Hans Caspar Ulrich, die Seidenherren und Amerika

Zusatztext

This book recounts the life-story of Zurich artist Hans Caspar Ulrich (1880-1950), who left behind a pioneering work on the origins and dissemination of silk-screen printing in Continental Europe. In this impactful work, Guido Lengwiler has recreated the events of more than a century ago, describing European efforts to establish a revolutionary printing technique that would have a formative influence on twentieth-century imagery in advertising and art - and that remains essential in technical applications today. After first attending the school of applied arts, Hans Caspar Ulrich completed an apprenticeship as a lithographer in Karlsruhe, and also worked for most of his life, with a greater or lesser degree of success, in the fine arts. But thanks to his expertise in printing techniques and his family connection to one of the Silk Lords of Zurich, Theodor Pestalozzi, his life took an interesting turn - and he introduced silk-screen printing to Europe. Originally exported for use in flour sieves, sales in the United States began to soar at the beginning of the twentieth century, where the new silk-screen printing technique was just emerging. Totally surprised by this new application, silk producers in Zurich invested large sums of money: on the one hand to send Ulrich to the United States for three months in 1927 in order to learn this new technique and, on the other, to establish screen printing in Europe too as well as to work on patents and licensing. Luckily, Ulrichs forgotten memoirs have survived. For the first time, the book publishes historical documents dating as far back as the origins of screen printing, which will equally enable further research.

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