Impressions of the 20th Century

From the first half of the twentieth-century, early British masters of etching such as Walter Sickert and Augustus John are included, while Paul Nash and Eric Gill exemplify the 1920's to 1930's fashion for woodblock-printing. Works from Picasso, Matisse, Vuillard and Chagall sit alongside prints from German artists Paul Klee and Franz Marc. After the Second World War the scale and ambition of lithographs and screen-prints began to rival contemporary paintings. All the key American exponents, such as Jasper Johns, Jim Dine, Roy Lictenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Ron Kitaj are represented, while in Britain artists like Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Bridget Riley, Eduoardo Paolozzi and Patrick Caulfield were pushing forward the boundaries of the fine art print. This book explores the ever-increasing diversity of print-making - whether crossing over into installation art or incorporating the human body as both image and tool - and challenges our notion of what constitutes a fine art print, posing intriguing questions as to how the medium might develop in the future.