The Birds (Les Oiseaux), from Xylographies

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries artists began to experiment with earlier printmaking techniques that had gradually fallen out of use. Vasily Kandinsky, working in Munich just after the turn of the century, became particularly interested in the woodcut. The prints in his Xylographies portfolio are executed in a style that combines elements of Jugendstil (the German version of art nouveau) and Russian folk art.