A Crystalized Vision of the Future
In its early days, the Bauhaus was associated with cathedrals—or at any rate, the idea of cathedrals.
Woodcut ranks among the oldest printmaking techniques. In theory, it is a simple process: to prepare a printing block, the artist carves into the grain of a piece of wood using a chisel or gouge, a sharp metal hand tool with a concave cutting profile. The excavated portion of the block—the negative—corresponds to blank space in the finished print; what remains of the block’s original surface—the positive—is a mirror of the final result. The carved relief is then coated with ink and stamped onto paper to produce the image.
Historically speaking, the reality is more complicated: woodcut printing has almost always been a specialty technique requiring extensive training and special talent to do well. During the Renaissance, European printing workshops relied on master woodcarvers to translate an artist’s design into a block suitable for printing; not even the German polymath Albrecht Dürer is thought to have carved his own. It was a labor-intensive process that required significant capital and a complex division of artistic labor.
Woodcuts saw a resurgence at the beginn…
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