A 1936 art review concerning the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition of woodcut prints by avant-garde German, Russian and French artists and the overwhelming sense of waste and disillusion that pervades each image.
“Before Franz Marc (1880 – 1916) was killed in the war he strengthened woodcut design in his departure from pretty and representational decoration toward more rugged abstraction…Almost all of these German, Russian and Frenchmen have concentrated their attention on human life. There is no pretty landscape, no picturesque architectural rendering, no still life, no sporting print. From a few prints the actual human form has been abstracted. One of these by Wassily Kandinsky ‘looks like a diagram of the contents of a madman’s waste basket’. The rest of the prints are chiefly tragic, mostly pitiful, occasionally derisive comments on the failure of man as an animal.”
