?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 500 - $ 750
VOJTECH PREISSIG CZECHOSLOVAKS! JOIN OUR FREE COLORS! Circa 1915. 353/4x251/4 inches. Wentworth Institute, Boston. Condition A: expertly repaired tear in bottom margin. The most famous in a series of 16 color linoleum cuts produced by Preissig for the Wentworth Insitute during the war, calling on Czechoslovaks living abroad to join the Czech legion fighting in Europe. The posters exist in different languages (Czech, Slovak and English) and different formats (the images also appear as postcards). A Czech artist, Preissig studied at the School of Applied Arts in Prague and worked with Alphonse Mucha in Paris between 1898 and 1903. In 1910 he came to America where he taught at Columbia University and was director of the School of Printing and Graphic Arts at the Wentworth Institute in Boston (whose initials are printed on the poster). A Czech patriot, Preissig lent his artistic skill to the work of Tomas Masaryk, also in America at the time, who was working towards an independent Czech state. The flags depicted in this poster represent the four regions which would, in 1918, comprise Czechoslovakia: Bohemia (the red lion), Moravia (the red and white-checked eagle), Silesia (the black eagle) and Slovakia (with the Slovak double-cross, similar to the French cross of Loraine). The red, white and blue flag with the stars in the middle was the Resistance flag of the Czechoslovak Independence movement, which Preissig had designed for the Czech Government in Exile. It was supposed to have become the Czech national flag, but was somehow overlooked in 1918 when Czechoslovakia was officially formed. Preissig returned to Czechoslovakia in 1930 where, after 1938, he was active in publishing anti-German propaganda. He died in Dachau in 1941. Rawls p. 65, Darracott 38, Theofiles 19, Rickards 78.
