Although most Expressionists are best known as painters or sculptors, a confluence of aesthetic, social, political, and commercial forces encouraged nearly all of them to embrace printmaking as an equally important means of expression. Printmaking—including woodcut, intaglio, and lithography—helped the Expressionists advance many important goals, including pioneering formal innovations, broadly disseminating their images and ideas, and promoting or criticizing social and political causes. While the woodcut, with its jagged gouges and bold, flattened, "primitive" aesthetic, became the preeminent Expressionist medium, the Expressionists also revitalized etching and lithography to alternately vibrant and stark effect.