High wire act

These high wire performers walking a tightrope across a Bavarian town square are perhaps emblematic of the risky lot of all artists. The public is enjoying the show in complete indifference to the man plunging from the rope on the right, or the two corpses being carried away by undertakers in top hat and tails at the bottom left... and yet still the artists doggedly climb the ladder to try their luck.

 Adolf Schinnerer, Die Künstler

Etching, 1927

The etching, printed on Japan paper by Heinrich Wetteroth, Munich, and hand-signed by the artist, comes from the edition of 250 published in Jahresmappe der Freunde Graphischer Künst, Nuremberg 1927. Adolf Ferdinand Schinnerer was born in 1876 in Schwarzenbach. Schinnerer studied at the Karlsruhe Academy under Ludwig Schmid-Reutte, Walter Conz, and Wilhelm Trübner; he won the Prix de Rome in 1909. In 1929 Adolf Schinnerer was one of those selected for inclusion in a prestigious exhibition of German painter-etchers at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. He died in 1949.