Print Making: Mexican and German influences.

La Catrina: Jose Guadalupa Posada 1910 | Erich Heckel: Two Wounded Men 1915

Print Making on Linoleum Blocks: I always think of print making with linoleum blocks as one of those “old school” art teacher projects…like those folks who can’t give up the pottery wheel or dark room photography. But like the aforementioned art forms, there’s so much to learn from it, and some great connections to art history; particularly the beginning of the 1900s.

I always used print making to teach about Jose Guadalupe Posada and his prints related to Mexico’s Day of the Dead, but last year a colleague obsessed with Germany took print making in the direction of German Expressionism and I quickly realized that the timelines overlapped. Guadalupe’s famous Catrina was printed around 1910, while Erich Heckel’s Two Wounded Men was printed in 1915. The connections are fascinating when you think about it. Die Brucke was looking to build a metaphorical bridge bringing expressionism to regular people, and arte popular was doing the exact same thing through print making in new papers. Just think about how much influence Posada’s Day of the Dead imagery and movies like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari had on guys like Tim Burton or Guillermo del Toro!

Cutting lino blocks is pretty straight forward (just remember to have your students protect their non-cutting hand with a glove!): carve your image, roll your ink, and print. You can draw straight on the linoleum or do a transfer of an image (like a rubbing or using carbon paper). I like having students draw their image on paper, then trace over it with carbon paper underneath to transfer the image to the linoleum block. The art unit starts with an investigation into German Expressionism or Day of the Dead (you can choose!).

We also get pretty eccentric with the papers in my classroom. The German Expressionist prints have silk screen ink squeegeed over cardstock paper as a background. The Posada influenced prints have watercolor backgrounds. It’s a nice activity to do when your students’ hands get tired from carving linoleum. I also like printing on newspaper. The idea is just to see how far your students can take print making and connect it to art history.