Woodcut and Linocut

About

In a relief print the artist cuts away everything meant to stay white; the raised surface is inked and pressed onto paper. China was printing from woodblocks by the 9th century; in Europe woodcuts appeared around 1400 on playing cards and devotional images. Albrecht Dürer's Apocalypse (1498) showed that a block could carry the energy of drawing.

Japanese ukiyo-e printers used a separate block for each colour; Katsushika Hokusai's Under the Wave off Kanagawa (c. 1831) is the best-known result. Around 1900 Edvard Munch sawed blocks into pieces to ink them in different colours, and Käthe Kollwitz cut her In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht (1920) in wood. Linoleum, softer and without grain, was taken up by artists early in the 20th century, and in the late 1950s Pablo Picasso developed the reduction linocut, cutting and printing one block in stages. Look for wood grain, knife edges and uneven ink.