Masterpiece Posters From The German Secession

by Stephen J. Gertz

LEENDERT (LEO) GESTEL (1881–1941)
PHILIPS ARGA LAMP
Lithograph in colors, c.1918.
Printed by Van Leer, Amsterdam.
41 x 30in. (104 x 78cm.)
£6,000–8,000. US$9,100–12,000. €6,800–9,000.

On October 2, 2013, Christie's-London is offering some of the finest posters to have ever been designed in its Graphic Masterworks: A Century of Design sale.

Here are eight masterworks from the German Secession, each a visual treat.

CHRIS LEBEAU (1878–1945)
DE MAGIËR
Lithograph in colors, c.1915.
49 x 35in. (125 x 90cm.)
£5,000–7,000. US$7,600–11,000. €5,700–7,900.

RICHARD NICOLAÜS (RIK) ROLAND HOLST (1868–1938)
GOETHE’S FAUST
Lithograph in colors, 1918,
Printed by Senefelder. 45 x 33in. (114 x 84cm..
£6,000–8,000. US$9,100–12,000. €6,800–9,000.

JOSEPH MARIA OLBRICH (1867–1908)
KÖLNER AUSSTELLUNG
lithograph in colors, 1905.
Printed by M.Dumont Schauberg, Köln.
40 x 25in. (101 x 64cm.)
£8,000–10,000 US$12,000–15,000 €9,000–11,000

GUSTAV KLIMT (1862–1918)
KUNSTAUSSTELLUNG DER VEREINIGUNG BILDENDER
KÜNSTLER ÖSTERREICHS SECESSION
Lithograph in colors, 1898.
Printed by Anst V.A.Berger, Wien. 25 x 18in. (64 x 47cm.)
£15,000–20,000. US$23,000–30,000. €17,000–22,000.

CARL KRENEK (1880–1948)
XXIX.K.K. STAATSLOTTERIE
lithograph in colors, 191. 25 x 19in.(63 x 48cm.)
£6,000–8,000. US$9,100–12,000. €6,800–9,000.

JOHAN THORN PRIKKER (1868–1932)
HOLLÄNDISCHE KUNSTAUSSTELLUNG IN KREFELD
lithograph in colors, 1903.
Printed by S.Lankhout & C.O., Haag. 33x 47in. (85 x 121cm.)
£8,000–10,000. US$12,000–15,000. €9,000–11,000.

JACOB (JAC.) JONGERT (1883–1942)
APRICOT BRANDY
Lithograph in colors, c.1920.
Printed by Immig.
40 x 30in. (101 x 77cm.)
£5,000–7,000. US$7,600–11,000. €5,700–7,900.

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All images courtesy of Christie's, with our thanks.
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Of Related Interest: 

Stunning Modernist Posters At Swann Galleries.

Seven More Stunning Modernist Posters.

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Getting Nowhere with John Cage: A Zen Biography

by Alastair Johnston

Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists by Kay Larson. The Penguin Press, New York, 2012. 496 pp., $30.

As a teenager I was interested in all kinds of music, so I took the opportunity to attend a concert for prepared piano by the America composer John Cage at the Royal College of Music (behind the Albert Hall) in London in 1968. I got there early to secure a good spot. I had no idea what to expect but the audience seemed unusual, more curious bohemian than the Baroque crowd. When a man with a wooden leg came in, it occurred to me he was part of the performance as he tapped his way to a vacant chair.

Cage was already controversial. In 1960 he performed "Water Walk" on the TV show "I've Got a Secret." It was a delightful and zany event which used water, ice and steam to create music.

When asked about the audience's laughter, he said he considered laughter preferable to tears. With this he gave permission to other musical experimenters, such as Frank Zappa playing on a bicycle on the "Steve Allen Show" three years later.

Cage was the enfant terrible of American music for half of the twentieth century. Few other composers adopted his chance methods and rejection of the then cutting-edge 12-tone scale. What's wrong with Schoenberg, who was Cage's early teacher? "The twelve-tone row is a method; a method is a control of each single note. There is too much there there. There is not enough of nothing in it."

It's the opposite of Gertrude Stein's famous characterization of Oakland, and something that would resonate through Cage's work. He was on a quest for silence, the discovery of nothing there. For instance, in his piece "Imaginary Landscape no. 4" for 12 radios -- or "Golden Throats," as he called them -- by the time of the performance (late one night at Columbia University in 1951) the radio stations had mostly gone off the air so there was static and a lot of silence. Others deemed it a failure, Cage was delighted.

It is appropriate that the author of this new biography is not a music critic or biographer. In fact this is Kay Larson's first book, though she has made her name as an art critic in the Village Voice and The New York Times. Furthermore it's as much about Zen as about the subject, which is a pleasant surprise. I didn't expect to read a book on John Cage and learn so much about D. T. Suzuki and spiritual practice.

After a bumpy start about Ginsberg, Snyder and the Beats, delivered almost as paper darts that don't fly, Larson settles down to be entertaining. Larson has a lively, journalistic style; she is a practicing Buddhist so starts with a major appropriation to her side: Marcel Duchamp. While we think of Duchamp as the Dada Supreme, she recasts his readymade "Fountain" as a perfect shining Buddha of the Bathroom: "In Stieglitz's photo the bulbous porcelain body looks exactly like the Buddha in outline... The white porcelain arc of the urinal serves as the Buddha's robe. Where the Buddha's head would be is a bright white spot that could represent the 'third eye,' one of the classic attributes of enlightenment" (pp. 47-8).

"Fountain" by Marcel Duchamp, 1917. Photographed by Alfred Stieglitz.

I was really taken with the little chunks of Zen wisdom she drops in as much as the net she casts to catch Cage hanging out with Alan Watts and Joseph Campbell, or leading a class in mycology while warning that no two mushrooms are alike.

His chance operations foreshadow a later musical innovator, Brian Eno, who created Oblique Strategies to help him work, in the same way Cage had used the I Ching, to bring indeterminacy into his music. Other pioneering feats include being the first "turn-tablist" -- in 1938 Cage had discovered two variable speed turntables at Cornish College radio lab in Seattle, and set out to play records that were just one tone per side, but to change the pitch periodically (by chance) and create an ever-evolving soundscape. Scratching and ambient music, both at once!

It was at Cornish that Cage met dancer Merce Cunningham and began a partnership that would last over 40 years.

Merce Cunningham by Halsman (Magnum) 1948

None of his contemporaries got it, so Cage turned his back on the musical avant garde and chose to hang out with artists instead. He had moved to New York by 1948 and was part of "the Club," an informal group of painters, including Motherwell and De Kooning, that got together to drink coffee and talk. There is a lot of discussion of Cage's creative process. The famous four and a half minutes of silence (4'33") is profounder than you would imagine, and Cage worked on it for ages. Seriously. First of all he learned that Muzac Corporation commissioned pieces that were that length, so it was conceived as a subversive joke. But then he started to explore silence, even going into an anechoic chamber at Harvard. This room excluded all outside sound. He rushed out to ask the engineer what the noises were he could still hear. The high whine is the neurons of your nervous system firing and the dull roar is the systolic rush of your blood. A flash of insight: There is no such thing as silence. There is no "something" and "nothing." There is only being.

This leads to a story about a Zen monastery in Japan. The monks get up at 4.30 to chant. After two hours or so one of them slides open the doors to the world and in come the noises of the morning: birds, traffic and wind.

The first performance of 4'33" by David Tudor in Woodstock caused a riot. There's a version by him on YouTube with voice-over and a stopwatch that is distracting, and an orchestral version that really gets into the spirit of the piece (though I prefer it as a solo work). 

Duchamp's long years of silence may of course be another source of inspiration. Cage had met him at the Arensbergs' home in the Hollywood Hills and in New York showed up to play chess with him, troubled that he couldn't ask him anything about music, but was calmed simply by his presence. Cage was obviously influenced by Duchamp's intention to make works which are not works of art, his "skillful poetics of ordinary things." Cage wrote: "At a Dada exhibition in Düsseldorf, I was impressed that though Schwitters and Picabia and the others had all become artists with the passing of time, Duchamp's works remained unacceptable as art. And in fact, as you look from Duchamp to the light fixture the first thought you have is 'Well, that's a Duchamp.'"

The art of the everyday -- in Cage's world "sounds" as opposed to "music" -- and the quest for stillness and silence reminds us of all the authors who chose not to write. There's an excellent recounting of them in Bartleby & Co by Enrique Vila-Matas (Random House, 2004). This book is a series of footnotes to a non-existent text and a delightful survey of non-writing "for those in the No," inspired by Bartleby the Scrivener's perennial retort, "I would prefer not to."

In New York in 1950 Cage attended talks by Sukuzi. Cage had been studying Vedanta. Through Alan Watts he met Joseph Campbell and his wife, and the widow of Ananda Coomaraswamy. Listening to Suzuki he realized he needed to get his ego out of his work. One of Cage's students was Christian Wolff, son of Kurt who had published Kafka, Rilke, and Benjamin before he fled Germany and started Pantheon Press in New York. Christian gave Cage the newly published two-volume I Ching. He could use the book to answer questions and thus avoid bringing his own taste into the work.

And Cage acknowledged Bob Rauschenberg's white paintings as efforts to make a neutral artistic statement, though when they met in 1951 at Black Mountain College, Cage was the teacher and Rauschenberg the student. In 1953 they collaborated on an artwork: Rauschenberg glued twenty sheets of paper together and put black ink on a tire of Cage's Model A Ford.

Larson writes, "Automobile Tire Print makes an inescapable allusion to Chinese scroll painting. Here though the scroll is just a single very long black line. The white spaces in the tire tread make the line visually vibrate. The black line is a 'gesture' that doesn't 'express' anything -- a witty put-down of Abstract Expressionist painting and a re-affirmation of Cage's views on an art of action and process."

Automobile Tire Print, SF Museum of Modern Art

The work has since been attributed solely to Rauschenberg, but Cage recalled, "I know he put the paint on the tires. And he unrolled the paper on the city street. But which of us drove the car?"

At Black Mountain, Cage and Cunningham staged the first "Happening." Later his students would start the Fluxus movement (and one of them, Dick Higgins, founded Something Else Press); he is also a godfather of the pop movement through his influence on Jasper Johns. Again Larson makes a Buddhistic connection. The readymades -- Ballantyne cans or flags -- show an aesthetic detachment. Larson quotes Leo Steinberg who was uneasy: he was angry at the artist for letting him down, mad at his friends for pretending to like it, mad at himself "for being so dull, and at the whole situation for showing me up." How often can art provoke that response?

Larson's use of asynchronous time is good, so halfway through 1950 we flash forward to Naropa Institute in Boulder to see a Cage performance being demolished by an audience of hippies in 1974. Naropa was supposed to be a catalyst for cutting through spiritual (as well as consumerist) materialism and "alleviate the terrible karma of addictions to power and achievement at the expense of others." What the author doesn't say is that Naropa was run by wild egos and an out-of-control little scuzzbucket, Chogyam Trungpa, who thought he was a rockstar and ruled the place with a panoply of power. (The Tibetans are the Catholics of the Buddhist world, while the Zen sect are more like the Unitarians, hence the Tibetans are into pomp and circumstance in contrast to the more spartan Zen Buddhists.) Cage chose to perform "Empty Words," based on the writings of Thoreau, where he dropped out words and phrases by chance operations (it sounds like a microphone with a faulty connection to me) until there was mostly silence. He imagined it like clouds drifting into the blue sky. The 1,500 Boulder hippies reacted in a violent uproar, shrieking, whistling, screaming, playing guitars, dancing, throwing things on stage. Cage was appalled, Trungpa on the other hand was "delighted at the ego noise" and asked him to join the faculty. When he repeated "Empty Words" three years later in Milan it led to another riot.

Cage faced a true Zen dilemma: how to keep creating when he would rather not let his ego be front and center. He is "going nowhere yet endlessly evolving." (p. 356) Back in New York, Suzuki had been appointed visiting lecturer at Columbia and Cornelius Crane, the businessman who subsidized the gig, insisted Suzuki's classes be open to auditors, making it possible for Cage and others to attend.

Suzuki talked about Zen: Before studying Zen men are men and mountains are mountains. While studying Zen there is confusion between the two. After studying Zen men are men and mountains are mountains once again. And a student asks, What's the difference between before and after? Suzuki replies: No difference, only your feet are a little higher off the ground.

Another talisman for Cage was Erik Satie who explored unusual avenues in music outside the mainstream. Cage was instrumental (pun intended) in getting together a group of 10 people to play "Vexations," the piece that repeats 840 times, and lasts over 18 hours. Written in 1893 it had been laughed off until Cage gave it a premier at the Pocket Theater in New York in 1963. Among the performers was John Cale who appeared on TV ("I've Got a Secret" again!) to talk about it. Andy Warhol was in the audience and it inspired his film "Sleep."

It wasn't until 1962, when he was fifty, that audiences began to get Cage. In fact his biggest success was his first tour of Japan, arranged by his student Yoko Ono & her then-husband Toshi Ichiyanagi. He visited D. T. Suzuki and Zen monasteries, and gave concerts with David Tudor. And he wrote another piece. An aesthetic of indifference had become key to Cage. This doesn't mean he doesn't care, just that he doesn't care to choose. The student of Suzuki had learned well. Finally, Cage gave up arranging things in exchange for process. The sequel to 4'33" is 0'00" which consists of an instruction: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action." Cage himself performed it by putting a contact mike on a desk and sitting down to type answers to his voluminous correspondence, thus combining his duty as a celebrity with clamoring fans wanting a piece of him and his need to be a creative artist.

We get more paper planes thrown out at the end: notes about Minimalism and later artists who were influenced by Cage, but we return to Duchamp and how he denied any influence from Oriental philosophy though he lived life like a Zen master. It was Cage who pointed this out. Al Held said, "Duchamp was just a French Symbolist until Cage showed us how to understand him."

For many people, myself included, Cage is more interesting as a philosopher than a composer. But his influence persists, and one of his compositions is still being performed. Inspired by Satie's "Vexations," Cage wrote "Organ 2/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible)." It is being performed in the church of St Burchardi in Halberstadt, Germany. The first movement began with a rest of 17 months duration on September 5, 2001 (Cage's 89th birthday). "The first chord roared from the organ on February 5, 2003. The first tone change drew a cheerful crowd on July 5, 2004. The first movement is scheduled to end in 2072." The piece will end in 2639.

I do have to lament how the mighty Penguin Press has let its typographic standards slide. There are some serious design flaws: hard hyphens in quotes that weren't caught, sections beginning at the bottom of the page, no ligatures, figure 1 for cap I, and other glitches that show the book was typed but not redacted by a real typographer.
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Exciting Event with Black Man and Blue Paint

by Alastair Johnston

Bill Traylor, Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (Delmonico Books / Prestel, 2012, 112 pp., cloth in d.j.)

A new book about Bill Traylor is cause for celebration, just as seeing any new work from this artist is a marvel. Back in the middle of the last century the big dogs of French art, Picasso, Dubuffet and co, were trying hard to forget their art school training and paint like children. The new appreciation for self-taught artists didn't catch on in the USA, however.

In the 1940s, Charles Shannon, the man who rescued Traylor's work from oblivion, took it to New York but was rebuffed by the museums and galleries there. In the intervening decades the art has not changed, while the American art world's attitude to outsider artists, like Ramirez, Darger and Traylor, definitely has.

"Would the Modern have been a different place if it had had 16 Traylors in its collection for the last 60 years? It's impossible to know, but one likes to think that they would have worked their magic on some of its curators." — Roberta Smith, "Altered Views in the House of Modernism," The New York Times, 29 April 2005 (quoted on p. 11)

But then curators and critics have always followed rather than led the art market, so folks who make millions selling real estate or faded denim pants can amass boring collections of "blue-chip art" (usually a euphemism for gilded equine ordure), then have a museum wing dedicated to their efforts and foist it off on the undiscerning public. 

Bill Traylor, "Untitled" ca. 1939-42, pencil & colored pencil on cardboard, 22 x 14 ins. (High Museum of Art)

Wait, how did I get here? Let's go back to the artist at hand. Bill Traylor was born a slave. Yes, such people still existed in relatively modern times. After "emancipation" he continued to work as a stable hand for his former owner until old age crept up on him. He moved to the city, and ended up on the streets of Montgomery, Alabama, in 1929, during the Depression, when he was in his mid-70s. Like Oliver Twist, he slept in a funeral parlor. He spent his days on the street, drawing and painting on scraps of scavenged cardboard. By chance, Charles Shannon (not the Charles Shannon who was Charles Ricketts' boyfriend and whose bulldog crapped behind Gertrude Stein's couch), a young white artist (himself an outsider in the black community), saw Traylor at work and started buying his paintings, giving him poster paints and supplies.

By 1939 Traylor had rheumatic pains in his hands, but still managed to create at least 1200 art works in the next 4 years. When Shannon gave him new poster board, Traylor set it aside for a spell to "cure," so that it would acquire rips and stains like the old discarded poster backs he liked to use, responding to the "smudges, cracks, stains and the irregular shapes" they contained in his drawing (p. 32). Despite their broad appeal his images are not cute and delightful in a decorative way, but rather uneasy and show a lot of fearfulness. A bird (chicken?) eyes a giant bug; men party and drink but they are standing on a very precipitous roof. He portrayed his own world, but parallels can be seen to the work of Chagall early or Matisse late.

Bill Traylor, "Figures, Construction" ca. 1940-2, watercolor & graphite on cardboard, 13 x 7 ins. (Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts)

Then in 1942 Shannon was drafted into the army. Traylor visited his family in Detroit but lost a leg to gangrene. Any further work he did in the remaining 7 years of his life has been lost. He died in a nursing home.

Some of his surviving work, which Shannon took to New York, was even offered to the major dealers in Outsider art. Frank Maresca & Roger Ricco hesitated and missed the boat, as they ruefully noted in Bill Traylor: his art, his life (Knopf, 1991), which includes a long interview with Shannon. Fortunately, two collections of Traylor's surviving art ended up being donated to two museums: the High Museum of Art in Atlanta (35 drawings) and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (31 drawings) who sponsored this joint exhibition and catalogue of their holdings.

Since the outlines of Traylor's life have been given in earlier monographs, this catalogue focuses on the condition and conservation of the surviving work, mostly done in fugitive media such as wax crayon or poster paint on acidic recycled cardboard, all of which are archivally problematic.

The soundtrack to Traylor's life would have been Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives, Duke Ellington, Erskine Hawkins, and the rural blues of Alabama and the Mississippi delta, as Phil Patton pointed out in his catalogue essay "High Singing Blue" (New York, Hirschl & Adler Modern, 1997, which was reprinted in the essential Deep Blues catalogue, Yale University Press, 1999). The blues are deep and moody, but Traylor opted for a bright cobalt blue that truly electrifies some of his paintings. 

Bill Traylor, "Untitled" ca. 1939-42, poster paint & pencil on cardboard, 13.25 x 7.25 ins. (High Museum of Art)

Many commentators and curators have tried to explain the symbolism of Traylor's work through references to Voudou ("Dancing man in top hat" as Baron Samedi?), African cosmology, the plantation, jazz & blues improvisation, and so forth. This new book suggests in a more down-to-earth way, that many of the abstract shapes can be explained by the environment of downtown Montgomery. Fred Baron and Jeffrey Wolf (in the key essay here) explain the allusions to a monumental fountain, a large 4-faced clock, and the capitol building that recur as abstract motifs in Traylor's work. In one image (shown in Deep Blues, cat no 37) a man is seen toting the "fountain" on his back, to remind us that so much was constructed "off the backs of blacks," as Linton Kwesi Johnson put it.

Bill Traylor, "Untitled" ca. 1939-42, poster paint & pencil on cardboard, 13 x 11.25 ins. (High Museum of Art)

Traylor's paintings are narratives, but they also enact rituals, like the cave painters in the Dordogne Valley who visualized the aurochs getting speared before they went out to hunt it. Snakes, owls, dogs, men with sticks, thieves, cripples, attack dogs, smokers & drinkers, populate his imagery. His work is untitled (mainly because he could barely write) but Shannon added titles, calling quite a few of them "Exciting event." (Exciting event with keg," "Exciting event with animals," "Brown house with exciting event," "Exciting event: blue man, snake.") This new book is another "Exciting event" — with visionary black man and blue paint.

The production of the hardback catalogue is exemplary, from the design by Zach Hooker to the typesetting, to the printing by Shenzhen in China.
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The Stunning Retro Collages Of Muharrem Çetin

By Stephen J. Gertz

USA TODAY,  from Neptune.

We confine ourselves to rare books on Booktryst yet, because typography is such a key element in them, any time we discover interesting uses of the art that capture our attention we'll stretch our mission to include them.

MOTHERING MAGAZINE, from Mercury.

Muharren Çetin is an artist in Turkey who integrates typography into modern collages built upon retro graphic elements.

MIND, MOOD, AND MEMORY magazine, from Ceres.

The result is modern sensibility brought to bear upon bygone imagery, and his  collages often suggest pulp magazine covers splashing what lies within to seize and hold the attention of potential buyers browsing a newsstand.

HORIZON MAGAZINE, from Saturn.

The anxieties and concerns wrought by the modern world that are the bread and butter of general circulation magazines are expressed. Sensationalism, 'natch, is not ignored. 

WEIRD AND OCCULT magazine, from Uranus.

It is all quite familiar yet as if from tabloid outer space.

BRAIN WORLD, from Saturn.

He works the old-fashioned way: no computer editing of any kind. When he cuts and pastes he uses low-tech scissors and glue. Though it seems as if he must, Çetin  does not  employ digital manipulation to grade and match color from disparate sources. The uniform range of hues is organic. That in itself is something of a marvel.

 

WOMAN'S DAY, from Mars.

"Born in Istanbul in 1983, Muharrem has been working in the textiles sector since the year 2000, and entered the world of fashion after working as assistant to the fashion designer Baha Kutan. For the past three years he has produced designs for numerous fashion brands...

MEN'S JOURNAL, from Jupiter.

"Fascinated by anatomical imagery, Muharrem began collecting bits and pieces in the hope of one day being able to utilize them for artwork. Two years ago he began experimenting by layering his found imagery and continued to extend his collection by skimming through online libraries and scanning old books" (Milk Gallery). He recently made the transition from digital to, as here,  purely physical pieces.

BRIDES magazine, from Venus.

"I’m working as a fashion and graphic designer in Istanbul. Trying to stay away form noisy-crowded places and still scared of clowns," Çetin says.

HIGHLIGHTS for kids, from Pluto.

Coulrophobia, the fear of clowns, DSM-IV code 300.29, has rarely brought such fine graphic design to the center ring.

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Images courtesy of Paulo Canabarro at Abduzeedo, with our thanks.
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The Bauhaus Bird Paradise of Carl Ernst Hinkefuss

by Stephen J. Gertz

In 1929, graphic designer Carl Ernst Hinkefuss (1881-1970) published, Mein Vogel Paradies (My Bird Paradise), a tie-bound modern block book for children featuring stunning color lithographs depicting abstracted forms of birds reduced to their fundamental forms, accompanied by verse about each individual bird, both text (printed in silver ink) and images printed on black paper. A two-page introduction by Hinkefuss encourages children to create their own pictures based upon his simple designs.

Carl Ernst Hinkefuss was a popular Bauhaus illustrator known for modernist graphic design work that integrated art with commercial values. He did a great deal of advertising design for Hamburg Amerika oceanliners. Hinkefuss was also the editor of the design periodical Qualität, 1920-1932.

He "trained as a painter, graphic artist, and architect at the Königliche Kunstschule and the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin at the turn of the century. While still a student, Hinkefuss became interested in the idea of artists collaborating with the business world, and after graduation he became a commercial graphic designer. From 1905 to early 1910, he worked in the advertising and publicity departments of several firms in Berlin and Dessau, and then later in 1910 set out as an independent publicist in Berlin" (Online Archive of California). 

He ultimately partnered with Wilhelm Deffke (1887-1950) in Wilhemwerk, their commercial design house.

Prospectus for Mein Vogel Paradies, 1929.

According to the prospectus for the book, it was produced using a fifteen color offset-lithography process. The prospectus also mentions a gift box but, apparently, it was never produced; no copies in a publisher's gift box have ever been seen.

Mein Vogel Paradies is an extremely rare book. OCLC/KVK note only four copies in institutional holdings worldwide. According to the ABPC Index, 1923-2011, no copies have ever come to auction. Fine copies, if you can find them, now sell in the low five figures.

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HINKEFUSS, Carl Ernst. Mein Vogel Paradies. Gesamtwerk von Karl Ernst Hinkefuss. [Berlin: Verlag International GMBH / Internationale Propaganda für Qualitatserzeugnisse], 1929. First edition, limited to 1500 copies signed by the artist. Quarto (11 5/8 x 8 1/4 in.). [14]  leaves on black paper printed in silver and fourteen other colors. Color lithographs. Color pictorial wrappers side-stitched with black string.

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Book images courtesy of Aleph-Bet Books, with our thanks.

Image of prospectus courtesy of Wilhelmwerke, with our appreciation.
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The Artists' Book Manifesto of American Painting in the 1960s

by Stephen J. Gertz

Walasse Ting

Until the late 1950s, the creation of artists' books had been primarily an European phenomenon. But 1¢ Life, a collection of poems by Chinese-born American painter Walasse Ting (1929-2010), and published in 1964 with sixty-two lithographs housed within silk-screen printed boards, represents an early example of a shift to the U.S. for their production, an extravagant declaration their migration to, and presence in, the New World, a flag boldly planted to stake their claim.

"The book very quickly became the manifesto of a new generation of painters and the expression of the new pictorial research that they were engaged in."

Kiki O.K. [Kogelnik]

Although 1¢ Life was Ting's conception, it was painter Sam Francis who drove this huge project to its conclusion; he recruited the artists and organized their work. Francis also sought and received funding for the project and brought in Swiss publisher Eberhard W. Kornfeld. The works were then exhibited at the Kornfeld und Klipstein gallery in Bern.

Tom Wesselmann

Sam Francis

The participating artists represented a Who's Who of the contemporary art scene. In addition to works by Francis and Ting, the lithographs in 1¢ Life are by Alan Davie, Alfred Jensen, James Rosenquist, Pierre Alechinsky, Kimber Smith, Alfred Leslie, Antonio Saura, Kiki "O.K." Kolgelnik, Robert Indiana, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Karel Appel, Tom Wesselmann, Bram van Velde, Joan Mitchell, Allan Kaprow, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, K.R.H. Sonderborg, Roy Lichtenstein, Oyvind Fahlström, Reinhoud d'Haese, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Mel Ramos, and Enrico Baj.

Robert Indian

The sixty-two lithographs (the images, heavily, although not exclusively, in the Pop idiom),  were created to accompany sixty-one of Ting's "raunchy pidgen English" poems based upon his observations of city life, snatches of street conversation, etc., i.e.:

Walasse Ting

Sun in my stomach
New moon in eyes
I want a hamburger
Loan me two dollars

Mel Ramos

In the poem above, Ting, who had ties to the Paris-based COBRA group of avant-garde artists, captures what could be a street person barking a command, startling,  a bit scary, a bit nuts, annoying, amusing and painful at the same time. Or, perhaps, a Pop snapshot  influenced by cartoonist E.C. Segar's popular character, J. Wellington Wimpy, the ground beef gourmand, Popeye the Sailor's gluttonous friend, and world-class mooch renowned for his 1/4 lb. entreaty to anyone he runs into, "I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today."  Or, that friend who's loaded but never has any cash. All the poem lacks is an appropriate coda:

Sam Francis

Parched is my throat

Thirsty my heart
I want an Orange Julius
Loan me 25 cents more

Thanks

See you later buddy

Roy Lichtenstein

Ting "wanted to publish the most international illustrated book, intended to illustrate his text, uniting tachisme, neo-dadaisme, pop art, and all other artistic movements.

Pierre Alechinsky

"The idea was born from global experience, close contact with culture, pseudo-culture, primitive existential worries, urban erotic and eastern wisdom. It was a Herculean task, for which only a Chinese would have been able to muster the perseverance" (publisher E. W. Kornfeld).

Andy Warhol

Blending Pop, abstract, and Conceptualist sensibilities "the pop artists formed the central core of the group. The book very quickly became the manifesto of a new generation of painters and the expression of the new pictorial research that they were engaged in...." {catalog excerpt from Gemini Fine Books & Arts, Ltd.).

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Cover by Walasse Ting and Roy Lichtenstein.

TING, Walasse. 1¢ Life. Edited by Sam Francis. Bern (E. Kornfeld), 1964. Trade edition, limited to 2000 copies, numbered in color stencil. Folio. 163, (11)pp. Sixty-two original color lithographs, including  thirty-six double-page, by Alan Davie (2), Alfred Jensen (3), Sam Francis (6), Walasse Ting (6), James Rosenquist, Pierre Alechinsky (5), Kimber Smith (6), Alfred Leslie (2), Antonio Saura, Kiki O.K. (2), Robert Indiana (2), Jean-Paul Riopelle (2), Karel Appel (5), Tom Wesselmann (2), Bram van Velde, Joan Mitchell, Allan Kaprow, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, K.R.H. Sonderborg, Roy Lichtenstein, Oyvind Fahlström, Reinhoud, Claes Oldenburg (2), Jim Dine, Mel Ramos (2), Enrico Baj (2). 19 illus.  Lithography by Maurice Beaudet, typography by Georges Girard.

Cloth portfolio, silkscreened in color, designed by Ting. D.j. Slipcase.

A limited edition of 100 numbered copies signed by each artist was also issued.

Castleman p. 208f.; Manet to Hockney 135; Grolier Club 55; Bibliothèque Nationale: 50 livres illustrés depuis 1947, no. 32.

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Images courtesy of Ars Libri Ltd., currently offering a copy of 1¢ Life, with our thanks.

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The Stammering Transports of an Ecstatic Man: Meidner's September Cry

by Stephen J. Gertz

 

"I cry in a loud voice. I listen to my mind but can not decipher the deep words. With flying arms I will go on from noon dream. ...” Ludwig Meidner, Septemberschrei.

A beautiful copy of Ludwig Meidner’s Septemberschrei  has come to market. With only 100 copies printed, it has become quite rare; the book is being offered for $7,500.

Ludwig Meidner (1884-1966) is regarded as a key representative of  urban Expressionism. But in 1918 the German printmaker and writer produced fourteen lithographs that would, in 1920, be integrated into his post-World War I manifesto on the arts, Septemberschrei, September Cry, a passionate outpouring against the very movement that made his reputation and its subjective anti-realism, rejection of the temporal, and distain for nature. The enthusiastic acceptance of mechanization, abstraction, and the concomitant spurning of nature had led to the horrific, monstrous machine warfare that consumed Europe. One can imagine Septemberschrei pouring from the mouth of Munch’s screamer:

"The manner in which many of us lived and worked before the war was not right...What we need for the future, all of us, is a fanatic, fervent naturalism; oh, a passionate, virile, and unflinching veracity, like that of Masters Multscher, Grünewald, Bosch, and Breughel...our visions must be articulated as clearly and powerfully as those of Multscher and Grünewald...let us always think of these two! And let us not forget the noble, reliable, prudent craft of these heroes...Yes, craft - precious, laborious craft - which has its own severe beauty! All too frequently we have been remote from our world. Our desired goal was a geometric formulation, and the most advanced artists in particular obsessively strove for abstraction and concrete art. All you painters with your heads in the clouds, you want to forget the earth and to squeeze the spirit pure and immaterial directly out of your tubes of paint. But behold for just a moment the glorious reality of things...Let us hold fast to the earth, lest we end up in the boundlessness of the wild blue yonder. Let us return to a passionate realism, to a deep, loving faith in the physical reality of the world."

The figures in the lithographs of September Cry are seers of a new future yet “the fourteen lithographs of prophets that accompany his text, however, were still representative of his ecstatic style. Meidner's quest for for a 'fanatic naturalism' was undertaken in in the 415 intaglio prints that he produced between 1919 and 1922. While some painters studied Max Doerter's painting manual in order to develop beyond Expressionist formalism, Meidner undertook a study of the graphic techniques of artists like Dürer and Rembrandt" (Crockett, German Post-Expressionism: The Art of the Great Disorder 1918-1924, pp. 62-63).

The prophets of Septemberschrei are all in the image of Meidner, who was as obsessed with self-portrait as Rembrandt.

“After [Oskar] Kokoschka, it is to Meidner that we owe the most important portraits of the generation of Expressionist writers, to which he himself - by virtue in particular of his books Im Nacken des Sternemeer (Behind One the Sea of Stars,’ 1918) and Septemberschrei (September Cry, 1920) - very much belongs. These works are personal admissions, clothed in expressive vernal formulas, ‘ardent confessions, stammering transports of an ecstatic man...’ The drawings [in Septemberschrei] display the whole panorama of the features that characterize Meidner” (Lang).

Meidner’s reactionary stance against Expressionism was not welcome in all quarters. Expressionism was considered the only approach that could capture the essential truth of reality in the twentieth century, a hard, urban, cynical, mechanistic, inhuman world that no amount of wishful thinking could erase. Critic Wilhelm Hausenstein decried "the shamelessness of...the neo-naturalistic baroque-naturalistic vehemence of Meidner" (Hausenstein, Die Kunst in diesem Augenblick, as cited by Crockett, p. 22).

Meidner’s highly emotional flood was an embarrassment and insult. The extreme intensity of experience that Meidner expressed was, for some, too much, as if, in his shock, the war had loosed an avenging, apocalyptic angel of the arts,  a Christ-figure in the wilderness struggling with the devil, shouting to God, seeking a true path out of the wasteland and to the Sermon of the Mount.

It is axiomatic that after a cataclysm a society will question everything that led up to it. The war had changed everything; to ignore the horror and return to business as antebellum usual was strictly for ostriches. These neo-naturalist artists and writers were birds of a different feather altogether, with eyes wide-open to keenly see that a world turned upside-down was not about to turn right-side up again, that, indeed, right-side up had been the wrong side up to begin with. The nineteenth century was now officially dead and buried, the millions who died during the war littering its corpse. But to throw the beauty of the natural world, however ugly, out with the bloody bathwater was immoral.

Meidner fled Germany in 1935. Though his rejection of abstraction in the arts would, theoretically, find sympathy with the Nazis, the idealized beauty that Hitler embraced and mythologized was not for Meidner, who sought and found the lyric bloom in the ugly truths of the real world. And, too,  Jews were, by 1935, persona non grata, a grim reality that was a bit too earthy, even for Meidner, whose ecstasy transported him out of Germany before the Nazi  Ministry of Transport transported him to Dachau et al and a most unnatural death.

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MEIDNER, Ludwig. Septemberschrei. Hymnen, Gebete, Lästerungen. Berlin: Paul Cassirer, 1920. Vorzugsausgabe (Special Edition), one of 100 hand-numbered copies on handmade Van Geldern-Bütten paper, with all fourteen lithographs signed in pencil by Meidner in the margin. Large quarto. (2), 75, (5) pp. fourteen original lithographs hors texte, lithographs hand-printed by Pan-Press.  In the publisher’s deluxe binding of quarter vellum over patterned brown paper over boards.

Lang 234, p. 54; Jentsch 88; Rifkind/Davis p. 528f.; Raabe/Hannich-Bode 203.2.

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Images courtesy of Ars Libri Ltd., with our thanks.
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