Winter
by Bertha Lum
- Date:
- 1909
- Medium:
- Color woodcut
- Dimensions:
- 20.3 × 35.2 cm
- Source:
- Minneapolis Institute of Art
by Bertha Lum
$1,000–$8,000. Snow and night scenes tend to command premium prices for this artist. Key value factors: Bertha Lum's status as a pioneering Western woodblock printmaker gives her work historical value. Her Art Nouveau-influenced prints are particularly sought after.
Winter settles over this 1909 color woodcut, the season expressed through reduced palette, bare forms, and the implied cold that permeates the scene. Lum's treatment of winter strips away the abundant color of her festival and summer prints, working instead with whites, grays, pale blues, and the dark accents of leafless branches or snow-laden structures. The Japanese aesthetic tradition celebrates winter as one of the four seasons that structure artistic production, associating it with qualities of endurance, purity, and the beauty of emptiness (ma). Lum, printing in the Japanese manner with water-based pigments on [washi](/glossary/washi), achieves a crystalline clarity suited to the season — the colors cold and clean, the carved lines sharp as frost-cracked air. Snow, when present, is rendered as unprinted paper, the whiteness of the sheet itself becoming the image's brightest element.
Woodblock print
c. 1832/38
Color woodblock print; oban
Yuki no Miyajima
1929
Color woodblock print; oban
1932
Woodblock print
Curated cross-cuts that include this print.
Winter was created by Bertha Lum in 1909.
Winter depicts snow scenes and winter.
Winter measures 20.3 × 35.2 cm.
