Style combination · Contrasts
Expressionist Woodcut Graphics × Simplicissimus Satirical Style
Both distort the figure in protest, but Expressionist prints gouge it from the woodblock with angular, raw marks; Simplicissimus keeps a clean brush contour and flat tints, and adds a punchline.
Mix them and make something Expressionist Woodcut Graphics Simplicissimus Satirical 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.
Expressionist Woodcut Graphics Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich)
- Type from Simplicissimus Satirical Style
- Colour from Simplicissimus Satirical Style
- Form from Expressionist Woodcut Graphics
- Composition from Expressionist Woodcut Graphics
- Surface from Expressionist Woodcut Graphics
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The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Simplicissimus Satirical Style
Riot
UnifrakturMaguntia, standing in for Set Fraktur for the title centred above each drawing and for the parenthetical artist credit ('(Zeichnung von Rudolf Wilke)', '(Th. Th. Heine)')
Text · Expressionist Woodcut Graphics
The graphic arm of German Expressionism, from Die Brücke in Dresden (1905) to the Berlin journals Der Sturm and Die Aktion and Frans Masereel's woodcut novels. Artists revived the woodcut as a raw, subjective medium: they gouged distorted figures and jagged lettering into the same block and printed them in harsh black or a single flat ink, often on coloured paper, for exhibition posters, portfolios, manifestos and magazine covers.
Special Elite; Expressionist Woodcut Graphics used Hand-cut woodcut capitals and Rudolf Koch's Neuland (Klingspor, 1923), a display face in the same hand-cut spirit
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The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Simplicissimus Satirical Style, with a counter-accent from Expressionist Woodcut Graphics. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Expressionist Woodcut Graphics Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich)
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#f0e6ccground · 36% -
#1b1a18ink · 14% -
#c4382caccent · 18% -
#d9932faccent · 14% -
#c85d80accent · 10% -
#93a1bdaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f0e6cc;
--ink: #1b1a18;
--accent-1: #c4382c;
--accent-2: #d9932f;
--accent-3: #c85d80;
--accent-4: #93a1bd;
--font-display: "UnifrakturMaguntia", serif;
--font-text: "Special Elite", monospace;
}Use it with care
Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich): Its caricature works by types, and that cuts both ways. Some pages drew colonised Africans as caricatures even when the target was the colonisers (Heine's Kolonialmächte, 1904). From August 1914 the magazine backed the war and turned its satire on the enemy nations, including racist pictures of non-European and Russian troops, and in the Weimar years it still ran nationalist jokes against the Allied victors and France. After 1933 it followed the Nazi line, including antisemitic satire, while Heine, hated by the Nazis not least for his Jewish origin, was forced out and fled. Several of its canonical draughtsmen served the regime: Hitler made Thöny an honorary professor in 1938 and put him on the Gottbegnadeten list in 1944; Schilling, a fierce critic of the Nazis before 1933, became their propagandist; and in the last issue of September 1944 Gulbransson, Schilling and Thöny supplied propaganda drawings. Take the method of 1896–1914 and 1919–1933 (one framed drawing, flat tints, a spoken punchline) and aim it at power. Exaggerate the uniform, bearing and costume of the powerful, not ethnicity, religion, disability or the bodies of the powerless. The profiteer, the usurer and the octopus gripping its victims (Heine's Der Wucher, 1923) were also stock antisemitic codes in these years, so mark a profiteer by class (top hat, monocle, fur collar), never by ethnic features. Gulbransson (d. 1958), George Grosz (d. 1959) and Bruno Paul (d. 1968) are still in copyright in the EU, until the end of 2028, 2029 and 2038; Heine's work has been public domain there since 2019. Draw your own, do not present a new design as a Simplicissimus page, and do not use the bulldog as a mark.
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The two styles
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More combinations
With Expressionist Woodcut Graphics
- Art Nouveau Contrasts · The parent's smooth whiplash and floral harmony is exactly what the gouge splinters; use one against the other to stage order breaking down.
- Punk & DIY Zine Pairs well · Hand-cut jagged letters and one cheap ink suit gig posters and zines that want anger without photocopy clichés.
- Plakatstil / Sachplakat Contrasts · Same country and years: Bernhard's calm flat object poster against an anguished Brücke woodcut shows commercial clarity versus inner expression.
- Taller de Gráfica Popular Pairs well · Both gouge black-and-white relief images; add TGP's legible headlines and social subjects to steady expressionist distortion for a public message.
- Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement Pairs well · Lu Xun's movement learned from Kollwitz and Masereel; set the two side by side to show subjective anguish turning into collective resistance.
- Argentine Adventure Historieta (Oesterheld–Breccia) Pairs well · Breccia's white scraped out of a black ground looks like the gouge of a Brücke woodcut; borrow the woodcut's jagged hand-cut capitals for a historieta title page or cover, and keep the comic's panels and captions inside.
- Hungarian Revolutionary Poster Pairs well · Kinchin sees 'a burgeoning taste for Futurist and Expressionist design' in the MA circle's exhibition poster (Bortnyik); add a gouged, splintered edge to the red body when the hero should look anguished rather than triumphant.
- Rorke's Drift Linocut Contrasts · Both gouge black relief prints, but the Brücke woodcut distorts one anguished figure on tilted axes, while Rorke's Drift spreads a whole story across calm, packed bands; pick by whether the image should confess or narrate.
With Simplicissimus Satirical Style
- Art Nouveau Contrasts · The parent: Heine took over the Jugendstil idiom, but where Art Nouveau spends the whiplash line on flowers and idealised women, Simplicissimus spends it on a grotesque type and a caption. Choose it when the curve should mock rather than adorn.
- Japonisme Pairs well · Heine drew on Japanese woodcuts: add japonisme's cropped asymmetry and silhouetted figures against blank grounds to give a caricature more air and bite.
- Plakatstil / Sachplakat Pairs well · The NDB places Heine's posters at the start of the new poster style: borrow the Sachplakat's single object and bold block lettering for a satirical poster that keeps Simplicissimus's flat silhouette and red-on-black.
- Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz) Contrasts · A later weekly humour magazine of the same satirical stance: Gırgır, Penguen and Uykusuz pack covers with speech balloons, comic strips and colour; Simplicissimus gives one framed drawing and one caption.
- Gothic Blackletter & Fraktur Tradition Pairs well · Set the title and the spoken caption in Fraktur, as the magazine did on almost every page, to anchor a caricature in German print culture around 1900.
- Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada) Contrasts · A contemporary in cheap satirical print around 1900 (Simplicissimus cost 10 pfennig an issue), but Posada's broadsheets pair a heavy relief cut with white-line hatching and shouting mixed display type above columns of verse, black on coloured paper; Simplicissimus gives one clean-contoured drawing with flat tints and a Fraktur caption.
- Dada Contrasts · George Grosz drew for Simplicissimus but in Berlin Dada turned satire into photomontage and typographic chaos; choose Simplicissimus for a drawn, legible joke, Dada for a cut-up assault.
- Moomin Graphics (Tove Jansson's Pen-Drawn World and its Licensed Afterlife) Contrasts · Jansson drew political satire for the Finland-Swedish magazine Garm in the broad European satirical-magazine tradition that Simplicissimus led; Moomin keeps a sure pen line but drops the upward-aimed attack and the grotesque body for round, gentle figures.