She quickly mastered this medium and developed a unique style that blended expressionism and impressionism and combined respect for traditional woodcut craft with a more modern sensibility.

Cityscapes and crowded public squares, often viewed from above, were among her favorite subjects, as well as the interiors of theaters, concert halls, and opera houses.

Her works from these years are a record of her travels, showing many cities in Germany, the Netherlands, Croatia, Italy, Sweden, London, Istanbul, Paris, Prague, and Budapest.

A Japanese military invasion of the South China coast in spring 1941 forced the Bormann-Milch family to leave Pakhoi and move to Shanghai, where Emma Bormann would remain until 1950.

Woodcuts and linocuts from this time show the Huangpu River and the busy streets of Shanghai, as well as her impressions of Hangzhou and Beijing, which she visited during the 1940s.

Aside from her phenomenal skill in suggesting tone and atmosphere in this intractable medium, the artist possesses a certain heroic and monumental quality of design.

She made a series of stencil prints showing the dancers and musicians of the Japanese imperial court (performances of gagaku and bugaku).

From 1958 until her death, Emma Bormann traveled back and forth regularly between Japan and Riverside, California, where her second daughter Jorun had settled.

So too Dr. Bormann is by no means to be found in the advance guard of modern art, but her works, rightly considered, could belong to no other period than the present.

[1] Her 1931 linocut "Dolma Bagtsché, Constantinople" (using what was then a new medium, linoleum) features the great Dolmabahçe Mosque silhouetted against a deep blue sea.