Lothar Schreyer (1886-1966) - Mutter Erde

Lothar Schreyer: Mutter Erde ("Mother Earth"), 1920 — from the portfolio La Lune en Rodage III

Woodcut with gouache (hand-colouring) on paper, signed, titled and dated. Sheet 26.5 × 17 cm, mounted on red card 31 × 31 cm.

A hieratic, frontal figure — "Mother Earth" — built from bold black contours and filled with flat zones of red, green, yellow and white: a radiant head crowned with black rays, a rounded body opening into an arch or gateway at its centre. The strict symmetry, the mask-like frontality and the primary, quasi-sacral colour give the sheet the character of a cult image or spiritual sign. It belongs to the visionary, ritual current of German Expressionism that Schreyer pursued at Herwarth Walden's Sturm and, from 1921, at the Bauhaus, where he directed the stage workshop: an art conceived less as picture than as Schauspiel — a sign to be beheld and enacted. The motif dates from 1920, this hand-coloured sheet being realised and signed by the artist in 1966 for Carl Laszlo's portfolio.

Lothar Schreyer (Blasewitz 1886 – Hamburg 1966) was a German painter, playwright and stage reformer, and one of the central theorists of Expressionist theatre. After studying art history and law, he became a dramaturg in Hamburg and, from 1916, editor of Herwarth Walden's journal Der Sturm in Berlin. In 1918 he co-founded the Expressionist Sturm-Bühne, developing a radical, ritualised conception of performance. In 1921 Walter Gropius appointed him master and head of the stage workshop at the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, where he taught until 1923. His work unites the visual, the theatrical and the spiritual to an unusual degree, and this figure of "Mutter Erde" is a characteristic example of his sacral-Expressionist imagery.

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. Mounted on red card.

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