“Autographic wood-engraving: Modernist DIY“
Résumé
This paper focuses on the description of modernist wood engraving as a humble form of art in the manuals published by John Farleigh, Clare Leighton and Iain Macnab between 1932 and 1940. As a specific form of artistic encounter with a medium, autographic wood engraving relied on the heritage of the Arts and Crafts’ ethics of making as well as on the modernist aesthetics of carving. This paper aims to show that the efficacy of humbleness as an artistic stance allowed wood engraving to straddle the provinces of art, craft and design at a time when the function of artistic skill and handmaking was being displaced.