The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (517 page)

 
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(1901–30)
. British painter, mainly of landscapes, harbour scenes, and figure compositions. In 1921 he studied at the
Académie
Julian in Paris and subsequently travelled widely on the Continent. To influences from modern French art (
Picasso
and
Diaghilev
were among his friends), he added an entirely personal lyrical freshness and intensity of vision, touched with what Gwen
Raverat
felicitously described as ‘fashionable clumsiness’. In a remarkably short time he achieved a position of high regard in the art worlds of London and Paris but he was emotionally unstable and his early death was probably suicide (he was killed by a train). After this he became something of a legend as a youthful genius cut off before his prime. Much of Wood's best work was done in Cornwall, where he and his friend Ben
Nicholson
discovered the
naïve painter
Alfred
Wallis
in 1928.

 
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Wood , Derwent
.

See
NEW SCULPTURE
.

 
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(1892–1942)
. American painter, active mainly in Iowa, his native state. Early in his career he was an artistic jack-of-all-trades. The turning-point in his life came when he obtained a commission to make stained-glass windows for the Cedar Rapids Veteran Memorial Building in 1927 and went to Munich to supervise their manufacture the following year. Influenced by the Early Netherlandish paintings he saw in museums there, he abandoned his earlier
Impressionist
style and began to paint in the meticulous, sharply detailed manner for which his work is chiefly known. Adapting this style to the depiction of the ordinary people and everyday life of Iowa, he became one of the leading exponents of
Regionalism
. He first came to national attention in 1930 when his painting
American Gothic
won a bronze medal at an exhibition of the Art Institute of Chicago, which now owns the painting. Although at the time it aroused violent controversy and was deplored as an insulting caricature of plain country people, the painting gradually gained great popularity. In 1931 Wood introduced an element of humorous fantasy in
The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere
(Met. Mus., New York) and in 1932 he painted his famous satirical picture
Daughters of the Revolution
, (Cincinnati Art Museum), described as ‘three sour-visaged and repulsive-looking females, represented as disgustingly smug and smirking because of their ancestral claim to be heroes of the American Revolution’. His other work includes some vigorous stylized landscapes, and during the 1930s he supervised several Iowa projects of the
Federal Art Project
. In 1934 he became assistant professor of fine arts at the University of Iowa.

 
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woodcut
.

The technique of making a print from a block of wood sawn along the grain (the term is also applied to the print so made). It is the oldest technique for making prints and its principles are very simple. The design is drawn on a smooth block of wood (almost any wood of medium softness can be used—beech, pear, sycamore for example) and the parts that are to be white in the print are cut away with knives and gouges, leaving the design standing up in relief. This is then inked and pressed against a sheet of paper. The origins of woodcut are obscure (the principle was employed in fabric printing in the Middle East at least as early as the 5th cent. AD), but woodcut as we know it appeared in Europe in the early 15th cent.; the earliest dated print is perhaps the
St Christopher
(1423) by an unknown artist in the John Rylands Library, Manchester. Many of the earliest woodcuts were crude popular religious images designed to be sold at fairs and pilgrim shrines (see also
BLOCK BOOK
), but in skilled hands the technique could produce much more sophisticated results. Woodcut was at its peak in the first thirty years of the 16th cent., in both individual prints and book illustrations, with
Dürer
being the supreme master. Thereafter it lost ground to
line engraving
, which could produce subtler effects. In the late 19th and early 20th cents., however, there was a major revival of interest in the woodcut as a medium of original artistic expression.
Gauguin
and
Munch
were the great pioneers in the 1890s, using the grain of the wood to create bold and vigorous textural effects, and they were followed by the German
Expressionists
(notably the members of Die
Brücke
), some of whom virtually hacked the design into the block. The coloured woodcut, using different blocks for each colour, was particularly popular in Japan (see
UKIYO-E
).

 
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