Print Revolutions

China invented paper and printmaking around 700 CE and developed color printing with multiple blocks by the 1600s. These cultural achievements had global consequences. Recent acquisitions of two important groups of historical and modern Chinese prints from the collections of Christer von der Burg and Patricia and Thomas Ebrey have put the Cleveland Museum of Art in the fortunate position to be able to tell China’s story of printmaking with its own holdings. 

Print Revolutions: Chinese Impressions, 1630s–1960s showcases some of the finest exemplars of Chinese printmaking, many of them for the first time. Over 80 prints, paintings, and porcelains from the museum’s collection, including a few loans, illustrate the development of color printing from the 1600s leading up to the international Modern Woodcut Movement in the early 1900s.

Color printing reached a height in the 1700s, and the most sophisticated prints were made in the so-called Ding workshops in Suzhou in Southeast China. Even after 300 years, these rare prints still show fresh colors and embossed, blind-pressed paper that give the subject an almost three-dimensional appearance. Other prints in the exhibition imitate costly paintings in hanging scroll format, such as the impression of a young woman observing a boy who plays with a dragonfly. The print is unique and is known to be the only surviving impression of its kind. The use of the central perspective and shading to create the illusion of depth, space, and volume was introduced to China through Western copperplate prints. Employed by printmakers in Suzhou, these prints swiftly became bestsellers among the urban population. Ironically, many Suzhou prints survived in Europe as wall decoration in castles and palaces, being among the first images from China that shaped Western ideas about what China was and looked like.

In China, the destruction of printing centers during the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-1800s, followed by the introduction of Western lithography, caused the decline of woodcut printing. However, by the beginning of the 1900s, black-and-white prints made a powerful revival. Prints of the Modern Woodcut Movement are highlighted in the exhibition with a portrait of its initiator, the writer and reformer Lu Xun (1881–1936), who is depicted with a print by the German Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) in the background and Das Kapital by Karl Marx on his desk. Lu saw the pictorial print as an ideal medium and a new artistic form to express the need for social reforms and national salvation in a time of crisis and war. 

In that context, prints from the 1940s made in Yan’an, the Communist wartime base in northern China, played a crucial role. These prints propagated the Communist efforts to educate the rural population and defend the country against the ruling Guomindang and the Japanese occupation. Closely associated with American soldiers, war journalists, Red Cross aids, and doctors of the Dixie Mission—a US initiative during World War II that explored collaborative operations against the Japanese—these prints were given to them in the hope that they be distributed and exhibited in the United States on their return. 

The Suzhou prints of the 1700s and the Modern Woodcut Movement mark high points in China’s long-lasting print tradition that flourishes to this day. Their presentation at the CMA underscores once more the dynamic cultural and artistic exchanges that have connected China with Europe and the United States.