Cutting remarks

Richard S. Field, Curator Emeritus of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, Yale University Art Gallery, will give this year’s Philip and Frances Hofer Lecture, on Thursday, December 3, 2009, 5:30 pm, in Houghton’s Edison and Newman Room. Entitled “Cutting Remarks: The Preparation of Woodcuts, 1400-1600”, the talk will discuss the history of the physical craft of cutting woodblocks for the printing of woodcuts, featuring detailed slides of a number of anonymous fifteenth-century blocks in order to sketch the early development of the cutter’s technique. At the conclusion, the audience will be asked to consider its opinions about a series of blocks that most scholars regard as forgeries, two examples of which are at Harvard.