Making Expressionism: The Print Network of Artists, Printers, and Publishers

This study explores the social network of German Expressionist Artists, Printers, and Publishers through prints (woodcuts, lithographs, etchings, etc.) and seeks to reconstructs the horizons of expectations for their art through prints as collectibles or publishable images in books or periodicals. The emergence of Expressionist print culture did not occur in isolation but was shaped by a broader visual revolution in the nineteenth century, when mass communication transformed ways of seeing and altered visual expectations. Expressionist artists and publishers, seizing the opportunity to experiment with print mediums or capitalizing on the possibilities of print media, established new conventions for how Expressionist imagery would be produced, circulated, and understood.

Based on data manually collected from auction house and art museums websites of over thousands of Expressionist prints, this social network analysis (SNA) examines the connections of artists, printers, and publishers based on their collaboration on different prints and maps the geolocation of the creative processes. In comparison with purely human-connection-based SNA, the object-based approach here represents more clearly who works together and how knowledge, skills, or consensuses are shared in practice. For example, the proportions of different print techniques such as etchings or woodcuts in each artist’s repertoire also reveal their stylistic affiliation. Moreover, whether and how much they chose to publish their works in books or periodicals suggest not only their preferences for engagement with the public but also the institutional and commercial infrastructures that facilitated or constrained their artistic choices.

By tracing how prints shaped expectations—both consciously and unconsciously—about Expressionism’s visual language, this study reveals the role of print media in defining the movement’s artistic identity. Ultimately, it demonstrates how printed images, as both communicative tools and collectible objects, played a crucial role in the formation and dissemination of German Expressionism.