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.

Z was the zoo

                                                                                   

In 1896 this famous poster designed by Theodore Steinlen was used to advertise a tour by the company from Le chat noir cabaret in Paris. With its alley cat looking as fierce as a Japanese kabuki actor and the bold use of red and black, it helped set the tone for what was to come, both the forthright appeal of modern advertising and the eclectic appeal of modern art. Steinlen was not the first artist to mix the skills of printmaking and commercial art. In Britain, William Blake had learned his skills as a fine commercial engraver in the late C18th but the reliance on imagery over content was new and the effect in Britain, Austria and Germany was immediate.
                                                          

Readers may doubt that Allen Seaby's exceptional image of a cockerel had Steinlen's cat as a predecessor but I can assure them that the fame of Steinlen's poster had reached provincial Reading where Seaby was teaching and that he was familiar with it. (And I am afraid I am not saying here how I know). But for all its fame and skill, I tend to think Steinlen's poster was soon improved on. L.H. Jungnicke;l's magnificent Tigerkopf  (1909) is a good example of the way an artist can strip away irrelevant detail like hammy Japanese lettering and arch stylisation and produce something of remarkable power. Jungnickel himself was a commercial artist and here you see the early stage of Andy Warhol's Marilyn (1962).
                                                              

The whole thing really is a story. Artists are forever picking up ideas and Le chat noir attracted so many kinds of people, everyone from bohemian artists and performers to Edward, Prince of Wales, it's hardly surprising a mere poster could have such a large effect. Others perhaps were more subtle but perhaps no one was more effective. But if we have to start somewhere, we have to begin with the Swiss artist, Felix Vallotton, who led the way with a woodcut of Paul Verlaine (himself a patron of Le chat noir) in 1891. It remains odd and perhaps isn't much of a woodcut in itself. I prefer his later woodcut of Verlaine from Le Livre des masques (1898) but Vallotton went on to describe a world in woodcut where all the creatures lived, from bohemian poets to communards to cats, they were there. His remarkable image Two cats was published by the German magazine, Pan, in 1895.

 

 

 

It was not only the images that themselves or the modern subjects that represented a great innovation. By drawing on the tradition of books of woodcuts, Vallotton provided artists with yet another precedent. La flute appeared in his 1896 book, Six musical instruments. It ten re-appeared in the Saturday Review in London in 1897 as H.M. The Queen by William Nicholson. For Nicholson, the image was a great coup and made him famous overnight. Not that he had been unoriginal. He had had the bright idea of removing the Prince of Wales from a double portrait photograph of the Prince and Queen Victoria (a photograph that appears to have disappeared from the internet) and substituted the Queen's terrier.
                                          

I think his debt to Vallotton is obvious and like Vallotton he also went on to make his own series of woodcut books for the publisher, William Heinemann (whose nerve had failed him over H.M. The Queen). Where Nicholson did move forward was in his use of colour. Curiously, Nicholson's woodcuts were not cut at all but engraved on end-grain. I suppose he had needed to provide his publishers with a durable material like box-wood. He certainly had no intention of using the finicky wood-engraving style commonly used by newspapers.

Just as influential was his book An Alphabet. (The date is usually given as 1st January, 1898, but it appeared in time for Christmas, 1897.) For all his modern boldness, Nicholson regularly fell back on a folksy style and the longer he went on the more he relied on a period feel that tends to set the tone for a lot of British illustration. But once the folksiness is removed, we are left with the sumptuousness of  images such as Moriz Jung's Jaguar from his Tier-ABC made about 1906 while still a student at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule. By comparison, Jungnickel's Tigerkopf is conventional. Jaguar is out-and-out Vienna Secession while Tigerkopf  is Secession modified by a visit to the zoo.                                                                  

 

After that, there was no holding anyone in Vienna back. The posters produced by Erwin Puschinger and other artists for the Jagd Ausstellung of 1910 may well be fussier and less original than some of the best posters of the period (and there were a lot of them) but no one after all was looking at posterity. Peter Behren's woodcuts had been appearing in Pan around the same time as Vallotton's work but his poster from the 1910 Deutsche Werkbund falls back on a more conventional fine art approach but I like it all the same for its sheer bravura.
                                                                  

Huehner (1907) was the nearest Carl Thiemann came to the commercial poster style but he was a fine artist by training and more associated with Munich than the more radical styles of the Vienna Secession. All the same, I have always thought this woodcut was Thiemann at his exquisite best. It sums up the modern need for fine but uncomplicated imagery. His woodcut landscapes tend to start looking like paintings for all the woodcut feel they have. The sheer decorativeness and subtlety of colour is what makes this Thiemann's greatest and most telling print. But then Thiemann had looked around the farmyard, not just the zoo.

Adventures at the Vienna zoo

 

Here is the perfect excuse to post two very recent finds - what I hope is a cleaner image of LH Jungnickel's Tigerkopf from 1909 and yet another of his unpredictable maccaws. The excuse was provided today by Neil's very welcome article about the merits of another Austrian printmaker, Norbertine von Bresslern Roth. I was disappointed that no one really took isssue with me at the time, so please look at  adventuresintheprinttrade.blogspot.com. I have also changed the second image for a better one that I am happy to admit I have just this minute stolen from Lily's seminal blog Japonisme lotusgreenfotos.blogspot.com. It is also very annoying to find that Lily posted an LHJ tiger image three years ago! That's a double dose of humility for me in one day.

I should also add that the second woodcut is a proof. That's why there are marks and no signature. There are at least two versions, one with a blue macaw, one with a grey-blue one. It may be that he produced different versions for different editions. I think I shall be unable to resist eventually putting together a post dealing with this and Jungnickel's working methods. Stand by.

LH Jungnickel's stencils: the final word?

Thanks to Lily at Japonisme, I think I may be able to say something definitive about the stencils produced by Jungnickel between about 1903 and 1907. It's a matter of chance whether I turn up colour images. Basically, they have to come up at auction in Vienna to appear anywhere online. The monochromes that are here come from the 1907 article about Jungnickel in the British art magazine The Studio, which Lily found, being more computer savvy than me.






First something about his technique. His materials were simple: card, paper, colours, knife, syringes, a wire screen. The paper was first primed by applying colour through the screen with a syringe. This produced a stippled effect similar to lithography. The shapes were then formed when stencils were laid over and colour was again applied through the screen. The size of syringe controlled the size of the spots. Obviously, this all required skill, patience and great care. The first image is one of his most complex and would have needed to be fairly large for Jungnickel to be able cut out and then apply stencils. Even so, it does leave you wondering.

For those readers by now very familar with his animal colour woodcuts, what is noticeable is the variety of his subjects: landscapes, social gatherings, work and some early examples of his groups of birds and animals. The article goes to great lengths to explain the effect of Alfred Roller's teaching on his students. As I said before, Jungnickel attended the Kunstgewerbeshcule between 1903 and 1904 and his stencil 'Sonnenstrahlen' was made in 1903. The simplicity of that image suggests to me it may have been his first success. All the images shown here had been made by 1907. With images of kittens and leopards, that makes six and there is a further one of macaque monkeys, which I think may be his last - or at least one of the later ones - because of the strictly secessionist manner.

So, why did he do it? My conclusion is that the earlier, more stippled stencils are well in line with the late Impressionism that was standard-issue amongst early secession colour printmakers. Helene Mass certainly fits in here. In all these prints, Jungnickel is interested in the effects of light, particularly in the top landscape, 'Tennis players' and 'The mowers'. The birds and animals look forward to his woodcuts - and to everyone else's, from Carl Thiemann to Emile Pottner. I think he stopped making stencils when he turned to woodcut about 1908 ('Tiger's head' dates from 1909). This helps to explain why he came to woodcut relatively late for someone of his generation. Stencil certainly was a very individual, even eccentric technique and one that drew considerable attention to him. I am aware of only his macaque monkeys that doesn't appear in the article.

My guess is that he was already experimenting with woodcut as he made the stencils. Many of the secessionists were making them - Orlik, Moll, Moser, Roller - but I think he needed to get them right. This also explain why 'Tiger's head' is such a good image for, I think, his second print. The stencils amounted to a long apprenticeship. This last one could just as easily have been a woodcut. Not only that, it could just as easily been by Carl Thiemann. Yet again, as you can now see here, it was LH Jungnickel who got there first.

'Mowers' & other stencils by LH Jungnickel

It's in the nature of things on a blog that once a topic takes people's interest, new images and information begin to turn up. Here are the three stencil sprays or Schablonnenspritztechnik by LH Jungnickel that I have images of, plus a digest of comments made by both Neil and Clive. 'Mowers' above is especially interesting because Jungnickel produced few landscape prints and this is the only rural subject by him I have ever seen. The only comparable print on the blog is his woodcut of the Schoenbrunn. Anyway, it's a fine piece of work, probably the most complex of the three, and I begin to see the way these new techniques provided the challenge for him to make his first impressive prints.



I have found a reference to at least one other stencil spray, called 'Tennis players', and I am sure there must be others. Both Neil and Clive drew a paralell between this technique and screenprint where ink is applied through a silk screen with stencils being used to provide the image. Clive also drew a very interesting comparison with spritzdekor, which was commonly used for ceramic decoration in Germany and other central European countries between the wars. Woodcut, linocut, screenprint and pochoir were all popular or industrial techniques that were adapted for use by artists in their own work, starting with the revival of woodcut, and I don't think it's a coincidence that both Jungnickel and Andy Warhol first worked as graphic artists in industry.

I did suggest in the last post on this subject that Jungnickel must have drawn inspiration from Japanese dyer's stencils but in fact I have no exact idea about the nature of his sources. These are techniques that are little known in the UK and trying to find hard facts about the way Jungnickel (or any of them apart from Emil Orlik and Walther Klemm) began to make prints between 1898 and 1905 is difficult, to say the very least. Having gained these skills, Jungnickel made stencils from 1903 possibly untill he abandonned the secessionist manner, and also produced woodcuts between about 1908 and 1917. He was a graphic artist, first and foremost, who produced many drawings and watercolours that drew on both European and oriental styles. His work as printmaker and otherwise is important, innovative, even experimental, as we see here, but in the end it was secondary.

LH Jungnickel's parrots & the origin of the species

It was hard to resist posting two more of Jungnickel's humourous takes on hyperactivity amongst parrots. This first woodcut is wonderfully manic with very little bearing on natural history at all but does employ his later style of sub-expressionism which in fact has more in common with textiles than Schmidt-Rottluff. The second colour woodcut shows a hyacinth maccaw, a rare parrot from Brazil. In his earlier, more strictly secessionist woodcuts, he provided no habitat at all for the animals. In this one we do at least have leaves and what I take to be jazz-age tree-tops. Rather like his parrots, Jungnickel tended to be a law unto himself.



It was his usual method to stalk his subjects in the confines of the Vienna Zoo but he has made a valiant effort to describe the peculiar colour of the bird and the shading of its plumage. The beak is in fact dark grey and he may have emphasised the size of its his head for comic effect. But the humped wings and alarming beak are true to type.



All the more curious, then, for him to come up with this jeu d'esprit of violet maccaws. It's true that violet parrots do exist but the Violet Maccaw is a species that only inhabits LH Jungnickel's drole imagination. Whether the woodcut improves on nature is open to question but the printing is sharper, notably along the bird's neck and on its wing, giving the parrot a much livelier profile. The blacks and greys also stand in greater contrast to the violet than they do to the blue so there was a genuine desire on Jungnickel's part to make a better print. (I'm assuming the blue one is the earlier version, of course). No doubt assiduous readers will soon be finding other maccaws unknown outside the hothouse of Austria-Hungary. And I will have no other option but to post.

LH Jungnickel & stencil or schablonenspritztechnik

I know I am giving alot of space to those Vienna secessionist dilettantes but I have found something today it was just impossible for me to ignore, a work that may be LH Jungnickel's earliest signed graphic production. It uses the technique discussed in 'LH Jungnickel: two new animal prints'. One of them is not a print at all but a stencil. In German it is Schablonenspritztechnik, the English equivilant being stencil spray. The work itself is called 'Sonnenstrahlen im Tannenwald', quite a mouthful, that translates as 'Sunrays in the pinewood'.

This stencil is coming up for auction on 3rd March at Palais Dorotheum in Vienna and they give the date as 1903. The previous year Jungnickel had left his job as graphics designer at the Stollwerck chocolate factory to enroll at the Kunstgewerbeschule under the seminal designer Alfred Roller (1864 - 1935). I include the poster Roller produced for the 1902 Secession exhibition (that centred round Max Klinger's sculpture of Beethoven) because it gives an idea what students gained from his work. (Emma Schlangenhausen was also to benefit from Roller's example soon afterwards). Jungnickel hasn't only borrowed the dimensions, he came up with a subtle variation on Roller's overall patterning. (He must also have seen Klimt's landscapes.) Without doubt his basic inspiration was Japanese katagami - bamboo dyer's stencils - but according to the British magazine The Studio Jungnickel invented this particular technique of (I think) applying ink through a gauze plate laid over a stencil. Modern German children use a toothbrush but of course Banksy uses an aerosol. What LHJ used, I don't know, but I offer a close up of his woodland along with the Macaque monkeys form the previous post.

You can see the combination of stencil and spraying in both works. I assume the monkeys are later where he appears to have sprayed the whole coloured area. It is specially interesting to see an artist responding to a course of study and in fact publishing these works (at a time when novelty was at a premium) apparently represented his breakthrough. As work, they are probably more interesting than they are rewarding and I can see why he went on to develop his colour woodcuts. As a technique it has obvious restrictions. And I think this is how the stencils need to be seen - in the context of the rest of his graphic work: the posters, the postcards for the Wiener Werkstaette (see 'Yours truly, LH Jungnickel') and his designs for Josef Hoffmann.

As a postscript I should add that I think I used to own something using a technique like this. I sincerely hope it wasn't by Jungnickel because I gave it to a friend! As a PPS, Dorotheum are expecting something in the region of 2,000 € for the stencil even though it is damaged. Just so that you know. As modern graphics go, this makes it pretty interesting.

LH Jungnickel: 2 new animal prints

I recently came across two prints by Jungnickel that were new to me and quite a surprise. The colour woodcut of the pair of greyhounds below is in restrained black and olive only but he used an unusual and subtle monochrome for the Macaque monkeys. There is another image of Macaques in the post on his colour woodcuts but this one employs a technique I don't have a word for. The term used in German is Schablonenspritztechnik. Google translation left me none the wiser so I would be grateful if German-speaking readers let us know exactly what this wonderful artist of ours is doing here. I've also included a drawing of a monkey so readers can see how carefully he studied the animals he used as models for his prints. They will also note the differences in style. He has been especially selective for the Macaque print. What I like about these prints is that Jungnickel doesn't try too hard. The depiction of the greyhounds' legs is spare enough to suggest their strength but the wanton approach of Bresslern Roth is absent. She is more stylish, certainly, but he always concentrates our attention on the animals themselves. The second print dates from 1912 so it comes towards the end of the series of colour woodcuts he made.

LH Jungnickel: the colour woodcuts

For me the big question about Jungnickel is this: how did he come to make a colour woodcut as original as his Tigerkopf by 1909? Untill then he had earned his living as a graphic artist (see Yours truly, LH Jungnickel) and then as a designer for the Wiener Werkstaette from 1903. Then in 1908 the Workshops and artsist who had ledft the Secession decided to hold their own show as part of their unofficial contribution to the celebrations for the anniversary of Franz Josef. I assume Jungnickel saw an opportunity to exhibit new work and made his first woodcuts specially for the Kunstschau. The tiger's head came the following year. (I don't know the dates for all of the prints here but I've assumed that the paler ones are earlier and the more expressionist ones are later). One thing that is pretty certain, though, is Jungnickel's commercial instinct. After all, this is the man who drew portraits for tourists in Italy and he can play to the crowd just as much as his parrots and monkeys. Nor did he go off to Africa to study his animals but went no farther than the Vienna zoo. He wasn't interested in their habitat and yet he was very interested in their psychology. So, where did his own interest in printmaking come from?

In 1902 he left the Stollwerck factory in Cologne and returned to Vienna where he enrolled at the Imperial Museum for Art and Industry. His teacher there was the designer Alfred Roller who himself contributed a woodcut to the famous square calendar produced by the magazine Ver Sacrum the year after. The modern colour woodcut by then was only five years old and it's interesting that he then took two more fine art courses - at the Munich Academy in 1905 and then at the Vienna Academy in 1906. Presuamably, he wanted to learn new skills and what makes me think it was Roller who interested him in woodcut rather than Emil Orlik is the lack of Japanese influence in his work. He was also less daring than some of his contemporaries but he made prints with impact and appeal - and they won him prize after prize (Rome, Amsterdam, Leipzig and San Francisco between 1911 and 1915). Even so these prints would have been strikingly original and modern at the time even though many artists were now using the square format.

The prints gained him another kind of success. 1911 found him as visiting professor in Frankfurt where he made two architectual woodcuts of the city. The same year saw him make his woodcut of the Schoenbrunner Park in Vienna. The first image you see below is in fact his design for the print and I think the existence on its own of this very accomplished work says a great deal about him and the milieu he was working in. Above all, what was of value was skill. The artists of Die Brucke might have had great talent, vigour and radicalism but Jungnickel was the Viennese craftsman-designer to a T.

It is knowing and urbane. (Remember what he did with hats like those on his postcards). These are exactly the people who would have come to the opening of the Kunstschau in 1908. It's interesting to see how Jungnickel improved on his design - he does away with the rather fussy 'reflection' of the cloud pattern on the gravel path and adds white areas of clothing instead to liven up the foreground. He has learned something from Orlik too (see 'O was for Orlik' in October) while making a more conventional image than Orlik would have done.

But it's the animals prints he does best and another artist recognised this. Norbertine von Bresslern Roth was ten years younger and didn't make her linocuts untill the 1920s and I am pretty certain about two things: firstly that she adopted the square format, the grouping of single species and muted colours from Jungnickel and, secondly, that he is the better artist. It was his innovation that she recognised - and she went on to make some very good, very stylish prints. The real difference, though, is this: her animals never look at you; his animals often do. In their own way, his animal prints are very original portraits. He had tested his skills on the tourists in Italy but had more interesting subjects at the zoo. It isn't just their behaviour that appeaks to him, it's their psychology, and I think this is why he chose obvious characters like monkeys and parrots. They have appeal but they don't have the easy appeal of a Seaby fox or rabbit.

We recognise the hilarious agility and inquisitiveness of the parrot almost straightaway. The violet maccaws of 1914 I'd have thought were later. Leaves and backgound are sketched in in a very non-Secessionist fashion and he beats the Grosvenor School to it by ten years at least with an incredibly lively and original surface. Bresslern Roth certainly didn't follow him into this particular part of the jungle. They look a bit too avant-garde for Graz.

But what really strikes me about these later woodcuts is how much he draws on painting for effect. He describes the paws and spots of his leopard with such care - no offhand attempt at pattern-making. What concerns him is the animal - its body, its emotion.

Which brings us to what I think is his masterpiece, the Pantherkopf of 1916. There are two versions. Both are well-known. I assume the simpler one below is the earlier image. He certainly saw this as a finished work because it's signed. What we are very lucky to have is a second version that takes the leopard into an area Jungnickel had never really been.

A shift of tone, the addition of the orange background and the touches of green, pink and very odd white make this a very compelling image indeed. The whole expression is thrown into relief. Again he saw the possibilities - or someone pointed them out to him. Whatever happened, he came up with one of the great images of modern printmaking. Neither Orlik nor Klemm nor Thiemann got anywhere near this for sheer power of draughtsmanship and directness.

The following year he published his portfolio Tiere der Fabel. The conception is different and they have something in common with Klemm's Vogelbuch. Inventive and humourous, they may well be the last colour woodcuts he made. I've only included one because I didn't want to weaken the effect of the other stand-alone prints.

He certainly continued as a successful artist. The photo of him below was taken at a major award ceremony in Vienna in 1937. He was a boyish fifty-six and only about three years away from disaster. Early in the war, the director of the Vienna Kunstlerhaus failed to send in his Aryan certification. Following this he was denounced for his closeness to Jewish colleagues and he took the same road that Josephine Siccard Redl had taken before him - the one to Istria. Failing to convince the authorities from Abbazia ( Opatije in modern-day Croatia) he spent the war years there. Back in Vienna, the Gestapo emptied his flat, which was finally damaged by Allied bombing in 1945, and he was convicted in absentia of 'subversive activity'. He wasn't able to return to Austria untill 1952n - he had been a citizen of the country since 1918. He only moved back to his adoptive home of Vienna in the sixties.

The poster below is for a 1966 exhibition organised by the municipality of Wunsiedel in southern Germany where he had been born. There is both pathos and poignancy in its provincial attempt to change him back into 'an animal artist of European importance'. I just hope someone warned them about the parrots.