1A prominent aspect of British visual culture from the 1890s to the interwar period is the revival of autographic printmaking.1 This was accompanied by the publication of reviews and articles in the periodical press and of specialized handbooks. This paper explores aspects of this trend and concentrates on the manuals of wood engraving that were published in between 1932 and 1940 by artists who were often practitioners as well as teachers. Characterized by simplicity and limited means, no longer the province of lovers of prints and connoisseurs, wood engraving is described as a humble form of art.

Figure 1 –– Clare Leighton, Wood-Engraving and Woodcuts (London: The Studio, 1932) 16–17.

2Before the First World War ‘creative’ wood engraving was taught in institutions such as the Central School of Arts and Crafts, the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, and to a lesser extent the Slade but the arrangements of arts schools were often limited and these engravers learned as much by inspiration and advice from fellow artists. However their teachers (such as Noel Rooke at the Central School of Arts and Crafts or Leon Underwood and Iain Macnab who ran their own private schools) were instrumental in initiating and reflecting on the trend, as well as collectors, curators and critics. The early to mid-1920s were an experimental phase as wood engraving became an avant-garde medium and James Hamilton aptly describes the decade as its ‘Heroic Age’ (Hamilton 115). Wood engraving achieved commercial recognition in the 1930s, reflecting a shift from craft to design after the collapse of the print market in the aftermath of the 1929 economic crash. By the end of the 1930s however the trend had spent its energy so that in the 1940s it was ‘once more the medium of the petits maîtres, a backwater in British art’ (146).

Figure 2 –– John Farleigh, Graven Image: An Autobiographical Textbook (London: Macmillan, 1940) 76–77.

3This paper examines the humble stance of the artists that authored handbooks on wood engraving by looking at how this form of autographic art is described in these works. Humbleness was instrumental in securing the popular success of these pictures as vernacular forms of art in the shape of prints, illustrations and posters—to name some of the outlets that were available in the 1930s. It is one of the reasons for these artists’ ability to carve a niche in English visual culture. The lure of the values associated with craft and design combined with three potent factors: the movement tapped into explorations of Englishness, adopted the ethical principles of the Arts and Crafts movement and also partook of the carving aesthetics deriving from sculpture and defined as dominant creative mode by critics such as Herbert Read and Adrian Stokes in the 1930s. This article focuses on the last two aspects and seeks to demonstrate that humbleness appears to have been a particularly apt strategy in achieving aesthetic success and artistic legitimacy.

D.I.Y.

4Handbooks on modern wood engraving were published from the early 1920s. The three works under consideration in this paper were written in the 1930s by prominent artists as well as writers, illustrators and teachers who had been part of the modern revival of the art. Writer, illustrator and designer John Farleigh (1900–1965) was taught wood engraving by Noel Rooke at the Central School of Arts and Crafts after the First World War where he later became a teacher. Keenly interested in design and craft, he was a founding member of the Crafts Centre of Great Britain (1946). His autobiography Graven Image published in 1940 is not strictly speaking a handbook. It describes his growth as an artist but also includes sections that read like a textbook, which is why it was included here. Clare Leighton (1898–1989) studied at the Slade School of Art in the early 1920s and like Farleigh she learned wood engraving at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. A writer, illustrator, teacher and lecturer, she was a compulsive traveller who finally settled in the United States in 1939 and took up American nationality. Her Wood-Engraving and Woodcuts was published in 1932. Scottish artist Iain Macnab (1890–1967) was the founder of the Grosvenor School of Modern art (1925). A versatile artist, he practised linocutting—a speciality of his school—and turned only later to wood engraving, producing noted illustrations in the 1930s and publishing Wood-Engraving in 1938.

5These books are written clearly, giving simple and didactic guidelines. They are illustrated with works from contemporary artists, with pictures of tools and reproductions of prints—including prints in the making in Leighton’s book which contains reproductions of different states. They target practitioners, art students, and amateurs, rather than collectors and connoisseurs and aim to raise the technical standards which, Macnab says in 1938 ‘have risen enormously’ over the last dozen years.2 They stress the apparent simplicity of wood engraving as craft and exhibit a hands-on approach as shown by the ‘How to do it’ series published by The Studio. Clare Leighton’s Wood-Engraving and Woodcuts is the second manual in the series and the author presents wood engraving as the simplest form of print, requiring basic tools and fairly inexpensive and portable material: ‘The principle of the modern woodcut is that of a white chalk drawing on a blackboard [. . .]. Every cut made on a wood block prints white, so that one is always working up from the black towards the light. [. . .] The materials needed are simple and fairly inexpensive.’3

6Similarly Macnab advises the beginner to avoid buying a large set of tools because ‘In time he will narrow his choice of tools down to perhaps three favourites’ (Macnab 17). Wood engraving requires a limited amount of investment and no specific training: the handbooks seek to debunk the idea that technique is ‘a fetish, a mystery, requiring initiation and long apprenticeship, a host of materials and a specialized workshop.’4 Both Leighton and Macnab explain that you don’t even need a printing press since an old spoon from the kitchen will replace the burnisher, as ‘a greater intimacy is possible’ (Leighton 17)—although Macnab admits that it can turn out to be ‘a lengthy and wearisome business’ (Macnab 50). Leighton prefers to use the three main tools (the scorper, graver, and spitzsticker) and warns against the ‘clever’ and ‘mechanical’ effect obtained with the multiple tool (Leighton 22, 9). Macnab adds that ‘the wood-engraver [can] put his blocks and a few tools in his pocket and go anywhere he like [s]’ (Macnab 2). The kitchen can serve as a studio and photographs of Leighton wearing an arts-and-craftsy smock in the first half of her book show that such practice belongs to the private, domestic realm rather than to the art gallery and the museum (see Figure 1, p. 36).

7A humble and arguably austere form of art, wood engraving is a process that works through gradual subtraction—as you cut away from the block—and demands concentration as you work on small-scale surfaces, creating a subtle gradation of tones from white to grey and black. In a special issue of The Studio, Leighton underlines its ‘severity of discipline’ and claims that ‘it has a wider range as a medium than any other of the graphic arts.’5 In order to master these nuances preliminary practice involves experimenting with a variety of scratches and lines to gauge how to best use the tools and how to control the hand’s motions. Thereafter it is up to the practitioners to devise their own rules, as Macnab explains: ‘There are [. . .] no fixed rules of style in wood engraving, and until the beginner has found his own way of expressing himself and has developed his own technique, this way may give him a method of attack’ (Macnab 49).

8The craft actually demands more practice and hard work than suggested in these books but it promises to yield artistic fulfilment as long as the artist possesses the required graphic skills and the ability to master specific constraints such as the values of black and white, the rendering of tone, and the ability to visualise how the reversed images will appear when printed. In perfect modernist fashion, these writings stress the limitation of the medium and the truth to material inherent in the practice: ‘It may sound paradoxical, but the more limitations an artist imposes upon himself by reason of an intractable medium, and the more he observes these limitations, the greater degree of freedom will he discover’ (Macnab 2).

9Truth to material involves not only the need to work within material constraints but also an engagement with a medium that has to be negotiated individually: ‘The methods are very individual, determined by whether the artist feels happier evolving the engraving directly out of the wood as he works, letting himself be dictated to more or less by his medium, or whether he wishes to be sure of his design before he starts’ (Leighton 1932, 11). This somewhat contradictory statement implies two opposed attitudes that are equally valid: responding to the medium’s constraints or working out a pre-conceived design. As a general rule, Leighton simply states: ‘The only thing to remember is always to be as direct as possible’ (18). More cautiously Macnab warns against ‘the temptation to start cutting immediately’ before considering whether the design is worth engraving and believes that one should evolve the engraving from a pencil drawing (Macnab 23).

10Wood engraving involves therefore humble means as well as humility on the part of the artist who must show application, patience, and more importantly a direct and individual engagement with a medium that doesn’t allow for retakes: ‘by the time the artist has produced several engravings most of these problems will have solved themselves. [. . .] the convention employed must be based on the artist’s experiments into the possibilities of the medium, and not on preconceived ideas and habits cultivated by working in other media’ (Macnab 46, 49).

11Wood engraving is a form of art that recognizes its technical basis as craft. The manuals exhibit the ‘menu of limitation’ that Bruce Metcalf defines as essential to craft: the emphasis on objecthood and material, hand making, working with ‘limited means’ within ‘a restricted field.’6 And indeed the restricted nature of wood engraving accounts for the fact that it was often taken up by young artists for a time and then given up after its possibilities had been fully exploited (Hamilton 14–15).

Carving a Niche

12Affordable and democratic, wood engraving appealed to a young generation of artists and became a source of pride (Carey 9). Leighton praised ‘the outstanding school of wood-engraving that is our glory to-day’ in 1932 (Leighton 1932, 96), the year when John Farleigh’s momentous illustrations to Bernard Shaw’s Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God were published. From the late 1890s photomechanical means of reproduction had entailed the demise of reproductive wood engraving. Wood engraving disappeared as a trade but was revived as a form of autographic art that encapsulated such values as the hand-made, individuality, uniqueness, and truth to material, as opposed to the so-called mechanical nature of photography and of industrial mass-production. The revival followed up on the Arts and Crafts critique of industrial production, and on John Ruskin’s and William Morris’s vision of craft as ‘unalienated labour.’7 Paul Greenhalgh points out that according to the Arts and Crafts Movement’s ethical principle ‘the crafts were to be a politicised form of work which produced art objects to decorate society. The vernacular was the model, unalienated work was the means and art was the goal’ (Greenhalgh 35). This model held its own up until the First World War and was still put in practice by the ‘great studio-crafts people’ such as Eric Gill and Bernard Leach (36), to which could be added those associated with the private press movement.

13The handbooks on wood engravings often begin with a history of the movement putting the emphasis on the precursors, beginning with the achievements of Thomas Bewick as tutelary figure. Such narratives are related to the interwar historiographic exploration of the roots of English art: from Bewick and William Blake to the Arts and Crafts movement, side-stepping the Industrial Revolution seen as a period of regression and debasement of creative handwork and craft, these modernist teleological narratives culminate in the modern movement. The practise of wood engraving is also seen as a form of creative recovery after the First World War: ‘the War somehow released the flood,’ wrote Campbell Dodgson, Keeper of Prints at the British Museum.8 The reader of these handbooks is presented with a step-by-step introduction course that involves a phylogenetic approach mirroring these historicizing narratives, as shown by Farleigh’s statement: ‘It is now obvious to me that the student must start from Bewick and go on through the nineteenth century, even up to the decadence of engraving, [. . .] in order to give his work a contemporary flavour and to exploit the medium at its fullest.’9

14That the word ‘woodcut’10 was sometimes used to refer to wood engraving afforded the latter the hallmark of authenticity and primitivism associated with pre-industrial craft. As Kathleen Chapman has noted, there was widespread interest in the woodcut in Europe, and more particularly in Germany where it chimed with nationalist ideological appropriation, as shown by its appeal to Expressionist artists: ‘The linearity, flatness and bold simplicity of the imagery of old woodcuts provided these artists with a primitivising formal language that they could adapt and update in their efforts to create direct expressions of their inner strivings and the spiritual essences of the world.’11 The directness of the artist’s engagement with the medium struck a chord with the Vorticist avant-garde in England and generally speaking such artists and writers as T.E. Hulme, Edward Wadsworth and later on Herbert Read were influential in disseminating principles derived from German aesthetics.

15After the First World War, reclaiming the hand-made fitted with the modernist appropriation of the vernacular,12 as shown by a surge in the number of organisations devoted to craft, testifying to its institutional recognition (Greenhalgh 38). As far as wood engraving is concerned, this was exemplified by the flood of engraved books about rural England that Kristin Bluemel describes as sites of ‘ideal modernity’ blending revivalist attitudes with modern formalism.13 The hybrid status of wood engraving—art and craft—allowed it to straddle recovery of lost traditions and expressive creativity. It also accounted for the ease with which wood engravers adapted to the shift from craft to design.

16At the end of the nineteenth century the rift between craft and design gradually led to the association of the latter with mass-production and industry (Greenhalgh 40). Concomitant was the rift between handmade and intellectual processes within the modernist avant-garde. Citing Arthur Danto’s definition of art as embodied meaning in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), Metcalf views such works as Marcel Duchamp’s Urinal (1917) as a form of deskilling (Metcalf 69–71). Greenhalgh concurs that the readymade as ‘non physical intervention’ aggravated the dismissal of craft from the provinces of art: ‘for the craftsperson [craft] was to do with empowerment, for the avant-garde fine artist it was to do with constraint’ (Greenhalgh 43).

17If wood engraving entailed a critique of mechanical production and presented itself as a craft, it also contributed to integrate art with modern industry. The commercial uses of wood engraving included posters, advertisements, calendars, and illustrations. Wood engravers managed to bridge the gap between art, craft and design, as well as between the vernacular and the modern. This was partly achieved by reclaiming the aesthetics of utility that derived from the Arts and Crafts Movement and was subsumed within modern design.14 By claiming that wood engraving was a form of design, wood engravers preserved the conceptual aspect of art while asserting the physical constituency of skill. They were also responding to ongoing changes in publishing and educational policies as well as in the curriculum of art schools and technical schools, a shift that resulted in diverse moves, from the creation of the Design and Industries Association in 1915—where the transitional figure of W.R. Lethaby endorsed both craft and machinery15—to that of the Society of Industrial Artists (1930) and the Council for Art and Industry (1933).

18In the conclusion to her handbook, Leighton summarises the economic reasons for the modern use of wood engraving: she cites the growing demand of a public that is ‘not wealthy’ and the development of a taste in keeping with modern design and house decoration (Leighton 1932, 94, 95), a development notoriously advocated by Paul Nash.16 In her 1936 book she stresses the democratisation of culture and design: ‘ [the artist’s] intense emphasis on form can find a satisfying expression in the solid, strong planes that can be cut in wood. His love of design is satisfied. It is a fitting medium for an intellectual age’ (Leighton 1936, 14). Macnab also stresses the formal simplification that ‘bring [s] out the inherent beauty of that medium’ (Macnab 2). Although most wood engraving prints and illustrations were figurative, the formalist interplay of black and white allowed them to compete with more abstract designs for interior decoration characterized by streamlining of ornament, as shown for instance by the pattern papers designed by Paul Nash for the Curwen Press in the late 1920s.17

19Indeed reduction and elimination are key technical characteristics that account for the abstract nature of wood engraving in the sense that it relies on abstracted shapes. To Herbert Read, who sought to reconcile art and industry, this abstract quality was precisely the basis of modern design and this was spelled out in terms of economy of material, simplification and clarity. As he explained in Art and Industry (1934), design stemmed from a new understanding of the social role of art, which involved stripping ‘the work of art to its essentials.’18 This aesthetics of elimination had already been claimed by critics and wood engravers from the late 1890s, and so had its moral corollaries, sincerity and integrity (Whiteley 194), two qualities that were thought to be inherent in the practice of wood engraving. However, it was given a new lease of life as it chimed with what became a dominant mode of understanding sculpture.

Carving Aesthetics: Direct Attack

20Advocacy of the handmade and of craftsmanship was not limited to wood engravers but related to the larger context of the modern carving aesthetics, which saw sculpture as a template for work in other media. This shift, Penelope Curtis contends, occurred ‘at the cost of modellers’: ‘in Britain, by c. 1930, there was really only one way of being modern. To be modern was to carve, and to carve abstracted forms derived from but not dependent on the human figure.’19 Critical posterity, she explains, has only retained carving as the orthodox way of being modern to the exclusion of a multiplicity of other approaches. Keeping in mind her vindication of ‘more plural modernism’ (Curtis 292), it is nevertheless noteworthy for the purpose of this essay to address the analogy between wood engraving and direct carving. Indeed both practises were underpinned by an aesthetics of directness and authenticity that signalled an implicit recognition of the artist’s ‘subjective omnipotence,’ a conception that John Roberts has shown was coming under increasing strain in the early decades of the twentieth century which saw a radical redefinition of the function of the artist’s hand and skill.20

21The analogy between wood engraving and carving was explicitly made by the art critic Herbert Furst and by artists such as Eric Gill and Gertrude Hermes who were both sculptors and engravers. In the first issue of The Woodcut which was edited by Furst from 1928 Paul Nash praises the ‘glyptic character of engraving on wood’: ‘[the woodcut] discovers itself as a very pure form of art, with its sculptural character, its simple expression in black and white, its direct technique and straightforward application. Of all the arts which are crafts it is the most autobiographical.’21 Furst had already underlined ‘the freeing of the “design” from the material by a series of gradual eliminations.’22 Similarly the manuals of wood engravings stress that precision of attack, simplicity and directness combine to produce ‘realised form’: as Leighton puts it, ‘the thinking must be done before the engraving’ (Leighton 1932, 96). The notion that sculptural form was carved out of resistant material was a classical principle that harked back to Vasari. In the 1920s it was upheld by art critics Stanley Casson, W. H. Wilenski and Eric Underwood as a British form of art.23 It may be argued that this positioning preserved sculpture from any complete association with craft as ‘non intellectual manual skill’ (Greenhalgh 45) as it foregrounded conceptual processes that aligned it with design. Nevertheless the modernist emphasis on direct carving also derived from New Sculpture’s criticism of neo-classical sculpture viewed as mechanical labour, which led to reinvest ‘the material with a hand-craft ethic.’24

22The carving aesthetics also applied to abstract painters such as Ben Nicholson. As Chris Stephens has shown, Nicholson’s white reliefs relate both to abstraction and to the English craft tradition. His attention to surface texture relied on the ‘ethics of craftsmanship and the handmade,’ and this ‘was fundamental to the “truth to materials” ideology which dominated contemporary sculpture’ (Stephens 232). One of the leading promoters of Nicholson’s art was Herbert Read who brought to the fore the ‘immediacy of the relationship’ between the artist and his material (232). Read put the emphasis on the importance of tactility and on the bodily engagement of the artist.25 His view of artistic creation relied on what he called ‘will to form,’ a notion he borrowed from Aloïs Riegl through Wilhelm Worringer: commenting on the sculptures of Henry Moore in The Meaning of Art (1931), he describes the creation of form as a move ‘from the inside outwards.’26 This in turn entails a form of reception on the part of the viewer based on ‘empathy’ (an adapted version of Theodor Lipps’s Einfühlung through Worringer and Hulme) as projection ‘into the form of the work of art’ (39).27 The craft that best exemplifies the will to form, according to Read, is pottery, ‘the most elemental’ and ‘the most abstract’ form of art, as he explains in The Meaning of Art (42). Elevating pottery to the rank of sculpture, Read advocates carving, as opposed to modelling, to underscore notions of ‘artistic integrity’ and ‘individuality’ (241). He remarks that the art of direct cutting was lost and is being rediscovered. His advocacy of carving shares striking similarities with narratives of loss and recovery in the manuals on wood engraving, and also with the descriptions of wood engraving as a reductive process.

23Read concentrates on the ‘will or impulse behind artistic expression’28 in a manner that ties in with a vision of the physicality of wood engraving, mediated by the body and using the body as a medium. The manuals’ authors stress the act of engraving as expressive extension of the body, using metaphors of attack: ‘all wood-engraving is done away from the body,’ writes Leighton (1932, 13), who also speaks of ‘attacking the block’ (36). In a more gender-conscious way Farleigh writes that ‘[t] echnique and conception are one—a form forces its way through the wood, the tool quivers and strains as it becomes part of that same urgency’ (Farleigh 195). Perhaps this was taken too literally by certain practitioners since Douglas Percy Bliss in his History of Wood-Engraving severely criticises ‘beginners, wind-fed with current cant, violently stabbing the beautiful pieces of boxwood’29 and Macnab describes the beginners’ zeal in similar terms when they ‘start hacking at the surface and ruin [the block] completely’ (Macnab 21).

24In order to emphasise the nature of wood engraving as a direct means of physical expression, handbooks often contain pictures of hands as the creative organ, linking the haptic with individuality and unmediated touch—i.e. by any mechanical means (see Figure 2, p. 37). Along with the craftsman’s ‘strange oddments,’ Farleigh observes how ‘a tool take [s] the character of the hand (which, it must be remembered, is controlled by the mind) and become [s] invested with the personality of the craftsman’ (Farleigh 69). This way of staging the representation of the craft is used in the volume Unit One (1934) edited by Read who also related the artist’s handwriting to the ‘capacity to allow the personality to express itself in the craftsmanship’ in the conclusion to Art Now (1933).30

25A few closing remarks are now necessary to summarise the paradoxical relationship between the artist and his medium. The humbleness of the craft and the humility of the wood engraver do not preclude forceful expressiveness of the artist’s part but contribute to accentuate it. Working on a woodblock involves a form of effacement as the engraver allows ‘the medium to dictate its technique,’ as Furst puts it (264). But on the other hand the incisions on the woodblock are an inscription of the creative impulse into the medium. The tool must ‘respond to the artist’s intentions,’ writes Macnab (21). This dual process of self-effacing and inscription is described by the artist and art critic Adrian Stokes, notably in his works on Italian Renaissance architecture and sculpture (more precisely low relief), The Quattro Cento (1932) and The Stones of Rimini (1934), in which he too opposes carving to modelling. For the carver, creativity involves a move outwards: he has to ‘to turn subjective matter outwards, to concrete upon the surface of the stone an inner ferment,’31 which is both that of the artist’s psyche and the immanent form ‘that already exists in the block’ (The Stones of Rimini 114). Humility in the face of the medium is rooted in craft as well as in manual labour: ‘as the cultivator works the surfaces of the mother earth so the sculptor rubs his stone to elicit the shapes which his eye has sown in the matrix’ (109). This gendered image of the cultivator carving the earth is a reference to John Ruskin’s lectures on engraving, Ariadne Florentina (1873–1875).32 In the wake of Ruskin and Morris the carving aesthetics underpinning these various works testifies to an attempt to restore a form of creative encounter with the material, an encounter which was thought to have been lost or debased.

26Wood engraving achieved a compromise between craft and art, art and design, tradition and modernity. Its efficacy stemmed from the fact that it claimed craft as an integral aspect of art and shared with design an ethics of elimination, simplicity and integrity but also wrested autographic originality away from modern design’s striving for impersonality (Whiteley 194). In so doing its practitioners highlighted the bodily engagement involved in the process and inscribed physicality and materiality within the realm of the visual. However, the humble stance of wood engravers can also be construed as a form of resistance and as a sign of aesthetic anxiety. As Roberts remarks at the outset of Intangibilities of Form, ‘touch and manual dexterity’ are ‘markers of artistic taste and authority’ that underpin the mystique of the autonomous artist as maker (Roberts 9). Yet this was losing ground in the early decades of the twentieth century as a new conception of ‘non-alienated labour’—namely the readymade as ‘immaterial labour’— brought about the ‘crisis of artistic skill’ (26). Therefore, the writings of the modernist wood engravers provide an invaluable comment on this transitional phase when the notions of skill, craft and artistic practice were undergoing radical transformations.

27In the mid- to late 1930s both Leighton and Macnab were taking stock of the evolution of wood engraving, realising that it had run its course in England. Leighton was soon to move permanently to the United States while both Farleigh (159) and Macnab warned against decline into mannerism. Macnab made the significant point that the rallying cry of ‘limitation of the medium’ had ‘tended to obscure the possibilities of the medium and [had] stifled initiative in craftsmanship’ (Macnab 45). ‘ [N] ot another textbook,’ Farleigh announces in the introduction to Graven Image which opens with a short anecdote: ‘With two hours to wait for a train, three tools and a spare block, I engraved my fourth block’ (Farleigh 1). By 1950, he was still praising people who ‘continue to make things by simple, almost primitive tools,’ as well as qualities that could not be found in industrial processes: ‘this subtle combination of freedom of design, response to material, human understanding, and love of making.’33 A visit to the website of The Society of Wood Engravers,34 initially founded in 1920, shows that these have been perpetuated and that the digital update of how-to-do-it guidelines has retained simplicity and humbleness as a principle.