Erich Buchholz (1891-1972) - Composition

Erich Buchholz: Composition — from the portfolio La Lune en Rodage III

Original linocut on vergé paper, signed and dated. The composition organises the square field with strict constructivist economy: a stepped, pixel-like black form ascends diagonally against the white ground, answered by a descending sequence of fine vertical bars, the whole framed by a single ruled border. Solid mass and linear interval are held in precise equilibrium — a reductive, architectonic vocabulary that reaches back to Buchholz's pioneering non-objective work of the early 1920s. The underlying composition derives from Buchholz's Composition of 1920, a work now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York (The Riklis Collection of McCrory Corporation).

Erich Buchholz (Bromberg 1891 – Berlin 1972) was a German painter and printmaker and a central figure in the development of non-objective and concrete art in Berlin between 1918 and 1924. His first solo exhibition took place in 1921 at Herwarth Walden's Galerie Der Sturm, Berlin, and included a series of sixteen woodblocks. At the landmark exhibition Constructivism and Suprematism, organised in 1922 at the Galerie Van Diemen in Berlin, he met László Moholy-Nagy, László Péri, Ernő Kállai and El Lissitzky, with whom he remained in close contact in the following years. Forbidden to work under the National Socialist regime, he resumed his artistic activity only after 1945.

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. Several of the included works mark turning points in the careers of the artists involved: Enrico Castellani's sheet is regarded as his first documented graphic work, and Piero Manzoni's Achrome as the only multiple the artist ever realised.

Condition: mint archival condition.

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