A woodcut is a print made from a plank of wood. The artist cuts away every part of the plank that should stay white, spreads ink over the raised surface that remains, and presses a sheet of paper onto it. Whatever was left standing prints in ink, and whatever was cut away keeps the color of the paper.
Printmakers call this a relief print, because the image comes from the parts of the block that stand up, as on a rubber stamp. The technique began in Asia. In China, a Buddhist scroll printed from carved wood blocks already bore a date in 868, and Europe was cutting its own woodcuts by 1400.
The wood shapes the look of the print. To leave a line standing, the knife has to remove all the wood around it, so a woodcut favors firm outlines and flat areas of black and white over fine shading.
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The name printed under a famous woodcut is usually the name of the person who drew it, not of the person who cut it. Albrecht Dürer is the best known maker of woodcuts in Europe, and nobody can say for certain that he ever cut one of his own blocks. German artists of his day normally handed the knife to a professional woodcutter.
In Japan, three centuries later, the work was divided even further. Hokusai drew the Great Wave, but a publisher, a workshop of carvers and a workshop of printers turned his drawing into the sheets that now hang in museums.
Only at the end of the nineteenth century did painters such as Paul Gauguin and Edvard Munch take up the knife themselves, and what they did with the wood changed the look of the woodcut.
What You'll Discover
How a plank becomes a printed picture.
What a Buddhist scroll from 868 shows.
Who held the knife for Dürer.
Why Dürer's rhinoceros wears armor.
How many hands made the Great Wave.
What Munch did with the grain of the wood.