Snake (plate, folio 15 verso) from A Bestiary
Joel Shapiro
American, 1941–2025
1990
A woodcut plate from Joel Shapiro’s illustrated book A Bestiary in which the artist reduces the idea of a snake to a compact, serrated black shape that suggests motion and menace through extreme simplification.
Against the broad white gutters the small, intensely black, angular silhouette—its edges like teeth or stitches—reads simultaneously as a coiled creature and an abstract, maplike form, balanced against a dense block of text on the facing page.
Bringing his sculptural sensibility into print, Shapiro uses minimalist, emblematic imagery to renew the medieval bestiary idea, showing how a few carved marks can summon long-held human stories about animals and character.
Medium
Woodcut from an illustrated book with twenty-nine linoleum cuts (two with pochoir and two with letterpress) and seven woodcuts
Dimensions
composition (irreg.): 3 7/16 × 3 11/16" (8.8 × 9.4 cm); page: 14 13/16 × 10 13/16" (37.6 × 27.5 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund
Accession
29.1991.4
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
