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Play with Heads

Play with Heads

1923
(German, 1888–1943)
Germany, 20th century
color lithograph printed in sienna
Support: Laid paper with watermark
Sheet: 41.9 x 29 cm (16 1/2 x 11 7/16 in.); Image: 26 x 19.8 cm (10 1/4 x 7 13/16 in.)
John L. Severance Fund 2000.120.7
Catalogue raisonné: Grohmann GL 16; von Maur 506
Location: not on view
Copyright
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Description

Variations on a theme, this rare set of prints explores diverse arrangements of three heads. Each image uses a single color and was printed in a spatter technique first used in the 19th century by French lithographers like Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. By drawing a blade across a toothbrush saturated with lithographic ink, the ink is spattered onto the lithographic stone in a random pattern of variously sized dots. By controlling the fine spray of droplets, transparent forms and a wide tonal range can be obtained. Unlike his contemporaries, El Lissitzky, Lázló Moholy-Nagy, and Kurt Schwitters, whose work focused only on abstraction, Schlemmer was intensely interested in the human form. He once said, however, that he was "interested in creating human types, not portraits." Thus he did not portray specific individuals, but prototypes for a purified, timeless image of humanity.
Play with Heads

Play with Heads

1923

Oskar Schlemmer, Utopia-Verlag, Weimar, November 1923

(German, 1888–1943)
Germany, 20th century

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