Augustin Tschinkel (1905-1983) - Personnage

Augustin Tschinkel — Untitled, plate from La Lune en Rodage III (designed 1934 / published 1977)

Linocut on laid paper (vergé), printed for the third volume of Carl Laszlo's portable art anthology La Lune en Rodage, Edition Panderma, Basel. The image originates in 1934, from Tschinkel's years in the orbit of the Cologne Progressives, and was issued in this published form in 1977.

Sheet: 28 × 28 cm.

Hand-signed [in pencil].
Condition: Fresh, unfaded impression with full margins; no foxing, tears or restoration;

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

La Lune en Rodage ("the moon being run in") was Carl Laszlo's portable anthology of post-war and contemporary art, published in Basel in three volumes (1960, 1965, 1977). Across the set Laszlo assembled original contributions documenting the European avant-garde of the 1950s–70s.

Augustin Tschinkel (1905–1983) trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. In the 1920s he joined the Cologne "Gruppe progressiver Künstler" around Franz Wilhelm Seiwert and Heinrich Hoerle, a circle that also included Gerd Arntz and Otto Freundlich, and was associated with the photographer August Sander. In 1929–1930 he worked at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Vienna — the institution behind the Isotype method of pictorial statistics, directed by Otto Neurath, with Gerd Arntz heading its graphic department — and contributed to the group's periodical a bis z (1930–1933). His reductive, sign-based imagery belongs to this constructivist-pictographic lineage. His work was included in "Politische Konstruktivisten. Die Progressiven 1919–1933" (Berlin, 1975); a solo exhibition, "Augustin Tschinkel. Grafiek, Illustraties, Typografie", was held at the Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, in 1976. He published widely on art and design.