| Creator | Eugen Ehmann |
| Printing year | 1921 |
| Sheet size (cm) | 127.5×89.5 |
| Printing technique | Lithograph |
| Printer | Wolfsberg, Zürich |
| Condition | A |
| Asking price | 1'200 CHF |
| Categories | Visual Arts, Zurich |
A cubist, highly original work by German architect Eugen Ehmann (1887 – 1963), who expresses the gloom prevailing in Germany after the lost war with a Pietà motif. The poster was commissioned as part of a series of exhibitions organized by the Kunstsalon Wolfsberg in Zurich, which from 1921 onwards devoted itself to European prints with a changing program of exhibitions over several years.
Salon founder Johann Edwin Wolfensberger (1873 – 1944) started out as a printer and worked his way up to become a first-class Swiss, if not European, address for lithographic printing. The studio still exists today, run by the fourth generation.
It is also noteworthy that Ernst Ludwig Kirchner designed a poster for this exhibition, which, however, remained unexecuted. Did he and Wolfensberger fall out, forcing Wolfensberger to find a replacement at short notice? And so he had to resort to an artist who was hardly known at the time and is now virtually forgotten? Perhaps he met him in Basel, where his Zurich art salon briefly opened a branch? In any case, Christie’s auctioned Kirchner’s gouache in 2008 for 280,000 Swiss francs.
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