naivete of these early artists allowed them to embrace the woodcut’s powerful simplicity of expression through roughhewn tectonic surface effects, with no division of labor between the designer and carver of an image. Westheim also locates this phenomenon as exclusively German. In Italy, he asserts, the woodcut did not have the same popular quality and served only a decorative function (Vignettenschmuck).12

Westheim’s fifteenth-century “golden age” of woodcut is unusually short-lived compared to traditional art-historical timelines. It collapses with the incursion of a so-called painterly approach in the world-historical illustrations of the Nuremberg Chronicle from 1493.13 In a fateful blow to woodcut’s authenticity, the “painters” responsible for the design of these woodcuts seem to no longer understand the printmaking process or the nature of the wood itself, trying instead to simulate effects of drawing, etching, or engraving. Westheim laments that this new kind of “artistic” thinking privileged technical displays of skill and reproductive potential over content. In his view, paragon of German Renaissance art Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), the first printmaker to achieve international fame, debased the woodcut medium even further by being too “original” (p. 19 top).14 The flourishing of realistic effects undermined the unique expressive potential and lapidary quality of the medium. Thus, Westheim recasts Dürer, unusually, as the anti-hero of German art, marking the start of a decline that continued through the eighteenth century.

The penultimate chapter on nineteenth-century Japanese woodcut is a rare departure from the Germanic focus of the book. Westheim remarks that early woodcuts in East Asia began as “primitive” monuments to spiritual expression, not unlike the early German woodcut.15 Yet he insists that the rise of modern international woodcut culture did not contribute much to the nascent revival of the German woodcut, nor did foreign woodcutters achieve the same kind of authenticity. The Japanese, he claims, handled the medium superficially in terms of surface effects and juxtaposed flat planes, whereas the German woodcut achieved an architectonic sense of monumentality and depth of expression grounded in a northern understanding of the nature of the wood itself. First the Norwegian Edvard Munch (1863–1944) and then German expressionist artists such as Emil Nolde (1867–1956) and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) began to recover primitive processes of woodcutting and printing by hand. They engaged the wood surface as more than a passive support or mechanical means, recognizing that every piece of wood brings its own “inner life” to the composition through qualities of grain, porosity, and texture that could be incorporated into the subject matter.16

Coming full circle from the beginning of the Holzschnittbuch, Westheim describes Munch’s process in terms analogous to the anonymous artist of the early St. Christopher woodcut. Munch similarly adapts his choice of subject matter to the quiddity of the material with its lapidary, elemental forms and “dynamic life of the surface” (p. 19 bottom).17 After Munch, the artists of Die Brücke resuscitated not only the “originality and monumentality” but also the “folklorish simplicity” and accessibility of the early German block books, with their instructive legibility.18 Westheim’s rhetoric of nature-based authenticity paralleled metaphors of organic growth in Die Brücke’s handcarved manifesto from 1906—a shared vocabulary of art, nation, and nature. Itself mirroring a late medieval block book in design, Das Holzschnittbuch similarly unifies and homogenizes in creating a nationalistic genealogy of the woodcut, downplaying intermedial influences such as the prevalence of painted woodcuts in the fifteenth century and the later international influence of Japanese prints.

Narratives such as Westheim’s recast the retrograde qualities of the medium as part of a distinctly modernist nationalistic mythos. Other modes of printmaking such as wood engraving were dismissed either as serving only reproductive imperatives or as contaminated by effects of “painterliness,” a term that was associated with French art and signaled, as Robin Reisenfeld notes, “an elite, materialistic, artificial and imported aesthetic imposed upon, rather than emanating from, German society.”19 The notion of a “painterly” incursion is central to Westheim’s argument concerning the woodcut’s original loss of authenticity in the Renaissance until its revival with the German expressionists. Even as the woodcut flourished internationally, this woodcut history held fast to an autochthonous lineage of local ingredients—Germanic wood, line, planarity, architectonics, collectivity, spirituality.20 Roughly contemporaneously with Westheim’s project, art historians Wilhelm Worringer (1881–1965) and Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945) celebrated similar notions of expressive linearity and organic growth in their now-foundational attempts to articulate a distinctive style for German art, with Worringer also linking the “abstract” qualities of the early woodcut, German national character, and the innovations of his own times, positing that “every genuine woodcut in its purest form is, in fact, a bit of a poster.”21 Similarly—an even lesser-known backstory—in 1924 the Weimar Republic’s federal commissioner of the arts, Edwin Redslob (1884–1973), saw the woodcut as providing powerful formal and ideological impetus for the renewal of advertising graphics, simultaneously embracing its national and international potential: “We should not believe, only because other peoples are less naturally inclined to the woodcut, that this medium has no future. Rather, we should recognize that precisely here is the opportunity for German artists to reach international prestige, through the formal expressive language of the woodcut.”22

Such mythologizing about the woodcut continues to inflect discussions of the medium, even when nationalistic aspects are downplayed in favor of a more anodyne version of its rhetoric concerning the woodcut’s elemental, expressive powers. For Westheim, the legacy of this anonymous-collective woodcut is historically and geographically localized yet also highly legible, allowing access to a level of truth beyond surface appearances or imitations of nature. Its surface, its medium, is nature—at the same time as its process is technologically and socially revolutionary, bringing art closer to “life” and to the people. Even the woodcut’s very obsolescence could be reclaimed as a primal register of materiality replete with both physical and metaphysical significance. Similarly, the authenticity that Westheim and the German expressionists located in the early woodcut goes beyond its formal vocabulary or the visuality of its facture. With its elemental grounding in nature and collective cultural genealogy, it also provided the blueprint for a “natural” authentication of nationalistic art history itself, a political story told in the guise of art’s seemingly most matter-of-fact mode of history—as a matter of medium history.

1. I am grateful to Benjamin Buchloh for the invitation to write about Das Holzschnittbuch and for thought-provoking conversations about Westheim and the history of the woodcut. Thanks also go to Joseph Koerner for his helpful suggestions and to Bay ByrneSim for her comments on earlier versions of this essay.

2. Paul Westheim, Das Holzschnittbuch: Mit 144 Abbildungen nach Holzschnitten des vierzehnten bis zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (Potsdam: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1921). For an overview of Westheim’s career, see Lutz Windhöfel, Paul Westheim und das Kunstblatt: Eine Zeitschrift und ihr Herausgeber in der Weimarer Republik (Cologne: Böhlau, 1995); and Peter Chametzky, “Paul Westheim in Mexico: A Cosmopolitan Man Contemplating the Heavens,” Oxford Art Journal 24 (2001): 25–43. The Holzschnittbuch has been referenced typically only in discussion of the Cologne progressivists and has not otherwise been examined on its own terms. See, for example, Lynette Roth, “The Cologne Progressives: Political Painting in Weimar Germany” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2009), esp. ch. 3 (“Handwerk: The Role of the Craftsman”). Translations from the Holzschnittbuch are my own.

3. Windhöfel, Westheim und das Kunstblatt, 268–311.

4. Chametzky, “Westheim in Mexico,” 25.

5. Ibid.

6. Paul Westheim, El grabado en madera, trans. Mariana Frenk (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1954).

7. Arthur M. Hind, An Introduction to a History of the Woodcut: With a Detailed Survey of Work Done in the Fifteenth Century (1935), 2 vols., rev. ed. (New York:

Dover Publications, 1963); and Max J. Friedländer, Der Holzschnitt mit 93 Abb. und 2 Tafeln (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1921). See also Hans Körner, Der früheste deutsche Einblattholzschnitt (Mittenwald: Mäander Kunstverlag, 1979). For a discussion of early print scholarship, see David S. Areford, The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 5.

8. Westheim, Holzschnittbuch, 13.

9. Ibid., 10.

10. Richard S. Field, “The Early Woodcut: The Known and the Unknown,” in Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their Publics, ed. Peter W. Parshall and Rainer Schoch (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 24.

11. “Es wird das Wesentliche gegeben [. . .] das Herz der Dinge.” Westheim, Holzschnittbuch, 35–36.

12. Ibid., 90–93.

13. Ibid., 95.

14. Ibid., 97–98.

15. Ibid., 147–149.

16. Ibid., 157.

17. Ibid., 179, 186.

18. Ibid., 177.

19. Robin Reisenfeld, “Cultural Nationalism, Brücke and the German Woodcut: The Formation of a Collective Identity,” Art History 20, no. 2 (1997): 299.

20. On German “wood ideology,” see Monika Wagner, “Wood—‘Primitive’ Material for the Creation of ‘German Sculpture,’” in New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism: Bridging History, ed. Christian Weikop (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 71–88.

21. “Vielmehr ist jeder ehrliche Holzschnitt in seiner reinsten Gestalt ein Stück Plakat.” Wilhelm Worringer, Urs Graf: Die Holzschnitte zur Passion (Munich: R. Piper, 1923), 16. Quoted and translated in Kathleen G. Chapman, Expressionism and Poster Design in Germany 1905–1922: Between Spirit and Commerce (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 51.

22. Edwin Redslob, “Der Holzschnitt in seiner Bedeutung für die Gebrauchsgraphik,” Gebrauchsgraphik 1, no. 4 (1924): 10, quoted and translated in Chapman, Expressionism and Poster Design, 79.