Exhibition Talk – The woodcut print in Germany after WWI: Remorse, redemption, reparation

This event is organised as part of the Fred Kormis: Sculpting the Twentieth Century event series at The Wiener Holocaust Library

As became all too familiar after the Holocaust, the experience of suffering and inhumanity often proves to be unrepresentable. However, in the aftermath of the First World War in Germany, the opposite was the case. Here, a flood of works on paper gave Expressionist artists and their bruised public an outlet for sentiments that ranged from an insistence on bearing witness to the horrors of trench warfare, to grief and despair; and to a redemptive hope on the other side.

Based on the extraordinary evidence of woodcut prints made by Fred Kormis as a prisoner of war in Siberia, this lecture explores the context of printmaking around 1918. Highlighting the cathartic process of woodcut printing for fellow sculptors and graphic artists Ernst Barlach and Käthe Kollwitz, it considers the qualities of this spare graphic medium that make it suited to the direct expression of existential extremes.

About the Speaker:

Dr Niccola Shearman is a historian of twentieth-century European art, with a focus on Germany and Austria to 1945. She has taught a variety of undergraduate courses at The Courtauld Institute and at the University of Manchester and is a regular contributor to Courtauld Short Courses and to the V&A Academy.

Niccola’s PhD (2018) concerned the intense wave of woodcut printmaking in the aftermath of the First World War in Germany. She has published articles on this subject and on related themes of art and empathy. Further research interests lie in the art of modernist Vienna, and in the careers of Viennese exiles to the UK under the rise of Nazism.

Booking details here

Image: Christian Rohlfs, The Prisoner, (detail) woodcut print, 1918