non-Australian Printmakers

The twentieth century was one of the richest periods in the entire history of printmaking, as artists across Europe, America, Asia and elsewhere engaged with the print medium not as a means of reproduction but as an independent form of artistic expression with its own specific possibilities and pleasures. The prints in this collection represent that tradition in its international dimensions, bringing together work by artists from outside Australia whose engagement with printmaking produced objects of genuine artistic quality and historical interest.

The revival of artistic printmaking in the late nineteenth century — associated with the etching revival championed by Francis Seymour Haden and James McNeill Whistler in Britain and America, and with parallel developments in France and Germany — established the conditions for the extraordinary flowering of fine art printmaking that characterised the twentieth century. Artists who might previously have worked exclusively in painting or sculpture increasingly turned to the print as a primary medium, attracted by the specific qualities of printed surfaces — the burred line of the drypoint, the tonal richness of the aquatint, the direct mark-making of the lithographic crayon — that no other medium could replicate.

The German Expressionists — Kirchner, Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff and their contemporaries — made printmaking central to their artistic project, exploiting the woodcut in particular for its capacity to deliver bold, simplified forms and the raw energy of the cut mark. The prints they produced in the first two decades of the twentieth century are among the most powerful in the history of the medium, and their influence on subsequent generations of printmakers across Europe and beyond was immense. The Expressionist woodcut tradition extended to Scandinavia, the Low Countries and eventually to artists working in contexts far removed from the German origins of the style.

The Paris-centred art world of the interwar period produced a different tradition of fine art printmaking, associated with the Surrealists and their successors and characterised by a greater emphasis on technical refinement and the exploration of the unconscious through automatic and chance-based processes. The etchings and lithographs produced in this context — by Picasso, Miro, Ernst and many others — are among the most celebrated prints of the twentieth century, and the secondary tradition of lesser-known artists working in related modes is of considerable interest to collectors who find the major names beyond their reach.

Printmaking traditions in Japan, China, Mexico and elsewhere developed their own distinct characters through the twentieth century, engaging with Western modernism on their own terms and producing work of great originality that has been increasingly recognised by collectors and institutions as the century has receded into history. The Japanese sosaku-hanga movement — in which artists designed, cut and printed their own blocks rather than working within the collaborative tradition of the earlier ukiyo-e — produced prints of exceptional quality whose international reputation has grown steadily since the postwar period.

For collectors seeking original fine art prints from the international tradition, this section of the catalogue offers material drawn from the full range of twentieth-century printmaking outside Australia. Each work represents a direct encounter with the print medium as a vehicle for artistic expression, and the variety of techniques, styles and cultural contexts represented gives the collection an unusual breadth and depth.