ABSTRACT
Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack's innovative use of monoprint has received little international scrutiny. While working in the Bauhaus print workshop, Hirschfeld-Mack developed a form of drawing-printmaking that he called Durchdrückzeichnung. The process had its antecedents in Gauguin's “traced monoprints” and was related to Klee's Ölfarbzeichnungen that he produced at the Bauhaus. In Hirscheld-Mack's processes paper constituted both support and print matrix, simultaneously holding and receiving the image. The type of paper employed – semi-transparent Japan paper or a wove watercolour paper – determined whether colour washes could be added, discreetly shaping the outcome. The selection of paper was a matter of careful deliberation, informed by a Bauhaus programme of material studies, which Hirschfeld-Mack would continue in Australia. This paper examines an important but overlooked episode in avant-garde printmaking, comparing the different experimental approaches of Klee and Hirschfeld-Mack work on paper. The relative simplicity of the Durchdrückzeichnung and Ölfarbzeichnungen methods dispensed with the need for heavy, complicated printing presses making the techniques ideally suited to artists working precariously when in exile from Nazism. From the Bauhaus, through exile in Britain and internment in Australia, right up until the end of his life at the height of the Cold War, Hirschfeld-Mack continued to work on paper.
