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"“If you care about graphic novels, you need this book.” — Bestselling author Neil Gaiman Graphic Witness features rare wordless novels by five great 20thcentury woodcut artists from Europe and North America. The stories they tell reflect the political and social issues of their times as well as the broader issues that are still relevant today. Frans Masereel (1899–1972) was born in Belgium and is considered the father of the wordless graphic novel. Graphic Witness includes the first reprint of his classic work The Passion of a Man since its 1918 publication in Munich. American Lynd Ward (1905–85), author of the provocative Wild Pilgrimage, is considered among the most important of wordless novelists. Giacomo Patri (1898–1978) was born in Italy and lived in the United States. His White Collar (1938) featured an introduction by Rockwell Kent and was used a promotional piece by the labour movement. Erich Glas’s (1897–1973) haunting wordless novel Leilot, created in 1942, foreshadows the Holocaust, which was not widely known about at the time. Southern Cross by Canadian Laurence Hyde (1914–87) was controversial for its criticism of U.S. H-bomb testing in the South Pacific. Author George A. Walker draws on his expertise as a woodcut artist to provide insight into the tools and techniques used to create these works of art. As well, he examines the importance of the role of artists as witnesses and critics of their times, and the influence of the genre on the emergence of comics and the modern graphic novel. This newly expanded edition of Graphic Witness, which features an afterword by cartoonist Seth, will appeal to readers interested in social issues, printmaking, art history and contemporary culture."

In 1761, Denis Diderot ascribed the fabulous success enjoyed by Francois Boucher (1703-1770) to "the libertinage, the brilliancy, the pompons, the bosoms and bottoms" that proliferated in the artist's canvases. For while Boucher's art charmed nouveau riche buyers and titled patrons, this was not always the case with critics, and modern scholarship has done little to challenge Diderot's eventual judgment that to admire Boucher's work is to be a stranger to "real taste, to the truth, to just ideas, and to the seriousness of art." This engaging study examines the motives behind the contemporaneous critical response to Boucher's picturesque repertoire of amorous peasants, blithe aristocrats, and fanciful mythological scenes, and to the rococo style in general. The vision of t rococo (feminine, aristocratic, decadent) and of Boucher (facile, libertine, debauched) that lingers in modern art history was invented by eighteenth-century critics bent on reform, both aesthetic and political.Exploring how the discrediting of Boucher and his school intersected with cultural debates about gender and class, this account of Boucher's art should persuade critics and admirers alike to take another, more considered look.