CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/16/2013

Vojtech Preissig

Featured image, a 1903 colored etching on paper entitled "Girl's Longing," is reproduced from Arbor Vitae's new monograph on the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Czech typographer, printmaker, designer, illustrator, painter and teacher, Vojtech Preissig. Towards the end of his life, Preissig devoted himself to publishing and illustrating the underground Czech magazine, V boj, which fomented resistance to the Nazi regime. He was arrested in 1940, and consigned to the concentration camp at Dachau, where he was forced to work on counterfeit money designs until his death there in 1944. Essayist Lucie Vlčková writes, "The last surviving works by Preissig are pencil drawings on the theme of the four seasons—their loose and weak lines testify to the artist's extreme exhaustion and physical suffering. Despite the selfless care of the fellow prisoners Preissig finally succumbed to a typhus infection on the 11th of June 1944, and his friends from the resistance group succeeded in casting a mould for his death mask."