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"The Voice of the Activist"
Gouge: The Modern Woodcut 1870 to Now. pp. 9-13

LUHRING AUGUSTINE
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in Mexico thereafter. Woodcut was the only technique available to David Alfaro Siqueiros during his 1930 imprisonment for communist activities. Using scraps of salvaged wood, he conceived a series of small scenes with abstract form but intense symbolic meaning. Woodcuts and linoleum cuts were central to the practice of the Mexican graphics collective El Taller de Gráfica Popular (Workshop for Popular Graphic Art), known as the TGP. The experimental workshop lured artists from abroad, including African American printmaker Elizabeth Catlett, whose portrait of a female sharecropper of 1952 is a vivid commentary on the status of women and the underprivileged classes. The gouge proved an effective tool for the TGP'S blunt imgery, and the print medium served their objective to project sharp, straightforward messages to a wide audience. The activist tradition lives on today, notably in the ambitious works of Artemio Rodriguez, an artist who shares his time between Tacámbaro, Michoacán, and Los Angeles. These politically charged prints are similar in scope, aspiration, and visual power to the great murals of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco.

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A parallel tradition of socially conscious woodcuts exists in Germany, ranging from the coarsely cut manifestos of the German Expressionists to the contemporary portrait cycle the Ring (2000) by Thomas Kilpper. In Georg Baselitz's The Eagle (1981), the iconic emblem of the German Federal Republic is depicted head down; its scratchy white outlines offer a striking, deliberate contrast to the stark black background. In Germany, as in other countries, the woodcut medium has lent itself to heroic portrayals of figures from the fringes of society. Here, Christian Rohlfs's The Prisoner (1918) shares the same critical intent as Scottish-born Peter Howson's depiction of a brooding homeless man in The Heroic Dosser (1987).

The activist woodcut is not always destined for wide distribution nor does it need to be visually boisterous. For example, a silent but powerful image is proposed by Zarina Hashmii in Dividing Line (2001): the line that creeps down the cream-colored sheet represents the border between India and Pakistan and the partition of Hindus and Muslims. Zarina's reversal of the typical white on black technique - an effect achieved by carving out the background rather than the line itself - endows the image with an ethereal lightness. 

Previous spread: Carmelo Gonzalez Iglesias, The Pseudo-Republic and the Revolution (detail), 1960. Woodcut printed in black, 51 7/8 x 169 in. UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum. Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Maurice Zeitlin. 

Left: Zarina Hashmi, Dividing Line (detail), 2001. Woodcut printed in black, 25 3/4 x 19 3/4 in. UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum. Purchased with funds provided by Friends of the Graphic Arts. 

Opposite page: Christian Rohlfs, The Prisoner (detail), 1918. Woodcut printed in black, 24 1/16 x 18 3/8 in. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies. Photograph (c) 2008 Museum Associates/LACMA. (c) 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.