The week-end on ebay

 

A round-up of the prints to be found for sale on ebay this week-end has to begin with Helen Hyde's Butterflies made in 1908. To start with I need to say the image above is not the one for sale. At under £200 you will get a print that has almost certainly been laid and down and is also cockled. On the plus side you will get the original frame complete with the label of the fashionable Glasgow dealer Andrew Duthie on the back. This is the only time Hyde has appeared on Modern Printmakers. It is a very well-made print and by the time she had made it, she had studied with block-makers in Tokyo. But it isn't all that cheap considering the condition and you should be able to find a good proof for not a lot more.

Nor will you get a bargain on Ethel Kirkpagtrick's Brixham trawlers. What you will get is an unframed proof in good condition, with the colours looking bright and fresh. Here we have Kirkpatrick at her insouciant best and from her classic period before the first war. As she has recently been featured in a small exhibition at the V&A, you will need to be just as insouciant when you pay. Kirkpatrick has a sense of movement and magic rare in British colour woodcut artists. Only Allen Seaby is her equal but unlike Seaby, she never made a duff print.

Robert Howey has never been cheap either but I thought the U.S. dealer was pushing it on this one. The impression Howey makes is usually good. After the storm is also well-designed. But so far as I am concerned, Howey doesn't follow through. He was really a commercial artist, with a small business in Hartlepool, and used  to use printer's ink so his images tend to look flat on his thin buff paper. Howey was one of the first English artists to make use of lino in the 1920s and provided a bridgehead in the north-east for the 'Exhibition of British Linocuts' tours in the late twenties. All in all, though, if you want sea and boats, stay with the expert.

I am a fan of the Swiss artist Alfred Peter and own a few of his bookplates and would have considered this one myself if it had not been for the condition of the paper. Peter remains good value if you like small prints. He was a fine craftsman and here you have his own New Year print made in 1911. I suspect the photo does not do the meticulous printing and compact design much justice.

Last but not least we have this fine etching of a faun by Hans Frank. At about £25 this looks like a bargain compared to the late colour woodcuts currently for sale in Germany and Austria at almost £500. I know many readers like to have the prints they buy framed on the wall. I keep most of mine loose in portfolios. This means I have am happy to have small prints at negligible prices wrapped in tissue and invariably looking great! Good artists understand the preciousness and intimacy found in small works. It is what gives so many British colour woodcuts their special value though when it comes to very small prints, the Swiss, the Germans and the Austrians are even more appealing than British wood-engravings and a fraction of the price.

Hans Frank revisited

One way or another I always find Hans Frank hard to avoid and here I am again looking at his early prints. Frank had a long and varied career which began while still a student at the School of Applied Arts in Vienna where he gained a reputation for colour woodcuts of remarkable skill and maturity. He was also fortunate to be studying at the school in the heyday of the Vienna Secession and was able to produce prints like Silver pheasant (above) as eloquent and impressive as any print made during those seminal few years.

This is a big claim and I make it because if Frank is the art equivalent of a conviction politician. What he did in those years was never half-hearted. Even when he represented young animals like fauns, they come vivid and fully rounded. At the same stage in his own career, Allen Seaby was struggling to get it right. Why? Because the British allowed technique to get in the way while the Austrians placed the emphasis on design. It was not about animals, it was not about birds, it was not about snow, it was about the ability of the artist to put a memorable image on the page.

By about 1908, Seaby was doing his best work but try and imagine him then making an etching as good as as Frank's Eagle (above) made by Frank in 1909 about the time Frank moved to the School of Fine Art. Ironically, the Austrians were interested in British printmakers but did not see the ones who were making artists' prints. Frank Brangwyn had three rooms dedicated to his etchings at the Vienna Secession exhibition of 1909 but he did not print his own work. William Nicholson's woodcuts were also widely admired in Austrian and Germany. Like Brangwyn he was invited to exhibit with the Secession (in his case in 1899) and although his portrait H.M. The Queen was responsible for all the  square images subsequently made in Vienna from then on, what the Austrians actually saw were wood-engravings made to look like woodcuts. Nicholson only once applied inks by hand and always used printer's ink (and probably did not print the work himself either). As with the Austrians, this all placed the emphasis on the image rather than the impression.

Frank did not always used a key-block but used pattern to build up the image instead. This made feathers useful and helps explain why exotic birds like peacocks and silver pheasants became subjects. Something similar can be said for butterflies or plants like clover. The butterfly above has a black pattern which means there is no need for an overall key-block while the petals of clover are pink and cream. With snow, there is no detail at all. This is not to say he was making it easy for himself only that he did not necessarily want to create a naturalistic effect.

It was all carefully considered and it would be a mistake to downplay or miss his achievement as I heard one distinguished British wood-engraver do when shown one of Frank's fauns. He called it 'sweet' and that was all. I wonder how he would have described Frank's woodcut of an eagle (above) if I had found that at Oxford Antiques Centre instead of the faun. I suppose Richard Shirley Smith wasn't very interested even though both the School of Applied Arts and then the School of Fine Art in Vienna were training artists like Frank during a time of great innovation for C20th design.

Prints made by Frank before the first war remain affordable. (What set me off was seeing a peacock of his up for sale on U.S. ebay. I have probably said this before but what you get with early Frank is a small piece of great period of modern design.  What you also get is the work of artist with considerable powers of observation as you will see from the detail (above) and of objectivity (below).  He is not as obviously Japanese in manner as, say, his contemporary Carl Thiemann, but when it comes to a stylish but objective interest in the world, he is far more Japanese than Thiemann. It all depends what you mean by Japanese!

The studio at Liboc: Walther Klemm & early colour woodcut

 

Walther Klemm enrolled at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna in 1902. This was the year a number of Austrian artists associated with the Secession began making colour woodcuts. In the spring a colour woodcut workshop had been set up at the Secession exhibition halls where artists worked together making prints and sharing techniques. The most important of them so far as knowledge of technique went was Emil Orlik. He had not only been to London where he had met both Frank Morley Fletcher and William Nicholson, he had also been to Japan and studied colour woodcuts methods there. This had created enough interest for Orlik to have a touring exhibition of the work he had produced during his stay. It also included work by the ukiyo-e artists he had collected (a collection that remained intact until it was sold by Sotheby's in London when the Museum of Fine Art in Prague bought a small selection). This had begun in Berlin and moved on to Dresden, Prague and Brno. 

Orlik was very interested in going to source wherever it happened to be and after his visit to London, made The English woman (1899) one of his first larger woodcuts and a seminal print but using only two colours. (I will illustrate this in another post). But there was always something uneventful about Orlik's colour woodcuts. They could be documentary and unexciting while and the peacocks and turkeys made by Klemm and Hans Frank had verve and vigour. According to Gustav Mahler, Orlik was talkative, a strength when it came to dealing with students and other artists but he was also academic, a side to his character that came out when he included work from his collection in the 1902 exhibition.

The other main participant at the 1902 exhibition was Carl Moll. He was editor of the Secession magazine Ver Sacrum and apparently showed woodcuts that year. His prints were bigger than Orlik's but had a similar understated, documentary feel to them and never made dramatic use of colour. 1902 was also the year that Hans Frank enrolled at  the Kunstgewerbeschule and, as I said in the recent post about him, he had begun to make his peacock prints in 1904. A year later Klemm was back in Prague where he met Carl Thiemann in the street one day. Both were natives of the spa town of Karlsbad (which David Hockney visited in the 1970s) and took a studio together in Liboc on the western side of the city and where Klemm introduced Thiemann to colour woodcut.

Klemm was twenty-two and Thiemann twenty-three and over the three years they spent at Liboc  the two artists worked together on the first great collaboration of modern colour woodcut. Their common starting point should be fairly obvious. Nicholson's The square book of animals (above) published by William Heinemann in London in time for Christmas 1899 was by and large pastiche. The blocks he used were box and he only once printed the colours by hand (for A fisherman in The Dome magazine). Hans Frank's peacocks also appear to be forerunners by a year while it is generally considered that Orlik showed Klemm the technique (though I have yet to come across any documentation in English). Orlik had previously made a series of woodcuts that included views of old Prague. I also believe Klemm and Thieman then worked together on a portfolio of colour woodcuts of the old city which were very different from the work of Orlik. Enhanced by powerful and vigorous cutting and subdued colour, Thiemann's in particular were the work of a sensitive painter while Klemm used the architecture to organise the picture plane (below).

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The best collection of these early prints by Klemm is held by the Museum of Fine Art in Budapest where an astute curator acquired prints it seemed almost as soon as Klemm had made them. Notable amongst them is 'Fishing boats on the Spree' (second from the top) made in 1906 presumably after a trip to Berlin. Here like nowhere else you see how original Klemm could be. Thiemann was a greater stylist than Klemm but the huts and wharves and their rough reflections on the Spree are the source for every one of Thiemann's later Venice woodcuts. If Thiemann had feeling, Klemm had ideas. Both needed each other for a time because both were very different but not yet different enough to go their own ways and during 1906 both artists worked on a second collaboration. (I' m assuming Old Prague came first.) This was a calendar for 1907 with twelve colour woodcuts and a black and white image on the front.

To be truthful I had forgottten all about this but to make amends I finally found four colour images including January and October (both above) by Klemm. A facsimile was produced by Thiemann's wife, Ottolie, in 1981 and these are both from that edition and once agaib make it plain what Klemm's strengths were. Thiemann's work was small scale and decorative. For all the small size, Klemm thought big and objective. The girl on the sledge is wonderfully depicted, with a strong sense of light, three dimensions and expression. I am in no doubt that Thiemann's print of a cockeral was the best of all the Liboc period by either artist but I suspect the idea came from Klemm. Thiemann never did a bird before and never did one again.

The two artists left Liboc in 1908 and moved to Dachau near Munich but the collaboration was at an end and some time afterwards Klemm took up a position as head of graphic art at the Weimar School of Art. There had been collaborations before in recent times - for instance between Nicholson and James Pryde as the Beggarstaff brothers and John Dickson Batten and Frank Morley Fletcher in London in the 1890s, but Klemm's introduction of Thiemann to new ideas marked the beginning of one of the best loved of all the series of prints made in central Europe early in the C20th. But it was Kleem who constantly invoked group effort with his wandering turkeys and it is Walther Klemm and myself who wish you a happy and prosperous 1907.

Hans Frank: peacocks & other birds

 

Over the past few days a number of readers have written in to express their astonishment at the price of the recent Eric Slater sale on ebay. A couple of days later there was further ado about the price fetched by Elizabeth Keith's ditzy fashion show of 1922, Kamakura, summer reflections. Ignore the hype and look elsewhere - and you could do worse than consider an artist (above) who continues to be affordable despite making colour woodcuts to a standard well beyond the capability of Slater.

Hans Frank studied at the Vienna School of Applied Arts between 1902 and 1906. This was a period when artists and designers of the calibre of Josef Hoffman, Koloman Moser, Alfred Roller and Hugo Henneberg were members of staff, so in buying an early colour woodcut by Frank like his three peacocks (above), by default you buy a piece of art history, hardly something you could say when you fork out £1725 on a Slater. You can tell by the date 04, this was designed during either his second or third year at the Kunstgewerbeschule. It may not have been printed then, but you can buy this on ebay today for a quarter of what you would pay for a Slater. This is nothing new. I once bought Frank's Seagulls at auction for £6 and some time later was offered Slater's Martello tower for £60. I turned it down. 

As we all know, ebay has its uses. But you will also know, ebay prices are consistently inflated. Frank's white peacock (above) sold in March, 2018, at Dorotheum in Vienna for as little as 160 euros - and this was not a blip. The truth is Frank does not have the clout of Carl Thiemann or L.H. Jungnickel, but was such a prolific artist, there is still work available for everyone to buy. I am not a big fan of the landscapes, but the bird prints are another thing. And if peacocks are not to your taste, there are other birds, including his eagle from 1916 (below), cranes and seagulls.

As you will know, Modern Printmakers is not the Racing Post and is not in the habit of handing out tips to readers, but just this once I will point something out in case you didn't know. Like his teacher, Anton von Kenner, Frank made bookplates. This means for of few pounds, you can pick up a small Frank colour woodcut on japan signed in pencil and with proper margins. OK, it may not be to the same standard as Frank's personal ex libris (below) made in 1917, but you can't really go wrong with Frank. His training at the School of Applied Arts and afterwards at the Academy was too thorough for him to make a wrong move.

 

I was disbelieving myself when I bought one with a butterfly perched on a letter, but there you are. It is possible. All you have to do is get yourself a small Daler portfolio and some acid-free and put them in. There is a special intimate pleasure in such small things as many artists have known for a long, long time. And while you are at it, do remember you read it here first.