Arboreal Modernism and the Woodcut Book

This book reveals how modernist artists across Europe and the United States turned to trees and wooden materials as both subject and medium to reimagine human relationships with the natural world. In an era of accelerating industrialization, these artists made the seemingly anachronistic choice to work with wood—creating handcrafted books that challenged the alienation of modern life through their very materiality.

Arboreal Modernism examines the transnational phenomenon of woodcut modernism through pioneering artists including Lynd Ward, whose anti-racist and anti-capitalist narratives used trees as witnesses to violence and models for social interconnection; Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, whose collaborative woodcut projects at the Hogarth Press challenged boundaries between text and image; Helen West Heller, the first artist to carve both word and image from the same woodblock in her innovative poetry; and Helena Bochoráková-Dittrichová, whose wordless narratives critiqued colonialism while envisioning alternative futures led by women. The book also traces this tradition's contemporary legacy through artists Eric Drooker and Peter Kuper. Through close analysis, Badoi demonstrates how the woodcut book served as both artistic innovation and political intervention, using the ancient technique of woodcutting to address modern concerns about ecology, community, and social justice. This study recovers an overlooked dimension of modernist experimentation while offering insights relevant to our current environmental crisis.