A Hybrid Production as a Problem for the Modernist Report

Abstract

The present work reviews some of the canonic approaches on the status of engravings as artistic production, both from the aspect of its graphic technique and its resort to narrative or to figuration, often connected to the universe of literary illustration or even the circulation of social images and discourses of a “militant” political content. The hypothesis here advanced is that both the narrative and the multiplicity of the engravings have generated a problem in relation to the modernist cannon; one sustains that the figurative condition – of illustration and/or social — of the graphic paradigm has situated the engraving as one of the excluded products from the modernist narrative, once the seclusion of engravers into technical virtuosity as the parameter for evaluation implied in its self-exclusion.