Modern Printmakers

This is something by way of a public service announcement. I certainly don't think the dealer who currently has the Emil Orlik portrait etching for sale on British ebay deserves it. But take a look at the wash-mount round the etching, which the seller thinks needs replacing. This is certainly the type of mount that was used by the Bond St dealer Colnaghi before the first war and as such I think needs looking after and not destroying. Instinct told me to preserve a similar mount round a Verpilleux colour woodcut even though my framer wanted to replace it with the same kind of thing. It was only years later I discovered that Colnaghi had them made. Not very important perhaps and obviously I cannot be certain about this particular mount but I also own a portrait etching by William Strang with exactly the same kind of mount. What's not to like? I haven't checked to see whether Colnaghi was also Strang's dealer, and it hardly matters. What I am saying is this: apply caution when dealing with nice old mounts. They have history, too, and may be worth restoring not chucking out.

Christmas has come to ebay in Austria and Germany with an astonishing review of early C20th of colour woodcut, and with nothing more striking than Hans Frank's exquisite tour-de-force Schwartzlilien from 1940. But I warn you, before you go rushing to put in a bid for some of these celebrated prints, the most collectable ones start out at a breath-taking 1200 euros. Included amongst these is a desirable In Ertwartung by the Austrian artist and designer Carl Moser from 1914 (below).

There are two things that strike me here. What always impresses me about the market in Austria and Germany is how much is still available after 100 years and how much you need to pay for them despite there being so many of them (relative to the British market, at least). If nothing else, it says a good deal about the good sense of collectors in both countries. So far as I can see neither Germany nor Austria have John Hall Thorpes and Eric Slaters where people are prepared to pay £1200 (in the case of Slater) for work that cannot begin to compare to the prints you see here. Of course there are Anglophiles in Germany who like to buy English prints, Slater included, but not at that price.

But not everything is expensive and Walter Helfenbein's Zwei Prachtfinken (above) should fit under the Christmas tree without making too large a hole in your bank account and is also well worth having. But then much the same could be said for Carl Thiemann's Birken im Herbst. Made in 1907, it comes from the period when Thiemann was using brighter colours and a more decorative approach to printmaking in general. It also has the great advantage of being from the signed edition. (Others were printed on a mechanical press).

Also in the mix is Thiemann's Late autumn. Utterly classic early Thiemann when he was still in the vanguard of colour woodcut, it isn't illustrated here because the image was so badly skewed. It will still set you back at least 1200 euros but console yourself with the fact that prints of lesser quality by German-born artists in the United States will cost you even more.

Also from the signed edition is Walther Klemm's well known print Junge Hunde. More out of the way is something very nice by Christian Ludwig Martin. Beautifully made and very pleasing, Boehmerwald dates from 1917 and looks back both to the days of the Vienna Secession and forwards to more popular work of the post-war years. It may not make the pulse race but it will leave you enough to spend on Christmas dinner.

Never really an artist to have much appeal for me and certainly not in the top rank, Leo Frank's Adler im Hochgebirge has all the emptiness of his twin brother at his weakest but with none of the decorative thrill when he is at his best. It's quite acceptable nevertheless as part of the general festive generosity.

I could go on. There is also a Helene Mass, Englebert Lap's Abend, Hans Frank's Tulpen, a simple but very pleasing Fritz Lang and Thiemann's potent Late autumn from the classic early period. But that comes in at a discouraging 1200 euros, too. We have to finish with an unnamed Oscar Droege. Frankly, not an artist that excites me. I would only buy one if it came up cheaply. So, which one would I buy if I had the euros to spare? I think it would be the Hans Frank for me. But at the end of the day, my own modest collection has work by German and Austrian artists I have picked up along the way while a subtle Arthur Rigden Read or heroic Ian Cheyne or virtuoso William Giles is what I really hanker after. It's finding them is the problem.

We have come to associate Tyrol with colour woodcut. Even if Engelbert Lap was born in Graz, he served with the Tyrolean Kaiserjaeger and settled in Innsbruck in 1910 and later made a career out of the mountainous landscape. Herbert Gurschner was born in Innsbruck and trained at the School of Applied Arts there but married an Englishwoman in 1924, lived in London from 1932 and eventually became a British national even though he remains best known of his prints of Tyrolean farming folk.

Carl Moser was different. He was not only more talented than either Lap or Gurschner, he was born in the Italian town of Bolzano many miles to the south. I say Italian because the town was predominantly Italian-speaking but was surrounded by mountains where most people spoke southern German except for townships to the east where others spoke the old romance language of Ladin - and it is Ladin that provides the key to the complicated nature of this Austrian Lebanon.; it was the old language of southern Tyrol. Italian and German speakers were more recent arrivals. But Moser isn't best known for Tyrolean subjects. Moser is best known for his Breton subjects. Unlike artists who came from regions like Alsace or the Sudetenland or even cities like Prague where German was spoken but eventually moved to Germany itself, Moser adopted another outlying province as an imaginative home, a sure sign of a sensitive and complex imagination.

The subject for his masterly Schloss Runkelstein is only a few miles to the north of Bolzano but by the time he made this colour woodcut in 1922, he had studied at the Academy of Fine Art in Munich and at the Academy Julian in Paris. Sources variously say he was introduced to colour woodcut in 1902 by Max Kurzweil or saw them exhibited at the National School of Fine Art. Either way nothing quite explains the utter refinement of his work. We can only look at it and wonder.

As you can see from the two versions of the print (and there is at least two others) Moser was a colourist. I certainly think the importance of Japanese art to Moser has been overdone. You only need to consider the way the castle sits squarely on its rock and the rock sits squarely beside the river or the peacock in Weissgefleckter Pfau (also from 1922) turns in space to see how much of a Western artist he was. What really is interesting is the way he looked back to the heyday of the Vienna Secession and made Weissgefleckter Pfau a self-conscious summary of its great achievements because it was certainly dead and buried by 1922. I think his imagination was historical. Japan was only another imaginative element in his work.

Look at the way he plays the modern world of silk hats and parasols off against the lace delicacy of the Breton bonnets. Audaciously, he even gives us two versions of the same figure in the one print. An archaic world fades away before our eyes. Folksy it may appear but the irony and the candid glance are modern. But it is the figure that is sensational. The woman on the right is just as solid as Schloss Runkelstein. Moser is not only concerned with surface pattern. The patterns help to describe form. More than that, as she looks over her shoulder, she reminds us of her ancestry. Manet is there, after all, and farther back, there is Goya perhaps, and certainly Vermeer.

Bretonische Hochzeit comes from 1906 while he was still studying and working in France. No doubt about it, he was an assiduous student and remained at the Academy Julian for six years when he was already capable of work as good as the wedding print and Bretonisches Dorf von Schiff aus (1904). He had begun to learn his trade early on in his father's studio and there is a sense of the studio in the foreground boat with the secondary image acting as subject. The framing devices and the ornate pile of rope are obviously Japanese. But it is the sense of space that he has picked up from Hokusai that is more profound, perhaps even the delicate psychology.

Moser was as tactful in his observation as he was in his use of colour and his borrowings from other artists, close to hand and far away. But he was a rather half-hearted symbolist. Pelikan is just too real to be a lot more than an ironic enquiry into ungainliness by an artist who was incapable of such a thing. But let's face it, the drawing and the colouring, the realisation of the pelican's body are superb. All the rest is froth, isn't it?

It is astonishing to find out just how much information has come up online in the past five years. In the early days of Modern Printmakers I wrote a rather crude and facetious post about the London sales promotion firm, Ralph & Mott, in the vain hope that someone would come up with information about the artists who worked for them. This week I was finally given two web addresses by a reader and decided to try and put together all the information and best images that are now available online.

The business was set up I believe in the late twenties by Rickman Ralph and Geoffrey Mott at 46, Gillingham St, Eccleston Square, in well-to-do west London. The pair had already collaborated and the new business built on their success by taking a modern and efficient approach to all types of visual sales promotion. Inevitably, transport, travel and holidays provided a good deal of their work but the firm also designed information booklets like the one (above) for I.C.I.

As you see, there was no obvious house-style aside from a strong image with clear messages. Nor were they the most stylish of operators in the field, although their poster of Paignton gave G.W.R. as chic an image as any that might have been provided by Tom Purvis. But this was a sophisticated operation with a sophisticated address, employing artists who were well aware of contemporary styles and were able to project a modern image yet present a message that was understandable to the public. For the Radio Times, Edward MacKnight Kauffer was combined with an intriguing use of collage while G.W.R. were offered bold deco lettering and Paul Nash's soft surrealism.

But it is the simple repetition of the circular logo, the gold ball, the letters O and G and other letters and words that is striking. One of their selling points was that commissions were discussed 'in Committee' and what in fact they were offering companies was sales by way of both information and an image with a strong dose of modern psychology. I also need to add that Ralph Mott also produced artists prints which they signed in pencil. One showing part of old Sarajevo appears on the previous post about the firm and I seem to remember a flower print in the style of John Hall Thorpe. It may appear unscrupulous today but I suppose at the time people knew what they were buying.

I still don't know what kinds of backgrounds Ralph or Mott had but neither were young when they began the business. What strikes me most is how uncertain I was about which image to open the post with! Usually with any artist it is deadly obvious which image will look best at the head of the post. With Ralph & Mott, I was spoilt for choice.

As for their staff, in 1920 they took on Reginald Lander who became chief designer and head of studio. Lander had trained at Hammersmith School of Art and may be responsible for so many of the cool tones of the images because they tend to occur in his work for other companies after the war. He worked in watercolour and gouache and surprisingly a number of original designs from the studio using both mediums have survived. The only other artist I know of is Edna Reynolds who went by the name of Jenny Reyn ie Wren. She had trained at Wycombe Art School in Buckinghamshire while she was still at secondary after her headmistress recognised her talent. Like Lander she went to work for Ralph and Mott in 1930 but both artists lost their jobs after the outbreak of war when their employers decided to close the business 'for the duration' in an attempt to preserve their capital.

It is always possible I suppose when you look at the details of these images to tell they come from the 1930s. All the same what impresses me about so much of this work is how much it has in common with our own advertising. The clarity and simple division of lettering and images and use of basic colours is remarkably modern. No one style was allowed to come out on top and they were always full of ideas. Look no further than this poster for Buxton where three kinds of typography alone were used - clean modern deco for basic information, descriptive lettering for large appeal and Roman characters to add further interest and depth. Living not so far away, I know Buxton and find the image entrancing, but for readers who do not know the place, Buxton was a Roman town with natural springs, and St Anne's Well can befound at the bottom of the hill in front of the crescent you can see. Hence the figure pouring water from the vase. Its appeal is relaxing, stylish, erudite - and convincing.

- S P Q R -

I am indebted to various sources. Not surprisingly the invaluable National Railways Museum at York is one of them but I also have to include bearalley.blogspot, Liss Fine Art, the Science Museum, Quad Royal, The Travelling Art Gallery, halasbatchelor75, Moore-Gwyn Fine Art and frenesilivros.blogspot. Special thanks also to Peter for the leads.

I have reluctantly decided to restrict access to Modern Printmakers after some plagiarism. I'm not generally touchy about things like that; plagiarism is par for the course on the web but this was manipulative and sneaky.

This will mean that posts will be different - more of a fireside chat and with material I would have been reluctant to post publicly. I may well go back to public operations but I may not. In the mean time Happy Christmas to the happy few! I am off to Wales today so there will be no posts till later on in January at least. But I also have a trip to Turkey.

This year's Christmas cake is the V&A's proof of Ian Cheyne's wonderful Mediterranean Bar from 1935. I'm sure they won't mind just this once.

Yes, I know. The Scottish artist, Margaret Romanes, with her bird and flower woodcuts that somehow seem to miss the point, is probably the last person you would associate with the methods of Sigmund Freud. But there it is and, I have to say, Still life with blue jug is worth a second look. For someone who had no training, she had the essential understanding of form necessary to make a print without a keyblock. It all ends up looking like a linocut (and nothing wrong with that) and she clearly felt she had to make the colours bright enough to distinguish between her various shapes. But at least it is wall-to-wall colour unlike so many of her better-known prints. And I am not going to go on about those.

What is interesting is that she could perform in cream and grey just as well. She was encouraged to paint by Stanley Cursitor. He had started out as a young man down from Orkney in the lithographic printing business before going on to train in fine art at Edinburgh College of Art during the fairly short period before the first war when Mabel Royds was teaching at the department. In common with Scottish contemporaries like Anna Findlay and Francis Blair, Romanes also made her way down to St. Ives in Cornwall. I think 'only select' was the watchword she used when she made St. Ives, Cornwall. It owes a good deal to Cursitor's post-war studies in monochrome but she was wise enough to learn from him and, in fact, she describes the huddle of sunlit buildings just as well as the still life objects but uses far fewer colours. The source of light is evident, the shadows intriguing. All of which goes to show that not all depth psychology has to be sinister.

None of these prints are dated so it is hard to make very much sense of her career  but in the late twenties, Dr. Winifred Rushforth arrived back in Edinburgh fresh from the Tavistock Clinic where she had been undergoing psychoanalytic training. I'm not sure what the exact time sequence was but her husband took the job of registrar at the College of Art after his business in India failed. Romanes then began her training under Rushforth and funded the setting up of the Davidson Clinic where Rushforth could work supporting mothers and children as she had done in India. It struck me as extraordinary at first that an artist who had made prints with not the least hint of surrealism or psychological depth would become a psychotherapist. But that was what she did. All of which really should remind us how little we know about these artist and their lives.

Some of the prints are for sale at Sulis Fine Art but, as you can see from the Cornish woodcut, the condition is less than perfect. They turned up in a job lot at auction in Edinburgh so her work is still floating about somewhere.

One day in 1923 the Canadian artist, Walter Phillips, was taken to Notting Hill Gate in London to meet the critic and writer, Malcolm Salaman. There was something provincial and naïve about Phillips' reaction to Salaman's flat, heaped as it was with prints of all kinds from old master to whatever peccadillos or whim had appeal in the market for etchings. For instance, there was Arthur Briscoe's manly array of rigging and seafarers and Elyse Lord's foppish, oriental confections. And there Miss Elizabeth Keith. And what did they think about her? Because, as with Phillips, there was something naïve in her own make-up. Phillips' work looked fine until it came up against real printmaking talent like Ian Cheyne and then, I'm afraid, it was sent packing. In a similar way, Keith's Tokyo publisher, Shozaburo Wantanabe, was possibly tempting fate when he arranged to have an artist as talented as Shinsui Ito prepare a design with Keith as its subject simply because Keith's weaknesses would be made all too obvious.

To start with, Keith would have been incapable of the bold candour of Shinsui's blues, pinks and marmalade orange. Nor could she have achieved the subtle simplicity of the hands, the uprightness of the back nor, most importantly, the scepticism of that steady gaze of hers. But here were two artists bartering gaze for gaze and while it is obvious that Keith was in no way intimidated, Shinsui rose to his subject as Keith could not. Only look at the brilliance of that swirl of marmalade feathers around her head, that frivolous crown of glory. Who chose the hat? Shinsui, Keith or even her zealous publisher? It sets off the pale north European skin so perfectly. Nothing remains of the young Japanese beauties that were Shinsui's stock-in-trade. Instead we have a perceptiveness so acute it verges on satire. The outlandishness of the hat, the tumbled folds of her blouse, the intrepid eyebrows, that crooked mouth, they all invites us, by way of minute exaggeration, to take pleasure in this rather extraordinary European with her tomboyish, adventurous ways. Look at her in front of that sumptuous car sharing a garland with her friend and fellow-Scot, Kate Bartlett. What amuses us is what amused Shinsui.

I need to credit and thank Darrel Karl at Eastern Impressions for the photograph of Keith and Kate and Charles Bartlett.

Walter Phillips was one of those in between artists who it takes some while to discover the kind of art that suits them. He has been claimed by the Canadians as one of their own, reasonably enough because he produced the work he is known for while in Canada (and the National Gallery were buying his woodcuts within only a few years of them being made). But I am not sure Canada does him much justice by this claim. His father came from a Welsh nonconformist background and in common with all Methodist ministers he went from place to place as a preacher in the manner of John Wesley (and as Christ had done before John Wesley) so the artist had a portable childhood and I am sorry to have to tell the National Gallery of Canada this but Phillips, in common with so many other artists, came from nowhere and what you see here are his pictures of nowhere.

He did receive some art training on the way and, once he finally settled for a time at school in Worcestershire, he was sent for a number of afternoons a week to Birmingham School of Art. Five years in South Africa followed, not the obvious place to go as a would-be artist, and when he returned to Britain without having made enough money to go on with his training at one of the ateliers in Paris, he settled down to life as a teacher of art in Salisbury and then got married. Canada came next but only for a while. After ten years in the country, he was back with his wife and children in England and, according to Phillips, it was only because the children missed Canada that the Phillips went back to Winnipeg. For Winnipeg it was he came from.

But in between something had happened. Phillips had gone through a process of self-creation of a kind that isn't uncommon. What is more unusual is the way Phillips provided us with the documents describing what happened although what he said has to be handled with caution and, in the end, the true facts about those troublesome years of self-discovery in Canada are hard to make out because the more concise Phillips is about his predicament, the more confusing it becomes. Just like Canada, Phillips makes claims that always leaves me feeling dubious.

He presented himself as a woodcut pioneer and I suppose in some ways what he said was true. There wasn't much in the way of woodcut in Canada at the time but claiming he had never seen any work by any of the Japanese landscape masters when he began to make woodcuts, takes some believing. He disliked etching, we know that; his fastidiousness comes across loud and clear when he describes the smell and mess of the process but how he stumbled on woodblock is impossible to make out. Again he claimed that he remembered a helpful article written by Allen Seaby but unfortunately that particular article came out three years after he began his own exploration of woodcut and it would have been very little use when it came to making woodcuts properly. He talked about trying different kinds of paper and emphasised his resourcefulness by saying he once tried printing on lavatory paper before he tried a piece of old hosho paper he had lying around. Yet how did that paper get there?

But what he made was different and unlike any of the colour prints being made in England around about 1916. He is most like Seaby (and Seaby admired what Phillips was doing) but Seaby kept to subject and in the end he is much more like the rather abstract German artist Paul Leschhorn or the designer-artists of Vienna. What Phillips did discover for himself was a sense of space in Canada. Ironically, his winter woodcuts are very small and as soon as I saw one for the first time in front of me, (it was The lily, the one at the top of the post), that was what I liked. Phillips wasn't trying quite so hard and it came across as natural - notes, in fact, from a small island.

Winter woodcuts came out as a portfolio of prints in 1936. He had already produced three other portfolios. It was one way of recycling work. Snow bank (second from the top) had been sent out as a Christmas card in 1923, with Phillips making a note that an edition of 100 had been made, while The lily was sent out as a Christmas card in 1925 (and Seaby received one). Like William Giles, Phillips could be quite free and easy with his editions. At least one of Giles prints came out in three different editions but then both Phillips and Giles could sell them. They were also friends, hardly surprising. Not only that, it was Giles who provided the connection with the old country and, paradoxically, who introduced him to the refined practice of Japan.

But then Phillips' memory played all kinds of tricks with time. He was aware of his isolation. Back in Canada, he recalled the time he had spent in London, how informed and cosmopolitan it was compared with Winnipeg. There was Salaman's flat with the heaps and heaps of prints, the atmospheric studios of Chelsea that were dedicated to art. But you only have to look at the small prints here to see how he manoeuvres and the way space and perspective are malleable. In the end, Phillips wasn't very bothered about facts What is so wintry about Pom-pom dahlias you might ask? It is the irregularity that is so appealing. The blocks he used are never square; there is give-and-take about these images. The lily is there because it was sent out at Christmas. Winter woodcuts is no more about a season than the prints are about a place.

I should have added that these images are from the Loch Gallery, Winnipeg, and my thanks are due to them. They had the complete portfolio for sale but it is now sold.

There was a mention recently (in the post about Shinsui Ito and his 'Portrait of Miss Elizabeth Keith) of some etchings by the British artist, Arthur Briscoe. Briscoe only had his first six prints published in April, 1925, when he was fifty-one or fifty-two, so if what Walter Phillips says is accurate, he must have been at Malcolm Salaman's flat in the first half of that year because he returned to Canada in the June.

It's interesting for this reason. The visit possibly adds some history to a single print, perhaps not that uncommon because artists would inscribe individual prints often enough and make them easy to identify. Presumably Briscoe or his publisher, Harold Dickens, had provided Salaman with some review proofs prior to publication. There may also have been a trial proof of Clewlines and buntlines among them. It was published in October later that year but Briscoe inscribed the proof 'To Malcolm Salaman'. As well he might. Salaman was the grand old man of British print (and you may be able to get some clue of this is Ernest Lumsden's own portrait published only one year later) and it was within his power, as Phillips acknowledged, to make the career of an artist he took to.

Briscoe had his own three-ton cutter, which he sailed along the Essex coast near the little port of Maldon, but in 1922 he had joined the crew of a Polish training ship, the Lvov, and sailed on her from Rotherhithe to Genoa. (You can see the ship being towed from Birkenhead where Briscoe was born and with the Liver Building on the Pierhead at Liverpool, behind. The ship was originally launched at Birkenhead in 1869.) The drawings he made during the voyage provided the basis for the first of his distinctive maritime etchings. Someone possibly had a good idea because the etchings came out when the market was at his most profitable. Etchings were already going for enormous prices and when Briscoe had a first print show of twenty-seven etchings at the Lefevre Gallery in October, 1926, it sold out. But times change and less than thirty years afterwards, an etching by Briscoe went for only two quid. Yes, and I am sure you have guessed the one it was. It was inscribed 'To Malcolm Salaman' and I wonder who owns it now.

The information about the ups and downs of Briscoe's prices and some other details comes from Kenneth Guichard British Etchers 1850 - 1940. So far as the ups go, Clewlines and buntlines is currently for sale at New England Art Exchange for $950. The Capstan (again from 1926 and showing cadets working on the Lvov) is available from the Allinson Gallery for $1,950.

Leslie Moffat Ward could travel as far as he liked to find fresh subjects but the farther he went, so far as I am concerned, the less he often gained by going there. In fact, unless he kept to the Isle of Purbeck, he almost always fell short of what he did best. There were exceptions but, even so, the Cotswolds or the Sussex Downs, can be quite a lot like Dorset in their massiveness. So, this post will not provide anything comprehensive but will take a look at what I like best about him. That said, turning up his best work hasn't been straightforward. His quaint and telling night-scenes seem to unavailable anywhere online. It is beyond me.

He moved to Bournemouth as a child and spent his adult life working as a teacher at the school of art right from its opening in 1913 until his retirement in 1955. Some of the time Thomas Todd Blaylock was headmaster and following his own early retirement after the war, turned out some outlandishly colourful colour woodcuts. Ward was more restrained and more distinctive. He also worked well within the British landscape tradition and I find it difficult to understand why his work remains such a minority or even local enthusiasm, especially when his irresistible etching A mile to Worth Matravers (1932) can be seen illustrated in Kenneth Guichard's well-known British Etchers 1850 - 1940. But there you are. Stuff happens.

In common with Samuel Palmer, the naïve vision tends to make people assume the work itself may be lacking in sophistication. But as with Palmer, the effect of the art was achieved by a rigorously original approach to technique and respect for the work of other artists. I can see those two cows in the foreground of Near Bradle, Dorset (1951) in Salomon van Ruysdael, ingenious but nevertheless well-observed moo-cows. Ward goes in for pattern-making, too, but never overdoes it, and no one could ever call him decorative; he selects with care, his crooked road in A mile to Worth Matravers is what helps make the print and it is exaggerated but light, shade and the effects of weather all soften the effect.

The Isle of Purbeck for readers out of the UK lies south-west of Bournemouth and is partly surrounded by the English Channel and the large inlet of Poole Harbour. It isn't somewhere I know but Dorset is one of the most distinctive counties in Britain and Ward obviously responded to the place in a way he did to nowhere else. So, there is no point anyone saying (as they have tried to do quite recently) that Ward had some kind of breadth just because he depicted the Pool of London, say, or the Lake District or Ronda. Making big claims for your own enthusiasms doesn't actually help the artist much and I don't want readers to miss the point of Ward. In terms of style (especially given those art deco sycamores) it is hard to believe there could be twenty years between the first two prints ion the post but there are subtle differences between them. The second is a work of maturity made when the artist was sixty-three and was deploying a range of skills and displaying a depth of vision that wasn't there before. There is an academic tinge there, too, but hardly a surprise given his background as a teacher. But he had the job because he had the skills. For instance, he was well-able to simplify form in the way he did in The condemned dwelling. It gives the print the naïve impact it has. But in the later work, to use the wonderful phrase by the French artist, Paul Serusier, he was searching out the greys; there are no extremes of shadow and dazzling light of the kind you can see in The long man of the Downs (above). He has a terrific sense of tone, so delicate and discriminating he can approach an etching like a watercolour. Beyond that, the perspective is beautifully rendered. Like a Chinese brush drawing, it reads upwards but also makes use of recession in the Western manner, (both more obvious in The long man of the downs).

The way he works the surface with so many marks gives everything that typical sense of solidity. It's a paradox but this is what true visionary art entails. He was also enquiring. You only have to look at the way he looks into the ruined dwelling or explores the nooks and valleys of the uplands. There is nothing vaporous about Ward. Even his clouds are muscular - especially his clouds! And I think his idea of the countryside is a true one - the ruined houses, the bent figures with their cattle or tools, each farm with its own incline and huddle of trees. You only get that sense of place when you know somewhere well enough. He is like S.G. Boxsius in the way he takes you round but Ward's tour is better-informed. It is what Oliver Rackham once called 'social countryside', a country of paths and lanes which everyone from cowmen to ramblers makes use of. It is of course diminutive but then you can't have everything.

Ward also took an architect's pleasure in neat new roads and houses and well-placed trees. State schools like Bournemouth taught a broader range of practical skills than they do today, including the bascis of geometry and architecture. What Ward summons up is that kind of diversity, there are social shades of meaning of the kind you find similar designer-artists like Eric Ravilious. It is a world of focus and workmanship and the applied arts as well as the imagination. The more you look, the more you understand.

Now and again I come across an image of a woman sewing or doing embroidery or one that shows her work-basket or what might be some of her work and I wonder what happened to it all. It's common enough in England to find the kind of tablecloths or tea cosies embroidered with silk or woollen flowers that were made to sell at church sales but fine embroidery is another thing. The watercolour portrait of Daisy Tuff drawn by S. G. Boxsius about 1916 even shows what might be two of the Pitman Craft series lying flat on the second shelf of the bookcase. But what happened to her work? I'm not certain that Daisy Tuff ever did any fine embroidery but she was an art teacher at the time the portrait was made (it's only a small section of a large watercolour) and they had far more practical skills than any art teacher would have today.

The basic story modern fine embroidery goes back to the 1860s. Once Jane Morris and her husband, William Morris, had rented Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire, she set about doing work like the bedcover you can see on the oak bedstead, above. She and her sister then handed on their skills to Jane's younger daughter, May, who eventually made the hangings to go round the bed. At the age of twenty-three, May was placed in charge of the embroidery department of Morris and Co and in 1896 supervised the embroidery class at the new Central School of Arts and Crafts in London.

I suppose it is always possible that Frank Morley Fletcher's wife, Dolly, trained under May Morris (above) while Frank was teaching his class at the Central School. She certainly had an embroidery class of her own while they were living in Edinburgh but that is all that I know. And it isn't much.

Men tended not to do embroidery but only make designs. J.H. Dearle who designed many of the floral backgrounds for Edward Burne Jones' tapestries, designed the screen. William Morris also produced designs for embroidery so he obviously understood what the craft involved, hardly surprising, really.

Phillips Needell was more attentive, which I suppose you would be if you had that kind of a name and I assume the woman shown doing embroidery in his colour woodcut is his wife, Anne, but I can't be sure. One thing you may have already noticed here is how commonly orangey terracotta was teamed up with blue-greens and turquoise. I certainly haven't chosen these examples deliberately. You only have to look at the colour of Daisy Tuff's dress and compare the section of Boxsius's Seaside, below, with its chic use of a warm and cool combination.

As colours they were used not only by Arts and Crafts practitioners. They came to us by way of Iranian art and it was a commonplace of European orientalists to use the colours to suggest the East but as a colour combination with style, it goes right back to ancient Egypt, that mother of style.

Arthur Rigden Read being the artist he was and having a wife well occupied with her own work, suggested all kinds of crafts in his colour woodcuts. I think they must be Kathleen Rigden Reads embroidery wools and work-basket in the window in May morning. I should think, if you look hard enough, there may be other examples. These are just a few that have struck as I've looked through pictures and what have you. Hopefully, now, someone will turn up some of the work itself. Because I tell you now I know it's out there and certainly in the United States.

This weekend an exhibition of paintings and wood-engravings by the glorious and original Claughton Pellew opens in the Colman Project Space at Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery. I'm not sure how big this is going to be but Norwich also have a fine collection of watercolours, including their famous John Sell Cotmans, and you might be able to squeeze in the Sainsbury collection at the university, too.

Pellew received the Modern Printmakers treatment in March 2011, so you can always read it http://haji-b.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/conscientious-claughton-pellew.html for my own opinions. You will also get the low-down on his gradual rehabilitation by various enthusiasts, all of whom owe a debt to Anne Stevens whose personal collection became the basis for the position Pellew now holds as one of the most admired and best loved of all the many British wood-engravers.

The show opens on 26th March and I think runs through the summer. I have to say The Castle Museum and Art Gallery were slow to publicise this and don't give a closing date on their site.

I begin to wonder what exactly was in Arthur Wesley Dow's mind when he made his first colour woodcuts in Massachusetts early in the 1890s. (The photograph shows Dow with a guitar seated on a wheelbarrow with his brother). Over the years he has gained a reputation as the first artist in the United States to make them and although this is true, scholars and academics are in the bad habit of giving such events as 'the first American colour woodcuts' a meaning they never had at the time. It's called art history.

That said, this would not be Modern Printmakers without a little bit of history of our own. Dow was not the first person to make modern colour woodcuts. The honour, such as it is, goes to Auguste Lepere in Paris. He came up with two or three rather peculiar and misconceived works starting just before Dow and was followed by Henri Riviere who had the bright idea of a making a portfolio of woodcuts, which all included one view or other of the brand-new Eiffel Tower in imitation of Hokusai's 100 views of Mount Fuji. But Riviere soon realised his project was too ambitious and he scaled back and most of the prints in the series became lithographs.

Wisely, Dow made much smaller prints than Riviere and also made prints that didn't depend on a famous location. Instead he chose the river bank of his home town of Ipswich and, I believe, the north shore at Boston. It was a deliberate choice because he had come to the conclusion that the representation of a subject was less important than manner of representation. Beyond that he also produced variants of the same print, often radically different ways of using the same blocks. These were called 'lost chances' by his colleague and friend, Ernest Fenellosa who was a curator of oriental art at the Museum of Fine Art at Boston.

Dow had come back to the U.S. in 1887 after training in Paris and later said, 'An experience of five years in the French Schools left me thoroughly dissatisfied with academic theory' and he went on to say, 'in a search for something more vital I began a comparative study of the art of all nations and epochs'. But this was not an idea he had to himself. Oscar Wilde was more subtle when he said, 'All beautiful things belong to the same era' and what Dow was doing was taking up the study of aesthetics and as he read and looked he came into contact with Fenellosa at M.F.A. and both began to work together and eventually Dow became an assistant curator for a time.

But this is not what artists generally do and in some ways the small prints you see here are what you might call teaching examples. At the time young craftsmen and artists were sent to museums and galleries to copy work and what Dow was doing was making a synthesis of the work he had himself studied to suggest a way forward beyond that kind of sterile reproduction. The next step was to start giving lectures and then to teach. But again, this was nothing new. His model was the English artist and theorist, John Ruskin, and it was education that drove men like Ruskin forwards, the education of the working-class, the education of craftsmen and of artists. But then Ruskin had a great and practical follower in William Morris. Fenellosa and Dow were variants, lost chances, if you like. You can see that Dow also took photographs of many of the same places. Like the prints, they are impressions, the Ipswich River and its boats and buildings and bridges are depicted tonally and then in colour. It could be anywhere; it didn't matter.

Fenellosa was a scholar and teacher while Dow was true to the nineties in the way he combined making art and coming up with a theory of art education. But it was all very different from what was happening in England in the Arts and Crafts at the time where the emphasis was placed on doing and the way people learned by doing proper work. All this helps to explain what I think these early prints by Dow are really about and why it was that British artists like John Platt, Ian Cheyne and Arthur Rigden Read from about 1920 onwards could send prints to the U.S. and win the prizes. Dow hadn't liked French academic theory and went on to replace it with theory of his own. It was left to Dow's students like Edna Boies Hopkins to make the really good prints. When Dow began to draw on the Japanese example and make colour woodcuts in his own way, he could have had no idea what would follow. Looking at this work is like following his footprints as he works his way along the shore. It is not so much they are variants, they are tentative, with nothing final about them.

The colour images are from Herschel and Adler's exemplary website so many thanks to them. The photographs come from the distinguished collection at M.F.A. Boston. Please don't sue.

I have no doubt that sooner or later someone with a Pinterest page will come along and swipe Kenneth's Broad's The harbour, Brittany for their little scrap-book. I suppose I don't mind all that much but it is galling to see prints taken from the blog and stuck there for no other reason than they look decorative. But meaningless, also, because, although The harbour, Brittany isdecorative, there is more to Broad than that and, in the end, people who come along and nab stuff for Pinterest hardly do the artists themselves any justice. So, I thought I would do a pin-up page of my own and try and suggest appropriate images to place along side Broad's work, pictures that he would have known and I believe he had in mind when he came to make some of his prints, a pin-up page of the imagination, if you like.

You only have to look at the raised lances and the colour scheme of Paolo Uccello's Battle of San Romano from the Louvre to see what I mean. Some readers may remember the post where I first talked about Broad and the painting by Uccello of the same name in the National Gallery, London. (There is a third painting in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.) I think it was hardly any coincidence that Broad included part of the facade of the Gallery in his view of St Martins in the Fields. We are fortunate in Britain to have three works by Uccello in the country and for anyone who isn't familiar with him, he was a C15th Italian artist who became famous for his innovations - principally, a very thorough-going use of perspective. Rather eccentric-looking today, yes, and Uccello may not have been a great master, but he was master of draughtsmanship and colour as the superb drawing of the central horse and the black-plumed knights on the left make clear.

Broad was not a true master, not like Uccello who was, but his very best prints are masterly. His primary skill was architecture and this is partly what he has in common with Uccello whose work was designed for large architectural spaces and have the same concerns with volume and line that architects have to have. Notice how Uccello uses a dramatic three-quarter profile for his self-portrait and looks up while Broad turns on the opposite direction and looks down.

Of course, it wasn't until I saw The harbour, Brittany that I realised that Broad appeared to have made use of Uccello's work more than once. He had already depicted the red and white poles from Mitcham Fair in 1925 and I was already pretty certain that he had been looking carefully at the Uccello in the National Gallery, London. But I have to say it was almost by chance that I founbd other intriguing and striking similarities. I may of course by wrong but it's still worth saying simply because I think an artist/architect like Broad had a very wide range of references and interests and I think it shows.

In 1401, Lorenzo Ghiberti won a major competition to produce a pair of bronze doors for the Baptistery at Florence. The commission was so large, he set up a workshop and took on other artists that sound like a roll-call of all that was original and decorative in early C15th Florence. The painters Antonio Pollaiuolo and Masolino, the sculptor, Donatello, and also Uccello were all amongst them. I don't think it's known how the individual artists worked on different panels, but going by the evidence of the one below with its crowds of people, tents and trees, I think Broad must have known them. He was first and foremost an architect with a classical bent, but he was also an enquiring and original printmaker who had learned to look and copy and adapt and I like the way he took his modern and witty and quirky look at the quattrocento, and I think it was well-worth doing. And put all of that on Pinterest, if you dare.

Before you all go hurrying off to look at British ebay, the colour linocut proof up for sale right now is not the superb impression, above, of Sybil Andrew's Steeplechasing (1930) but the less exciting one, below. Of course, when I saw it, I hurried off myself to do some research because I recognised Andrews style, well aware that other people would do exactly the same thing. But it isn't Andrews; it is someone else.

Who it is, I don't know, and I can't say I particularly care but it is interesting to see artists making good copies of classic British linocuts - good untill they are compared with the original when you see just how exceptional Andrews could be. I am a fan, certainly more than I am of Cyril Power or Claude Flight and frankly I think it was basically dishonest to edition such a close copy. It isn't exactly the same because one pair of coat-tails is missing and the marks below the hedge are different, but in basic respects, it is similar. The print has also mis-registered, something I don't think you would ever see in Andrews.

Somehow whoever did it missed the point though. Andrew's stylish Grosvenor modernism (because she wasn't really a modernist, she was only pretend) has been lost. The sharp, geometric shapes that gave the Andrews' print its up-to-date appeal look like a cereal packet in the copy. You can also see that the edition is ten, not really an edition number that you would expect from Andrews. In fact, she made three. The British edition was fifty and that was followed by the U.S. edition, which was sixty. You can see USA 32/60 on the image above. It also appears that the Osborne Samuel proof at the top was from the US edition. There was then an Australian edition in 1936 but with only twenty proofs taken before the lino-block failed. There were also trial proofs that have come up for sale.

So far as price goes, the ebay print is up with a starting-bid of £25 wheras proofs sold in Britain sold for about £15,000 at Christies and last year another went for £19.000, so I dio hope what I am saying is correct. Decide for yourself.

Until two or three years ago, there used to be a shop on Mansfield Road in Nottingham called Daphne's Handbag. Daphne's (as everyone always called it) was one of the first and finest of the retro junk shops and remains much-missed for the kind of Quixotic bargains you could pick up there. One of my best finds was a Peter Nelson aluminium floor lamp from 1967, which I paid something like £25 for. Another day there was a small crimson glass bowl that struck me as more fifties fantasia than out-and-out kitsch. Anyway, the colour appealed (see above) and I bought it and it still sits behind my as I type. What I didn't know at the time was this: it was the work of the Scottish glass designer and artist, William Wilson. Even when I came to know and like his work, I still had no idea it was by him. But then, it was much the same with Peter Nelson.

In 1837 the Government School of Design was opened at the impressive complex of offices on The Strand in London, the first stage of the long official effort to improve the design standards of British manufactured goods. So far, so functional. Luckily, the radicals had better ideas - and said so - so by the early C20th the teaching of design became linked to working practice. There was also the opportunity for workers in crafts trades like glass-making to gain further education on schools of design and Wilson was one of those who benefitted.

Born in 1905, he was apprenticed the Edinburgh stained glass makers, James Ballantine & Son. Wilson then went on to the College of Art where at least two of the heads of Applied Art had experience in stained glass. John Platt was one while Charles Paine (who may have taught Wilson before he went to Santa Barbara) had worked at Guthries.

Whilst there, Wilson also began to study printmaking. What he managed to do was avoid the kind of academic bane that went on to afflicted Ian Fleming and his own teacher, Adam Bruce Thomson. Nevetheless, Thomson recognised Wilson's talent and through him he gained a Royal Scottish Academy travel scholarship that took him off to all the usual 1930s destinations, with France predictably joining Spain and Italy where Wilson drew heavily on the old tradition of engraving established by Andrea Mantegna. In fact, although many of his finest prints have the fine tone of engraving on copper, almost all the sources have the majority of his prints like Der kleine Soldat (1932) and The harrow down as etchings.

In 1935 he gained further grants and scholarships that enabled him to train in engraving under the redoubtable Robert Austin at the Royal College in London and to study contemporary stained glass making in Germany. Apparently, though he didn't spend all that much time at the R.C.A. At thirty there was probably not so much for him to learn, even from an engraver as good as Austin, and he spent his time with other artists and notably with the young etcher, Edgar Holloway.

Shacked up together for a time at Orchard Cottage in Essex, Edinburgh friends like E.S.Lumsden came down to visit and, indeed plans for Edinburgh were being laid and Wilson asked Holloway to return with him and set up a stained-glass studio together. It may partly be because he lacks Wilson's obvious erudition and but also because he strikes me as rather selfish and manipulative, but Holloway is not an artist I am very keen on. Anyway, he refused, so, Wilson went alone, the friendship cooled and the rest is history. Ironically, Holloway remains better known this side of the border, a situation not at all acceptable to Modern Printmakers.

I have deliberately offered a mix-and-match approach to Willie. Wilson, as you will have seen, as all the right strengths - powerful line, superb colour and a profound grasp of tone. The good news is that small examples of Wilson's work in glass like controlled bubble ash-trays are still readily available, at least in Britain. Only this lunch-time I found a posy vase designed by him in a thrift shop (or as we call it here, a charity shop). It was £4. Then later on, a two-tone paperweight in a lot at my local auction-house.

After the war, Wilson was asked to design for the firm of James Powell & Sons at their famous Whitefriars works and so much of it was made, it isn't possible for anything to be all that expensive and any day on British ebay there is work by Wilson or vases designed in the sixties and early seventies together with Harry Dyer. Both the taller vases above are by that partnership and appeared on ebay.

I'm not trying to sell Wilson cheap. The standard of his work for Whitefriars was high though not to all tastes. I remember a friend being given a Wilson/Dyer vase similar to the red one above only blue and found by his cousin in a thrift shop that he didn't like but felt unable to give to me! And, yes, I didn't know it was by Wilson either! But you will see, I am sure, the way the muscularity of the etchings finds its way into the post-war glass, especially the later work with Dyer. The controlled bubble work is earlier and all by Wilson alone and, as I said, has a 1950s whimsicality but has Wilson's tremendous sense of colour, shade and mass. To be honest, I haven't looked in great detail at the stained glass because it's complicated and has been covered to some extent by Sandy from Kirkcudbright on Sandy's Witterings and his related blogs from where I have pinched the image above.

Thanks to Sandy and, not for the first time, I am also indebted to Robert Meyrick's seminal catalogue and essay 'Edgar Holloway and friends'. Published by the University of Wales School of Art in 1999, unlike Wilson glass, I would think it was hard to come by, but there we are, that is a start on Willie Wilson and a long time coming it has been.

A copy of Exeter School of Art magazine with a lithograph on the front by Norah Pearse came up for sale on ebay a few weeks ago.Sadly, I missed it. Not that it was much good (the drawing was haphazard) but The cloakroom had a St. Trinian's sense of anarchy and fun typical of Pearse. (See note below) The girls were larking about in gym-slips and it reminded me what kind of institution an art school in the 1930s really was. It was a school; the students were in their teens. Nor were they there to train as artists. The whole idea was to send them off later for a year's teacher training, a fact that goes some way to explaining why it is that so many of them were skilful enough to make good prints but were often hopeless when it came to drawing.

As for linocut, it had been promoted as suitable for use by children in Vienna long before it arrived in Britain. It didn't make the break-through here until the 'Children's Art Exhibition' was held was held in London in 1921. Allen Seaby must have gone to see it because he was writing about linocut for educational purposes soon afterwards. Claude Flight's much more famous book Lino-Cut followed in 1927). Lino isn't very durable but it is easy to manipulate and, as Flight never tired of saying, it was simple enough to achieve a sense of being modern. Whether or not this makes Pearse's Seals worth £200 is another thing, but after seeing St. Trinian's, I think I would pause for thought before I coughed up. But I did buy in the Cotswolds (above) and I'm glad I did.

Splash shows part of the sea-front at Exmouth in Devon very near to where I had a bed-sit type of flat in the mid-seventies, so, for all her ways, I must take Norah's side. (She came from Exmouth and she appeals). What should be obvious by now is that Pearse was aware of London trends (and exhibited with the Graver Printers) and had what Clive Christie would always call 'an aesthetic'. The subdued tones of the prints are very thirties just as much as the observation of social life. What is interesting is the way Pearse moves easily between the social life of seals and tigers and even trees and the everyday activities of human beings. She also makes good use of the pliant line that linocut so readily allows without going in for the kind of pattern-making that followers of Flight tended to adopt after a stint with him at the Grosvenor School. Grosvenor is there, for sure, but it isn't brominent.

Where she does depart from Flight and all of them is in her use of perspective. She was more modern in her subject matter than in her manner. Of tigers, watched by children has the Pearse sense of humour, the unpredictability of the tigers matched by the kiddies beyond the bars. I have no doubt she knew the linocuts of Norbertine Bresslern Roth but again she goes her own way and this is why she interests me. Look at the way she plays off the tiger-stripes and the bars, and the effects she gains with patches of light and shadow. The anecdotal humour shouldn't detract from the complicated arrangement of the print. It wasn't that easy to get all the figures right and she wisely limited herself as always to a narrow range of colour. And again it works. Picasso it isn't but nice it is and it's a shame this is the only image available. Of course some readers may recall my first tentative post on Pearse but most prints I know of are now here (except a jolly image of surfing, which is just to muddy and small). At least we now have a better idea of what she could do.

As for St. Trinian's School, it first appeared in a British film in 1954, based on the work of the cartoonist, Ronald Searle, and with an eccentric headmistress played by the character actor, Alistair Sim. Some very wayward schoolgirls indeed were a great part of the success of the film and I always found it hilarious. It went on to become part of a series of five. Go to YouTube andbehave!

In 1896 this famous poster designed by Theodore Steinlen was used to advertise a tour by the company from Le chat noir cabaret in Paris. With its alley cat looking as fierce as a Japanese kabuki actor and the bold use of red and black, it helped set the tone for what was to come, both the forthright appeal of modern advertising and the eclectic appeal of modern art. Steinlen was not the first artist to mix the skills of printmaking and commercial art. In Britain, William Blake had learned his skills as a fine commercial engraver in the late C18th but the reliance on imagery over content was new and the effect in Britain, Austria and Germany was immediate.

Readers may doubt that Allen Seaby's exceptional image of a cockerel had Steinlen's cat as a predecessor but I can assure them that the fame of Steinlen's poster had reached provincial Reading where Seaby was teaching and that he was familiar with it. (And I am afraid I am not saying here how I know). But for all its fame and skill, I tend to think Steinlen's poster was soon improved on. L.H. Jungnicke;l's magnificent Tigerkopf (1909) is a good example of the way an artist can strip away irrelevant detail like hammy Japanese lettering and arch stylisation and produce something of remarkable power. Jungnickel himself was a commercial artist and here you see the early stage of Andy Warhol's Marilyn (1962).

The whole thing really is a story. Artists are forever picking up ideas and Le chat noir attracted so many kinds of people, everyone from bohemian artists and performers to Edward, Prince of Wales, it's hardly surprising a mere poster could have such a large effect. Others perhaps were more subtle but perhaps no one was more effective. But if we have to start somewhere, we have to begin with the Swiss artist, Felix Vallotton, who led the way with a woodcut of Paul Verlaine (himself a patron of Le chat noir) in 1891. It remains odd and perhaps isn't much of a woodcut in itself. I prefer his later woodcut of Verlaine from Le Livre des masques (1898) but Vallotton went on to describe a world in woodcut where all the creatures lived, from bohemian poets to communards to cats, they were there. His remarkable image Two cats was published by the German magazine, Pan,in 1895.

It was not only the images that themselves or the modern subjects that represented a great innovation. By drawing on the tradition of books of woodcuts, Vallotton provided artists with yet another precedent. La flute appeared in his 1896 book, Six musical instruments. It ten re-appeared in the Saturday Review in London in 1897 as H.M. The Queen by William Nicholson. For Nicholson, the image was a great coup and made him famous overnight. Not that he had been unoriginal. He had had the bright idea of removing the Prince of Wales from a double portrait photograph of the Prince and Queen Victoria (a photograph that appears to have disappeared from the internet) and substituted the Queen's terrier.

I think his debt to Vallotton is obvious and like Vallotton he also went on to make his own series of woodcut books for the publisher, William Heinemann (whose nerve had failed him over H.M. The Queen). Where Nicholson did move forward was in his use of colour. Curiously, Nicholson's woodcuts were not cut at all but engraved on end-grain. I suppose he had needed to provide his publishers with a durable material like box-wood. He certainly had no intention of using the finicky wood-engraving style commonly used by newspapers.

Just as influential was his book An Alphabet. (The date is usually given as 1st January, 1898, but it appeared in time for Christmas, 1897.) For all his modern boldness, Nicholson regularly fell back on a folksy style and the longer he went on the more he relied on a period feel that tends to set the tone for a lot of British illustration but once the folksiness is removed with are left with the sumptuousness of images such as Moriz Jung's Jaguar from his Tier-ABC made about 1906 while still a student at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule. By comparison, Jungnickel's Tigerkopf is conventional. Jaguar is out-and-out Vienna Secession while Tigerkopf is Secession modified by a visit to the zoo.

After that, there was no holding anyone in Vienna back. The posters produced by Erwin Puschinger and other artists for the Jagd Ausstellung of 1910 may well be fussier and less original than some of the best posters of the period (and there were a lot of them) but no one after all was looking at posterity. Peter Behren's woodcuts had been appearing in Pan around the same time as Vallotton's work but his poster from the 1910 Deutsche Werkbund falls back on a more conventional fine art approach but I like it all the same for its sheer bravura.

I have never been sure about the date of Carl Thiemann's Hahn und Henne but at least now I do have the correct title. It is the nearest he came to the commercial poster style but he was a fine artist by training and more associated with Munich than the more radical styles of the Vienna Secession. All the same, I have always thought this woodcut was Thiemann at his exquisite best. It sums up the modern need for fine but uncomplicated imagery. His woodcut landscapes tend to start looking like paintings for all the woodcut feel they have. The sheer decorativeness and subtlety of colour is what makes this Thiemann's greatest and most telling print. But then Thiemann had looked around the farmyard, not just the zoo.

Just opened on Friday at the Art Gallery, Dachau, 'Walther Klemm und Carl Thiemann: Zwei Meister des Farbholzschnitts'. The exhibition marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Carl Thiemann on 3rd December, 1966. It runs until 15th August, 2016, and may be the one and only opportunity to see the work of these two famous colour woodcut artists side by side. The gallery at Dachau has a large collection of the work of both men.

The show re-unites two old friends who were brought up in Karlsbad in the old Sudetenland, studied at the Prague Academy and shared a studio in the city, then moved to Liboc in the Czech countryside. Klemm saw the work of Emil Orlik in Vienna after Orlik's return from Japan and showed Thiemann how to make colour woodcuts. They published their first prints in a portfolio they called Alt-Prag about 1905 and, all in all, this is a chance to see the way young artists commonly worked together during this important period. There is an informative preview (in German) at http://www.kunstmarkt.com/pagesmag/kunst/_id360206-/news_detail.html .

Just how much they had in common they had at the time may be judged by two of the woodcuts here. The third one is Klemm's Moorbach from 1908, the year they both began to work at the artist's colony in Dachau. (The other two landscapes are by Thiemann, including a version of his Kiefern am Grunewaldsee). The exhibition takes their Dachau as its central subject. Klemm left Dachau for a post in Weimar in 1913 and eventually stopped making colour prints. Thiemann stayed for the rest of his life and

Many thanks to Klaus for letting me know about this exhibition. Opening times and other details can be found on the Dachau museum and galleries website.

Somewhere or other Stendhal mocked the Jardin des Tuileries for being a superficial imitation of Italian style. (I can't remember exactly what he said). All the same, with its self-conscious swags and fountains, its singing and light-heartedness and grace of manner, it strikes me that Paris is a Latin city just like Nice (for instance) and what I like about Lill Tschudi's French linocuts is how much of a Latin she became while in Paris and Jeu de boules (1934) sums up exactly what I mean.

She was thorough when she came to make her linocuts. Scale drawings and studies in gouache or watercolour survive for a number of them and what is interesting is how much the sense of scale and perspective changed once she translated the image into linocut and the textures of the printing were left to speak for themselves. But something got to her in Paris and I think the French linocuts are Tschudi at her best.

Apparently, she saw an exhibition of Norbertine Bresslern Roth's prints while still a girl at home in Switzerland and it was then she decided she, too, would turn into a maker of stylish linocuts but first London and then Paris got in the way. In the early thirties she went off to take Claude Flight's now famous weekly class in linocut at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London. Flight certainly had a way with him when it came to students following his 'I belong to no school' example but Tschudi survived his rather doctrinaire approach and, as you can see from Jeu de boules, she was able to combine the flat, rhythmic designs of the typical Grosvenor linocut with a strict sense of space, perspective and original form of which Georges Seurat had been the modern master. What Seurat didn't have but what Jeu de boules does is a representation of Gallic masculine posture. And it absolutely oozes concentration.

So, how did she do it? While Flight in London was still banging on about the futurists and vorticists as if they had only happened the week before, in Paris there had been a 'return to order' and, interestingly enough, what Tschudi did was to become a student of three of the most orderly of these artists. Gino Severini had even been a futurist before the war but had made the great return to the twin shrines of tempera and mosaic. But perhaps, as with so many others, the greatest of her teachers was Paul Cezanne. You only have to look at the way he simplifies form and also lets both the paint and the canvas have a say in his self-portrait of 1900 to see what I mean. By comparison, Flight was clueless.

So, how many teachers did she need? Severini was based part of the time in Rome and part of the time in Paris and I don't know anything about his classes or if he gave any. Andre Lhote was a decorative cubist and ran his own academy that attracted many artists of talent (and showed commitment by continuing to teach during the German occupation of Paris). But most famous of them all was Fernand Leger, very noticeable on the internet nowadays for the almost endless series of photographic portraits that testify to his physical presence and allure. And it is all very French (and Italian) and you wonder to what extent these three different men were as much models as teachers because the actual subject of Tschudi's French prints is the male form, pure and simple. They sing, they dance, they do the Twist.

What I am also saying is that she was taking on ideas and I think her considerable achievement was to make prints that are buoyant, colourful but that make sense simply because she had thought them out. She isn't the engineer that Leger was; nor does she have the cool beauty of Severini, but she can move us around her pictures with skill and conviction. It's always an interesting journey, we don't trip over too much stylisation and we see the male form from various angles. Its cubism with gusto, that's what it is.

Emil Orlik and a Colnaghi wash mount on ebay

Classic colour woodcuts on ebay from Austria and Germany

Carl Moser: castles of refinement

Ralph Mott

Modern Printmakers update

Margaret Romanes: art & psychoanalysis

Shinsui Ito 'Portrait of Miss Elizabeth Keith'

Walter Phillips 'Winter woodcuts'

A footnote about Malcolm Salaman & Arthur Briscoe

Leslie Moffat Ward: news from nearby

The embroiderers

Claughton Pellew at Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery

Arthur Wesley Dow: lost chances along Ipswich River

Kenneth Broad, Paolo Uccello & others

A modernist colour linocut for sale on ebay

The word on Willie

The colour linocuts of Norah Pearse

Z was the zoo

Walther Klemm and Carl Thiemann, two masters of the colour woodcut at Dachau

Lill Tschudi: the Latin Quarter