“A SUMPTUOUSLY PRODUCED WORK”

RENGER-PATZSCH, Albert. Kupferhammer Grünthal [The Grünthal Copperworks]. (Leipzig: C.G. Röder Aktiengesellschaft), [1937]. Large quarto, original tan cloth. $950.

First edition of this impeccable photobook that displays “the full range of Renger-Patzsch’s talents” (Parr & Badger), with 50 fine photogravure plates on Germany’s Grünthal Copperworks.

“This company photobook, made for the 400th anniversary of the sheet copperworking firm of F.A. Lange in 1937, contains some of Albert Renger-Patzsch’s finest work.” In this volume of “sharply observed, technically impressive and well-reproduced” images, expressing themes of Land, Men and Work, Renger-Patzsch opens with a series of meditative landscapes, then “focuses on the workers with a number of fine close-up portrait heads,” and concludes with a number of “impeccably crafted interiors. Kupferhammer Grünthal is a sumptuously produced book, demonstrating the full range of Renger-Patzsch’s talents” (Parr & Badger II:186). The volume’s precise conceptualization and its 50 black-and-white photogravure plates affirm his renown as a leader in the “New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) style he sparked [that] was one of Germany’s most pervasive modernist movements” (Roth, 50). Text in German by Ernst von Laer. Without scarce slipcase, very rarely found. See Open Book, 102.

Images fine, faint creasing to endpapers, light soiling to original cloth. An excellent near-fine copy of a highly prized photobook.