Karl Quarch Publishing House
The publishing house Karl Quarch was an art publisher in Leipzig . The publishing house published works by many graphic artists from the GDR , most of whom were graduates from the Leipzig University of Graphics and Book Art , and from the mid-1960s onwards mainly edited artistically demanding small graphics .
history
In 1919 Karl Quarch founded a "publishing house and paper goods wholesaler" in Leipzig. The company manufactured “luxury paper goods”, in particular postcards and art prints , but also such products as jewelry for poetry albums and sealing wax . After the founder's death, his son Karl Quarch jun. 1941 took over the management. As a result of the air raids on Leipzig in 1943, the publishing house and with it the publishing house's collection of documents were destroyed by bombs.
The company was represented as an art publisher at a Leipzig product sample show in October 1945. Due to a lack of material, the publisher mainly produced products such as wooden trays, picture frames and eye-catchers for shop window decorations until the 1960s. At the beginning of the fifties, the production of greeting and mourning cards , which were made on steel engraving presses, began again . The company now traded under the name of “Workshops for engraving printing”. It had found a niche in which to survive as an independent business.
Karl Quarch jun. was a conservative, Christian-humanist educated person. The communication of art for broad sections of the population was close to his heart. He worked purposefully on his publisher profile: to produce high-quality prints with high circulation. The typographer Eberhard Kahle, who mainly worked for the publisher, described the publisher as follows: “Quarch was a mediator between graphic creation and literature. He can confidently be called the last private sponsor of ambitious texts and illustrations in the GDR. ”Quarch won renowned GDR graphic artists for his publishing house, most of the graduates from the Leipzig University of Graphics and Book Art , and from the mid-1960s he edited prints of artistically demanding ones and handcrafted small graphics that should also be used in everyday life. He combined the artist's hand-signed and sometimes hand-colored original graphics with a card production that turns a greeting card, letter card or bookmark into an object of art. These works became the trademark of the publishing house, which thus had a unique position in the GDR, and went on sale at affordable prices, especially in the galleries of the state art trade and other galleries and art dealers, as well as in the book trade.
In 1974, for example, the portfolio “Oh, she doesn't let it happen” with 5 hand-colored wood engravings (sheet size 21 cm × 10 cm ) by Karl-Georg Hirsch (greeting cards with envelopes) printed from a stick and signed by the artist cost 15 GDR marks. The cassette (linen) "Long live what struts on earth in green costume" with 12 wood engravings by Werner Klemke, also printed from a stick, hand-colored and signed by the artist, for hunting slogans engraved in wood (sheet size 35 cm × 22 cm ) cost 202 marks in 1976 .
This path ended after German reunification. In 1992 the publishing house on Hainstrasse in Leipzig was given up and the publishing house temporarily relocated to Wanfried in Hesse.
The publisher's archive is now in the scientific collection of the Leipzig University Library .
Publisher's artist
Hubertus Blase, Albrecht von Bodecker , Wolfgang Böttcher, Henner Franck, Peter Hartmann, Otto Herbig, Karl-Georg Hirsch , Christa Jahr , Inge Jastram , Werner Klemke , Johannes Lebek , Harald Metzkes , Gerhard Kurt Müller , Helga Paditz, Werner Schinko , Max Schwimmer , Lothar Sell, Oswin Volkamer, Volker Wendt, Werner Wittig and Wolfgang Würfel .
Exhibitions about the publisher
- 2019 Leipzig, University Library ("Political Literature and Non-Political Art. 50 Years of MÄRZ Verlag - 100 Years of Karl Quarch")
- Exhibition catalog: Thomas Fuchs (editor, author): Nonpolitical Art, 100 Years of Karl Quarch Verlag . Universitätsverlag, Leipzig 2019, ISBN 978-3-96023-275-9 (book trade edition)
literature
- Ekkehard Schulreich: In the black! Original prints are the trademark of the Leipzig publisher Karl Quarch. Searching for traces - a century after the publishing house was founded . Mironde Verlag, Niederfrohna 2019, ISBN 978-3-96063-021-0
Individual evidence
- ↑ The typographer Eberhard Kahle. In: Leipziger Volkszeitung , March 21, 2019.
- ^ Archive of the Karl Quarch Verlag , special collections of the Leipzig University Library, on portal.wissenschaftliche-sammlungen.de, accessed on June 18, 2020
- ↑ On the beauty and suffering of horses , on ub.uni-leipzig.de