
- This event has passed.
Exhibition Talk – The woodcut print in Germany after WWI: Remorse, redemption, reparation
November 7, 2024 @ 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm

Christian Rohlfs, The Prisoner, woodcut print, 1918
This event is organised as part of the Fred Kormis: Sculpting the Twentieth Century event series. Visit the exhibition page to find out more.
As became all too familiar after the Holocaust, the experience of suffering and inhumanity often proves to be unrepresentable. However, in the aftermath of the First World War in Germany, the opposite was the case. Here, a flood of works on paper gave Expressionist artists and their bruised public an outlet for sentiments that ranged from an insistence on bearing witness to the horrors of trench warfare, to grief and despair; and to a redemptive hope on the other side.
Based on the extraordinary evidence of woodcut prints made by Fred Kormis as a prisoner of war in Siberia, this lecture explores the context of printmaking around 1918. Highlighting the cathartic process of woodcut printing for fellow sculptors and graphic artists Ernst Barlach and Käthe Kollwitz, it considers the qualities of this spare graphic medium that make it suited to the direct expression of existential extremes.
About the Speaker:
Dr Niccola Shearman is a historian of twentieth-century European art, with a focus on Germany and Austria to 1945. She has taught a variety of undergraduate courses at The Courtauld Institute and at the University of Manchester and is a regular contributor to Courtauld Short Courses and to the V&A Academy.
Niccola’s PhD (2018) concerned the intense wave of woodcut printmaking in the aftermath of the First World War in Germany. She has published articles on this subject and on related themes of art and empathy. Further research interests lie in the art of modernist Vienna, and in the careers of Viennese exiles to the UK under the rise of Nazism.
Book nowWe need your support more than ever. Help us preserve the truth.
We are an independent charity dependent on your support. We need to raise over a quarter of a million pounds each year for our work to continue and this is only possible with your help.
With your support we can continue to;
- Be a world leading Holocaust archive
- Offer a vital learning resource to oppose anti-Semitism and other forms of prejudice.
- Reach out to our worldwide audience of over two million people
- Preserve our archive for future generations so they can learn the lessons of the past
- Provide a free program of public events and exhibitions