Emil Orlik - Aus Japan

#

mil Orlik was born on July 21, 1870, the younger of two sons, to a well-to-do Jewish tailor living on the outskirts of the ghetto in Prague. Even as a child it was his one wish to become a painter. Thus, immediately after his graduation from secondary school in 1889, he took up his artistic education in Munich. The course of studies at the art academy, to which he had been admitted after three semesters preparation, he found unappealing---he preferred copying the old masters in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, for example Rembrandt. On the side, he attended the copper engraving school at the academy and experimented with various graphic techniques. After three semesters he broke off his studies, and in 1894 returned to his home town of Prague. There, he joined the Verein deuscher bildender künstler in Böhmen (Association of German Fine Artists in Bohemia) and became a close friend of Rainer Maria Rilke, who was also a member of the association. Rilke thought that Orlik was "the most talented German-Bohemian artist." Rilke, who even wrote an essay about Orlik in 1899 entitled Ein Prager Kiinstler (A Prague Artist), moved to Munich in 1896 and Orlik followed him in the same year. There he collaborated on the artistic journal Jugend (Youth). Together with a friend, Bernhard Pankok (1872-1943), he studied for the first time in his life woodcutting techniques, Which pleased him so much that over the next few years he created a whole series of woodcuts. His interest in this graphical art form caused him a few years later to travel to Japan, to "study art and technique at its source."

Setsuko Kuwabara

• Fifteen full-colour plates with an extra small plate on the dedication page (Total 16 plates)
• Enclosed in portfolio (350X300 mm)
• Colour Offset Printing facsimile edition.
• Limited to 500 copies numbered
• Edited and Text by Setsuko Kuwabara (Japanese-German Center, Berlin) Eberhard Friese (Ruhr University, Bochum)
• Text in German, English and Japanese
• Originally published in Tokyo, Koshiba & etc.,1904

#