Woodcut

Woodcut is a method of relief (raised) printing in which the image is cut into the surface of a wooden block sawn along the grain. The artist removes the areas that are to remain white, leaving raised the lines and planes of the intended image; these raised parts are inked and pressed against the paper. Woodcut is the oldest technique for printing images: in East Asia it was used from the early medieval period, and in Europe it spread in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries alongside the manufacture of paper. European woodcut reached its highest artistic level in the work of Albrecht Dürer, whose prints astonish with the fineness of their line and the complexity of their composition. In the twentieth century, the German Expressionists revived the woodcut for its rough, energetic expressiveness. Woodcut should be distinguished from wood engraving, cut across the grain, and from the related linocut. In Ukrainian art, woodcut had a long tradition in the decoration of early printed books, notably in the book engraving of the Baroque era.