Popular Prints
Cheap sheets printed in quantity and pasted on the walls of ordinary homes, doing the work of celebration, satire and devotion alike from Russia to Vietnam.
Dictionary entry
- Lubok 17th–19th century / Style
Russia's popular print: thick outlines, flat hand-coloring, image and text sharing the sheet, circulating sacred stories and satire cheaply. The avant-garde rediscovered it in the 20th century as Russia's native form.
- Épinal Print 1796– / Style
Pellerin of Épinal mass-produced popular prints whose clear outlines and stencil color told stories, armies and morals. They shaped popular vision so completely that 'image d'Épinal' came to mean a rosy cliché.
- Posada's Calaveras 1880s–1913 / Style
The skeleton satires Posada engraved for Mexican broadsides: dressed-up calaveras laughing at class and death alike. La Catrina became a national icon of the Day of the Dead and Mexican graphics.
- Đông Hồ Prints 17th century– / Style
The woodblock prints of Vietnam's Đông Hồ village: printed with natural pigments on dó paper coated with ground seashell, New Year pictures like 'The Rat's Wedding' carrying village philosophy in satire and auspice.
- Nianhua Song dynasty– / Style
At the Chinese New Year these woodblock prints go up on doors and interior walls. Door gods, wealth gods and opera scenes in vivid color, with regional styles such as Yangliuqing and Taohuawu, built a visual language centuries deep that later supplied socialist posters with their iconography.
- Indian Calendar Art 1894– / Style
The mass-printed gods begun at Ravi Varma's press: oil-painted mythology delivered to homes as oleographs, still printed today as bazaar art shaping India's visual everyday.