E mail for Modern Printmakers

 

   

I needed an excuse to post Hugo Henneberg's colour linocut Dalmatia. It had not been online all that long when I came across it and is one of the few colour prints he made that was not part of the portfolio of prints.  Mainly, though, I wanted occasional readers to know my email address has changed from the one that appears in older comments to cgc505@outlook.com and they can write to me, Gordon Clarke, for information or with any information about artists who I have written about or even ones I have not.

Results of the sale at Banbury (and what you did not see there)

                                                                         

I would like to say that any one of the colour prints you see here came up for sale at Banbury rather than the ones that did, but all of them are as rare as anything is going to be and would attract any serious collector. But I have brought them up from my records and thought it was a good idea to let readers see some of the work that does not come up for sale at all often. This is not to disparage the prints that were sold. I would have bought any of them but I needed to a bookcase and fridge instead.

I have been warned to let you know that online buyers needed to pay 40% more than the hammer price. The buyers premium of 31.2% includes VAT and on top of that online sales are subject to a further fee of  8.2%, also including VAT. The effect was to depress prices and meant that once the vendor had paid their own fee, they would not be getting very much. Overall it probably means you would be better off selling on ebay if you did not have to pack up all the stuff you have sold.

I was surprised Allen Seaby's woodcut Pewits was the most expensive at £500 (and altogether you would almost pay £700 which is not all that cheap for a piece of work that I personally think falls flat). The barn owl print was much better value at £240 and more attractive than a fridge. It would end up costing you about £330 and as I could have got to Banbury on the train I could have picked it up.

The Phillips went cheap at £420 although the auctioneers did themselves and their vendors no favours by putting up poor photographs. Considering the photos have to be paid for by the vendor, it makes the whole situation even worse. It's all a bit of a stunt but there you are, and going by what you can pay for a Phillips from a dealer, someone will be pleased.

As predicted, John Hall Thorpe's prices are going nowhere and are well below what they were in their heyday ten years ago. We all knew he was overpriced then and scoffed but I would have gladly paid £130 for this pair of prints. The fuss over Hall Thorpe tended to obscure the fact that his work is well-made indeed. He had been a professional block-cutter in Australian before he came to Britain and had a good eye for colour. What he did not do was print the work himself, something the labels make clear. This never seemed to put buyers off in the past and for that type of decorative work it hardly matters.

The Urushibara was another reasonable buy at £250. Read's Venetian shawl was even better at £270 given the poor condition of so many of the proofs I have seen and the place the woodcut has in British colour woodcut history. Read was the only British colour woodcut artists to pull portraiture off. Not only that, he singlehandedly reinvented the medium for a post-war audience who no longer wanted the earnest work of the pre-war arts and crafts movement.

I have no doubt you will also want to know what the prints are that did not come up for sale at Banbury (and which will probably not come up for sale anywhere soon). First of all comes S. G. Boxsius' diminutive masterpiece Bowsprits. Despite the poor quality of the reproduction, the work stands out as Boxsius at his most Boxsius, with all that that means. Far more rare is Phyllis Platt's stylish portrait of her daughter, Una, lying reading on a sofa. This has never appeared online until today and very few people  have ever seen it. I found the illustration in a catalogue that was sent to me. I probably don't need to say she was the wife of John Platt but typically we know very little about her. The third print is Seaby's Karnack from 1925, followed by a more interesting early colour woodcut of a St Ives shop window by the Scottish artist, Frances Blair. Below that is Edward Ashendens's Old Icelander. He is best known as a designer of dioramas but here is making a creditable colour woodcut. Continuing the theme of ships and the sea, there is Hugo Henneberg's important colour linocut Dalmatia and then Kenneth Broad with all his originality and sense of style to the fore in a subtle and sensitive colour woodcut he simply called Hastings.

Night and day at the Villa Henneberg

 

Yet again I have been put onto something intriguing by the vigilant Jim Barnes in Scotland. This time it is an unexpected connection between the Scottish art nouveau designer, Margaret MacDonald, and a man who has had considerable coverage over the years on Modern Printmakers. I mean Hugo Henneberg. To be honest, I was unaware of the extent of Henneberg's collecting, but in the photograph (above) from the Austrian magazine Ver Sacrum you can see a smoker's cabinet he bought from MacDonald and her husband, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, after it was exhibited at the 8th Vienna Secession exhibition in 1900.

The two silver-plated panels representing night and day were made for the cabinet by MacDonald in 1899 and were considered lost until they turned up for sale at Dorotheum where they sold for 94,000 euros. That was in December, 2019. As you see, they combine classic elongated art nouveau forms with the eliptical shapes characteristic of the Celtic style which played such a part in the national revival in Scotland and Ireland. The ancient Celtic-speaking people of the maritime coast of Europe were famed for their craftsmanship, particularly in bronze, copper, gold, silver and enamel and, as Simon Esmond Cleary once said, objects like the British torc (below) from 1st Century BC remain the finest things ever made on these islands of ours.

 

But it was all rather odd the way MacDonald went about it. She wore her own hair the same was as the figure in the panel and the whole approach had a sense of theatricality and dressing up which now appears to be at odds with the stringency of what became modern design. Nevertheless, Scotland made a unique contribution and the purchase of MacDonald and Mackintosh's work by such an innovatory artist was typical of the eclecticism of so much modern art (though eclectic may not be the word art historians would make use of).

Henneberg may already have been thinking about a setting for his new piece of furniture because soon afterwards he asked Josef Hoffman to design a house as part of a group of four artist's residences on the Hohe Warte in the hills above Vienna. The semi-detached houses occupied by the artist, Carl Moll, and designer Koloman Moser were covered some years ago in a post called ' Carl Moll: secessio plebis in montem sacrum'. It was a title I could not resist. Nor could another well-known blogger resist the idea I had had because it was immediately plagiarised much to everyone's disbelief.

The Villa Henneberg in particular gave expression to the idea that fine art, design, architecture, gardening and music all belonged together in the same domestic setting, even if it was nit a very comfortable one. Dress reform also played its part as you can see from the photograph of MacDonald. Gustave Klimt was famous for wandering about in long loose gown and Henneberg went to him for a portrait of his wife, Marie, to hang above the over-scale fireplace in the large hall, which you can see in the immaculate maquette above. It was made deliberately hard to say whether you were inside or out. The trellis pattern was borrowed from garden design and it naturally played a part outside.

The house was completed in 1902 in a style which I can feel no great enthusiasm for and which I suspect would generally be regarded to day as laboured if not heavy-going. What it gained in originality, it lost in charm. I used to think that was the way it was with the secession but it was much the same with other artist's houses. About 1906, Pierre-Auguste Renoir had a house built in a gnarled old olive grove above Cagnes sur Mer near Nice. Supposedly based on a local style of farmhouse, the exterior is striking for its overall lack of appeal, but is full of exquisite detail and such a a refined sense of colour, it makes the National Trust look like beginners.

See also 'Hugo Henneberg and the history of linocut' and 'Hugo Henneberg, the first linocut virtuoso'.

A Christmas card from Ernst Stoehr

 

A reader in Scotland has out me on to some prints by Ernst Stoehr (1865 - 1917) that made use of lino for the very first time between 1904 and 1908. At first sight none are obviously linocuts in the way that Hugo Henneberg's Der blaue Weiher (1904) is and the final print of the series has been properly described as mixed technique. All were sent out as Christmas cards by Stoehr and his wife, Frederike, and were dated on the back. Unfortunately when Dorotheum sold them last year in Vienna, they failed to give the dates. At a guess, the earliest cards are the ones that look most like lino though even there Stoehr was experimenting and as he went along, he tried different kinds of paper and different ways of applying ink.

Stoehr was a leading figure of the Vienna Secession which he helped found in 1897. He can be seen sixth from the left leaning forward in the homburg hat in the famous photograph taken at the 1902 Beethoven exhibition. Others included are the designer Koloman Moser, dapper and unmissable in front of Gustave Klimt seated in the chair and also Emil Orlik sitting cross-legged immediately to the right of Stoehr. Note the two painters who have left their paint-pots on the floor.

The Albertina give a date of 1904 - 1905 for the top print which they call Seelandschaft. The date makes sense because the fluid line that lino is so well-suited to can be seen along the left margin of the lake and in the brown shadow on the rock. As an image it is close to an oil, Abend am Weiher showing a winding path beside a lake made by Stoehr in 1903. What is surprising was the way he had identified two of the great strengths of lino as a medium. It is easy to work and made sense to use when making Christmas cards and it is soft and makes it easy to produce a sinuous line of the kind widespread among designers and artists of the period.

This all suggests to me how much all these artists were picking up from one another and trying out new approaches and how much making prints was a real part of the process. Only consider the way Stoehr has adapted the action of the roller to make suggestions rather than apply the ink evenly. He was obviously more interested in producing blocks of colour rather than hard lines and even-looking surfaces. Wisely he limited himself to grey and blue ink and achieved varying tomes either by putting less pressure on the block when printing (the leaves) or under-printing (the ground round the lake).

Under-printing was not unique to linocut. Ethel Kirkpatrick in Britain was using the technique with great subtlety on he Cornish prints about 1906 or 1907. But in order to appreciate what Kirkpatrick was doing you need to see successive proofs. Stoehr realised that with lino the technique could be used far more directly. Bear in mind nthis has become a standard approach when making lino prints and when he made his Christmas cards this was possibly the first time it had been applied so effectively.

By the time he made the lake-scene above, the techniques he used were much less obvious. Presumably the mountain and its shadow were printed over a basic stippled background partly. Only one of the sets if initials of the five sold last year in Vienna was printed. It may have been this one, but it is very hard to tell from a photo. Stoehr had a press at his home in Slovenia and this made it possible for him to experiment with effects.

You will not be surprised to read that Stoehr used pastel but printing colour impressions using lino blocks not only meant he could reproduce images for cards, he could achieve depth by conrasting the trees with the reflections of the woods and mountains.  Very few linocutters ever really both about the effects of light in their prints. Gertrude Lawrence was one of the few British artists to do so. What she had in common with Stoehr is that both were mainly painters and both of them understood the greater possibilities. So far as that goes, I think the print above is pretty good and certainly well-thought out.

The landscape above seems to be the last of the series and is dated 1908. Of all of them this is the one that is farthest from lino and closest to sablonenspritztechnik or stencil spray used by L.H. Jungnickel about the same time. Long-term readers might remember a series of posts about Jungnickel, including his use of stencil. This looks like Stoehr used blocks as a basis but no-one so far as I know has said exactly how the inks were applied. This uncertainty only goes to prove (if further proof were needed) how far Austrians artists were putting graphic art, including photography, not only at the centre of the modern movement, but making it a cornerstone of modern visual experience. The innovations made in France at the same time by Matisse, Derain and Picasso were far-reaching, but the Secession artists and designers in Austria moved beyond the easel tradition of the old masters to break new ground that left artists in France looking conservative. These are only Christmas cards, yes, but occasional, no, not never.

Hugo Henneberg & the history of linocut

 

As a proof of Hugo Henneberg's colour linocut Pine trees at Durnstein (above) is currently for sale on U.S. ebay, it provides an opportunity to have another look at the important series of prints the linocut belongs to. The history is fairly complex and has been poorly understood outside Austria. The image I have used here comes from the British Museum collection. The Museum acquired several prints by Henneberg in 1980, but incorrectly described them in the catalogue as woodcuts thereby missing the true value of the historic linocuts in the collection.

Not only that, Henneberg's print acted as an example to other printmakers like S.G. Boxsius who is also in their collection. Pines (above) may not be one of the linocuts held by the Museum, but readers will see how much he depended on Henneberg as an example when he produced his own original work. This is worth saying because the history of linocut has been badly misunderstood in Britain simply because writers on the subject have often repeated a series of misleading remarks made in the 1920s by Claude Flight who saw linocuts made in a children's class at the School of Applied Arts in Vienna at an exhibition held in London in 1920.

In 1903, Henneberg made a series of woodcuts (like the one above) showing the Wachau area of the Danube valley. The art journal Ver Sacrum reproduced two of them that year, possibly in the final edition (but I have not seen them as yet). Many of the artists and designers contributing work to Ver Sacrum were associated with the Kunstgewerbeschule or School of Applied Arts (and the Secession) and went on to provide designs for a new journal of graphic art called Die Flache, with the first edition coming out in 1903. Many designs made use of wood, stencil and lino and this may be the first time lino was used as a conventional print medium by professional designers. Stencil designs like the fish on page 161 partly derive from Japanese dyer's stencils. One or two of the other designs may have used lino in the same way Edward Bawden did for wallpaper designs in 1928.

Some of these designs were figurative, some repeat patterns, others were for lettering. What appeared to happen then was Henneberg decided to use lino as a medium for a fine colour print and in 1903 or 1904 made his sumptuous Der blaue Weiher  or The blue pond (which you can find on the original post by clicking on Henneberg's name on the new index). He then went on to make a series of seven colour linocuts he published in 1910 as a portfolio usually described as the Wachauansichten or the Wachau Portfolio. After his death in 1918, a further edition was printed in 1920. Many of the prints now available belong to that edition and were printed from Henneberg's blocks and have a studio signature in black (below) rather than being signed in pencil by the artist. Other prints, like the 1903 series of castles, have a studio stamp on the back. This doesn't make them not worth having, but it does make the issue complicated.

It also should not detract from Henneberg's innovation and his ability to adapt, specially when it came to using a medium as cheap as lino that had none of the history of woodcut behind it. There was also co-operation between artists who were making prints and it is no longer at all clear to me what happened when Henneberg and his neighbour, Carl Moll, worked together, (mainly because my German isn't good enough). Galleries in Austria now say colour prints I thought were by Moll are the work of Henneberg, although at the time I did think it was odd. Worse still, they now describe prints as lino that were once called woodcuts. Obviously research and knowledge has improved even over the past ten years and contemporary Austrian sources like Galerie Walfischgasse are most likely to be correct. They describe the print below as a colour linocut by Henneberg rather than by Moll as I thought it was! Either way, it is a remarkable use of a medium that has so often been promoted for its expressive use.

An informed view always helps when it comes to buying old prints and this is nowhere more than case than with early C20th colour print. I know there is more than one reader of Modern Printmakers who is an enthusiastic collector of the work of Boxsius. Part of the idea behind this post is to place Boxsius in a proper context and suggest the way a British printmaker took the lead from Austrian colleagues. Some readers will also be aware that a proof of Boxsius' A Devon village was sold only yesterday. This is another print that owes some of its success to the example set by modern European printmakers who were experimenting with a surprising range of mediums that have left some tell-tale signs on mid-twentieth British prints as the next post hopes to show.

Hugo Henneberg, the first linocut virtuoso

                                                                

Around 1904 the Viennese artist, Hugo Henneberg, made this remarkable colour linocut  he called Der blaue Weiher (the blue pond), remarkable not only because of the image itself, but because he had used a cheap and nasty material like linoleum to make it. Exactly where he got the idea from, I do not know. Lino had only been used for making printing blocks in wallpaper production since the 1890s, so here was an example of a modern artist adapting a commercial technique in the same way pochoir was used in the twenties and screen printing in the sixties. What really is surprising, though, it just how good it was.

Henneberg was not the only artist to be using lino at the time. Gabriele Muenter had begun her series of portraits of Wassily Kandinsky (who had been her teacher at Munich) in 1903. Henneberg was different, more formal. Linocuts like Am Quai (above) also took photographs he had been making since the 1880s as a starting point. So, he was no youthful beginner. Although Am Quai is based on a photograph taken at Trieste in 1899, I'm including  his photograph, Bach in Fruhjahr, (below). It gives more of an idea of his overall approach to making images. The problem is it's not always easy to say exactly what he was doing because  Henneberg began to make colour woodcuts at the same time and in reproduction it can be very tricky trying to tell linocut from woodcut. Am Quai is sometimes described as woodcut and mistakes have been made with other prints, probably because no one expects them to be linocuts!
                                                                          

The temptation to head the post with Der blaue Weiher was too big for me to resist. Yet in many ways it isn't typical and most of his other prints would strike most modern readers as more conventional, a shame because what Henneberg's was doing with lino was new. But then, look here. He goes off to Italy with Gustav Klimt and Carl Moll in 1899 and comes home and  makes an atmospheric but formal print like Am Quai. It's Hiroshige without the humour and perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that what followed over the next few years was a fascination with baroque.
                                                             

Stiftshof in Duernstein (above) might come over as more intriguing than exciting, particularly the version in black and white. Certainly, it sits oddly with the Secession reputation for innovation and advanced modernity. I think what he had done with Der blaue Weiher was draw on the decorative work of Klimt. The way the reflections end up making patterns is similar to both Klimt and Egon Schiele. Frankly, he might have been better following this up with others like it, but he turned to Moll instead who was both less talented and more conservative. Both artists had homes designed by Josef Hoffman on the Hohe Warte in Vienna and Henneberg went as far as to base one of his colour woodcuts on a painting by Moll. This was inexplicable. Seeing one medium in terms of another is basically anti modern. It also causes confusion. To my dismay, only this weekend I discovered that I had put a colour linocut by Henneberg at the top of a post about Moll's colour woodcuts and no one but no one picked me up on it!
                                                              

I tend to think that so far as Henneberg and colour print went, Moll led the way. Moll had published a portfoilio of large prints in 1903. Other artists made even larger colour woodcuts than Moll, but lino lends itself to a big scale because it is cheap and is easier to manipulate, particularly if you to go in for the kind of architectural detail that Henneberg seemed to like. Funnily enough, this makes him look a lot like his British contemporary, Sidney Lee. What was missing in Lee, though, was Henneberg's sophistication. Italy was easier to comprehend when looked at from Vienna rather than Manchester where Lee came from. Henneberg's virtuosity sits easily on him while Lee always has too much northern grit about him (though I used to like that). Henneberg could turn from photography to woodcut and lino with ease and get it right and, what is more, having no other artists to turn to for an example when it came to lino. Nor did anyone think of working on such a scale for many years. The fact that no one much, apart from Ernst Stoehr, followed his example only emphasises how individual he was. The Wachau portfolio of seven linocuts he published in 1910 became his testament because only eight years later, he was dead. You can see Duernstein above.
                                                          

                                      
Unfortunately, not many of the images available online are all that good and the situation is complicated by an edition that was printed posthumously in 1921. The original edition published by Gesellschavt fur Vervielfaltignede Kunst have their mark on the left and a studio stamp of Henneberg's signature on the left, while the 1921 edition was annotated by Karl Nickman but with the printer so far unidentified (or at least that is how I understand the German notes). But either way, you get the idea. Here is Stein, above, and no doubt readers in Bavaria who are fans of Henri Riviere will notice what Henneberg was able to learn from that artist. (It's worth saying that Riviere was invited to exhibit with the Secession in 1899 along with William Nicholson, so there is no doubt about Henneberg knowing his work, I would think.)
                                                                   

In all this Henneberg was pretty forward-looking. If he derived styles and ideas from artists as diverse as Hokusai and Moll, he also set the tone for a lot of work that came after the first war. British printmakers as diverse as S.G. Boxsius, Claughton Pellew and Edward Bawden would all recognise a fellow practitioner, I would have thought. One thing they all have in common is an interest in place. Wachau is in Upper Austria and the prints take in similar views over one small area. It is what a portfolio can do in the right hands; the prints speak to one another as much as they do to us. And I think they do speak. The atmospherics of the photographs and the Secession formalism of the earlier colour prints have developed into that old thing, a flowering later in life. Claude Flight liked to claim that linocut had no history and that was what made it attractive to him.. What he should have said was it had no history he knew about, but some of it you see here - in fact a lot of it is here! It is astonishing really that Henneberg got so far.

At a time when symbolism came all too easily to artists and was often taken for granted, it would be easy to miss the poetic mood in Henneberg. Take a look at  Waldweg (above).  Nothing else really explain his shifts from photography to colour print and the way he appeared to change so readily from wood to lino (but because a lot of the prints are not dated, it isn't easy to say exactly what he was doing). So far as I can see, he preferred to use colour with lino. The colour of the woodcuts tends to be flat and unvaried. Even so, I also think the black and white linocuts like Wehrturm in Duenrstein, below, find Henneberg at his most delicate and subtle. It's a paradox I know but a paradox the traditionalist in him would understand.

Last but far from least, I am indebted to Galerie Walfischgasse in Vienna for the high standard of many of the images you see here.