Art I'm Looking At – "Woodcut: Primary Printmaking" at the Legion of Honor

On a recent visit to The Legion of Honor in San Francisco, I saw two good shows – "Japanese Prints in Transition: From the Floating World to the Modern World" (which closed August 18) and "Woodcut: Primary Printmaking" (which runs through October 20). I recently posted some comments about the first of these. Here are some highlights of the Woodcut show. 

On the basement floor at the Legion of Honor there are a couple of small side galleries that are easy to miss, but they are almost always rewarding. One of these often presents works owned by the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts (originally independent but now part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), which has a fabulous collection of more than 90,000 works on paper. The Woodcut show is one such show.

The current show focuses on one printmaking process, the woodcut. "Woodcut" refers to a specific type of relief printing. A relief print is made from a surface from which the non-printing areas have been removed with a sharp tool leaving the original surface to carry the ink that forms the image (in this case the surface is a block of wood). The Japanese prints in the show mentioned above are an example of relief printing that uses multiple blocks, one each for each different color in the final image, but a woodcut may be made from any number of blocks or just one. 

This show now on at the Legion of Honor is not extensive but it draws on the Achenbach Foundation collection to give some idea of the range of expression woodcut allows. Here I post a few of my favorites from the show, but several others that I liked very much were virtually impossible to photograph because of the way they are framed – in particular, what is perhaps my favorite piece in the show, a large print by Carol Summers in rich, deep blues and blacks (at the bottom here I've added an image of the piece, entitled "Stromboli Dark" that I found on a Smithsonian website). 

As noted above, Woodcut: Primary Printmaking runs through October 20 at the Legion of Honor. The Legion of Honor is at 100 34th Avenue (at Clement St.), San Francisco, CA 94121, generally open from 9:30 to 5:15, closed on Mondays.