woodcut, technique of printing designs from planks of wood incised parallel to the vertical axis of the wood’s grain. It is one of the oldest methods of making prints from a relief surface, having been used in China to decorate textiles since the 5th century ad. In Europe, printing from wood blocks on textiles was known from the early 14th century, but it had little development until paper began to be manufactured in France and Germany at the end of the 14th century. Cuts with heavy outline and little shading, as the “Christ Before Herod” (British Museum), may date from 1400, while the earliest dated print of German origin is the Buxheim St. Christopher of 1423. In Bavaria, Austria, and Bohemia, religious images and playing cards were first made from wood blocks in the early 15th century, and the development of printing from movable type led to widespread use of woodcut illustrations in the Netherlands and in Italy. With the 16th century, black-line woodcut reached its greatest perfection with Albrecht Dürer and his followers Lucas Cranach and Hans Holbein. In the Netherlands Lucas van Leyden and in Italy Jacopo de’ Barbari and Domenico Campagnola, who were, like Dürer, engravers on copper, also made woodcuts.
The woodcut process was widely used for popular illustrations in the 17th century, but no major artist employed it. In the early 19th century it was replaced by wood engraving, which reproduced paintings and sculpture more easily and accurately than did woodcuts. With the mid-19th-century development of photoengraving, however, wood engraving lost its popularity. About that time, artists rediscovered the expressive potential of woodcuts. Instead of the fine-grained hardwoods traditionally used in woodcuts, the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch began to incorporate the grain of softwood into his designs, and the French painter Paul Gauguin achieved new tones and textures by treating the wood surface with sandpaper. Woodcut became an important medium to the German Expressionists, who, inspired by the vitality of medieval woodcuts, gouged and roughly hewed the wood to achieve a brutal effect. In the United States, woodcuts gained importance in the 1920s and ’30s through the illustrations of Rockwell Kent and artists working in the Work Projects Administration. After World War II the artists Misch Kohn, Leonard Baskin, and Carol Summers further developed the woodcut medium in the United States. In the late 1970s and early 1980s it was again revived, in large part because of changing aesthetics in painting.
Woodcuts also play an important role in the history of Japanese art. During the 17th century, a style of genre art called ukiyo-e gained prominence in Japan. Woodcuts served as a convenient and practical way of filling the large demand for inexpensive ukiyo-e pictures. The creation of the ukiyo-e woodcut is attributed to Hishikawa Moronobu (c. 1618–c. 1694), whose designs for illustrations of popular literature were immediately successful. A special branch of ukiyo-e was the making of miniature prints, called suri-mono, to commemorate special occasions. They usually carried a poem and were made on special paper decorated with gold or silver dust. In the 18th century, ukiyo-e culminated in the landscape prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige. Many ukiyo-e woodcuts found their way to the West in the late 19th century and influenced avant-garde artists. In the 20th century the technique was revived by such Japanese hanga masters as Munakata Shiko, Hiratsuka Un’ichi, Maekawa Sempan, and Onchi Kōshirō.