Spotted Online – Otto Wirsching Woodcuts at 50watts.com

Click through to 50watts.com for a series of 1915 woodcuts by Otto Wirsching. Beautiful work, and seeing these reminds me just how sad it is that this art style is basically dead today.

Despite his thorough knowledge of Mediterranean art, Wirsching’s greatest artistic inspirations were the paintings and woodcuts of the great German masters of the Renaissance; he studied these works avidly at Munich’s City Library. When he returned to Munich at the beginning of 1913, he moved to the nearby village of Dachau, since the 1880s an important artists’ colony of the naturalist school. When war broke out, he served in the artillery, but was back in Dachau by 1916. Here he painted and also perfected his skill as a graphic artist, creating a fanciful style that translated his knowledge of the German Masters into a modern idiom.