Hendrik Werkman - back when the earth wasn't yet round...

HN Workman
Damals if they were not beef...
Plano: 24 x 50 cm
Two color printing
Printed on grey Hahnemühle paper and mounted on tinted matt ivory cardboard at the top.
The Stolphoeve press, Enkhuizen
1979
Edition of 70 numbered copies
Published on the occasion of the exhibition about the work of HN Werkman in studio e-10 in Enkhuizen.
Cool copy

Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman (1882 – 1945) was a Dutch expressionist artist. He became known as the printer of De Ploeg, the artists' association that 'shaken up' cultural life in Groningen at the beginning of the 20th century.
Werkman has also written. He is the author of a small number of experimental poems and poetic prose pieces, some of which can be classified as Dada. Other texts are manifestos, which he used to shake up cultural life in Groningen, for example Groningen Berlin Moscow Paris 1923 and Growing Laughter.
Inspired by avant-garde graphic artists from Central and Eastern Europe, Werkman began making art in 1923 with his own typesetting materials: letters, numbers, signs, lines and blocks of wood. This resulted in the publication of The Next Call. In these graphic works of art, 'druksels' as Werkman called them, he takes bourgeoisness and tradition under fire, sometimes in fierce language, sometimes in poetic expressions. The work refers strikingly often to internationally renowned avant-gardists, but is ultimately about Werkman himself. For the ninth and final Next Call, published in 1926 and dedicated to the Serbian avant-gardist Ljubomir Micić – Werkman wrote the poem Damals, in which both despondency and resignation as well as longing and a yearning for a lost paradise resonate.