American Prints 1880–1950

About

Printmaking in the United States went through several distinct revivals in these seven decades. The first, from the late 1870s, was led by painter-etchers who treated the copper plate as a place for personal, sketch-like expression, with James Abbott McNeill Whistler as their model. In the 1900s John Sloan etched the rooftops, windows and street life of New York, and Edward Hopper's etchings of around 1915–23, such as Night Shadows (1921), anticipated the lonely cities of his paintings.

In Provincetown around 1915, B.J.O. Nordfeldt and others developed the white-line woodcut, printing a colour image from a single block. George Bellows made lithography a medium for boxing matches and crowds. During the Depression, the Federal Art Project's print workshops gave work to many artists and helped establish screenprinting as a fine-art technique. Elizabeth Catlett, based in Mexico from 1946, made linocuts and lithographs of Black American life charged with social purpose.