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.

Carl Moll : secessio plebis in montem sacrum

In 1900 Carl Moll (1861 - 1945) asked the architect and designer Josef Hoffman to build him a house on the Hohe Warte in Vienna. In fact, it was called a doppelhaus, not exactly what the British describe as semi-detached, but there was an adjoining house for the designer Koloman Moser (1868 - 1918). Moll was approaching forty, a successful painter, who had helped lead many talented artists out of the Kunstlerhaus, which was more or less the only place artists could exhibit, to form the Vienna Secession in 1897. It was curious name, radical and yet conservative. It had been adopted by the first secession at Munich in 1893 and based on the Latin tag secessio plebis in montem sacrum, recalling the way the common people had left the city of Rome to build their own homes away from the dominance of the patricians. You can see some leading members of the Secession in the well-known photograph taken at the 1902 Beethoven exhibition. Let's face it, none of them look especially plebian, not even Gustav Klimt, sitting on a throne in his dress-reform robe. (Moll is reclining far right with Emil Orlik next to him and Moser is sitting in front of Klimt).



It was only a year later that the Wiener Werkstaette was formed by Hoffman and Moser. In a similar style, Moll took up colour woodcuts, still only five years old as a medium for modern artists. The print showing the Hohe Warte in 1903 (at the top) was one of the earliest. I'm not sure whether this snow scene, below, comes from that first 1903 batch, possibly not, but it also shows the Hohe Warte where Moll lived. It's a fine print, expressive of a way of life where design counted down to the last detail.

You can see the terrace of his house above the trees in this painting. (He also made a print looking up at the house with its clipped bay trees but it was unavailable for use here). The combination of warm and cool tones, of growing things and a severity of design is something we would still accept even today as contemporary.

The photograph below was taken just round the corner - you can see the same chairs and the same rendering and brickwork on the house. Moll himself is seated at the centre, the teacher and stage-designer, Alfred Roller, is on his left and of course that is Gustav Mahler, his son-in-law, behind him. Hoffman was also present that day and it was around this time that the Secession split (in 1905, to be exact). If Moll had produced his first woodcuts in response to the founding of the Wiener Werkstaette, his second series was certainly published by them. His 'Ten woodcuts' portfolio of 1908 didn't contain the kind of prints that were numbered and marked handdruck but I assume they were produced in time for the great Kunstschau organised by the Secession in the same year (as I think LH Jungnickel's first animal prints were). They may have been tired of the unexciting marketplace the Kunstlerhaus had become but opportunities to exhibit and sell their work in a city with very few galleries were important. (You won't be surprised to learn that Moll was also a director of the Gallery Mietkhe for a time).

He also travelled, to Italy, of course, where I think the subject for this woodcut must come from. In some ways, it's another version of the Hohe Warte. On their own, they don't have alot of appeal to a modern audience used to woodcuts in the Japanese manner. He knew Orlik as we've seen but he didn't follow him. He appeared to take up woodcut with something specific in mind because he stopped making them after 1908.

The next house he built was never the subject for a print, so far as I know. But many of the prints are strong on architectural subject matter and this is one of their features that make them so typical of what they were all attempting at the time - to inter-relate the disciplines. Fine art, design, architecture, even music, as in the Beethoven exhibition. In Moll's case, it may have produced woodcuts that might strike us as arid today but they are worth looking at more closely, particularly the very first one.

Their use of light, shadow, perspective, linearity and particularly overprinting, are are quite novel and well-thought out. Moll wasn't a young man trying a medium that had just been rediscovered; he was an established artist, doing something new and, in many ways, relevant: presenting a view of urban life as well-ordered, interconnected and liveable, not a bad aim, after all, and one we still respond to.