POESIA TYPOGRAPHICA
H. A. P. Grieshaber
Koln: Galerie der Spiegel, 1962. Second edition printed in a limited edition of 1,000 copies [The First edition was produced in a limited run for friends only in 1957]. Text in German. Small 4to. Printed French folded wrappers. Woodcut illustrations throughout by HAP Grieshaber, coloured pages including two in gold, text pages printed on clear cellophane featuring Grieshaber’s elaborate graphic design and typography throughout. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Spine lightly darkened and wrappers tanned, but a nearly fine copy.
6 x 8.5 unpaginated soft cover book printed on various paper stocks including clear acetate and gold with Japanese-folded pages. Beautiful production foretelling the direction typography would take some thirty years later.
Helmut Andreas Paul Grieshaber or HAP Grieshaber (1909 – 1981) was a German artist. His preferred medium was large format woodcuts.From the age of 17 he was apprenticed to the printing trade in Reutlingen. While here, from 1926 to 1928, he studied art in nearby Stuttgart. He then travelled extensively to Paris, London, Egypt, Arabia and Greece. Grieshaber lived abroad in the early 1930s. He worked as an illustrator in London and arranged exhibits of his work in Egypt and Greece. His journal 'Deutsche Zeitung' published in Athens created political problems for him and he was forced to return to Germany.
Banned from painting and exhibiting in Germany, Grieshaber showed his works in secret and worked as an untrained laborer and a newspaper delivery man. He unwillingly “joined” the German army in 1940 and was captured by the Belgians in 1945. After his return to Germany in 1947 Grieshaber taught at the Bernsteinschule near Sulz am Neckar and at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and concentrated on doing large-scale woodcuts and posters. From 1951 to 1953 he taught at the Bernsteinschule school of art. Between 1955 and 1960 he taught at the Kunstakademie (Academy of Fine Arts) in Karlsruhe as successor to Erich Heckel.
In 1960, Grieshaber resigned his teaching post in Karlsruhe to protest against examination regulations. He spent the next two years working for the journal 'Labyrinth'. In 1964 he founded and co-published 'Engel der Geschichte'. He also created artworks for public spaces, such as wooden reliefs, mosaics, murals and stained-glass windows. He exhibited at Documenta in 1959 and 1964.
Grieshaber was a long-time pacifist and political activist, not only against the dictatorships in Greece and Chile, but also in the area of conservation and ecology, against nuclear plants, and in favour of a bridging between the two Germanies. His companion in his later years, from 1967 till his death in 1981, was the lyric poet Margarete Hannsmann.
Grieshaber was honoured with numerous prizes and retrospective exhibitions. He exhibited works at the documenta in 1959 and 1964. In honor of his 70th birthday in 1979, large retrospectives were shown in various museums in both parts of Germany. The last prize that Grieshaber was awarded in 1980 was the art prize of the town of Konstanz. Grieshaber died in 1981 in Eningen unter Achalm.
Grieshaber's work were influenced by works of Paul Klee and Lyonel Feininger.He took a stab at industrial design in the 1970s with a 500-piece run of the upscale Suomi tableware by Timo Sarpaneva that Grieshaber decorated for the German Rosenthal porcelain maker's Studio Linie.