Auguste Lepere And The Artistic Revival Of The Woodcut In France, 1875-1895.

Abstract

During the period 1875-95 the woodcut as a craft medium, in the form of reproductive wood engraving for illustrated books and newspapers, was becoming commercially obsolete, gradually being replaced by the new photomechanical processes for relief printing. At the same time, however, the woodcut as a medium for original artistic expression was experiencing a vigorous renaissance. In France, a strong print tradition gave rise to experimentation with the single-sheet woodcut to a degree matched nowhere else. A key participant in this development was the painter, draftsman, and woodcut artist Auguste Lepere (1849-1918). Both a reproductive wood engraver and an original artist, Lepere published his first signed wood engraving in 1875 and gradually evolved into an important figure in the woodcut revival, which emerged about 1890. The dissertation examines Lepere's woodcut oeuvre and his activities on behalf of the medium from 1875 to 1895 and explores at length his relationship to other artists working in the medium during this period. Lepere was the originator of the bois original--the single-sheet artist's woodcut as worthy of critical attention as any other original art form. In his exploration of the woodcut aesthetic, which evolved in part from a simultaneous study of both Japanese and fifteenth and sixteenth-century European traditions, Lepere was joined by other pioneers such as Lucien Pissarro, Emile Bernard, Henri Riviere, Henri Guerard, Charles Maurin, and Felix Vallotton. During the late 1880s Symbolist aesthetics, the emergence of which coincided with the death of reproductive wood engraving, also came to play its role in affecting the development of the woodcut; this phenomenon has been taken into account in a summary treatment of the work of Bernard, Denis, Gauguin, Alfred Jarry, and Remy de Gourmont. In conclusion, the activity of Auguste Lepere as an artist and as an organizer on behalf of the woodcut precipitated is rebirth as an artistic medium at the end of the century. His role was that of a catalyst; as Roer Marx said of him, il a emancipe son art.