Helmut H. Rumbler gallery

Booth N°2

Among other works, this year the gallery is presenting a lithograph by Matthias Koch, Landscape with Ruins from 1802.
The absolute incunabulum of artistic lithography.
Superb impression printed on delicate pink-toned handmade paper; of the loveliest brilliance.
Winkler was able to document only three exemplars: in the Städel in Frankfurt, the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, and the Veste Coburg. Another impression is found in the collections of the City of Offenbach.
One of the first artist’s lithographs, and among the works created by a circle of artists and dilettantes in response to encouragement by the Offenbach publisher F. Johannot – even before Philip André and his successor G. J. Vollweiler had published their famous Specimens of Polyautography in London in 1803.
As early as 1804, in a brief article on Johannot’s Offenbach enterprise that appeared in the Neue Allgemeine Intelligenzblatt für Literatur und Kunst, G. Fischer praised the virtues of the new printing technique, referred to as “polyautography,” compared with all predecessor methods, noting that now, ‘the artist himself executes his drawing on the stone, and since it is neither etched nor incised, it retains all of its originality and power, which are lost with engraving and etching through the tracing out of the design and the mechanical impediments of the instruments employed. Here, in contrast, the initial, the original design retains all of its quality, and as a type, each impression is also a genuine original’.