Gerd Arntz (1900-1988) - Bespiegelungen II

Gerd Arntz: Bespiegelungen II (composition 1932), Edition Panderma, Basel

A hand-signed linocut by Gerd Arntz, one of the sharpest social critics among the German modernists between the wars. The composition stages Arntz's central theme as a stark black-and-white contrast: at the left, a lone figure stands confined behind the bars of a cell; at the right, on a sunlit threshold, a group of bourgeois figures — an unclothed body seen from behind, elegantly dressed women, a top-hatted gentleman with a cane. Confinement set against privilege, labour against leisure: the Bespiegelungen ("reflections") hold the two worlds up to one another in a single frame.

Arntz reduced the human figure to a flat, high-contrast silhouette — the same radical economy of form that he would carry into the Isotype pictograms. Here that vocabulary is turned to overtly political ends, in the manner of his work for the Cologne Progressives. The composition dates from 1932; this sheet is a later impression issued by Edition Panderma (Carl Laszlo) in Basel, hand-signed in pencil by the artist.

La Lune en Rodage, Carl Laszlo's editioned anthology of the post-war and avant-garde, gathered figures across the European avant-garde; Arntz's contribution brings the inter-war social woodcut tradition into that context.
In good condition, with some minor age-related signs to the paper.
Title: Bespiegelungen II
Composition: 1932 (this impression a later Edition Panderma printing) [see note]
Technique: Linocut on paper [see note]
Edition: Edition of 230
Signature: Hand-signed in pencil
Dimensions: 21 x 28 cm
Condition: Good; minor age-related signs to the paper
Publisher: Edition Panderma (Carl Laszlo), Basel
Provenance: Edition Panderma (Carl Laszlo), Basel — Galerie von Bartha, Basel — Private collection, Basel

Gerd Arntz (1900 Remscheid – 1988 The Hague) was a German modernist printmaker and a core member of the Cologne Progressives, who depicted class, labour and social conflict in his characteristic high-contrast black-and-white woodcuts and linocuts. Politically a council communist, he took over Otto Dix's Düsseldorf studio in 1925. From 1929 he worked with the sociologist Otto Neurath in Vienna, where he became the principal designer of Isotype (the International System of Typographic Picture Education) — the pictogram language that shaped modern information graphics. His artistic estate is administered by the Kunstmuseum Den Haag (formerly Gemeentemuseum).