Jan 29, 2019 - Sale 2497

Sale 2497 - Lot 152

Price Realized: $ 5,460
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 6,000 - $ 9,000
(KIRCHNER, ERNST LUDWIG.) Heym, Georg. Umbra Vitae. Nachgelassene Gedichte. 47 woodcut illustrations by Kirchner interwoven with poems by Heym, including red and black woodcut frontispiece. 8vo, original pictorial cloth in black, gold, and green, a touch of fading to spine; hinges tender; internally clean. Munich: Kurt Wolff, 1924

Additional Details

an unusually bright first, limited edition of kirchner's masterpiece of expressionist book design and one of the most imporant works in the history of book design and illustration. number 75 of 510 copies. The idea for the book came from Hans Mardersteig, who wrote Wolff about Kirchner's excellent woodcuts for Heym's poems, which the artist created in his spare time. The entire production was the artist's creation, from layout to binding and endpaper design; he even cut some of the woodblocks for the text. He considered Heym "a Whitman tranposed into the German psyche who saw and wrote prophetically about the recend decades of our era." (Lang, pg 42); The Artist and the Book 142; Lang 175; pp. 42-44; Raabe 3; Castleman p. 229; Göbel 624; Schauer II, 119; Jentsch 152; Dube 61, 759-807.