Liverpool Shipping, 1918, a woodcut by Edward Wadsworth

Printmaking in the West began in the 1500s, matured with Rembrandt, and reached its zenith in the early 20th century, when the machine and mechanical reproduction were celebrated as the salvation of mankind. After that, printmaking settled into its status as a minor art form. Other than printmaking aficionados, who today really wants to spend much time looking at prints?

Those were my thoughts as I strolled into the exhibition, “Rhythms of Modern Life,” on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through December 7th. (Originating at the MFA in Boston, the show will travel to the Wolfsonian-Florida International University in Miami after it’s had its run at the Met.) With more than 100 prints, made between 1914 and1939, the exhibition demonstrates that when British modernism and the art of printmaking came together, the results were small, stunningly beautiful works of art.

If you think avant-garde art has to be ugly, or if you learned in art-history class that avant-gardism was all about the French, Germans, and Italians, the British artists showcased in this exhibition prove the opposite. It turns out that British artists associated with the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, and those who enthusiastically embraced such modern art movements as Cubism, Futurism, and Vorticism, made art as modernly handsome and visually innovative as their continental counterparts.

Many of the prints in this show were inspired by artists who were under the spell of ideas most of us now find deeply repugnant — the fervent adoration of machines, the joy at the thought of a world transformed by industrialization, and the overarching conviction that the modern age manifested the happy idea of “progress.”

Even so, almost a century after they were made, these prints move us by their clarity, simplicity, and ordered exuberance — qualities that we hardly ever find in our own times, when everything in life is considered much too complicated and ambiguous for us to ever understand.

Consider the small Edward Wadsworth woodcut from 1918, entitled Liverpool Shipping. Using nothing but black ink to delineate lines and shapes on a white ground, the artist conveys not just a particular image, but a broad and general feeling of men busily scrubbing away at the side of a ship on a clear, bright day. Without even a flick of the artist’s “touch” (the image seems as if it could be the product of a machine), the picture proclaims that a ship is a grand thing, the dockyards a bustling place, and a little bit of black on white all that’s needed for an artist to make great art.

By ignoring the natural propensity for a woodcut to be a vehicle for “self expression” (woodcuts and angst are almost synonymous with one another), Wadsworth demonstrates two of the most important principles in art: The best art emerges when the artist struggles against the natural resistance of a specific medium, and, in almost every case, less is more.

Liverpool Shipping, like almost every print in this exhibition, proves that man-made beauty frequently survives long after the ideas that inspired it disappear. However cockamamie the idea, if the artist believes in it deeply enough, there’s the chance that a bit of beauty will be born.