HAP Grieshaber. Woodcuts. Introduction by Margot Fuerst. With 12 original woodcuts including 6 dedicated to Mahalia Jackson.

Ein gutes und sauberes Exemplar. - Do not expect from me an art historian's interpretation. Over the years Grieshaber has been explored so often by competent writers, as for example Wilhelm Boeck, that a layman does not need to feel restricted by the rules of the experts when asked to add his comment. I have now been living for more than ten years in the world of these images, and I am clearly biased. Most certainly I am not constantly aware of each of the many pictures which surround me-pictures from the various periods beginning with the Thirties-; it is rather one particular picture at a time, which strikes my eye and occupies my mind. Yet I always experience their consonance so intensely that each exhibit becomes a new surprise simply because it bestows a different unity to the long familiar pictures. It is a very complex unity, an arc that spans from tender lyricism and epic serenity to violent gestures and the pathos of sorrow and elegy, and within which each work, though dominated by an accent of its own, also embodies elements of the entire world of ex-pression. This interrelationship between the pictures is analogous to the structure of the individual work: each block has its own intrinsic value like a voice in a polyphonous concert. This explains why Grieshaber can use the individual blocks separately and thus by reduction accentuate their melodies.