Fritz Köthe: Composition — from the portfolio La Lune en Rodage III Original linocut on vergé paper, an unnumbered copy from the edition of 230 (with a further 65 unnumbered hors-commerce copies). Sheet 28 × 28 cm. Hand-signed in pencil below the image. Framed in a white frame with a yellow passepartout. (35 x 35 x 4 cm) Fritz Köthe (Berlin 1916 – 2005) was one of the leading German exponents of Pop Art and Photorealism. Following his academic training, from around 1960 he developed an independent visual language built from painted collages and motifs drawn from the world of consumption and advertising — cigarette packets, automobiles, motor-racing iconography, technical surfaces. Characteristic is his cool, precise treatment of commodity aesthetics: Köthe translates the vocabulary of advertising into a painterly, controlled, often smooth and glossy surface that detaches the pictorial sign from its commercial function and makes it available as an autonomous motif. Within postwar German modernism his work stands for a specifically European appropriation of American Pop Art impulses, closer to the matter-of-fact and technical than to the ironic-affirmative line. La Lune en Rodage is the three-volume collective portfolio assembled by the Basel-based publisher, psychoanalyst and collector Carl Laszlo (Pécs 1923 – Basel 2013), issued by Edition Panderma, Basel, in 1960, 1965 and 1977. The three volumes gather a total of some 180 original works and form a dense survey of the European avant-garde between the 1950s and the 1970s — with contributions by, among others, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Enrico Castellani, Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Bridget Riley, Günter Fruhtrunk, Meret Oppenheim, Bruno Munari, Hans Arp and Victor Vasarely. Several of these contributions mark turning points in the work of the artists involved: Castellani's sheet is regarded as his first documented graphic work, and Manzoni's Achrome as the only multiple the artist ever realised. Its inclusion in the third volume places Köthe's contribution firmly within this international avant-garde anthology. Condition: mint. Framed in a white frame with a yellow passepartout. Provenance: Edition Panderma, Carl Laszlo, Basel — Galerie von Bartha, Basel.