First Printing, Colored & Signed by the Artist
Die Landpartie. Aus meiner Jungszeit.
[Berlin: H Birkholz Druck-Werkstätte, 1920].
Price: $5,000.00
About the item
First edition, no. 92 of 100 numbered copies, signed in ink by the artist: “Dieses Exemplar hat die Nummer 92 und is von mir koloriert, H. Zille”. 8 lithographic plates (containing 11 images and handwritten text), printed rectos only, colored by the artist. Manuscript statement of limitation on verso of title leaf. 1 vols. Folio. First Printing, Colored & Signed by the Artist. Drab wrappers, stitched. Some toning of paper stock, small marginal flaws, otherwise clean and fresh. Near fine. Oschilewski 12; Rosenbach, 109-116b (noting this copy). Provenance: Hauswedell Auktion 58 (1954), lot 2630; American private collection.
Item #266107
Heinrich Zille (1858-1929), known as the Raffael der Hinterhöfe (the Rafael of the back tenements), was an enormously popular German artist whose work chronicling Berlin life was most commonly reproduced for mass distribution in periodicals. He was a member of the Berlin Secession and a friend of Max Liebermann, Kathe Kollwitz, and Hans Baluschek. Zille also produced a few series of erotic drawings for limited, private circulation, including Zwanglose Geschichten und Bilder (Gurlitt, 1919), Die Landpartie (1920) and Hurengespräche (privately printed in 1921 under the pseudonym W. Pfeifer, with a false date of 1913). Zille was prosecuted for obscenity for his 1925 lithograph Modellpause in the periodical Simplicissimus, (depicting 8 models in various stages of undress).
Die Landpartie, “a little humoresque”, produced by ZIlle himself, demonstrates his eye for ordinary life and his erotic flair. Rosenbach identifies two issues in the first edition of 100 copies, issue A on white Werkdruckpapier, with lithographic limitation statement on the verso of the first leaf and a ruled square for numbering; and issue B (as here), on yellowish laid paper stock (auf gelblichem, geripptem Bütten), with a different formulation of the limitation statement, entirely in the artist’s hand, concluding with these words: “Dieses Exemplar hat die Nummer 92 und is von mir koloriert, H. Zille”. Rosenbach states that copies of issue A numbered higher than 58 are not known (with one exception, a copy of issue B numbered 20); other known copies of issue B are numbered 78 to 99. The present copy was sold at auction in 1954 and is noted by Rosenbach; since then it has been in an American private collection.
Rare and unusual.
