A few day ago I bought an interesting book at my favorite rare book book seller : A catalog of deliverable prints of the “Kunstverlag Hanfstaengl” for the year 1961. The woman at the counter told me that the book has been sitting around on the shelf for ages and offered me to look up the price again, just in case the value dropped. Thy have tho policy to offer books at a lower price then the one on the web. It turned out, that the price increased in the last years, but in that case they stick with the original offer.
Prints made by “Kunstverlag Hanfstaengl” are quite common in Germany, you can find them often on flea markets, the quality is good, and many people are confused by the fact, that they can be very old and try to sell those as originals.
Anyways, I bought the book, since i’ve discovered a print in it, that I own. It’s the one of the Kingfisher on page 168. I never managed to read the whole signature and now I know the name, I learned that I was actually searching with a few wrong fragments. The etching is by the artist Kurt Meyer-Eberhardt from Munich.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to claim the Fritz Neumann and Kurt Meyer-Eberhardt are somehow related, even if there are some similarities in the motives. That might be just be the Zeitgeist between the 50ies and 70ies.
But maybe there are more similar catalogs out there by other art publishers that may contain works by Ric or Fritz Neumann.
