Search results for "Wood engraving"
showing 5 items of 5 documents
Woodcuts and Some Words: Edward Gordon Craig’s lasting impressions
2019
This article examines Edward Gordon Craig’s analogy between drama and wood engraving, stage and printed page in his autobiographical handbook on wood engraving, Woodcuts and Some Words (1924). Taking as a premise Craig’s interest in the world of print as materialization of his “new theatre”, it explores the semantic shift of the notion of impression from the symbolist realm of suggestion to that of modernist imprint. It finally seeks to determine the significance of engraving in Craig’s career, a medium that was the matrix, the relic and the archive of the images and of the ideal vision he pursued all his life.
Lines or Dots? Reproduction Processes in Handbooks on Illustration, 1890s-1910s
2016
International audience; This chapter examines the way that black and white illustrators came to terms with the industrial use of photomechanical processes and the major changes that occurred in the reproduction of illustrations from the 1890s to the early decades of the 20th century. It explores how handbooks on illustration and illustrators’ autobiographies reflected the need to preserve the so-called “vitality” of the graphic line, an autographic trace of the artist’s gesture. It focuses on the contemporary description and reception of half-tone, the screened process that breaks up tone into dots and that was used to reproduce wash, watercolour, and photographs. This process was often cri…
“‘Bosques distantes”: a matéria dos livros e a pastoral modernista“ (“‘Distant woods’: The matter of books and the modernist pastoral“)
2022
This paper is part of a broader project that aims to examine the importance of the materials used in the making of illustrated books from a medial and ecocritical perspective. I focus on a specific case study in which I explore the attitude to nature encapsulated in the use of and reference to wood in British interwar wood-engraved illustrated books. My departure point is the English artist Paul Nash’s Places (Heinemann, 1922), a short collection of prose poems and wood-engravings. An elegy produced at a time when Nash was trying to come to terms with the aftermath of the First World War, Places was published after he made the great war paintings depicting the human losses and the ecocide p…
Couleur et transparence à l’ère des procédés photomécaniques
2015
This paper aims to show that the reception of British coloured illustrated books in the early twentieth-century reflects the artistic and aesthetic repositioning induced by the development of photomechanical process. Photomechanical reproduction freed the graphic line as well as colour. Reviews published at the turn of the century—as exemplified by The Studio—reveal a tension between opacity and transparency, materiality and lightness, chromophilia and chromophobia. These oppositions apply to the art of the book—as in the books illustrated by Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac—as well as to interior decoration. They are subsumed in the image of the peacock’s ocellus, the eyespot that symbolise…
“Autographic wood-engraving: Modernist DIY“
2017
International audience; This paper focuses on the description of modernist wood engraving as a humble form of art in the manuals published by John Farleigh, Clare Leighton and Iain Macnab between 1932 and 1940. As a specific form of artistic encounter with a medium, autographic wood engraving relied on the heritage of the Arts and Crafts’ ethics of making as well as on the modernist aesthetics of carving. This paper aims to show that the efficacy of humbleness as an artistic stance allowed wood engraving to straddle the provinces of art, craft and design at a time when the function of artistic skill and handmaking was being displaced.