William Wauer (1866-1962) - Horse

William Wauer: Horse, from La Lune en Rodage III (1977)

A silkscreen by William Wauer — sculptor, painter, theatre and film director, and one of the central figures of Herwarth Walden's Der Sturm — issued in Carl Laszlo's La Lune en Rodage III, Edition Panderma, Basel. The print transposes Wauer's sculptural language of dynamic rhythm and faceted, cubo-futurist surface into two dimensions: an animal in motion, reduced to interlocking planes — a vocabulary directly related to the constructive expressionist sculpture for which he is best known.Wauer was a polymath of the Berlin avant-garde. He directed the silent biopic Richard Wagner (1913), Der Tunnel (1915, the first adaptation of Bernhard Kellermann's science-fiction novel), and Peter Lump (1916), staged Herwarth Walden's pantomime Die vier Toten der Fiametta in 1911, and exhibited his sculpture in Der Sturm gallery from 1918 onward — his cubist portrait bust of Walden is considered an Inkunabel (incunable) of Expressionist sculpture. In 1924, as the Sturm circle dissolved, Wauer founded Die Abstrakten — the Internationale Vereinigung der Expressionisten, Kubisten, Futuristen und Konstruktivisten — which he led until the National Socialists banned it in 1933. He worked for the Bauhaus, took part in the sculpture competition of the 1928 Olympic Games, and was declared entartet in 1941, when he was banned from working. After 1945 he resumed exhibiting and taught at the West Berlin adult education centre. His birthplace in Oberwiesenthal is today the Wauer Museum

.This silkscreen bears the estate stamp — issued from the Wauer estate after his death in 1962 — and is therefore one of the small number of Wauer prints that circulate with direct documentary authority. Printed on paper, in good archival condition with some minor bends in the left area of the sheet (visible in the photographs).La Lune en Rodage — Carl Laszlo's portable museum of the avant-garde — was published in three volumes (1960, 1965, 1977) by Edition Panderma, Basel, and contains in total approximately 180 works by the leading figures of the period. This is an unnumbered copy from the total edition of 230 of volume III (of which 65 hors commerce impressions were issued unnumbered).Provenance: Edition Panderma, Carl Laszlo, Basel — Galerie von Bartha, Basel — Private Collection, Basel.


William Wauer (1866 Oberwiesenthal – 1962 West Berlin) studied at the academies of Dresden, Berlin and Munich, lived in San Francisco, New York, Vienna, Rome and Leipzig before settling in Berlin around 1900, and worked successively as art critic, publisher, theatre director, film director, sculptor, painter and printmaker. He joined Walden's Der Sturm in 1912 and contributed to its journals, art school and exhibition programme until 1924.