PUBLICATIONS

Sardonically entitled Thomkins-Journal nr. 1, nr. 2, nr. 3, Lucerne, this catalogue displays a front cover on which the word “Lucerne” is rendered in the style of a road sign, whereas its rear cover is emblazoned with the phrase en recul, which is its anagram. (In addition to being the city in which the show was held, Lucerne is also the place in which André Thomkins was born.) The catalogue illustrates the works which he presented in 1978 at Kunstmuseum Luzern at the exhibition entitled Permanentszene, and is flanked by a previous publication that bears the same name, issued in Stuttgart by Edition Hansjörg Mayer, and of which it completes and further defines the content. At the exhibition in Lucerne, André Thomkins in fact exhibited an additional two hundred works — drawings, watercolors, paintings, collages and texts — for a grand total of five hundred and twenty-three works that spanned the period from 1947 to 1977. Printed as a small pamphlet, the catalogue is entirely in black and white and reproduces numerous pencil drawings and handwritten texts by the artist, thus displaying his interest not only in the visual arts, but also in writing, word play, paradox and nonsense. Thomkins was a professor at the famous Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts and lived and worked in both Germany and Switzerland.

Exhibition catalogue, Kunstmuseum Luzern, March 19 - April 23, 1978. Texts: André Thomkins, Martin Kunz, Theo Kneubühler, and Serge Stauffer