Günter Schöllkopf

Stuttgart-born G?nter Schöllkopf was a prolific illustrator, printmaker and painter. His passion for literature led him to produce hundreds of etchings in response to French, German and Irish writers. Throughout his life, he had a close relationship to literature, so that, as he once wrote, he designed most of his etchings and drawings as ‘cyclic interpretations on major topics of Western literature’. His interest lay in such poets, playwrights and novelists as Francois Villon, Heinrich Heine, Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac and James Joyce. He also illustrated the work of William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, and contemporary writers, poets and journalists including Thaddäus Troll and Fritz Gordian.

Günter Schöllkopf drew his ideas from literature, music, history and politics. When he died, aged 44, he left around 1000 works including lithographs, drawings, watercolours, oil paintings, and above all else etchings. In addition, he made numerous book illustrations and black and white drawings for the daily and weekly German press. Active from the 1950s to the 1970s, Schöllkopf is one of the most outstanding representatives of printmaking in Germany. He wrote in one of his own diary texts: "I am a man of metal. I have to have zinc, zinc sheet, copper, steel pens, Swedish steel around me. Whether I engrave or work with the splendid acid that eats into the metal plate, it does not matter; I feel painful pleasure ...’

In 1956, Schöllkopf won the Prize for Graphics at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart. Between 1965-1966 he received a scholarship from the Villa Massimo in Rome, being the youngest prizewinner, and in 1979 he was awarded a scholarship from the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Many of the artist’s prints were handed over to the German Literature Archive Marbach. The work, deposited in one of the world's most important literary institutions, contains 350 etchings and lithographs as well as seventy sketchbooks and diaries.