Colour linocut on wove paper, 35,8 x 26 cm (plate), 44,7 x 34,1 cm (sheet). C. 1955. Signed in pencil. Hand print by the artist. Not in Lang and Patka (Universität für angewandte Kunst, Wien) and without the numbers added only posthumously.
Franz Herberth was born in Vienna in 1907 and studied from 1924 at the School of Applied Arts in Vienna under Franz Cižek, Erich Mallina, Anton Kenner, Rudolf Larisch and Bertold Löffler. After completing his studies, he remained at the School, working from 1930 as a teacher in the print workshop. In 1939 he was dismissed because of his marriage to the non-Aryan Bettina Freund, after having been expelled a year earlier from the Bund Österreichischer Gebrauchsgrafik (Austrian Society of Commercial Art). In 1940 he was ultimately prohibited from working altogether. After the war, he became head of the print workshop at the University of Applied Arts, as it had become, and was made a professor after working there for twenty years. He died in Pulkau, Lower Austria, in 1973.
Herbert confined himself to coloured linocuts and, from the early 1960s, wood engravings (with a marked change in style because of the medium), but in doing so exploited all printing refinements to their limits. Unlike the artists of the Grosvenor School in London, who from the mid-1920s gave an initial (figurative) stimulus to coloured linocuts, borrowing heavily from the Italian Futurist movement, Herberth returned rather to the abstract vocabulary of Viennese Kineticism. Unlike Futurism (which had also been an inspiration for Kineticism), there is no attempt at communication of a message or agitation in Herberth’s work, highlighting even more clearly the break with Socialist Realism, which he turned his back on in the early 1950s when he renounced his membership of the Communist Party. The effect of his quiescent “kinetic” rather than “Kineticist” abstract compositions is due not only to their experimental quality but above all to the careful planning, the expert knowledge and the intelligent exploitation of the technical possibilities.
“The spatial effect in Herberth’s compositions, created not just by the lines, but also particularly by the overprinting of the plate, slightly offset, with a second translucent colour, becomes a quasi-characteristic element of his work. Apart from parallel shifts, there are also sheets in which the translucent overprint is slightly rotated. His compositions become even more complex through the overprinting of a plate turned through 180 degrees. Herberth went on to mix and vary these possibilities” (Michael Schneider: Vom Gegenstand zum Material – Zur Entwicklung der Technik des Hochdrucks im druckgrafischen Werk von Franz Herberth, in: Erika Patka (Hrsg.): Franz Herberth — Neue Dimensionen der Druckgrafik um 1950, Wien 2003, p.10).
