Fritz Schwimbeck (1889-1972)
"Der Ameisenmann" ["The Ant Man"], also known as "Schatten" ("Shadow")
circa 1918/19
pen and black ink and pencil on sketch paper
17,8 x 10 cm (7" x 4")
signed in pencil lower right: "F.Schwimbeck"
verso, on the backing board, a dedication to Dr. Richard Hiepe (1930-1998), the Marxist art historian and director of the Neue Münchner Galerie.
This sketch is a study for an illustration to Gustav Meyrink's novel Das grüne Gesicht [The Green Face].
Reference:
Alice Arnold-Becker, Unheimlich: Die Kunst von Fritz Schwimbeck [Creepy: The Art of Fritz Schwimbeck](Friedberg: Likias Verlag, 1923) (catalogue of the exhibition at the Museum im Wittelsbacher Schloss Friedberg), ill. and discussion pg. 30.
Discussion:
"Schwimbeck is particularly known for his atmospheric, often dark and densely hatched drawings and illustrations. The painter and graphic artist was in close contact with important writers of his time; and, since the 1910s, he created book illustrations of dark romanticism and the fantastic, for works by Hanns Heinz Ewers, E.T.A. Hoffman, Edgar Allen Poe, and August Strindberg, as well as William Shakespeare. Like the other painter-poets [for example, Odilon Redon], Schwimbeck also favored black-and-white drawings in order to gain more distance from reality, to move the viewer to their own subjective understanding of the picture, and to give the viewer a supernatural experience." B
