Gerd Arntz (1900-1988) - Bespiegelung I

Das Motiv liegt vor — Englisch wie zuvor. Ein Widerspruch in deinen Angaben, den ich nicht stillschweigend glätten will: du nennst das Werk einmal aus Das kleine Museum und einmal aus La Lune en Rodage. Das sind zwei verschiedene Panderma-Editionen von Laszlo. Ich habe die Beschreibung auf Das kleine Museum aufgebaut (das nennst du zuerst und konkret) und den La-Lune-Satz herausgenommen — sonst steht ein sachlicher Fehler im Lot. Kläre unten, welche es ist.

Gerd Arntz: Bespiegelung I — from Das kleine Museum

Original linocut on wove paper, hand-signed "G. Arntz" in pencil and dated 1932. Mounted on cardboard, 32 × 32 cm.

The composition is built from an emphatic contrast of black and white: a nude female figure, drawn in fine white contour, stands before a broad black diagonal field strewn with small crescent forms, her body and shadow extending into the dark mass. Figure and ground are treated as equivalent constructive elements — the human silhouette dissolving into, and re-emerging from, the flat geometric field. This reduction of the figure to a clear, illusion-free sign, set within a rigorously ordered black-and-white surface, is characteristic of the Figurative Constructivism developed by the Cologne Progressives, of which Arntz was a central exponent.

Das kleine Museum is one of the portable collections edited by the Basel-based publisher, psychoanalyst and collector Carl Laszlo (Pécs 1923 – Basel 2013) and issued by Edition Panderma, Basel. Laszlo assembled the leading artists of his time in these editions; many of the included works mark a turning point in their respective careers and production.

Gerd Arntz (1900–1988) was a member of the Cologne Gruppe progressiver Künstler (Cologne Progressives) and ranks among the defining figures of twentieth-century political printmaking. In abstracted figures rendered as woodcuts and linocuts, he depicted the life of the working class and the struggle between labour and capital. From 1929 he worked in Vienna with Otto Neurath at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum, where he became the principal designer of the pictographic statistics later known as the Isotype system. His artistic estate is administered by the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag.

Provenance: Edition Panderma, Carl Laszlo, Basel — Galerie von Bartha, Basel — Private Collection, Basel.