Erich Buchholz (1891-1972) - Composition

Erich Buchholz — Composition (1920)

Medium: woodcut on laid paper (vergé), published by Edition Panderma (Carl Laszlo), Basel.

Hand-signed and dated by the artist [date as inscribed beside the signature].
Condition: mint, archival condition.

Provenance: Edition Panderma (Carl Laszlo), Basel; Galerie von Bartha, Basel; private collection, Basel.
The 1920 composition behind this sheet belongs to the most radical phase of Buchholz's work. Erich Buchholz (1891–1972) was a central figure in the development of non-objective, proto-Concrete art in Berlin between 1918 and 1924 — part of the small circle that drove abstraction toward the constructed, geometric image years before it had a settled name. His first solo exhibition, at Herwarth Walden's Galerie Der Sturm in 1921, presented a series of sixteen woodblocks; the best known, Planetenbahnen (Orbits of the Planets), began as a printing matrix and became an autonomous painted relief — an early instance of print and panel collapsing into a single object. At the 1922 Constructivism and Suprematism exhibition at the Galerie van Diemen, Berlin, he came into contact with László Moholy-Nagy, László Péri, Ernő Kállai and El Lissitzky — the network through which Russian Constructivism and Suprematism entered the Berlin avant-garde.
His trajectory was then broken twice over: he set painting aside in 1925 under economic pressure and, from 1933, was forbidden to paint by the National Socialist authorities, resuming only in 1945. That long silence is part of why his radical early work circulated so little for decades and why his rediscovery came comparatively late.
The original Composition of 1920 is held in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York (gouache and watercolour on board, 33.3 × 28.2 cm; The Riklis Collection of McCrory Corporation, acc. 860.1983) — a museum reference that anchors this sheet directly to a documented work of the early German avant-garde.