Woodcuts & Wood Engravings: How I make them
- New York: Pyson Printers, 1939
New York: Pyson Printers, 1939. Portfolio Edition. Very Good. Loose sheets [32 cm x 25 cm]. Final page is p. 187. Eight folded sheets. These sheets measure 50 cm x 32 cm when unfolded. Very occasional light soiling to the text and illustrations. Several illustrations with fine pinholes in the corners. Housed in a clamshell box which is in rough condition, with cracks to the joints, and the remains of a bookplate on the inside of the clamshell. It is remotely possible that the portfolio is missing p. 95/96 and p. 120, however this absence is hard to discern for certain, as there could be a couple of inconsistencies in the method of pagination designation. ***It is definite that the portfolio is lacking the signed proof of the artist's engraved self portrait. One of 250 copies issued in portfolio form, reproducing the master printmaker's woodcuts, color woodcuts, wood engravings, engraved vignettes and initials, wood engravings in two, three, four and five colors, and book pages.
German-born Hans Alexander Mueller (1888-1962) studied and taught at the Academy of Visual Art in Leipzig, where the highly influential socially-conscious printmaker Lynd Ward, known for his six wordless novels, was his student. In the mid-1930s Mueller emigrated to the United States, settling in Scarsdale, New York. Life Magazine (December 4, 1939) highlighted Mueller's work Woodcuts & Wood Engravings: How I make them, helping to strengthen his reputation in the United States. He is also known for his illustrations of Treasure Island and Don Quixote.
"In this book, one branch of modern graphic art will be dealt with, the woodcut and the wood engraving. For the time being the two will be referred to collectively as 'woodcut,' as distinguished from the etching or the lithograph. It pleases me to believe or at least to hope that my audience will not consist entirely of my professional colleagues.
"The reason for my compiling this book so soon after entering this great country in the hope of making here a second home is that American friends have urged me to express my personal attitude toward the woodcut, with reference both to my own work and to my experiences with more or less talented pupils during seventeen years as director of the class in woodcutting at the Leipzig Academy of Graphic Arts and Book Crafts.
"Let me repeat, then, that I am not writing a history of the woodcut, but rather attempting to demonstrate my own artistic credo. - Scarsdale, New York, April, 1939
German-born Hans Alexander Mueller (1888-1962) studied and taught at the Academy of Visual Art in Leipzig, where the highly influential socially-conscious printmaker Lynd Ward, known for his six wordless novels, was his student. In the mid-1930s Mueller emigrated to the United States, settling in Scarsdale, New York. Life Magazine (December 4, 1939) highlighted Mueller's work Woodcuts & Wood Engravings: How I make them, helping to strengthen his reputation in the United States. He is also known for his illustrations of Treasure Island and Don Quixote.
"In this book, one branch of modern graphic art will be dealt with, the woodcut and the wood engraving. For the time being the two will be referred to collectively as 'woodcut,' as distinguished from the etching or the lithograph. It pleases me to believe or at least to hope that my audience will not consist entirely of my professional colleagues.
"The reason for my compiling this book so soon after entering this great country in the hope of making here a second home is that American friends have urged me to express my personal attitude toward the woodcut, with reference both to my own work and to my experiences with more or less talented pupils during seventeen years as director of the class in woodcutting at the Leipzig Academy of Graphic Arts and Book Crafts.
"Let me repeat, then, that I am not writing a history of the woodcut, but rather attempting to demonstrate my own artistic credo. - Scarsdale, New York, April, 1939