1913. Original printing stencil and two proofs (relief and in the manner of a pochoir), approx. 27.5 x 31.2 cm. Reference: Vogt 180 (our stencil); Utermann 102 (our relief impression); Belgin 073 (our relief impression).
One of the most fascinating printmakers, whose roots actually lie in German Romanticism with his birth date of 1849, was Christian Rohlfs, whose style was as peculiar as it was versatile and cannot really be clearly assigned to any particular school. Obviously influenced by the achievements of the artists group Brücke, Rohlfs moved closer to Expressionism from around 1910. In addition to his lyrical painting, which was close to Impressionism and often touched on abstraction, Rohlfs loved graphic experimentation, less in terms of motifs (where he remained attached to a form of figuration, albeit often very abbreviated) than in technical terms. Similar to Paul Klee later on, Rohlfs indulged his desire for new effects and combinations using various mixed techniques. As a result, Rohlfs practically never produced editions with the demand for a consistent print quality, but rather different, often hand-reworked states of the same motif. The argument often heard in connection with printmaking that reproduction per se means a loss of originality and consequently of value is countered by Rohlfs' versatile imagination, which aims for kaleidoscopic effects and makes each of his prints unique.
