Gwen Raverat: Beautiful Woodcut Illustrations

Lillith of Babylonian Mythology

A Babylonian terra-cotta relief dated to around 2000 BCE […] The relief shows a nude woman with wings and a bird’s taloned feet. She wears a hat composed of four pairs of horns and holds in each upraised hand a combined ring and rod (similar to an Egyptian shen ring amulet). She stands on two reclining lions and is flanked by owls.

– Dr. Christopher L.C.E. Witcombe 

I do not own these images; they are from Dr. Witcombs website:

 http://arthistoryresources.net/ 

Otto Mueller’s Amazing Figures

I don’t own the rights to these images. All of these images are from the Wikimedia Commons.

Woodcuts by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

These woodcuts are by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, another founding member of Die Brücke. He committed suicide. I like these prints very much, although the figures he creates are generally more simplified than I would try to create myself.

I have always appreciated anatomical accuracy, and aim for a more realistic figure. I think the lesson for me to learn from these prints is about composition, and how one constructs the underlying shapes in an image for a woodcut.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I do not own the rights to these images, they are from Wikimedia Commons.

Erich Heckel and Die Brücke (German Expressionist Printmaking)

I have been examining an art movement known as Die Brücke (The Bridge). I love the style of printmaking the movements is associated with. I also love the philosophical side of this art; Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings are an influence to the group. Nietzsche, and other existential philosophers, are a huge influence on my art, and my creative writing, so I am thoroughly intrigued.

Today, I focus on  Erich Heckel. I just love his prints. Look at this coloured woodcut of camp sailors. This image seems important for LGBT history as well as Art History. Heckel had a wife, I might add; as did lots of gay men in the 20th century.

I like Heckel’s themes. He has done quite a few beach bathing nudes, a subject I return to time and again in my drawings. I feel like I could learn lessons about simplification from these prints.

All images are from Spaightwood Galleries website, and belong to them.

Contextual Studies – Mauricio Lasansky’s Nazi Drawings

“I tried to keep not only the vision of The Nazi Drawings simple and direct but also the materials I used in making them. I wanted them to be done with a tool used by everyone everywhere. From the cradle to the grave, meaning the pencil. I felt if I could use a tool like that, this would keep me away from the virtuosity that a more sophisticated medium would demand.” – Mauricio Lasansky

Mauricio Lasansky was the founder of University of Iowa’s Printmaking department. Although he is origionally from Argentina, he has been a huge influence on American printmaking both directly and indirectly. University of Iowa is the finest in the United States; some of Lasansky’s students have gone on to set up Printmaking studios at universities and colleges all across the America. Printmaker Doug Hall, my former professor, was one of them.

While I am interested primarily in Lasansky’s printmaking techniques, he is probably most famous for The Nazi Drawings–a series of 33 expressive drawings, or rather 30 and a triptych.

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When I first saw the Nazi Drawings, I was 18 years old. I was totally shocked by them, and moved to tears. They are life sized drawings that command your attention. I think that even if I did not know that these drawing were about the holocaust, I would have had the same emotional reaction.

The Nazi Drawings Triptych were made with collage, from newspaper articles about the holocaust and a 19th century Bible.

 

 All images belong to http://www.lasanskyart.com/ 

I found a catalogue for an exhibition of these drawings at Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1967. The text in the catalogue is from Professor Edwin Honig’s analysis of the drawings. He points out the obvious symbolism in the nazi’s skull helmets, then goes much deeper.

“#7 – The intricate culmination of earlier motifs becomes powerfully  apparent in the next drawing where a semi-nude woman is portrayed full-length in profile: heavy-penciled swaddling lines envelop the skull-helmeted head—like a spring bonnet with teeth for flowers—and the woman’s hair becomes a gross entangled nest out of which the sagging face half emerges, patched on the eye. The melon of a naked breast rests on a filmy, crumpled shift that is being held up by hands clasped together on the bare belly, while one hand and forearm are again heavily pencilled to depict the webbing of a long glove. This motif is picked up again in the splotch of pubic hair and the boldly irrelevant stockings and high heels. It is apparent that the whole figure is cut off and pasted together in three sections, as if to call attention to the factitious and tawdry nature of what is being exhibited.”

I feel that Honig’s analysis of Lasansky’s Nazi Drawings has really opened up for me a hidden narritive.  He shows how first the Nazi characters are introduced, with all their symbolism. Then the victims; the women and children. Lasansky’s forces us to remember this story of human cruelty.

When I first viewed the drawings, I was overpowered by the individual images. Honig links the images together, and has made me realize the order in which they are viewed is key. I really want to create narrative in my art. In this way Lasansky’s drawings, and Honig’s analysis of his work are inspiring to me.

“#13- […] Dominant once more is the prostitute figure of the last six drawings, now pathetically strung up like a side of beef, her naked haunches, back, and thighs displayed, her hands clasped together, perhaps in prayer, somewhere above her completely dishevelled hair, seen from the rear like a tumbled nest. Her shift, sadly fallen around her thighs, is being held up idly by a blackened, encased executioner figure to her right. […] Additional pairs of hands and forearms appear in the lower portion of the drawing, one apparently holding a skeleton head looms up to the left, grinning out at the spectator beneath vague tracings of another female figure strung up to the left of the former one, perhaps suggesting in this way an ad infinitum series of the same kind of victim. A tracery of heads and infant skulls, giving random sense of abandoned, snuffed out lives, seems to glow transparently through the lower portion of the drawing. The pose of the figures here strongly recalls the graphic idiom of Goya’s Desastres de la Guerra.”

“#20.. […] The collage print through which the naked victim has been thrust is made up of pages out of the Book of Samuel.  […] This brutalized figure of a woman raped and impaled, in her last agony of stiffened and twisted hands and feet, with the knobby protruding joints of the starved body, becomes a figure not only of the slaughtered innocents and the suffering martyrs of the past, but of the modern everyman, the killer and the victim both, which each of us actually is.”

In conclusion, the Nazi Drawings continue to inspire me, years after I first viewed them. I continue to see more meaning the more I look.

To read all of Professor Honig’s analysis, please visit http://www.lasanskyart.com/art/collections/nazidrawings/nd_tour_intro.shtml

 

For a more in depth look into the Nazi drawings, I recommend this documentary:

Contextual Studies – Update

I am unable to get on campus today, so I decided to try and finish off the Contextual Studies module at home.  For the first part of the day, I will do more research about Lasansky’s Nazi Drawings; in the latter part I will try to record a 5 minute video talk about Lasansky, including examples of his work.