Augustin Tschinkel (1905-1983): Personnage

Artist
Augustin Tschinkel (1905–1983)
 
Title
Personnage
 
Medium
Linocut
 
Material
Paper
 
Dimensions
28 x 28 cm
 
Editor
Edition Panderma, Basel
 
Year
1934 (linocut), printed in 1966
 
Signature
Signed in pencil
 
Provenance
Edition Panderma, Carl Laszlo, Basel
Galerie von Bartha, Basel
Private Collection, Basel
 
Condition / Restauration
Mint archival condition
 
Biography
Augustin Tschinkel (1905–1983) was a Czech artist of figurative constructivism who became one of the most distinctive voices of the Cologne Progressives (Kölner Progressive). After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, he travelled to Cologne for the landmark Pressa exhibition of 1928, where he worked alongside the designer Ladislav Sutnar on the Czech pavilion. There he met Franz Wilhelm Seiwert and joined the group of progressive artists Seiwert had founded with Heinrich Hoerle, whose circle included Otto Freundlich, Gerd and August Sander. Tschinkel adopted the group's reductive black-and-white pictorial language — clear, schematic figures easy to reproduce for the leaflets, posters and journals they aimed at a working-class audience — and became the principal exponent of these "social graphics" in Czechoslovakia.
 
In 1929 he followed Gerd Arntz to Vienna to work at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (Museum of Society and Economy), where he helped develop the Vienna Method of pictorial statistics that grew out of Otto Neurath's programme of visual education — the system later known internationally as Isotype. He contributed to "a bis z" (1929–1933), the periodical of the Cologne Progressives. After the museum was suppressed in 1934 he returned to Czechoslovakia, applying the Vienna Method to educational and statistical publishing, and in the 1950s maintained a correspondence with Raoul Hausmann.
 
Tschinkel took part in the exhibition "Politische Konstruktivisten. Die Progressiven 1919–1933" (Berlin, 1975), and his one-man show "Augustin Tschinkel. Grafiek, Illustraties, Typografie" was presented at the Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, in 1976. He was the author of numerous books and articles on art and design. "Personnage" distils his lifelong interest in the human figure as a constructed, universally legible sign — a synthesis of constructivist clarity and humane social purpose.