Lothar Schreyer (1886-1966) - Mutter Erde

Lothar Schreyer: Mutter Erde, 1920

Woodcut with gouache on paper, hand-signed by the artist. The sheet measures 26.5 × 17 cm and is mounted on red cardboard, 31 × 31 cm.

In mint archival condition. All visible details are shown in the photographs.

The work dates from 1920, the height of Schreyer’s Expressionist period in the circle of Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm, and the year before Walter Gropius called him to the Bauhaus. In these years Schreyer was developing a total stage art in which word, sound, colour, form and movement were to fuse into a single work. Woodcut and hand-colouring were central to this programme. Schreyer used them not as illustration but as an autonomous means of building a picture from colour, form and sign. The combination of printed block and hand-applied gouache makes every impression individual.

Lothar Schreyer (Blasewitz near Dresden 1886 – Hamburg 1966) was a German painter, writer and theatre director, and one of the defining figures of Expressionist theatre. He first studied art history in Heidelberg, then law in Berlin and Leipzig, and took his doctorate in 1910. From 1911 to 1918 he worked as dramaturge and assistant director at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. From 1916 to 1928 he was editor of Herwarth Walden’s journal Der Sturm, and he taught at the Sturm school of stage art until 1924. In 1918 he founded the Expressionist Sturm-Bühne with Walden and directed it until 1921. In 1921 Walter Gropius appointed him master and head of the stage workshop at the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, where he taught until 1923. He then worked in Berlin, among other roles as head of the art school Der Weg. From 1928 to 1932 he was chief editor at the Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt in Hamburg. After converting to Catholicism in 1933 he also wrote under the pseudonym Angelus Pauper. He continued to paint until his death in 1966.

Provenance: Carl Laszlo / Edition Panderma, Basel; Galerie von Bartha, Basel; private collection, Basel.