Lot 305 D

The present work is an extremely rare example of a non-representational collage created by Otto Griebel during the short Dada-influenced phase of his oeuvre. In 1919 he became friends with the composer Erwin Schulhoff, who was connected with Berlin's Dada scene and contributed to the first Dada Soirée. The two of them joined with Otto Dix, Sergius Winkelmann and Kurt Günther to form a loose-knit Dresden Dada group. In 1920, together with Schulhoff, Griebel published the graphic portfolio “Zehn Themen”, in which he illustrated the musician's scores with abstract colour lithographs. Beginning that year, Griebel was also in direct contact with Dada's protagonists in Berlin and started working with collage and montage under their influence. Because he was already politically very actively involved with Germany's Communist Party at that time, he primarily used these techniques to communicate radical political content in a provocative manner.
A rare work like “Der Turm des Regenbogens” unites abstractions of the kind found in the “Zehn Themen” portfolio with the paper collage typical of Dada into a composition that is extraordinary within Griebel's oeuvre. It was originally owned by Otto Dix, who was Griebel's friend and whose studio was next door to his.