Sale 2495 - Illustration Art, December 6, 2018

112 c JULIUS KLINGER. “Women on a Couch.” Illustration for the cover of Wiener Mode , 1925. Pen-and-ink on stiff paper, mounted to board. 413x337 mm; 16 1 / 4 x13 1 / 4 inches, on 20 1 / 2 x18-inch board. Unsigned, but with Klinger’s “K25” stamp, lower right and title and artist’s name ghosted within image. Framed. Provenance: Reinhold-Brown Gallery to current owner. [3,000/4,000] a masterly example of klinger ’ s fashion and graphic design which incorporates the principles of both the wiener werkstätte and japonisme . The ghosted lettering of Klinger’s name and the title of the magazine, appear to be either painted over, or, more likely, the once-affixed lettering was removed, leaving traces of a lightly worked surface. In either event, it was not atypical of Klinger to rework a design with color, type, or compositional changes, creating several variations. In her book on Julius Klinger, Karen Etingen describes this image as demonstrating “a virtuostic understanding of both fashion and graphic design . . . aside from the faces and décolletés of the women-which have been left white so as to draw attention to them-there is not one area of the plate that has not been adorned, attended to, and attacked.” It also reflects the influence and strict architectural interpretation of design of his mentor, Koloman Moser—”The Life and Art of Julius Klinger: Beyond Poster Art in Vienna,” (Montréal: L’Affichiste, 2016), page 26 (and image 3.2).