The Woodcut

Artist Harry Kernoff, Harry Kernoff  in the Thirties produced illustrations and stark woodcuts on radical labour themes, with portraits such as the disillusioned unemployed or workers trying to break free from the shackles of capitalism. Some of these appeared in the newspaper of the left republican group, Republican Congress. Not only did he compose the striking cover of his friend Leslie Daiken’s edited anthology Goodbye, Twilight!, he also provided illustrations for Fifty Years of Liberty Hall: the Golden Jubilee of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union 1909-1959. His illustrations featured in an important anthology of Irish poetry, New Irish Poets: Representative Selections from the Work of 37 Contemporaries, from American publisher Devin Garrity, published in 1948.

Kernoff travelled to the USSR with the Irish section of the Friends of Soviet Russia, in the early 1930s as part of a delegation of Irish visitors including Irish suffragist Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington. Before leaving the ship, he is reputed to have presented a portrait of James Connolly to the ships’ captain and crew. Kernoff recognized the radical potential of woodcuts, to produce striking images that would stay in the mind’s eye while communicating a direct political message. In his obituary in the Irish Times, in 1974, John Nolan dubbed Kernoff ‘The Artist of the Workers.’