Stylogeny combining Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement × Taller de Gráfica Popular

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Style combination · Pairs well

Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement × Taller de Gráfica Popular

Mexico and China built woodcut movements in the same years for the same publics; mix their imagery for internationalist solidarity prints.

From the research on Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement

China's 1930s–40s woodcut movement ran in parallel with the TGP; combine the two black-line traditions for prints about labour and resistance across continents.

From the research on Taller de Gráfica Popular

Mix them and make something Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement Taller de Gráfica Popular

WAKEChinese Modern × Taller de1931 · 1937
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement, their arrangement from Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement, the finish from Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement Taller de Gráfica Popular

Type from Taller de Gráfica Popular

Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement avoids condensed display: this is where the two pull against each other.

Colour from Taller de Gráfica Popular
Form from Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement
Composition from Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement
Surface from Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement

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The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Taller de Gráfica Popular

Wake

Inter Tight, standing in for Letterpress grotesque and slab-serif captions

Text · Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement

The leftist print movement launched by Lu Xun's 1931 Shanghai woodcut workshop, which made the self-cut black-and-white woodcut China's art of national crisis and revolution. Young artists learned from Käthe Kollwitz, Frans Masereel and Soviet woodcuts to gouge close-up, diagonal images of workers, refugees and resistance for journals, books and travelling exhibitions; in Yan'an after 1942 they adopted New Year print outlines and colour for peasant audiences.

Shippori Mincho; Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement used Hand-cut Chinese characters carved into the block and Brush-written kaishu titles on journal and book covers

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The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Taller de Gráfica Popular, with a counter-accent from Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement Taller de Gráfica Popular

  • #f0e8d6 ground · 36%
  • #151515 ink · 14%
  • #c0392b accent · 18%
  • #e0b23a accent · 14%
  • #d9c39a accent · 10%
  • #8a6e4b accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f0e8d6;
  --ink: #151515;
  --accent-1: #c0392b;
  --accent-2: #e0b23a;
  --accent-3: #d9c39a;
  --accent-4: #8a6e4b;
  --font-display: "Inter Tight", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Shippori Mincho", serif;
}

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The two styles

A black-and-cream woodcut-style illustration shows a tightly packed group of armed people advancing through rubble, led by a large foreground figure gripping a rifle. A woman carrying a child appears at upper left, while soldiers, an artillery piece, smoke and ruined buildings recede beneath the Chinese lettering “前進”. 1931–1949 · East Asia Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement The leftist print movement launched by Lu Xun's 1931 Shanghai woodcut workshop, which made the self-cut black-and-white woodcut China's art of national crisis and revolution. Young artists learned from Käthe Kollwitz, Frans Masereel and Soviet woodcuts to gouge close-up, diagonal images of workers, refugees and resistance for journals, books and travelling exhibitions; in Yan'an after 1942 they adopted New Year print outlines and colour for peasant audiences. A red-and-black woodcut-style poster reads “TIERRA LIBRE” above agricultural workers, including a woman raising an axe and a man holding a long-handled tool. Broken chains cross the foreground above fallen caricatured figures, coins and stacked money, with planted fields, a church and a rising sun behind the workers. 1937–1977 · Latin America & Caribbean Taller de Gráfica Popular A Mexico City printmaking collective founded in 1937 around Leopoldo Méndez, Pablo O'Higgins and Luis Arenal to put art at the service of popular and anti-fascist struggles. Heir to Posada's broadsides, it produced cheap linocut, woodcut and lithographic posters, leaflets, portfolios and books: dense black-and-white images of workers, peasants and revolutionary history, often captioned with bold letterpress headlines.

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