Polish wood engravers: Wladislaw Skoczylas and his influence

Wladislaw Skoczylas (1883-1934) is considered the father of modern Polish wood engraving, and most of the other artists in this post studied under him. Skoczylas studied at the art academy in Krakow, the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna, and in the Paris studio of Émile-Antoine Bourdelle. From 1910 he devoted a large part of his work to etching, and from 1923 turned from etching to specialize in wood engraving. From 1928 Wladislaw Skoczylas taught at the Department of the Graphic Arts in the Applied Art School in Warsaw, where he inspired and influenced a whole generation of Polish wood engravers. Skoczylas exhibited in the show Art Polonais at the 1921 Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and was kept in public eye in France by exhibitions of his wood engravings at the Galerie Zak. Skoczylas also continued to paint throughout his career, and regularly exhibited at the Salon d'Automne, of which he was a member.

Wladislaw Skoczylas, Brigands pour un trésor

Wood engraving, black-and-white state, 1924

Wladislaw Skoczylas, Brigands pour un trésor

Wood engraving, coloured state, 1924

Wladislaw Skoczylas, Saint-Christophe

Wood engraving, 1929

Wladislaw Skoczylas, Baruch

Wood engraving, 1929

Bogna Krasnodebska-Gardowska (1900-1986) was certainly a pupil of Skoczylas. She specialised in religious subjects.

Bogna Krasnodebska-Gardowska, L'Apocalypse

Wood engraving, 1929

My sole engraving by Stefan Mrozewski (1894-1975) is also a religious subject (the entombment of Christ); Mrozewski's most important work is considered his series of 101 large engravings for Dante's Divine Comedy, on which he laboured for 32 years. Stefan Mrozewski was born in Czestochowa, Poland, in 1894. Although he showed early talent as an artist, his modest family circumstances initially prevented him from studying art. In 1920 he served in a cartographic unit in the Polish-Soviet war. Afterwards, he attended several art schools, notably studying wood engraving and etching under Wladislaw Skoczylas at the Applied Art School in Warsaw. From 1925-32 Stefan Mrozewski lived in Paris, where he exhibited at various Salons and at the Galerie Bonaparte. His reputation in Paris was such that Pierre Mornand devoted a chapter to his work in Vingt-deux artistes du livre. From 1933-35 Mrozewski lived in Amsterdam, and from 1935-37 in London. He returned to Poland only to find his homeland invaded by the Nazis; Stefan Mrozewski was active in the Polish Resistance, putting his graphic skills to good use. After Poland was swallowed up by the Soviet Union in 1945, Mrozewski made his escape, first to familiar France and Holland, and then in 1951 to the USA, where he lived and worked until his death in Walnut Creek, California, in 1975.

Stefan Mrozewski, Mise au tombeau

Wood engraving, 1929

Edmund Ludwik Bartlomiejczyk (1895-1950) was more of a contemporary of Skoczylas than a student, and in fact Bartlomiejczyk also had a considerable influence on wood engraving in Poland, in his role as a professor at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. Like Skoczylas, he took inspiration from Polish folk art, as in this fine engraving of a peasant playing the bagpipes.

Edmund Bartlomiejczk, Le joueur de cornemuse

Wood engraving, 1929

The same folk art influence can be seen in the work of Zygmunt Kaminski, who drew particularly on the Polish paper-cut tradition. Kaminski (1888-1969) illustrated the novel Chlopi by Wladyslaw Reymont with original woodcuts in this folk art style. He lived and worked in Warsaw. In 1921 Zygmunt Kaminski exhibited at the Exposition des Artistes Polonais organised by the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Zygmunt Kaminski, Chlopi

Wood engraving, 1931

The painter, sculptor, stage director, and printmaker Zbigniew Pronaszko (1885-1958) was born in Zychlin; his younger brother Andrzei Pronaszko was also a significant Polish artist. Zbigniew Pronaszko studied in Krakow under J. Melczevski, and also in Munich. In 1928 he exhibited four canvases in the Polish section of the Salon d'Automne in Paris, bringing his art into the international arena.

Zbigniew Pronaszko, Illustration for 10 Ballad O Powsinogach Beskidzkich

Wood engraving, 1931

Although many of the artists discussed so far drew on folk art, they did so from an educated perspective. My last Polish wood engraver was a true outsider artist. The sculptor and printmaker Jedrzej Wowro (sometimes spelled Vowro) was born in Gorzeniu Dolnym in 1864. Jerdzej Wowro was an entirely self-taught folk artist. Born into a humble farming family, he remained illiterate. Jedrzej Wowro worked in coal mines, mills, and as a lumberjack. It was after being buried in a mine collapse that he returned to Gorzeniu and married Mary Guzek, who was literate, and who introduced him to stories of the saints who appear in much of his work. In 1923 his second wife Marianna Pin took some of his sculptures to the local manor house and showed them to the writer and champion of expressionism Emil Zegadlowicz. From that moment, Zegadlowicz became Jedrzej Wowro's patron, encouraging others to buy his work, and commissioning 20 woodcuts between 1925 and 1933. After that Wowro, now internationally known, was too ill to work. He died at the age of 73 in 1937.

Jerdzej Wowro, Ballada O Swiatkarzu

Wood engraving, 1931

Animal grace: Norbertine Bresslern Roth

Norbertine Bresslern-Roth was born Norbertine Roth in Graz, Austria, in 1891, Bresslern-Roth was one of the pre-eminent linocut artists of the twentieth century, and one of the first to truly explore the possibilities of the medium. Her work had a profound influence on later linocut artists such as Lill Tschudi, while her own choice of subjects (chiefly animals and birds) and compositional style were influenced by the art of L. H. Jungnickel. Charles at Modern Printmakers has an excellent post on Bresslern-Roth, in which he is slightly dismissive of her as essentially an imitator of Ludwig Jungnickel, and while I think it is true that she derived a great deal from him, I do believe her work has its own strengths. Pre-eminent among these is her ability to capture a sense of motion and energy in a static image. "Kampf", her energetic depiction of a fight-to-the-death between a lobster and an octopus is a striking case in point.

Norbertine Bresslern-Roth, Kampf

Linocut, 1923

Bresslern-Roth studied under Alfred von Schrötter at the Graz Academy, then under Ferdinand Schmutzer at the Vienna Academy, and finally at Hans Hajek's school for animal painting in Dachau. Norbertine Bresslern-Roth then returned to Graz, where she lived for the rest of her life. Although she had exhibited with the Vienna Secession from 1912, Norbertine Bresslern-Roth essentially stood aside from the artistic currents of her time. A trip to North Africa in 1928 profoundly influenced her subsequent subject matter and colouring. Her linocuts are very richly inked, and the colours positively glisten from the page. My other prints by, or after, Bresslern-Roth are a series of these linocuts reproduced as lithographic facsimiles. In these, the colours, while true, have a dusty feel in comparison to  the glowing quality of the original linocuts. But they are still powerful and attractive, and I add some to this post to give a more balanced view of her output than "Kampf" alone. The lithographs were made for the book Linolschnitte von Norbertine Bresslern-Roth by Alphons Poller (1926). Bresslern-Roth evidently authorized them, but how closely she was involved beyond that is not clear. Quite probably she would have approved the proofs.

Norbertine Bresslern-Roth, Baviane

Lithograph after a linocut, 1926

Norbertine Bresslern-Roth, Feuersalamander

Lithograph after a linocut, 1926

Norbertine Bresslern-Roth, Fischer

Lithograph after a linocut, 1926

Norbertine Bresslern-Roth, Flucht

Lithograph after a linocut, 1926

Norbertine Bresslern-Roth, Galago

Lithograph after a linocut, 1926

Norbertine Bresslern-Roth, Reiher

Lithograph after a linocut, 1926

Norbertine Bresslern-Roth, Überfall

Lithograph after a linocut, 1926

Norbertine Bresslern-Roth, Ura

Lithograph after a linocut, 1926

Norbertine Bresslern-Roth, Urishirsche

Lithograph after a linocut, 1926

Although she lived until 1978, Norbertine Bresslern-Roth's era was the 1920s and 30s. In 1930, for instance, she was selected as the subject of the seventh monograph in the series Masters of the Colour Print edited by Malcolm C. Salaman and published by The Studio. As well as Salaman's rather gushing text, this had eight tipped-in colour plates (screened four-colour reproductions). This was probably the high point of her international fame, though her art has come back into focus recently through the close attention paid to it in the blogs Modern Printmakers and Art and the Aesthete.

Pierre Dubreuil and Hans Gött: two pupils of Henri Matisse

While most of Henri Matisse's close relationships with other artists were as friend and colleague, sharing ideas and going on joint painting expeditions (for instance in Collioure with Derain in 1906, in Tangier with Marquet and Camoin in 1912, in La Goulette with Étienne Bouchaud in 1926), he also had various formal and informal master-pupil relationships. Most notably, between 1908 and 1912 he ran the Académie Matisse. Many of the students there were Scandinavian, of whom the stars were Sigrid Hjertén, Isaac Grünewald and Per Krohg, but there were also Americans (Max Weber, Alfred Maurer), Germans (Hans Purrmann) and even Britons (Matthew Smith). At this time Matisse had much more respect internationally than he commanded at home, and there was a notable lack of French students at the Académie Matisse. One young French artist who did attend was Pierre Dubreuil. I'm prompted to write about him because of the almost simultaneous acquisition of his engraving Sarah la baigneuse, and the etching Schlafendes Mädchen by Hans Gött. Two sensuous reclining nudes, both resonating with Matisse's vision of an art of luxe, calme, et volupté. Gött was not a student at the Académie Matisse, but instead benefited from informal lessons in Matisse's atelier in 1919.

Pierre Dubreuil, Sarah la baigneuse

Engraving, 1930

Pierre Dubreuil was born in Quimper, Brittany, in 1891. After initial studies in Vannes, and three months at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Dubreuil entered the Académie Matisse in 1908, and remained there until Matisse dissolved the school in spring 1912. His artistic career was stalled by World War One. First military service and then war mobilization stole seven years from his artistic development. Dubreuil did not exhibit until 1921, after which he was a regular at the Salons des Artistes Indépendants, d'Automne, and des Tuileries. As a printmaker, his preferred medium was the copper engraving, though he also produced drypoints, etchings, and wood engravings. He was president of the Société des Peintres-Graveurs Français, and a member of the Peintres-Graveurs Indépendants.

Pierre Dubreuil, On n'est pas heureux qu'avec une bonne femme 

Engraving, 1930

As well as painting and printmaking, Pierre Dubreuil painted murals and designed tapestries, and illustrated a number of books, including works by Restif de la Bretonne, Paul Valéry, Hugues Rebell, and Henri de Regnier. Alongside Matisse, he contributed original prints to the two great collaborative livres d'artiste of the 1930s and 40s, Paris 1937 and Alternance.

Pierre Dubreuil, La Double Maîtresse

Wood engraving, 1930

In 1944 Dubreuil illustrated La Nichina, a novel by the dissolute Hugues Rebell about a sixteenth-century Venetian courtisan, with numerous engravings. The book was published in a fairly large edition of 970 copies, of which 930 were on vélin de Rives, and 40 on vergé de Hollande. The 40 on Hollande laid paper also had a supplementary suite of the engravings, printed in sanguine on china paper. The engravings were printed by Paul Haasen.

Pierre Dubreuil, La Nichina (reclining)

Engraving, 1944

Examples in sanguine on chine and in black on vergé de Hollande

Pierre Dubreuil, Venice, Campanile di San Marco

Engraving, 1944

Pierre Dubreuil, Venice

Engraving, 1944

Pierre Dubreuil, Au soleil levant

Engraving, 1944

Pierre Dubreuil, Filles déguisées en page

Engraving, 1944

Pierre Dubreuil died in Paris in 1970. In 1991 J.-P. Zingg published the first monograph on his work, Pierre Dubreuil. Female bathers were one of his most consistent themes, culminating in a series of paintings between 1941 and 1957 of nude bathers discreetly shadowed beneath trees.

Hans Gött, Schlafendes Mädchen

Etching, 1924

Hans Gött (sometimes spelled Hanns Gött) was born in 1883. He is known as a painter of women, especially nudes and intimate portraits in domestic settings. This is not surprising as, after studying at the Munich Academy, Hans Gött went to Paris in 1919 to study in the atelier of Henri Matisse, whose work remained a strong influence on Gött's art.

Hans Gött, Ars Amatoria I (Romulus with a Sabine woman)

Lithograph, 1920

Hans Gött, Ars Amatoria II (Pasiphae and the bull)

Lithograph, 1920

Hans Gött, Ars Amatoria IV (Daedalus and Icarus)

Lithograph, 1920

Hans Gött, Ars Amatoria VII (Lovers)

Lithograph, 1920

Hans Gött, Remedia Amoris II (Phyllis)

Lithograph, 1920

As a printmaker, Hans Gött worked in both etching and lithography. Among his lithographs are ten made for an edition of Ovid's Ars Amatoria published in 1920; on the title page the artist is credited as Hanns Gött. These witty lithographs show the influence of Matisse's line, though in my view they are too much in thrall to line, and make poor use of lithography's tonal effects. It's as if the artist was expecting to illustrate the text in etching. Hans Gött lived and worked in Munich, and died in 1973.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir as a book illustrator

In 1878, the publishers C. Marpon and E. Flammarion published a lavishly illustrated edition of Émile Zola’s novel L’Assommoir. The title page had a wood engraving of the central character Gervaise by Fortuné Louis Méaulle after a drawing by André Gill, but no other indication of the treasure trove of art to be found within. In fact half a dozen engravers had been kept busy interpreting illustrations by a gallery of artists, including Gill, Norbert Goeneutte, Frédéric Regamey, Henri Gervex, Daniel Vierge, Maurice Leloir, Georges Bellenger, and François Feyen-Perrin. There are 62 plates in all, and four of them are by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

La descente des ouvriers

Wood engraving by Fortuné Méaulle after Norbert Goeneutte, 1878

I don’t know who the publishers engaged to art direct this complex illustrated book, but my hunch would be Regamey, the former art director of the 1870s journal Paris à l’eau-forte, to which many of these artists (though not Renoir) had contributed. I suspect the inspiration for the curious mixture of artists and styles came from the 1876 edition of Léon Cladel’s Les Va-nu-pieds, which was published by Richard Lesclide’s Librairie de l’eau-forte. This was originally announced to be illustrated with etchings by André Gill, but in the end it was illustrated with wood engravings after Gill, Regamey, Vierge, Guérard, Somm, and various other contributors to Paris à l’eau-forte. It appears that Marpon and Flammarion liked the idea of issuing novels in serial parts, using multiple illustrators in this way (although to my mind it produces in the end a book with little visual cohesion or integrity), and they proceeded to issue similar illustrated editions of various Zola novels. So far as I know, Renoir only contributed to L’Assommoir. He probably agreed to the commission because of his friendship with Zola. According to this article Zola was involved in selecting the artists, and personally approached Renoir. Renoir also owed a debt of friendship and gratitude to the original publisher of L’Assommoir, Georges Charpentier.

La Loge des Boche

Wood engraving after Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1878

130 copies were printed on handmade Hollande wove paper, each containing an additional suite of the illustrations printed on china paper; these rare copies are now immensely sought-after. But there was also a trade edition on ordinary book-wove paper. This cheap paper has not stood the test of time very well, and many copies of the ordinary edition have browned and foxed. But I have been lucky enough to find a copy in which the pages are clean and fresh.

Lantier et Gervaise passèrent une très-agréable soirée au café-concert

Wood engraving by Henri Paillard after Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1878

Renoir’s four plates are of varying quality, I think. “Lantier et Gervaise passèrent une très-agréable soirée au café-concert”, which is signed A.R. in the bottom left of the block, and was engraved by Henri Paillard, is the most successful to my eyes. The subject-matter is perfect for Renoir, and the whole scene is brimming with life.

Les filles d’ouvriers se promenant sur le boulevard extérieur

Wood engraving after Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1878

“Les filles d’ouvriers se promenant sur le boulevard extérieur” is also very atmospheric. It bears the signature Renoir, again in the bottom left, but there is no indication as the identity of the engraver. The original drawing in pen and brown ink over black chalk is in the Regenstein Collection in the Art Institute of Chicago. The author of the note on it in the Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies declares it “one of the most important drawings the artist produced during the years of high Impressionism.” A long-lost earlier version of the same composition, annotated by Zola, was discovered in an office safe in 2003, and sold at auction for £106,750.

Le père Bru piétinait dans la neige pour se réchauffer

Wood engraving after Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1878

The other two illustrations don’t seem to me to reach the same high standard. Each has its Impressionistic charm, one a cramped interior, the other a shivery exterior, but in both cases Renoir, unused to creating drawings for reproduction, has introduced so much cross-hatching that the effect is very dark, and a little confused. It’s interesting to me that in only one case of the four is the engraver credited, and that plate is, for me, much the most successful; the engraver, Paillard, was himself a noted artist. Although all the illustrations are always described as wood engravings, I passingly wondered if the other three Renoirs, and a few of the other images where no engraver is credited (such as Regamey’s "Gervaise et Coupeau", and Goeneutte’s "L’atelier de fleuristes"), might possibly be reproduced by some other process, such as Gillotage (a form of photolithography using zinc plates). It's very hard to say for sure. But I think on the whole that they probably are wood engravings - certainly, there is more detail in the published plate of Renoir's "Les filles d'ouvriers..." than there is in either of the two drawings, and all the images are reproduced purely in line, with no tone.

Below are just a few of the other illustrations to this edition of L’Assommoir, to indicate the range of talents at work on this project.

La bataille de Gervaise et Virginie

Wood engraving by Eugène Froment after André Gill, 1878

Gervaise et Coupeau, l’ouvrier zingueur, mangeaient ensemble une prune à l’Assommoir

Wood engraving after Frédéric Regamey, 1878

Les Lorilleux travaillant l’or

Wood engraving by Clément Bellenger after Georges Bellenger, 1878

Ça ne vous empêchera pas d’y passer, ma petite

Wood engraving by Albert Bellenger, 1878

L’accident du coupeau

Wood engraving by Jules Léon Perrichon after Alfred Garmer, 1878

Ce fut le zingeuer qui força Lantier à entrer

Wood engraving by Alfred Kemplen after Maurice Leloir, 1878

L’atelier de fleuristes

Wood engraving after Norbert Goeneutte, 1878

Gervaise lavant par terre dans la boutique de confiserie

Wood engraving by Fortuné Méaulle after Alexandre Auguste Rosé, 1878

Les femmes attendant la paye à la port de l’atelier

Wood engraving by Clément Bellenger after Daniel Vierge, 1878

Max Pollak: Portrait of Maria Ley

Max Pollak was born in Prague in 1886. He grew up in Vienna, where he studied printmaking under William Unger and Ferdinand Schmutzer. He won the Prix de Rome for his etchings in 1910. In WWI Pollak was an official war artist for the Austrian army. After spending three years in Paris, in 1927 Max Pollak emigrated to the United States, settling in San Francisco, where he lived for the rest of his life. He was a member of the California Society of Etchers (winning their award in 1942, 1944, and 1945) and of the Chicago Society of Etchers (winning their award in 1942). In his American years Pollak etched scenes in Mexico and Central America, as well as California. Brilliant and accomplished as these etchings are, it is generally thought that his work in Vienna and Paris is his finest, most particularly the sensuous portraits he etched of dancers such as Maria Ley, Kitty Starling, Ronny Johansson, and Isa Marsen. These are triumphant examples of movement captured in a still image, etched in Max Pollak's typical manner with the image mainly or completely incised with a drypoint needle and the colour hand-applied to the plate for each impression, à la poupée.

Max Pollak, Maria Ley

Drypoint, 1924

Like Max Pollak, the subject of this drypoint Maria Ley emigrated to the United States, where she was known as Maria Ley-Piscator. Maria and her husband Erwin Piscator (a colleague and close friend of Bertolt Brecht) founded the Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research. Among their pupils were Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, Walter Matthau, Tennessee Williams, and Tony Randall.