WW – Original drawing – Löffler, Berthold: – Zwerg – Dwarf.

Wonderful, beautiful elaborated drawing by Berthold Löffler, most likely design for the book ‘Die sieben Zwerge Sneewittchens’ (The seven dwarfs of Snow-White’). In this period of his life, Löffler was very interest in the theme of dwarfs, he invented and made the illustrations for the above mentioned book, but also made dwarfs as ceramic models. The drawing on vellum-paper, mounted on cardboard. Drawings of this quality a hard to find on the market. Löffler came from a Bohemian family of cloth makers. After attending evening courses at the drawing school of the North Bohemian Trade Museum in Reichenberg/Bohemia (1888–1890), he completed the Vienna School of Applied Arts under Franz Matsch and Koloman Moser. In 1899, Löffler, under the pseudonym B. Le-Fleur, together with Carl Maria Schwerdtner and Robert Friedländer, published the satirical magazine Quer Sacrum as a parody of the Vienna Secession’s magazine Ver Sacrum. From 1900 he worked independently, and in 1903 he was appointed assistant to Anton Groll. Together with Michael Powolny he founded the “Vienna Ceramics” workshop in 1905. In 1907 he took over the “specialist class for painting and the workshop for printing processes” at the Vienna School of Applied Arts, from which a whole generation of modern Austrian graphic artists emerged, including Oskar Kokoschka, Josef von Divéky and Josef Binder. In 1908 Löffler was a co-founder of the “Kunstschau” and the “Österreichischer Werkbund” and in 1909 he was appointed professor as the successor to Carl Otto Czeschka, who had been appointed to Hamburg. As a war artist, he designed posters for war exhibitions and war bonds, patriotic picture books and screw-on medals.[3] Study trips took him to Germany and Italy. Löffler decorated children’s books with lithographs in the style of the Vienna Secession for various Viennese publishers and he designed postcards, posters and calendars for the Wiener Werkstätte. In the ceramic sector, he worked on projects by Josef Hoffmann, among others – for example for the Purkersdorf sanatorium, the Cabaret Fledermaus and the Palais Stoclet in Brussels. Löffler also designed a series of ex-libris, including the one for Sigmund Freud (incidentally, the name Siegmund was spelled incorrectly, but this did not stop Freud from using this ex-libris). Apart from that, he presented paintings and graphic works to numerous international exhibitions.