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The books of Sulamith Wülfing A Bibliographical Work in Progress by Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr.

begun 9/23/2002 last update July 20, 2011   contribute info

Band 26

Band 26 - Christian Morgenstern - Gedichte [Christian Morgenstern - Poems]

1975 - 1st printing of 3000 copies (9.25"x11.75" / 23.4 x 30 cm)
gilt titles and cover art of a six-sided star within a hexagon over a radiant sun (reprinted from Band 23)
"Vorwort" by Otto Schulze in German and in English:

Six b&w and six color* untitled plates follow untitled poems in German with English translations on versos:

1. Rudolph Steiner is the title of the first poem - he was an Austrian philosopher.
   *[young woman in white cap and wreath in a green cloak with ornate circular decorations]
2. [pencil drawing of a young woman's face and shoulders with eyes closed and old hands cupped before her face]
3. *[young woman sits in the bloom of a flower with her right hand raised before her face as if in benediction and her left outstretched. Part of the flower rises up to form a golden crown on her head]
4. [pencil drawing of a couple softly embracing. Profile view - she with eyes closed and hands on his shoulders, he gently enfolding her with hands on her neck and shoulder. Both in dark garments and with a bright sun forming a halo behind them.]
5. *[young girl with red cape and bare breast stands between dried and blooming flower stalks] (Plate 3 from Band 23)
6. [pencil drawing of woman in wreath and heavy, voluminous gown that is falling off her right shoulder stands before a white sun(?) with arms raised and eyes closed.]
7. *[four young girls of various ages dressed in rich finery, each wearing a red, blue, gold, or patterned gown, parade from right to left across the picture.Behind them, moving left to right, are ghostly versions of themselves in white gowns.]
8. [pencil drawing: white robed angel stands on a cloud and embraces a richly dressed woman standing precariously on rocks. The angel gazes directly at the viewer and the woman has her eyes closed.]
9. *[at left, a gnarled tree frames a woman in red being comforted by an older woman in flowing silver robe] (Plate 7 from Band 23)
10. [pencil drawing of woman in elaborately brocaded gown standing on a rocky, yet flowered promontory which rises at left even above the sun. She gazes at the robed and haloed figure standing at right amid the clouds.]
11. *[woman floats in profile from right to left with her right hand outstretched, her eye closed and her cape swirling behind her while wisps of diaphanous material float sinuously about her.]
12. [pencil drawing of a girl standing amid a grove of four tree trunks overlooking a moonlit valley. A large feather and leaves and stems from plants are piled in the foreground.]

There is no list in rear of book

"Foreword" in English:

Sulamith Wülfing's work, supratemporal and unique, is the expression of an absolute personality. She does not succumb to the temptation of sacrificing to concept her forms arisen out of her response to things and, in their sum, an image of the whole.

Her pictures are not illustrations and her creations do not spring from external experiences that correspond with the subject, but are abstractions of responses that are released in her by parallel, yet, in the final result, contrary encounters.

So she can venture to throw the bridge across to Christian Morgenstern, whose poems become visible from viewing them through her transfigurations which preserve the essential character and forms of the poems, yet bear them anew out of line and color.

Because of Sulamith Wülfing's lively sense of what is distinctive and exemplary in the simple and manifold, the permissible and binding, and a feeling for the set and the free, it is here possible for her to create these pictures which convey the very essence of Morgenstern' (sic) poems, but yet, by means of the new form, to provide new possibilities of experiencing and gaining a sympathetic understanding of them.

The intellectual plain of the twoshape-giving minds is one and the same; their tools - words - line and color - different. Thus poems and pictures come into being as the expression of different work, yet out of the perception and assimilation of one and the same experience.

Otto Schulze-Elberfeld

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